This is interesting, but I still don't buy that re-birth control paleolithic people just decided not to get it on because carrying kids around got too heavy.
Also the metaphore between oppressed neolithic peasants and farm animals feels a little strained to me.
Some of you might find this article of interest...
Bacon causes cancer: Do consumers care?
January 2022 Agricultural and Resource Economics Review
DOI: 10.1017/age.2021.25
LicenseCC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Xiaoyang He Jayson Lusk
Abstract. In October 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) released a report classifying processed meat as a type 1 carcinogen. The report prompted headlines and attracted immediate public attention, but the economic impacts remain unknown. In this paper, we investigate the impacts of the IARC report on selected processed meat prices and purchases using retail scanner data from US grocery stores. We compare changes in prices and sales of selected processed meat products to a constructed synthetic control group (using a convex combination of nonmeat food products). We find a significant decrease in bacon prices in the wake of the IARC report release, but we find no evidence of a sales reduction. We find no significant changes in price and sales for ham and sausage. The pattern of price and quantity changes are consistent with downward shifts in demand and outward shifts in supply for bacon and sausage following the release of the IARC report.
This piece was really interesting. And I know it’s an incorrect read of the piece, but I couldn’t help but think it sort of goes against the whole “1 billion Americans” thesis in a sense…. But not really given we’ve already entered this era. Once you’re here, there’s in some sense no going back because you’re already at a level where you need mass farming etc to sustain where you already are. But the piece is interesting because it makes you think about the different universes of life as humans have experienced them. It may not be necessarily better across all dimensions today.
> Even without being overly romantic about the welfare of wild animals, it’s clear that chickens in battery cages have lower living standards than wild junglefowl.
Is this true? Chickens' ancestors like to eat bamboo, which is a feast or famine food… so the average life of a junglefowl is dying of starvation.
Off-topic: some of my posts aren’t appearing in the discussion below? I don’t believe they were offensive and I think contributed to the conversation. Does anyone know why that might be? Did I over-post? Were they reported and removed? Just got eaten in the Substack server?
This is such a disturbing and depressing topic. Something deep and moralistic in me get enraged when I'm reminded of the colossal-scale abuse of animals that not only don't harm us -- they help us live by feeding us.
We ought to treat domesticated and farm animals with a sense of thankfulness for what they do for us.
Yes, at the end of the day, it is a transaction. But to Matt's point, we're the kings letting the billions of minions in our kingdom suffer terribly.
"By shifting to more plant-rich diets, wealthy nations could cut their agricultural emissions by 61 percent—and sequester nearly 100 gigatons of CO2 equivalent if the surplus farmland is left to rewild.
"The global food system is the second-biggest source of anthropogenic greenhouse gases (GHGs), accounting for up to a third of emissions. Over half of that number comes from meat and dairy production, despite these sources providing a meager 20 percent of the world’s calories. Wealthy nations drive most of this demand."
In humans, there is a genetic condition called Congenital insensitivity to pain and anhydrosis (CIPA). It seems like it would be well worth figuring out how to propagate that condition among slaughter animals. Then everyone can be happy. The animals won't mind being tortured, the farmers can continue torturing them, and the eaters can stop worrying about it.
There are probably other genetic conditions that could zonk out the animals so that they wouldn't be capable of suffering any psychic pain either.
I frequently have debates with a vegan friend and have persuaded him that its morally okay for him to eat the eggs from the chickens I raise by arguing their domesticated life is substantially better than it would have been in the wild. My chickens have thousands of square feet per chicken to roam (to be qualified as free range just requires 5 sq ft/chicken) and die only at about 10% a year from natural predators. Their quality of life is about as good as it can be for chickens, but its also not economically scalable.
The fallacy of this piece is the more humans, and Americans especially, the better. The increase in human population in the last 150 years from 1.3 billion to almost 8 billion is striking, and every one of us of the 8 billion is grateful to be alive, and grateful for all the great stuff we can buy, but to suggest population increase is the most important sign of a species' health isn't self-evident, nor is it evident it's good for the planet. Sure, 8x more people will make and consume 8x more stuff, great for GDP growth and warding off other humans, with different cultural values, like the Chinese and Russians. But great for the planet?? This is a piece where Matt's let big numbers and the long view of history overwhelm his brain.
pre birth control, the absence of population increase meant either 1) many women weren’t getting enough calories to menstruate or 2) the plague was culling the population.
My understanding is that parents felt the same bone deep grief that today’s parents do when they lost children. I don’t understand how they weren’t all insane. Maybe that’s why they were so mean to each other.
"it would be better to see happy, free range chickens and cows roaming pastures"
People should be aware that terms like "free range" mean that the product is from a factory farm. Just about every such term you see means that ("cage free"; "humane"; "organic"; "natural"; etc.).
To the extent that there are ethical producers left, they avoid these factory-farming terms. 99% of animal products are from factory farms, so if you think one isn't, you have almost certainly been deceived. If you don't know the producer, don't believe it.
Not the main point, but I don’t really buy the account of human history here.
There’s not, like, rigorously collected data about peasants lives per se, but patchwork data about the few bits which were important to elites.
Moreover, a lot of that is focused on France, which was in the midst of a massive war for nearly the entire late Middle Ages. And when the 100 Years War itself was paused, France was at war with the raiding brigands formed by former soldiers with nowhere to go. I’m not sure that aligns with the precise picture of “extractive elites” painted here. World War II wasn’t fun in Britain (or anyone else) from a tax-and-consumption standpoint nor did the British elite give up its way of life, but we’d hardly call the privations imposed to fight the war a tale of extractive elites.
So I’m just kind of dubious about this stuff. We don’t really have good evidence on the actual lives of peasants and a lot of the data we do have always seems to be from exceptional periods, which probably don’t paint an accurate picture even from elite perspectives.
But there’s also this other problem that we do have records in diaries and letters and family histories of peasants rising into the upper ranks. That’s hardly consistent with life having gone utterly unimproved since the Neolithic revolution.
We have enough data on historical grain prices to know that lower class people couldn’t Ffird enough food. We also know there were lots of foundlings, and that’s just scratching the surface.
"We don’t really have good evidence on the actual lives of peasants..."
It's unclear what you mean by "actual lives." A great deal can be inferred from, for example, the typical lifespan of peasants versus noble-born by examining bones.
Matty, you could elaborate here on the side effects of such large animal cultivation. Many people know about the carbon footprint of beef. But in this year of covid, more people should know about the ways intense cultivation of poultry and pigs specifically is the main way we’re getting new flu variants, including potentially catastrophic bird flu ones.
Agree with this. The climate change impact is a big factor you need to account for if you're going to advocate for large populations of humanely raised livestock. There's also the fact that more humane conditions mean less intensive farming and therefore potentially more land use, if you're going to keep the populations large.
Love these big picture, historical pieces. Keep them coming.
This is interesting, but I still don't buy that re-birth control paleolithic people just decided not to get it on because carrying kids around got too heavy.
Also the metaphore between oppressed neolithic peasants and farm animals feels a little strained to me.
Some of you might find this article of interest...
Bacon causes cancer: Do consumers care?
January 2022 Agricultural and Resource Economics Review
DOI: 10.1017/age.2021.25
LicenseCC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Xiaoyang He Jayson Lusk
Abstract. In October 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) released a report classifying processed meat as a type 1 carcinogen. The report prompted headlines and attracted immediate public attention, but the economic impacts remain unknown. In this paper, we investigate the impacts of the IARC report on selected processed meat prices and purchases using retail scanner data from US grocery stores. We compare changes in prices and sales of selected processed meat products to a constructed synthetic control group (using a convex combination of nonmeat food products). We find a significant decrease in bacon prices in the wake of the IARC report release, but we find no evidence of a sales reduction. We find no significant changes in price and sales for ham and sausage. The pattern of price and quantity changes are consistent with downward shifts in demand and outward shifts in supply for bacon and sausage following the release of the IARC report.
This piece was really interesting. And I know it’s an incorrect read of the piece, but I couldn’t help but think it sort of goes against the whole “1 billion Americans” thesis in a sense…. But not really given we’ve already entered this era. Once you’re here, there’s in some sense no going back because you’re already at a level where you need mass farming etc to sustain where you already are. But the piece is interesting because it makes you think about the different universes of life as humans have experienced them. It may not be necessarily better across all dimensions today.
> Even without being overly romantic about the welfare of wild animals, it’s clear that chickens in battery cages have lower living standards than wild junglefowl.
Is this true? Chickens' ancestors like to eat bamboo, which is a feast or famine food… so the average life of a junglefowl is dying of starvation.
Off-topic: some of my posts aren’t appearing in the discussion below? I don’t believe they were offensive and I think contributed to the conversation. Does anyone know why that might be? Did I over-post? Were they reported and removed? Just got eaten in the Substack server?
This is such a disturbing and depressing topic. Something deep and moralistic in me get enraged when I'm reminded of the colossal-scale abuse of animals that not only don't harm us -- they help us live by feeding us.
We ought to treat domesticated and farm animals with a sense of thankfulness for what they do for us.
Yes, at the end of the day, it is a transaction. But to Matt's point, we're the kings letting the billions of minions in our kingdom suffer terribly.
"By shifting to more plant-rich diets, wealthy nations could cut their agricultural emissions by 61 percent—and sequester nearly 100 gigatons of CO2 equivalent if the surplus farmland is left to rewild.
"The global food system is the second-biggest source of anthropogenic greenhouse gases (GHGs), accounting for up to a third of emissions. Over half of that number comes from meat and dairy production, despite these sources providing a meager 20 percent of the world’s calories. Wealthy nations drive most of this demand."
https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/01/plant-based-diets-rewilding-provides-massive-opportunity-to-cut-co2/
In humans, there is a genetic condition called Congenital insensitivity to pain and anhydrosis (CIPA). It seems like it would be well worth figuring out how to propagate that condition among slaughter animals. Then everyone can be happy. The animals won't mind being tortured, the farmers can continue torturing them, and the eaters can stop worrying about it.
There are probably other genetic conditions that could zonk out the animals so that they wouldn't be capable of suffering any psychic pain either.
I frequently have debates with a vegan friend and have persuaded him that its morally okay for him to eat the eggs from the chickens I raise by arguing their domesticated life is substantially better than it would have been in the wild. My chickens have thousands of square feet per chicken to roam (to be qualified as free range just requires 5 sq ft/chicken) and die only at about 10% a year from natural predators. Their quality of life is about as good as it can be for chickens, but its also not economically scalable.
The fallacy of this piece is the more humans, and Americans especially, the better. The increase in human population in the last 150 years from 1.3 billion to almost 8 billion is striking, and every one of us of the 8 billion is grateful to be alive, and grateful for all the great stuff we can buy, but to suggest population increase is the most important sign of a species' health isn't self-evident, nor is it evident it's good for the planet. Sure, 8x more people will make and consume 8x more stuff, great for GDP growth and warding off other humans, with different cultural values, like the Chinese and Russians. But great for the planet?? This is a piece where Matt's let big numbers and the long view of history overwhelm his brain.
pre birth control, the absence of population increase meant either 1) many women weren’t getting enough calories to menstruate or 2) the plague was culling the population.
My understanding is that parents felt the same bone deep grief that today’s parents do when they lost children. I don’t understand how they weren’t all insane. Maybe that’s why they were so mean to each other.
“If anything, the meat industry is promoting the idea that customers won’t be able to tell the difference.”
Bahaha. They got so used to cutting off beaks, cutting off noses to spite their own faces was a natural progression.
"it would be better to see happy, free range chickens and cows roaming pastures"
People should be aware that terms like "free range" mean that the product is from a factory farm. Just about every such term you see means that ("cage free"; "humane"; "organic"; "natural"; etc.).
To the extent that there are ethical producers left, they avoid these factory-farming terms. 99% of animal products are from factory farms, so if you think one isn't, you have almost certainly been deceived. If you don't know the producer, don't believe it.
Not the main point, but I don’t really buy the account of human history here.
There’s not, like, rigorously collected data about peasants lives per se, but patchwork data about the few bits which were important to elites.
Moreover, a lot of that is focused on France, which was in the midst of a massive war for nearly the entire late Middle Ages. And when the 100 Years War itself was paused, France was at war with the raiding brigands formed by former soldiers with nowhere to go. I’m not sure that aligns with the precise picture of “extractive elites” painted here. World War II wasn’t fun in Britain (or anyone else) from a tax-and-consumption standpoint nor did the British elite give up its way of life, but we’d hardly call the privations imposed to fight the war a tale of extractive elites.
So I’m just kind of dubious about this stuff. We don’t really have good evidence on the actual lives of peasants and a lot of the data we do have always seems to be from exceptional periods, which probably don’t paint an accurate picture even from elite perspectives.
But there’s also this other problem that we do have records in diaries and letters and family histories of peasants rising into the upper ranks. That’s hardly consistent with life having gone utterly unimproved since the Neolithic revolution.
We have enough data on historical grain prices to know that lower class people couldn’t Ffird enough food. We also know there were lots of foundlings, and that’s just scratching the surface.
Peasants didn’t typically buy grain but were entitled to a percentage of what they produced.
"We don’t really have good evidence on the actual lives of peasants..."
It's unclear what you mean by "actual lives." A great deal can be inferred from, for example, the typical lifespan of peasants versus noble-born by examining bones.
As in we don’t even the amount of data we use to draw granular conclusions about life in countries we consider “poorly documented”.
Matty, you could elaborate here on the side effects of such large animal cultivation. Many people know about the carbon footprint of beef. But in this year of covid, more people should know about the ways intense cultivation of poultry and pigs specifically is the main way we’re getting new flu variants, including potentially catastrophic bird flu ones.
Agree with this. The climate change impact is a big factor you need to account for if you're going to advocate for large populations of humanely raised livestock. There's also the fact that more humane conditions mean less intensive farming and therefore potentially more land use, if you're going to keep the populations large.
Consider the coconut!
Consider its leeeeaaaveeesss...