The post-meat future for cows will presumably look some like the current age for horses.
Prior to cars, humans kept a gazillion horses and mules. NYC was chockablock with horses, and of course manure everywhere. And the life for horses was really bad. Wars in particular saw horses and mules dying in droves.
Now? Many fewer horses. Average life of horses (at least in first world) much better.
Not sure that people will keep private stables of cows after meat, or that Preakness will introduce chicken races. But the huge drop in horse population gives us a hint of how it will go.
Unsure about stables of cows but if you look at West Texas for instance, the land there isn't particularly suitable for agriculture, and it's pretty dry - takes almost 100 acres to sustain 1 cow.
What can you do with that land?
1) Wind farms - we see some of this out there but not every place is suitable and that would still leave a lot of space for cows.
2) Solar farms - this might actually use up ground space.
3) Free-range cows.
Assuming humanity doesn't become completely morally opposed to eating meat (possible!) I suspect it will be more free-range cows in places like this. (Although note that while I personally try my best to pay the premium for grass-fed beef it's usually considered not as tasty as grain-fed)
As for chickens... I've had coworkers who raised chickens for their eggs in their backyard. If you've got 2-3 chickens in a reasonable backyard that's probably an ok life for them and you get the eggs - but I'm also told they don't make great eating by the time they're old.
Correct on the eating. The vast majority of the food value of laying hens is from the eggs. And the genetics of broilers vs laying hens differ too -- the former have faster, earlier muscle growth -- to an almost disturbing degree in some breeds -- while the latter tend to be more robust and better, well, layers.
Generally by the time they are old enough to lay they are quite tough, nothing like grocery-store chicken. This is generally true, not just for chickens -- we slaughter animals young for a variety of reasons. One is efficiency (why keep feeding them past a certain point?), but a very important one is how muscle toughens over time.
(I used to raise both broilers and laying hens on pasture, along with a very small herd of steer, basically a Joel Saletin friends-and-family meat CSA, in the early 00s.)
Definitely! For males of dairy breeds, that's their fate 99.9% of the time. For cattle intended to be meat, though, we let them get a little older, sans testicles.
I'm not sure the actions of farmers are really that rational - a lot of farms are hobbies/tax breaks for rich people not real businesses. Of course, we could subsidize meat less if it wasn't so popular.
"By the same token, keeping pigs in “gestation crates” so narrow they can’t turn around is obviously not great for the pigs. But it does dramatically increase the number of pigs and also benefits privileged elites — which in this case is not the assembled nobility at Versailles, but all the human beings who eat meat or dairy products."
Dude, you've got to stop eating dairy products made from pig's milk. This is like a Scrabble triple word score of kosher violations.
There's a political parallel between the animal welfare and climate change issues, it seems to me. Matt suggests that with the right regulations, the price of animal meat could be pushed so high that it surpasses the cost of alt-meat and people switch because they've been made worse off. This sounds to me exactly like taxing fossil fuels to stop global warming: i.e., not a thing that's going to happen.|
I think Ezra Klein got it right not too long ago in the NYT. What we really need is more government-funded research to reduce the cost of alt-meat (and improve its quality) so that it falls below the current price of animal meat and people switch because they've been made better off. That's exactly what happened to the competitiveness of photovoltaic power, and it worked.
I also think it's great that there's an animal welfare NGO called The Humane League.
It's obviously easier if the net result is cheaper than current meat. But if there's enough improvement in the quality of both plant-based and animal-based meat, while plant-based meat is a *little* more expensive than current animal-based meat while the remaining animal-based meat is moderately more expensive than that, I think that's also a plausible pathway. (I don't know that cars needed to get *cheaper* than horses or streetcars before they started taking off in popularity, since there was also a quality of transportation improvement.)
Yes, the point is to move the price/quality tradeoff for alt-meat to a point where it dominates animal meat. Quality improvements are probably more important than price in that regard.
My most optimistic thought on the whole subject is that intuitively, it seems quite likely that some plant-based meats end up being cheaper on their own. Current beaf replacements are a great example. Once the formula is set, and the firms aren't shoveling 50% of their money into R&D, growing peas and making fake meat is much much more efficient than growing soy beans, feeding them to cattle over the course of 1.5 years with net volumes of food of like 150x, the slaughtering and processing the cow. Cows come with the added benefit leather, and meats other than ground beef of course, but still the plant-based option is miles more efficient. For more difficult meats to replicate though, it will be much harder.
I'm fine with this generally - but why does the research need to be funded by the government? It seems like a better solution would be for private individuals who are concerned/passionate about this issue to provide the funding to make this happen (and potentially rep market rewards from it as well).
I think that one major function of government is to fund things that are good but which individual incentives don't bring about. I think alt-meat research is described by this.
I think the challenge is that the limit to the "good" things that the government could fund research on is far out there if there is a limit at all. There seems to be plenty of money in the private sector sloshing around from people spending on their interests - seems like people who have an interest seeing this move forward should step up without relying on the "government" to fund it. Get a group like the Humane League mentioned elsewhere to be a place where people could invest toward this goal. And to be clear - that's a desire that goes far beyond plant based meats, but to a whole host of issues where people want the government to do something instead of joining to gather voluntarily to do it.
We've had this discussion before, and my response would be that government doing research is good. But are we expecting the government to research everything that anyone considers good? More to the point, your essentially saying that only government can fund good research. Which if true, is horribly depressing.
It's really sad and scary that we've left our morals get so out of whack on farming. IMO there's nothing inherently wrong with raising animals for slaughter, as humans have done for thousands of years, but the conditions we're raising animals in are now are really indefensible - much worse than they've been in the past and clearly so bad for the animals that not being born at all would be better.
I'm a big believer in "progress" so it's tough to see how terrible it's been for farm animals. Technology has been laser-focused on efficiency, and markets have forced famers to optimize relentlessly for cheap meat - which they've done very well, with no regard for animal welfare.
I think for many people the world is too much with us. They don't want to ruminate (that's a dumb pun there, I guess) on what lives are like for these animals, just like they don't really want to know why their clothes are as cheap as they are, or what's entailed in mining for the cobalt in their electric cars or in picking the strawberries they eat.
How bad that is I don't know, but it's certainly a human reaction that I'm sure every damn one of us shares to some degree.
My understanding is that factory farming is much worse than sweatshops making clothes or cobalt mines or strawberry picking, and I think it’s unfortunate that it’s all conflated in this way.
Of course. As I’ve repeatedly said, the only constraint under the framework by which I understand it is the convenience and comfort of the humans involved. I’d be profoundly discomforted by pointlessly torturing anything.
But that’s not what you proposed above. You quite literally claimed that “mistreating” *animals* in a factory farm is worse than mistreating humans in a number of other circumstances.
I utterly despise any moral framework that allows someone to consider this to be true.
I've been in the packing plants. I've been in the feedlots. I have never, ever, seen an animal tortured to death. Yes, I've also seen the PETA videos and some farms have real problems, but we all need to turn down the hyperbole a bit before we get solutions.
The thing is, you can’t live a completely cruelty-free life. Imagine if every time you saw a homeless person, you stopped and invited them to live with you. And if rats took over your place, you let them have it so you didn’t have to kill them.
Humans have a great capacity for empathy, and also a great capacity for callousness, because otherwise we would go crazy. So it’s perfectly natural to have an “out of sight, out of mind” mentality in many cases.
Yes but there are degrees here. I’m vegetarian. Cutting out meat products does not reduce my quality of life substantially, unlike giving away my living space.
Surprised you didn't touch on the environmental effects of switching away from eating meat. Animals require far more land and food to grow than plants do, and animal "emissions" (particularly from cows) increase the methane in the atmosphere. This, rather than overall animal welfare, seems to be the purpose of plant-based meat substitutes.
One thing that I’d really like to see that I don’t think I have yet is a hectare-to-hectare comparison of the amount of grain necessary to create equal weights of ground beef and Impossible/Beyond/etc.
There's about twenty ingredients in those burgers. All of which have to be planted and harvested using fossil fuel powered tractors. Then transported for processing. Then processed. Then distributed the same as everything else. Every step is energy intensive and none of it shows up in the calculations.
This is why I wanted a hectare to hectare comparison. It takes a _lot_ of intensive farming to produce a single pound of beef before the cow even comes into it, but the energy cost for a hectare of soy is more or less constant either way. If the faux meats cut that back by even 10 or 20% (and it seems likely based on the study Matt posted that it's much better than that) they're doing the world a solid.
It's not exaggerated. The caloric efficiency of beef is 3%. It's far better to eat plants directly even if they're processed. You see in the link above that meat substitutes use 7% of the farmland.
I don't really to be honest. I eat meat. But I suspect the people making these arguments don't really know how to do the math. Mostly because they literally ignore the math. And it really doesn't matter since people who eat meat and enjoy it are not waiting for the perfect argument not to do so.
Right, but it’s more efficient to feed the grain or soy to a human compared to feeding it to an animal that uses the calories to make meat, milk or eggs that a human eats.
I'm not taking a stand on the meat v. "meat" thing, to me that's a consumer preference. But the hectare to hectare comparisons aren't correct at any rate because animal production (including all that corn and soy) is mostly on marginal land that wouldn't be used for vegetables. One is not just comparing growing apples to oranges, it's more like growing apples or nothing. You can, but it's super expensive to, convert Kansas and Iowa into peas and carrots. So, your question is thoughtful, but it isn't as simple as "well, Illinois could just grow more bananas."
Unless I am _really_ misinformed, the primary ingredient in Impossible™ is isolated soy protein, which is absolutely sourced from the same big midwestern row crop operations as cattle feed is. It's certainly not a 100% apples to apples comparison, since AFAIK cattle raising and finishing uses corn rather than soy and obviously corn has different energy costs, but it's not like orders of magnitude different in any direction.
If the new faux meats were all sourcing their ingredients from speciality produce growers in California, they'd be absurdly expensive and would never have a chance in hell of expanding production the way they plan to.
The wall I always run into when thinking about more humane farming practices is the cost tradeoff implication that poor people shouldn't eat as much meat. Talk about making regular meat more expensive driving consumption down is just another way of saying that only the more well off will have meat.
I think making alt-meat cheaper and better is the best option, but still, I can't help feeling a little...icky if in 30 years the lower classes can only afford Synth-Meat while the rich get a real porterhouse. Very...scifi dystopian, like when the crew of the Serenity lose their minds over getting real apples one time.
It’s best to keep in mind that science fiction is not actually a vision of the future (how could it be?) but a vision of the present reducto ad absurdem. And in the era when most of the stories we think about in this context were written (Harry Harrison, Philip K Dick), explicit meat substitute products actually existed and were pretty universally awful.
So I think it’s pretty pertinent that Impossible™️ and Beyond™️ etc are selling well despite being _more_ expensive than supermarket ground beef, and like our host my family has switched to it for our occasional burger nights because we’re not invested in the idea of eating beef per se, we just like the occasional burger and they absolutely deliver that. They can’t deliver “porterhouse” or even “short ribs” yet, but if (when?) they do we’ll give it a shot.
I think it’s much more likely that at that point beef from cattle will occupy the same place that single malt scotch does in the world right now: a luxury that even the working poor can splurge on occasionally but where everyone knows that part of the point of it is demonstrating to yourself that you can buy a $150 bottle of whisky and for day to day use the $15 bottle of white label Jim Beam will do just fine thank you.
(What I _really_ see as a sticking point for the alt meat industry is that so far nobody has produced alt-BONE and you can’t make a proper stock without it. Anyone got a few hundred million in VC money they’d like to throw at that?)
May I introduce you to Infuse, and similar orthopedic-surgery bone paste products? I can't speak to whether it would make a tasty soup stock, and that would certainly be an off-label use not condoned by the manufacturer but....
Re: alt bone, I'd be very interested in reduced meat products. I occasionally eat beyond/impossible products but care only about the climate effects, not the eating/not eating animal products part. I see a lot of value in a product that just used bones for stock or similar techniques to enhance the flavor of a mostly plant based product.
The $15 bottle of Jim Beam will most certainly *not* do just fine, thanks.
If fake meat tops out at the same quality relative to real meat as Jim Beam does to good single-malt scotch, I’m going to be first in line to vote against anyone proposing to make the latter inaccessible.
Oh, hahahaha, fair: that was a rhetorical flourish. Standard Beam's a fine mixer though, and their bonded releases aren't bad.
But single-malts are just stupidly overpriced right now due to a combination of shuttered distilleries in the 80s-90s (Port Ellen, etc, RIP) and absurd demand from China. I love my Islays and wish more domestic distillers would target that kind of flavor profile, but for a weekday dram after dinner there are much better values to be found.
I keep a bottle of yamazaki 12 around, that does it for me. No need to go nuts, though the 18 is tempting now and again when I look at my bank balance and think “I could afford that!
If it weren't for desensitization we'd probably find abusing, killing, and eating sentient beings pretty dystopian also. Public feelings might change rapidly as need to rationalize personal consumption falls.
Right now, the luxury item is the alt-meat. So lower-income people would be getting today's "superior" good. There will always be expensive versions of things and cultural values evolve around them. It's hard to predict what these values will be. But recipes will adapt around whatever's available as they always have.
This is part of why Beyond and Impossible started their campaigns by being present only in fancy restaurants, and then moving only to fancy grocery stores, before moving to regular grocery stores and fast food (and even now staying in the "expensive burger" at the fast food places). They're positioning their products as luxury items, and working on 2.0 and 3.0 versions that will be preferred by most people to current meat.
I share your hesitation about weighting animal welfare more highly than equality between humans, but I really think we're coming up on the point where Synth-Meat and real meat are indistinguishable, and there's a decent chance with meat grown from cultured cells that in the future the two will be literally, materially identical. I eat a lot of the Beyond Sausage, and it's for all intents and purposes a sausage. But until we get to that point, yeah, I'd weight the desire of humans in the developing world to enjoy developed-world standards of living, including a developed-world diet, ahead of the non-human animals' right to live.
The non-human animals’ right to live isn’t really the issue in this debate—it’s their right not to be tortured throughout their life—but of course you could prioritize that below developing world standards of living too. But I think we have to ask whether desire for the Western diet is the only interest we should consider. Cheap meat, corn syrup, etc. lead to all kinds of health problems that concentrate among the poorest members or our society; these problems are certainly better than malnutrition, but they aren’t an unalloyed good, and I think the health considerations along with the animal welfare considerations should keep us from assigning 100% importance to surface-level equality here.
But by definition, if you don't assign paramount importance to "surface-level" equality on this issue, you're going to line up in favor of all sorts of odd restrictions on food production that trickle down into the global supply.
I don't know. Do you consider bans on crating and similar practices to be odd restrictions? I certainly don't think it's self-evident that a race-to-the-bottom in terms of animal living conditions is optimized for human happiness.
Yeah if you double the price of eggs, and ostensibly the price of chicken as well, some people will starve. Certainly you're hitting the poorest, hardest. Keeping food cheap is a really important way to fight poverty, and the reduction in food prices on an inflation adjusted basis has helped reduce poverty substantially over the past 50 years.
Factory farming produces a real surplus, inputs are much smaller than outputs of a pretty important thing. If you reduce that real surplus, you have to make up for it in some other non-magic way. That's very difficult to do, so the people who bear the brunt of the pain of that choice are the people with the least amount of political claim on the remaining surplus.
There are so many options for rich people who want to sate their moral appetites and their hungers, and I think that's the better path than forcing industry-wide changes by political will.
Using issues that would result if reform was immediately forced on third world counties is a bad reason to not do them here. If we forced Swedish labor laws on the Congo that would result in a lot of bad things, but that's not a reason for Sweden to not have them.
No one would starve if the US banned the most egregious treatment of Chickens.
Do you subscribe to the idea that the sentience of the animal matters in the discussion? It’s always bugged me that pigs seem like super smart animals, very aware of their own suffering, whereas chicken (and fish especially) seem much further from consciousness.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the poultry industry has been a part of promoting the idea that they are barely conscious (I always thought that too). But I should be very clear that I have no evidence of this.
Ironically, I didn’t eat octopus for years, because they were so smart. Then I read a beautiful book about a researcher bonding with their aquarium’s octopus. My main takeaway was that octopuses are smart, but also absolutely brutal to each other, and live short, violent lives. I started eating octopus again. One of my favorite meals, in fact.
I'm skeptical that there's really such a thing as well treated farm animals. At least not at any scale. The combination of the huge power difference between animals and farmers, the profit motive where efficiency equals cruelty equals profitability, and how easy it is to hide the cruelty to the public is just too much for any ruleset to overcome.
You point out some particularly egregious practices, but even meat sold as "humane" uses practices that objectively seem pretty cruel. The rules around things like "free range" chicken are more like a sick joke in practice. How much energy, focus, and resources are we willing to put into developing this elusive "ethical meat industry" when we have the much more straight forward solution of simply not using sentient creatures as a source of food?
To answer your last question: people don't wanna and you can't make them. At least as long as they can vote. There are, in fact, some wonderfully treated animals. Those are dairy cattle. And let me assure you those princesses are treated like the extremely valuable assets they are. All they can eat. Free medical care that would grace any country in the world and quite long life spans.
Dairy cattle have some of the worst lives imaginable. They are forcibly impregnanted repeatedly. If their calf is a male, it's dragged away from them while they scream and often slaughtered immediately for pet food or veal. The females spend their lives hooked up to machines for pumping out milk (Which has an FDA allowed amount of blood/pus in it given the condition), until they collapse before 5 years old and are killed, despite having a natural life span of 15-20 years. They're genetically manipulated and pumped full of hormones to produce more milk.
It's wonderful news that the dairy industry has been struggling so much the last few years.
Been in a few dairy barns and you are wrong. In fact I have been through the food chain as a engineer from end to end. I can't imagine where you got your information from but it is bogus. You are right about one thing though. When they finally reach the end of their life they do usually wind up in the HRI section of the meat packing plant. Too tough and lean for cut meat. So the hospital,restaurant and institution section turns them into really long meat loaves and sometimes cold cuts.
If you can afford it, I strongly urge you to buy pasture raised chicken and eggs (and ethically raised beef, which is cheaper relative to pasture chickens). Cage-free/free range are meaningless terms — basically, they open a tiny door and it never occurs to the chickens that they could go outside and explore.
Whole Foods has the “Step” system. Buy Step 4, 5, or 5+.
I believe you can humanely slaughter animals. But they should have good lives beforehand.
EDIT: Also… I suggest trying not to eat pork. I know, I know, bacon. But speaking as someone who ***loves*** meat, I gave it up twenty years ago, and have had maybe one moment where I was sad I couldn’t eat bacon. Pigs are smarter than dogs, and are also highly social. If they didn’t poop so much, we’d probably keep small ones as pets.
I am not sure if there is any type of humanely slaughtered pork. But I think pigs are smart and social enough that you’re getting into dolphin/whale territory.
I’m of the opinion that every little bit helps. If you eat a lot of bacon, try “fake-on.” Or eat it less frequently.
One other thought on this- the animals are kinda fucked. Even if the US and Europe are willing to pay more for better animal welfare and beyond meat substitutes, the real issue is that emerging countries are for sure not. As emerging market countries continue to develop a middle class, the demand for meat will continue to grow. It’s got some parallels to the energy crisis with much fewer potential solutions. Affordable lab grown mean is much further out than green energy.
This is, I think, a lot of the reason that people are extremely excited about the current and next generation of fake meats. Even if you're just replacing burgers, sausages and chicken nuggets, there's the potential for them to absorb a _lot_ of the developing world's demand for meat without having to turn half the planet into CAFOs.
Also... I'm _really_ curious if any of our Desi commenters can chime in with how this stuff is being received (if at all!) in India? It's a country where there are a ton of vegetarians and where raising both cattle and pork for meat are fraught with cultural concerns: this would seem like an obvious market if they can get the price points down?
If agricultural animal husbandry is more correctly conceptualized as not being purely about the efficient production of chattel property, but as also involving an element of caretaking for sentient beings, then it's possible to draw analogies to, and perhaps lessons from, other situations where we have to mitigate the economic efficiency with an imperative of treating the creatures who are being taken care of well. Nursing homes, orphanages, long-term psychiatric institutions, prison, etc. We have statements of ethics, binding rules like staff-to-patient ratios, etc, to try to mitigate and push against the logical conclusions of efficiency from the operators point of view.
In the days before industrialized agricultural, on family farms embedded in a a community and culture, this was handled through cultural norms and practices that just were the water and air farmers lived in, without having to think about it or analyze it. But we're long past that point.
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.
Somewhat related, I enjoy cooking and learning to cook new things. Recently, the wife and I have befriended our first vegan person (and I don’t know that we knew any vegetarians either, none come to mind). It has been a fun challenge to learn how to prepare enjoyable vegan dishes, and even though I probably won’t stop eating meat altogether, it has made it much easier to plan for meatless or even vegan meals because I’ve figured out a few things I like.
As a vegan, I genuinely don’t understand the word humane describing a life that ends in slaughter. It strikes me as a bunch of lipstick on a pig.
I’ve never been an activist vegan, I don’t think it’s my business what you put on your plate, but I don’t think you can talk about raising an animal to kill it for no reason other than you think they taste good as humane anymore than humane cannibalism or human sacrifice is okay. I don’t think it’s realistic to describe them as happy cows just because they get to eat grass for a bit. So much of their lives will still be exploitative in ways few humans would accept even for treatment of others let alone themselves.
Have you spent much time around cattle? It doesn't take a lot to keep them happy. A nice pasture to roam in, shelter from bad weather, plenty of food, etc. If they have a good life, what does it matter if they are humanely killed at the end and eaten? They don't know the difference.
There's a lot to learn from Temple Grandin who did so much pioneering work in (not oxymoronic) "humane slaughtering." She cares very deeply that the animals not suffer at the very end of their lives and her work has led to major changes in prominent company practices.
Terry Gross (of all people!) once asked her why it made a difference if the slaughterhouse was more humane since the animals were being killed anyway. Grandin, in her rather guileless autistic way (she's on the spectrum), put Gross in her place in this classic bit from "Fresh Air":
GROSS: So, what happens if cattle see a yellow light or a moving hose or something that distracts them and actually scares them as they're on their way to slaughter? I mean, they're going to get killed, right? So why are we worry that they're going to be a little upset beforehand?
Dr. GRANDIN: Well, you could say the same thing. You know, get some old grandmother in nursing home and say, we'll just throw her over in the corner, she's going to die of cancer tomorrow, that doesn't matter. I mean, it gets back to relieving suffering and there's no reason for it to be scared.
That's not an accurate description of industrial beef and dairy production in the US. I grew up with cows 200' from my front door and live in farmland to this day. They're not plants, they're not scallops, they experience suffering, they're social creatures. A cow knows when their babies are being taken away. They suffer from chafing and infection, from excessive heat, and cramped quarters.
The "ignorance of reality" is from people that think farm animals live the lives depicted in children's books.
I mean only a bit of time around them volunteering a few times a month for four years at a vegan rescue ranch.
But like you still are going to kill them, and I’m not sure you can just flip on the adjective humane and make that okay. And I mean you’re not going to let them live out their natural life, and your still going to raise them in a way consistent with commodification.
The bar is so much lower than we would ever accept for even other people let alone ourselves that it is hard to take the idea seriously.
I understand that from a philosophical perspective actively killing a creature is considered different from letting nature take its course, but I also think when trying to evaluate the claim that some form of animal husbandry is “humane” (and to be clear I think the vast majority of that is laughably far from it) you do have to keep in mind that being torn apart by predators is a large part of the experience of being a large slow-moving ruminant. (even more so of a rabbit or chicken)
It doesn't make much sense to use that as the bar though when as humans we are capable of much more (or much less). It doesn't matter what would happen to some cow in the wild if it isn't in the wild and wouldn't have been born in the wild.
Sure. Again, I'm in no way trying to defend the current state of animal farming pretty much anywhere. I'm just disinclined to think that "at the end, they die" is by itself disqualifying. That's the end state for us all, and nature has some pretty gruesome deaths in store for some unlucky percentage of any species.
But if it is a dog or cat, "at the end, they die" is disqualifying. You can't adopt a dog and eat it if lived a good life for 5 years.
And all of this ignores that grass fed, free range cattle is actually worse for the environment and not scalable. I would posit 98% of the readers of this blog want to meet emissions targets, and doing that doesn't entail putting the 100 million cattle in the US on pasture.
If someone wants to eat that, I got no problem with it. I wouldn't want to, but that's about me and my biases not about the corpse. The corpse doesn't care if it gets eaten, cremated, buried or just left outside to be picked over by scavengers.
It’s worse than not being slaughtered, but that’s not the relevant comparison. The relevant comparison is “is it worse than not being born at all”? In the case of most farm animals today, IMO their lives *are* worse than not being born and this is a moral outrage we should stop. But if it were true that animals raised for slaughter were happy to be born - then I don’t see the problem.
I’m a former vegetarian who used to believe in a rights-based framework, but I’ve since been convinced by the argument (I came across it in Michael Pollan) that individual rights are the wrong way (or at least not the only way) to think about it, and that animal happiness involves the animal living in the way truest to its nature, which in farm animals’ case means domestically on a farm, with all that entails. Whereas animal rightists like Peter Singer hold that for pigs not to be born would be morally neutral—rights accrue to individuals, and unborn individuals don’t have them—I think the perspective that animals on traditional or neotraditional farms would lose something by not being born—and the ecology would lose something as well—is more convincing. I definitely recommend you read Omnivore’s Dilemma if you haven’t already!
The post-meat future for cows will presumably look some like the current age for horses.
Prior to cars, humans kept a gazillion horses and mules. NYC was chockablock with horses, and of course manure everywhere. And the life for horses was really bad. Wars in particular saw horses and mules dying in droves.
Now? Many fewer horses. Average life of horses (at least in first world) much better.
Not sure that people will keep private stables of cows after meat, or that Preakness will introduce chicken races. But the huge drop in horse population gives us a hint of how it will go.
Unsure about stables of cows but if you look at West Texas for instance, the land there isn't particularly suitable for agriculture, and it's pretty dry - takes almost 100 acres to sustain 1 cow.
What can you do with that land?
1) Wind farms - we see some of this out there but not every place is suitable and that would still leave a lot of space for cows.
2) Solar farms - this might actually use up ground space.
3) Free-range cows.
Assuming humanity doesn't become completely morally opposed to eating meat (possible!) I suspect it will be more free-range cows in places like this. (Although note that while I personally try my best to pay the premium for grass-fed beef it's usually considered not as tasty as grain-fed)
As for chickens... I've had coworkers who raised chickens for their eggs in their backyard. If you've got 2-3 chickens in a reasonable backyard that's probably an ok life for them and you get the eggs - but I'm also told they don't make great eating by the time they're old.
Correct on the eating. The vast majority of the food value of laying hens is from the eggs. And the genetics of broilers vs laying hens differ too -- the former have faster, earlier muscle growth -- to an almost disturbing degree in some breeds -- while the latter tend to be more robust and better, well, layers.
Generally by the time they are old enough to lay they are quite tough, nothing like grocery-store chicken. This is generally true, not just for chickens -- we slaughter animals young for a variety of reasons. One is efficiency (why keep feeding them past a certain point?), but a very important one is how muscle toughens over time.
(I used to raise both broilers and laying hens on pasture, along with a very small herd of steer, basically a Joel Saletin friends-and-family meat CSA, in the early 00s.)
"...we slaughter animals young for a variety of reasons"
Another reason is we don't need many bulls to keep the cattle herds going. Veal is almost entirely from male cattle.
I find veal too bland.
Definitely! For males of dairy breeds, that's their fate 99.9% of the time. For cattle intended to be meat, though, we let them get a little older, sans testicles.
Feeding livestock seems to be a slightly more sustainable use of food waste than composting.
Just go to India and you'll see what a post-beef future looks like haha. Cows literally roam the streets freely.
I'm not sure the actions of farmers are really that rational - a lot of farms are hobbies/tax breaks for rich people not real businesses. Of course, we could subsidize meat less if it wasn't so popular.
"By the same token, keeping pigs in “gestation crates” so narrow they can’t turn around is obviously not great for the pigs. But it does dramatically increase the number of pigs and also benefits privileged elites — which in this case is not the assembled nobility at Versailles, but all the human beings who eat meat or dairy products."
Dude, you've got to stop eating dairy products made from pig's milk. This is like a Scrabble triple word score of kosher violations.
There's a political parallel between the animal welfare and climate change issues, it seems to me. Matt suggests that with the right regulations, the price of animal meat could be pushed so high that it surpasses the cost of alt-meat and people switch because they've been made worse off. This sounds to me exactly like taxing fossil fuels to stop global warming: i.e., not a thing that's going to happen.|
I think Ezra Klein got it right not too long ago in the NYT. What we really need is more government-funded research to reduce the cost of alt-meat (and improve its quality) so that it falls below the current price of animal meat and people switch because they've been made better off. That's exactly what happened to the competitiveness of photovoltaic power, and it worked.
I also think it's great that there's an animal welfare NGO called The Humane League.
It's obviously easier if the net result is cheaper than current meat. But if there's enough improvement in the quality of both plant-based and animal-based meat, while plant-based meat is a *little* more expensive than current animal-based meat while the remaining animal-based meat is moderately more expensive than that, I think that's also a plausible pathway. (I don't know that cars needed to get *cheaper* than horses or streetcars before they started taking off in popularity, since there was also a quality of transportation improvement.)
Yes, the point is to move the price/quality tradeoff for alt-meat to a point where it dominates animal meat. Quality improvements are probably more important than price in that regard.
My most optimistic thought on the whole subject is that intuitively, it seems quite likely that some plant-based meats end up being cheaper on their own. Current beaf replacements are a great example. Once the formula is set, and the firms aren't shoveling 50% of their money into R&D, growing peas and making fake meat is much much more efficient than growing soy beans, feeding them to cattle over the course of 1.5 years with net volumes of food of like 150x, the slaughtering and processing the cow. Cows come with the added benefit leather, and meats other than ground beef of course, but still the plant-based option is miles more efficient. For more difficult meats to replicate though, it will be much harder.
I'm fine with this generally - but why does the research need to be funded by the government? It seems like a better solution would be for private individuals who are concerned/passionate about this issue to provide the funding to make this happen (and potentially rep market rewards from it as well).
I think that one major function of government is to fund things that are good but which individual incentives don't bring about. I think alt-meat research is described by this.
I think the challenge is that the limit to the "good" things that the government could fund research on is far out there if there is a limit at all. There seems to be plenty of money in the private sector sloshing around from people spending on their interests - seems like people who have an interest seeing this move forward should step up without relying on the "government" to fund it. Get a group like the Humane League mentioned elsewhere to be a place where people could invest toward this goal. And to be clear - that's a desire that goes far beyond plant based meats, but to a whole host of issues where people want the government to do something instead of joining to gather voluntarily to do it.
We've had this discussion before, and my response would be that government doing research is good. But are we expecting the government to research everything that anyone considers good? More to the point, your essentially saying that only government can fund good research. Which if true, is horribly depressing.
It's really sad and scary that we've left our morals get so out of whack on farming. IMO there's nothing inherently wrong with raising animals for slaughter, as humans have done for thousands of years, but the conditions we're raising animals in are now are really indefensible - much worse than they've been in the past and clearly so bad for the animals that not being born at all would be better.
I'm a big believer in "progress" so it's tough to see how terrible it's been for farm animals. Technology has been laser-focused on efficiency, and markets have forced famers to optimize relentlessly for cheap meat - which they've done very well, with no regard for animal welfare.
Reminds me of https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/, about the dangers of too much optimization. I wonder what will happen to humans, if we ever run out of growth.
I think for many people the world is too much with us. They don't want to ruminate (that's a dumb pun there, I guess) on what lives are like for these animals, just like they don't really want to know why their clothes are as cheap as they are, or what's entailed in mining for the cobalt in their electric cars or in picking the strawberries they eat.
How bad that is I don't know, but it's certainly a human reaction that I'm sure every damn one of us shares to some degree.
My understanding is that factory farming is much worse than sweatshops making clothes or cobalt mines or strawberry picking, and I think it’s unfortunate that it’s all conflated in this way.
Define "worse".
Because if, as I and plenty of other folks believe, the animals literally *do not matter a whit*, then it's not worse.
Is it really true that you wouldn’t mind if, say, someone tortured a dog to death right in front of you?
Of course. As I’ve repeatedly said, the only constraint under the framework by which I understand it is the convenience and comfort of the humans involved. I’d be profoundly discomforted by pointlessly torturing anything.
But that’s not what you proposed above. You quite literally claimed that “mistreating” *animals* in a factory farm is worse than mistreating humans in a number of other circumstances.
I utterly despise any moral framework that allows someone to consider this to be true.
I've been in the packing plants. I've been in the feedlots. I have never, ever, seen an animal tortured to death. Yes, I've also seen the PETA videos and some farms have real problems, but we all need to turn down the hyperbole a bit before we get solutions.
In that comment, I was asking how serious David was about not caring about animals at all, not saying anything about farms.
The thing is, you can’t live a completely cruelty-free life. Imagine if every time you saw a homeless person, you stopped and invited them to live with you. And if rats took over your place, you let them have it so you didn’t have to kill them.
Humans have a great capacity for empathy, and also a great capacity for callousness, because otherwise we would go crazy. So it’s perfectly natural to have an “out of sight, out of mind” mentality in many cases.
Yes but there are degrees here. I’m vegetarian. Cutting out meat products does not reduce my quality of life substantially, unlike giving away my living space.
Doug Forcett can try. https://youtu.be/U25110YEIzY
Never helping anyone or anything else is sociopathic. That’s just not how humans are. But pathological indifference still isn’t the same as sadism.
Surprised you didn't touch on the environmental effects of switching away from eating meat. Animals require far more land and food to grow than plants do, and animal "emissions" (particularly from cows) increase the methane in the atmosphere. This, rather than overall animal welfare, seems to be the purpose of plant-based meat substitutes.
One thing that I’d really like to see that I don’t think I have yet is a hectare-to-hectare comparison of the amount of grain necessary to create equal weights of ground beef and Impossible/Beyond/etc.
Meat substitutes use 7% as many hectares https://css.umich.edu/sites/default/files/publication/CSS18-10.pdf
Damn!
There's about twenty ingredients in those burgers. All of which have to be planted and harvested using fossil fuel powered tractors. Then transported for processing. Then processed. Then distributed the same as everything else. Every step is energy intensive and none of it shows up in the calculations.
This is why I wanted a hectare to hectare comparison. It takes a _lot_ of intensive farming to produce a single pound of beef before the cow even comes into it, but the energy cost for a hectare of soy is more or less constant either way. If the faux meats cut that back by even 10 or 20% (and it seems likely based on the study Matt posted that it's much better than that) they're doing the world a solid.
So does the grain we feed animals we raise for food.
My point exactly. The differences are exaggerated.
It's not exaggerated. The caloric efficiency of beef is 3%. It's far better to eat plants directly even if they're processed. You see in the link above that meat substitutes use 7% of the farmland.
I don't really to be honest. I eat meat. But I suspect the people making these arguments don't really know how to do the math. Mostly because they literally ignore the math. And it really doesn't matter since people who eat meat and enjoy it are not waiting for the perfect argument not to do so.
Right, but it’s more efficient to feed the grain or soy to a human compared to feeding it to an animal that uses the calories to make meat, milk or eggs that a human eats.
Let me know when the soylent green is prescribed by law. Really. No one cares but a small minority and people can still vote.
Agreed. The global warming issue is big.
I'm not taking a stand on the meat v. "meat" thing, to me that's a consumer preference. But the hectare to hectare comparisons aren't correct at any rate because animal production (including all that corn and soy) is mostly on marginal land that wouldn't be used for vegetables. One is not just comparing growing apples to oranges, it's more like growing apples or nothing. You can, but it's super expensive to, convert Kansas and Iowa into peas and carrots. So, your question is thoughtful, but it isn't as simple as "well, Illinois could just grow more bananas."
Unless I am _really_ misinformed, the primary ingredient in Impossible™ is isolated soy protein, which is absolutely sourced from the same big midwestern row crop operations as cattle feed is. It's certainly not a 100% apples to apples comparison, since AFAIK cattle raising and finishing uses corn rather than soy and obviously corn has different energy costs, but it's not like orders of magnitude different in any direction.
If the new faux meats were all sourcing their ingredients from speciality produce growers in California, they'd be absurdly expensive and would never have a chance in hell of expanding production the way they plan to.
The wall I always run into when thinking about more humane farming practices is the cost tradeoff implication that poor people shouldn't eat as much meat. Talk about making regular meat more expensive driving consumption down is just another way of saying that only the more well off will have meat.
I think making alt-meat cheaper and better is the best option, but still, I can't help feeling a little...icky if in 30 years the lower classes can only afford Synth-Meat while the rich get a real porterhouse. Very...scifi dystopian, like when the crew of the Serenity lose their minds over getting real apples one time.
It’s best to keep in mind that science fiction is not actually a vision of the future (how could it be?) but a vision of the present reducto ad absurdem. And in the era when most of the stories we think about in this context were written (Harry Harrison, Philip K Dick), explicit meat substitute products actually existed and were pretty universally awful.
So I think it’s pretty pertinent that Impossible™️ and Beyond™️ etc are selling well despite being _more_ expensive than supermarket ground beef, and like our host my family has switched to it for our occasional burger nights because we’re not invested in the idea of eating beef per se, we just like the occasional burger and they absolutely deliver that. They can’t deliver “porterhouse” or even “short ribs” yet, but if (when?) they do we’ll give it a shot.
I think it’s much more likely that at that point beef from cattle will occupy the same place that single malt scotch does in the world right now: a luxury that even the working poor can splurge on occasionally but where everyone knows that part of the point of it is demonstrating to yourself that you can buy a $150 bottle of whisky and for day to day use the $15 bottle of white label Jim Beam will do just fine thank you.
(What I _really_ see as a sticking point for the alt meat industry is that so far nobody has produced alt-BONE and you can’t make a proper stock without it. Anyone got a few hundred million in VC money they’d like to throw at that?)
"so far nobody has produced alt-BONE"
May I introduce you to Infuse, and similar orthopedic-surgery bone paste products? I can't speak to whether it would make a tasty soup stock, and that would certainly be an off-label use not condoned by the manufacturer but....
https://www.medtronic.com/us-en/healthcare-professionals/products/spinal-orthopaedic/bone-grafting/infuse-bone-graft.html
Oh man. Someone get Kenji Lopez-Alt on the line; this smells like a million-view blog post...
No marrow, though. Will have to file a complaint with the reps when I see them.
Re: alt bone, I'd be very interested in reduced meat products. I occasionally eat beyond/impossible products but care only about the climate effects, not the eating/not eating animal products part. I see a lot of value in a product that just used bones for stock or similar techniques to enhance the flavor of a mostly plant based product.
Stop making whiskey analogies, lol.
:p
Never! 🥃🥃🥃
The $15 bottle of Jim Beam will most certainly *not* do just fine, thanks.
If fake meat tops out at the same quality relative to real meat as Jim Beam does to good single-malt scotch, I’m going to be first in line to vote against anyone proposing to make the latter inaccessible.
Oh, hahahaha, fair: that was a rhetorical flourish. Standard Beam's a fine mixer though, and their bonded releases aren't bad.
But single-malts are just stupidly overpriced right now due to a combination of shuttered distilleries in the 80s-90s (Port Ellen, etc, RIP) and absurd demand from China. I love my Islays and wish more domestic distillers would target that kind of flavor profile, but for a weekday dram after dinner there are much better values to be found.
I keep a bottle of yamazaki 12 around, that does it for me. No need to go nuts, though the 18 is tempting now and again when I look at my bank balance and think “I could afford that!
If it weren't for desensitization we'd probably find abusing, killing, and eating sentient beings pretty dystopian also. Public feelings might change rapidly as need to rationalize personal consumption falls.
Right now, the luxury item is the alt-meat. So lower-income people would be getting today's "superior" good. There will always be expensive versions of things and cultural values evolve around them. It's hard to predict what these values will be. But recipes will adapt around whatever's available as they always have.
This is part of why Beyond and Impossible started their campaigns by being present only in fancy restaurants, and then moving only to fancy grocery stores, before moving to regular grocery stores and fast food (and even now staying in the "expensive burger" at the fast food places). They're positioning their products as luxury items, and working on 2.0 and 3.0 versions that will be preferred by most people to current meat.
"The Tesla strategy." :) It's a good plan!
Whoever the CEO is needs to take the Elon Musk strategy of riling up the libs to get conservatives to eat them. Angry liberals will eat them anyway.
Amusingly, that's the only interaction I have with it, is as a burger alternative in restaurants.
We almost never consume ground beef at home.
I genuinely don’t know the answer here but what would be so different about this than what we have now?
Like I haven’t eaten meat in years but when I did the difference between a 10-20 dollar steak place and a 100 dollar steak place was pretty stark.
I share your hesitation about weighting animal welfare more highly than equality between humans, but I really think we're coming up on the point where Synth-Meat and real meat are indistinguishable, and there's a decent chance with meat grown from cultured cells that in the future the two will be literally, materially identical. I eat a lot of the Beyond Sausage, and it's for all intents and purposes a sausage. But until we get to that point, yeah, I'd weight the desire of humans in the developing world to enjoy developed-world standards of living, including a developed-world diet, ahead of the non-human animals' right to live.
The non-human animals’ right to live isn’t really the issue in this debate—it’s their right not to be tortured throughout their life—but of course you could prioritize that below developing world standards of living too. But I think we have to ask whether desire for the Western diet is the only interest we should consider. Cheap meat, corn syrup, etc. lead to all kinds of health problems that concentrate among the poorest members or our society; these problems are certainly better than malnutrition, but they aren’t an unalloyed good, and I think the health considerations along with the animal welfare considerations should keep us from assigning 100% importance to surface-level equality here.
The only people with the right to make that decision are… well, let’s just say they’re not us.
Sure. I thought we weren't talking about making decisions for anyone, but about what makes us feel icky (in OP's terms) and what doesn't.
Ehh, I guess.
But by definition, if you don't assign paramount importance to "surface-level" equality on this issue, you're going to line up in favor of all sorts of odd restrictions on food production that trickle down into the global supply.
I don't know. Do you consider bans on crating and similar practices to be odd restrictions? I certainly don't think it's self-evident that a race-to-the-bottom in terms of animal living conditions is optimized for human happiness.
Yeah if you double the price of eggs, and ostensibly the price of chicken as well, some people will starve. Certainly you're hitting the poorest, hardest. Keeping food cheap is a really important way to fight poverty, and the reduction in food prices on an inflation adjusted basis has helped reduce poverty substantially over the past 50 years.
Factory farming produces a real surplus, inputs are much smaller than outputs of a pretty important thing. If you reduce that real surplus, you have to make up for it in some other non-magic way. That's very difficult to do, so the people who bear the brunt of the pain of that choice are the people with the least amount of political claim on the remaining surplus.
There are so many options for rich people who want to sate their moral appetites and their hungers, and I think that's the better path than forcing industry-wide changes by political will.
Using issues that would result if reform was immediately forced on third world counties is a bad reason to not do them here. If we forced Swedish labor laws on the Congo that would result in a lot of bad things, but that's not a reason for Sweden to not have them.
No one would starve if the US banned the most egregious treatment of Chickens.
No they wouldn't starve. But they would probably vote for Republicans who for obvious reasons oppose these measures.
I think Republicans are more into red meat.
I assure you there are poor people in the US.
To the point that they are literally starving from calorie deficit? Not many.
To the point where they’ll vote against anyone who proposes to raise the cost of chicken or beef by US$1-3 per pound?
Lots.
Historically, the poor have eaten grain. Fewer animals being slaughtered would reduce demand for grain and make it cheaper for poor humans to buy it
Grain is plenty cheap enough as-is in the developed world, to the point where exports and foreign aid gut poorer, mainly-agrarian economies.
And I don't think we should be basing literally any decision on "historically..."
Historically, a slight majority of children died before reaching adulthood.
Historically, around 5% of women died birthing a child before reaching the age of 40.
Historically, the vast majority of people alive were obscenely poor by modern standards.
Historically, life sucked.
Do you similarly oppose carbon taxes because it will hurt poor people?
I oppose carbon taxes because they will make us lose elections.
Clearly misses the point of the question. This isn’t a thread about political outcomes.
Increasing the prices of eggs and chicken would also lose elections but that wasn’t the objection raised.
Do you subscribe to the idea that the sentience of the animal matters in the discussion? It’s always bugged me that pigs seem like super smart animals, very aware of their own suffering, whereas chicken (and fish especially) seem much further from consciousness.
I agree, but the way factory chickens are treated is pretty awful even with that consideration. They can certainly experience direct suffering.
Fish do seem like a different category IMO.
what about dolphins?
I’m not aware of anyone raising dolphins for slaughter
If someone is, I don't think I want to know about it.
Though they are sex monsters.
Dolphins are mammals.
Not being "raised" precisely, but you may want to look up the documentary, "The Cove."
Delicious!
Dolphins aren't fish? I'm not sure what you're getting at. If it's bycatch then I agree that's a big problem.
Fish don’t exist. https://www.wpr.org/we-call-them-fish-evolution-says-theyre-something-else
Fish are real. BIRDS aren’t. Common mistake.
Birds are dinosaurs.
Chickens don’t seem to be as dumb as we’ve been told:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/01/170103091955.htm
I wouldn’t be surprised if the poultry industry has been a part of promoting the idea that they are barely conscious (I always thought that too). But I should be very clear that I have no evidence of this.
Watch My Octopus Teacher and then try eating some grilled Octopus!
Ironically, I didn’t eat octopus for years, because they were so smart. Then I read a beautiful book about a researcher bonding with their aquarium’s octopus. My main takeaway was that octopuses are smart, but also absolutely brutal to each other, and live short, violent lives. I started eating octopus again. One of my favorite meals, in fact.
I'm skeptical that there's really such a thing as well treated farm animals. At least not at any scale. The combination of the huge power difference between animals and farmers, the profit motive where efficiency equals cruelty equals profitability, and how easy it is to hide the cruelty to the public is just too much for any ruleset to overcome.
You point out some particularly egregious practices, but even meat sold as "humane" uses practices that objectively seem pretty cruel. The rules around things like "free range" chicken are more like a sick joke in practice. How much energy, focus, and resources are we willing to put into developing this elusive "ethical meat industry" when we have the much more straight forward solution of simply not using sentient creatures as a source of food?
To answer your last question: people don't wanna and you can't make them. At least as long as they can vote. There are, in fact, some wonderfully treated animals. Those are dairy cattle. And let me assure you those princesses are treated like the extremely valuable assets they are. All they can eat. Free medical care that would grace any country in the world and quite long life spans.
Dairy cattle have some of the worst lives imaginable. They are forcibly impregnanted repeatedly. If their calf is a male, it's dragged away from them while they scream and often slaughtered immediately for pet food or veal. The females spend their lives hooked up to machines for pumping out milk (Which has an FDA allowed amount of blood/pus in it given the condition), until they collapse before 5 years old and are killed, despite having a natural life span of 15-20 years. They're genetically manipulated and pumped full of hormones to produce more milk.
It's wonderful news that the dairy industry has been struggling so much the last few years.
Been in a few dairy barns and you are wrong. In fact I have been through the food chain as a engineer from end to end. I can't imagine where you got your information from but it is bogus. You are right about one thing though. When they finally reach the end of their life they do usually wind up in the HRI section of the meat packing plant. Too tough and lean for cut meat. So the hospital,restaurant and institution section turns them into really long meat loaves and sometimes cold cuts.
Elaborate on where I am wrong. What happens to the male cows? How are the female cows impregnanted? Why do they end up with bovine mastisis?
You have this cool schtick where you back up nothing you say and go around saying everyone is wrong.
If you can afford it, I strongly urge you to buy pasture raised chicken and eggs (and ethically raised beef, which is cheaper relative to pasture chickens). Cage-free/free range are meaningless terms — basically, they open a tiny door and it never occurs to the chickens that they could go outside and explore.
Whole Foods has the “Step” system. Buy Step 4, 5, or 5+.
I believe you can humanely slaughter animals. But they should have good lives beforehand.
EDIT: Also… I suggest trying not to eat pork. I know, I know, bacon. But speaking as someone who ***loves*** meat, I gave it up twenty years ago, and have had maybe one moment where I was sad I couldn’t eat bacon. Pigs are smarter than dogs, and are also highly social. If they didn’t poop so much, we’d probably keep small ones as pets.
I am not sure if there is any type of humanely slaughtered pork. But I think pigs are smart and social enough that you’re getting into dolphin/whale territory.
I’m of the opinion that every little bit helps. If you eat a lot of bacon, try “fake-on.” Or eat it less frequently.
One other thought on this- the animals are kinda fucked. Even if the US and Europe are willing to pay more for better animal welfare and beyond meat substitutes, the real issue is that emerging countries are for sure not. As emerging market countries continue to develop a middle class, the demand for meat will continue to grow. It’s got some parallels to the energy crisis with much fewer potential solutions. Affordable lab grown mean is much further out than green energy.
This is, I think, a lot of the reason that people are extremely excited about the current and next generation of fake meats. Even if you're just replacing burgers, sausages and chicken nuggets, there's the potential for them to absorb a _lot_ of the developing world's demand for meat without having to turn half the planet into CAFOs.
Also... I'm _really_ curious if any of our Desi commenters can chime in with how this stuff is being received (if at all!) in India? It's a country where there are a ton of vegetarians and where raising both cattle and pork for meat are fraught with cultural concerns: this would seem like an obvious market if they can get the price points down?
If agricultural animal husbandry is more correctly conceptualized as not being purely about the efficient production of chattel property, but as also involving an element of caretaking for sentient beings, then it's possible to draw analogies to, and perhaps lessons from, other situations where we have to mitigate the economic efficiency with an imperative of treating the creatures who are being taken care of well. Nursing homes, orphanages, long-term psychiatric institutions, prison, etc. We have statements of ethics, binding rules like staff-to-patient ratios, etc, to try to mitigate and push against the logical conclusions of efficiency from the operators point of view.
In the days before industrialized agricultural, on family farms embedded in a a community and culture, this was handled through cultural norms and practices that just were the water and air farmers lived in, without having to think about it or analyze it. But we're long past that point.
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.
Somewhat related, I enjoy cooking and learning to cook new things. Recently, the wife and I have befriended our first vegan person (and I don’t know that we knew any vegetarians either, none come to mind). It has been a fun challenge to learn how to prepare enjoyable vegan dishes, and even though I probably won’t stop eating meat altogether, it has made it much easier to plan for meatless or even vegan meals because I’ve figured out a few things I like.
Ask me how I know I’m a normie, lol. “Doesn’t know any vegans or vegetarians” is probably a huge cultural signifier these days
If you don't mind answering, I'm curious roughly where you live?
It seems to be quite popular in the UK, at least enough that all the stores I went in over Christmas had plant-based everything.
https://www.statista.com/forecasts/1062341/adults-following-vegetarian-diet-in-great-britain-by-gender-and-age
The downside of this is that some plant-based foods (like oat milk lattes) aren't healthy at all.
I’m a vegetarian and I do it to reduce suffering, not for my health.
Matt! I'm am unironically proud of you for this essay.
As a vegan, I genuinely don’t understand the word humane describing a life that ends in slaughter. It strikes me as a bunch of lipstick on a pig.
I’ve never been an activist vegan, I don’t think it’s my business what you put on your plate, but I don’t think you can talk about raising an animal to kill it for no reason other than you think they taste good as humane anymore than humane cannibalism or human sacrifice is okay. I don’t think it’s realistic to describe them as happy cows just because they get to eat grass for a bit. So much of their lives will still be exploitative in ways few humans would accept even for treatment of others let alone themselves.
Have you spent much time around cattle? It doesn't take a lot to keep them happy. A nice pasture to roam in, shelter from bad weather, plenty of food, etc. If they have a good life, what does it matter if they are humanely killed at the end and eaten? They don't know the difference.
There's a lot to learn from Temple Grandin who did so much pioneering work in (not oxymoronic) "humane slaughtering." She cares very deeply that the animals not suffer at the very end of their lives and her work has led to major changes in prominent company practices.
Terry Gross (of all people!) once asked her why it made a difference if the slaughterhouse was more humane since the animals were being killed anyway. Grandin, in her rather guileless autistic way (she's on the spectrum), put Gross in her place in this classic bit from "Fresh Air":
GROSS: So, what happens if cattle see a yellow light or a moving hose or something that distracts them and actually scares them as they're on their way to slaughter? I mean, they're going to get killed, right? So why are we worry that they're going to be a little upset beforehand?
Dr. GRANDIN: Well, you could say the same thing. You know, get some old grandmother in nursing home and say, we'll just throw her over in the corner, she's going to die of cancer tomorrow, that doesn't matter. I mean, it gets back to relieving suffering and there's no reason for it to be scared.
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/99009110
Having worked in both a nursing home and farms I'd say that's a good analogy.
Temple Grandin is absolutely amazing. I recommend any of her books.
That's not an accurate description of industrial beef and dairy production in the US. I grew up with cows 200' from my front door and live in farmland to this day. They're not plants, they're not scallops, they experience suffering, they're social creatures. A cow knows when their babies are being taken away. They suffer from chafing and infection, from excessive heat, and cramped quarters.
The "ignorance of reality" is from people that think farm animals live the lives depicted in children's books.
I mean only a bit of time around them volunteering a few times a month for four years at a vegan rescue ranch.
But like you still are going to kill them, and I’m not sure you can just flip on the adjective humane and make that okay. And I mean you’re not going to let them live out their natural life, and your still going to raise them in a way consistent with commodification.
The bar is so much lower than we would ever accept for even other people let alone ourselves that it is hard to take the idea seriously.
I understand that from a philosophical perspective actively killing a creature is considered different from letting nature take its course, but I also think when trying to evaluate the claim that some form of animal husbandry is “humane” (and to be clear I think the vast majority of that is laughably far from it) you do have to keep in mind that being torn apart by predators is a large part of the experience of being a large slow-moving ruminant. (even more so of a rabbit or chicken)
It doesn't make much sense to use that as the bar though when as humans we are capable of much more (or much less). It doesn't matter what would happen to some cow in the wild if it isn't in the wild and wouldn't have been born in the wild.
Sure. Again, I'm in no way trying to defend the current state of animal farming pretty much anywhere. I'm just disinclined to think that "at the end, they die" is by itself disqualifying. That's the end state for us all, and nature has some pretty gruesome deaths in store for some unlucky percentage of any species.
But if it is a dog or cat, "at the end, they die" is disqualifying. You can't adopt a dog and eat it if lived a good life for 5 years.
And all of this ignores that grass fed, free range cattle is actually worse for the environment and not scalable. I would posit 98% of the readers of this blog want to meet emissions targets, and doing that doesn't entail putting the 100 million cattle in the US on pasture.
Do you also support changing laws to allow people to eat dogs/cats that were treated well beforehand?
If someone wants to eat that, I got no problem with it. I wouldn't want to, but that's about me and my biases not about the corpse. The corpse doesn't care if it gets eaten, cremated, buried or just left outside to be picked over by scavengers.
It’s worse than not being slaughtered, but that’s not the relevant comparison. The relevant comparison is “is it worse than not being born at all”? In the case of most farm animals today, IMO their lives *are* worse than not being born and this is a moral outrage we should stop. But if it were true that animals raised for slaughter were happy to be born - then I don’t see the problem.
https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Ameglian_Major_Cow
Okay I'm glad I'm not the only person who immediately flashed to a very young Peter Davison wearing an a hilariously bad prosthetic nose. :)
I’m a former vegetarian who used to believe in a rights-based framework, but I’ve since been convinced by the argument (I came across it in Michael Pollan) that individual rights are the wrong way (or at least not the only way) to think about it, and that animal happiness involves the animal living in the way truest to its nature, which in farm animals’ case means domestically on a farm, with all that entails. Whereas animal rightists like Peter Singer hold that for pigs not to be born would be morally neutral—rights accrue to individuals, and unborn individuals don’t have them—I think the perspective that animals on traditional or neotraditional farms would lose something by not being born—and the ecology would lose something as well—is more convincing. I definitely recommend you read Omnivore’s Dilemma if you haven’t already!