Oh, you're killing me. I love foie gras. And I love veal. So. Maybe I give up foie gras and keep the veal, pretty please?
And I promise to watch less t.v. and eat more vegetables and be nice to old people. Mostly. (I don't love veal that much and old people sometimes totally skeeve me out.)
We need to hook the geese up to some giant Matrix-style body farm so they can be enjoying a pleasurable virtual-reality goose fantasy world while we fatten their livers.
My meat policy: kill them all you want, just don't treat them mean.
Practically, this would almost make you a vegetarianism. Wild game and free-range chickens would be OK. Maybe fish. Veal would *definately* be out.
I like Peter Singer's writings on animal rights and vegetarianism. You would too, I'm fairly certain. His arguments are quite close to yours. He lays out the argument that just becase animals don't have the same rights as us, they do not therefore have zero rights. This seems fairly intuitive for a lot of people, which is why most people seem to block out thoughts of what they're consuming. Ever try to bring this up to people? Usually, you'll either be told to shut up directly, or in so many words. Or, the other reaction is to gloss over it in bad faith, and pretend like they think animals have no rights.
i'd go even further than Michael and say that the logical end of this would probably make you a vegan. by some respects, the treatment of dairy cows in factory farms is a lot worse than that of cows used for beef.
It's certainly difficult to choose meat killed in accordance with one's principles. Almost impossible!
I alternate between cooking without meat, to not giving a hoo and eating an animal that surely had the ugliest of deaths and the most wretched of lives.
I once heard Nick Zangwill give a strong consequentialist defence of meat eating.
Arguing, essentially, that human meat consumption means that there are otherwise more cows, pigs, chickens, etc. in the world than there would be and as long as net cow happiness during its lifetime outweights any unhappiness caused in death then eating meat leads to increased net global happiness. :-)
As a result, we are all obliged to switch from a traditional meat and two veg. diet to '3 meat'.
I suspect this argument may have been slightly tongue-in-cheek, or a subtle reductio of aggregative forms of consequentialism, or both.... :-)
I'm with Michael on this one, except for the part where he turns you into a belief system in that first sentence.
My meat policy: kill them all you want, just don't treat them mean.
If you genuinely feel this way, and I wouldn't judge if on some level you didn't, then if nothing else foie gras and veal are very likely out. KFC too. I'm presently doing my damndest to work out the middle ground you described. I have to think those principled lines exist; my larger concern is giving momentum to a body of activists with whom I disagree significantly on a number of issues.
Eggs would be out, too; overcrowded laying hens with their beaks cut off.
I think ogged's intuition is basically correct, but it doesn't work terribly well once you really consider that most modern farming methods are unpleasant (and often necessary for large-scale production.) If you can afford organic free-range, that's fine and probably preferable anyway for lots of pertinent health reasons; but I have a hard time telling someone who can't afford the pricier meat that they shouldn't eat any meat because the chicken suffered.
I think it would be very easy to hide from a human that you're going to eat him/her. As long as you don't leave around your How to Cook Forty Humans cookbook.
If you keep your meat well sedated while stuffing its liver, is that acceptable? I can see a nice untapped market for anti-depressants.
4: I would have been sympathetic, but the Amazon page images were missing random words, so it's more veal for me.
7: I don't know about the milk thing- as all rBGH packages must state, there's no way to distunguish between milk from treated vs. untreated cows. I suspect the presence of pus might give it away. I'm sure some rBGH cows get udder infections, but I don't think that's the milk you end up with, it might just be PETA propaganda to show you those particular pictures.
I have trouble with this -- I don't want to be a vegan, because it's just too much trouble, but I can't find a principled line to draw that doesn't balk at what they do to dairy cattle and laying hens. I end up buying free-range whatever when it's an option, and other than that trying not to thnk about it too much.
I have a hard time telling someone who can't afford the pricier meat that they shouldn't eat any meat because the chicken suffered.
I don't, especially, but one way to address this issue on a policy level would be to stop subsidizing the wrong agriculture and start subsidizing small scale farms.
Also, to my knowledge there are no laws governing the label "free-range" etc. And organic means a few things about the treatment of the animal, but it certainly doesn't mean everything. Considering what the food industry liked to label "lite" before there were laws governing that, I would think that would be reason for pause. Regulations governing this would be a good thing too.
Ultimately, though, I think there is probably no way to continue meat, egg, and dairy consumption on the scale we do in this country and keep it ethical. People have to eat fewer animal products, and the only way you make that happen is to make them more expensive. That would have lots of positive effects not only on animal treatment, but on the environment and human health as well.
Ultimately, though, I think it's not exceedinly meaningful to talk about "policies" that are not backed up in a meaningful way by your consumption habits. Your dollar is one kind of vote you have in this country, and if you would chortle at someone who says "I support gay and reproductive rights" and then votes Republican, then you should consider the same disjunctures in the grocery strore.
is there a way to get foie gras that isn't forcefeeding-based?
No -- French peasants have been forcefeeding ducks and geese for ages. The gras means fat, and refers to the forcefedness of the bird. I'm not sure how much less luscious non-forcefed bird liver is, though.
I've heard that "free range" means the birds have access to an outside area. Usually they do not take advantage of the area, choosing to cluster together inside, but at least they have access to the outside and are not individually caged.
Unfortunately, that means they fight and the resulting deaths drive up the price of the "organic" food.
People who view the PETA propaganda should also view the anti-abortion propoganda. I think they are produced by the same group.
perhaps there should also be some legislative remedy for excess use of "ultimately, though" to start paragraphs. maybe a "penultimately, though" subsidy.
Sure, but it's relatively easy for me to decide to buy only organic meats and free-range soybeans and what have you; the extra expense is more or less mitigated by the fact that I'm single: an extra $0.30 a portion is only an extra $.30.
But it strikes me as a bit wrongheaded to insist that prices should increase so that poor people or middle-class people with families can't afford to eat meat. After all, your (general you here) ability to eat meat won't be hindered.
Support the small farmers and enforce some meaningful regulations about what constitutes organic. But I don't think it's a plus to make options like meat, eggs, and milk more expensive; that's not going to help out anyone's health, cause if beef is super-expensive, prepackaged macandcheese is going to look a lot better.
18: A friend of mine whose family are chicken farmers describes chickens as brainless, nasty little bastards. Apparently they only go 'cluck' in cartoons.
"I wouldn't mind a ban, if I weren't worried about those damn rabble-rousing activists coming next to take away my veal, and then my beef. Then they'll take my chicken, and there will be no one left to squawk for me."
Whether or not you support a ban on killing chicken should have nothing to do with whether you support a ban on foie gras, unless you believe that banning foie gras will lead to a ban on chicken. Stand up for your beliefs!
Call me a butcher, but re 21, I'll choose the poor over the animals every time. Though it would be nice if mass production had a leetle more regard for the animals.
You know, one problem I have with all of this is that while I sympathize with their goals, I have a real problem with most animal rights groups, including a low opinion of their honesty. (See Tripp's 18.)
I'm not actually sure that the foie gras forcefeeding is particularly cruel by the standards of other things we do to food animals. (Veal I am clear on.) I've seen arguments that it is, but I've also seen arguments that it isn't -- that the forcefeeding isn't traumatic or painful, and the liver condition produced isn't painful either. I have a vague suspicion that the foie gras outrage is like banning fur -- a publicity stunt rather than a real attack on the worst abuses.
Mac and cheese also has animal products, so it would not look attractive as an alternative. Plant-based foods would look attractive as an alternative.
This is sort of relevant to that food stamp thread. Being poor sucks, in lots of ways. It means you don't get a lot of the things you want. The government's job is to get you the things you need. Meat, eggs, and dairy are not offered right now at the actual cost to produce them, and there are lots of negative consequences to our national decision to promote agribusiness. If we stopped subsidizing mass meat, egg, and dairy production and put our subsidies into better food (ethically and sustainably produced animal and plant food/moving some of the farm subsidy money into other programs to offset the cost of food, maybe expanded food stamps or EITC), it might mean that one of the ways it might suck is not being able to ingest the same amount of tasty animal goodness as you would given unlimited resources, but it might better for the ethics of animal husbandry, and further better for everyone's health and the environment (and adverse environmental conditions affect the poor more than the rich as well).
I personally don't have some kind of arrogance-guilt about it because a) I am relatively poor, though single and b) I restrict my diet more than anything I'm advocating for other people.
Tripp, there are not laws that say that's what "free range" means. That's my point. You could put them in crates outside instead of inside and there would be no law saying you couldn't call them free range. There used to be no law governing the use of the word "organic." Now there is, and we understand what organic means when we read it on a label (or we can go look it up). As for PETA propaganda, I'm not sure if you're criticizing the sensationalism or its representation of fact, but if it's the latter, do you have a basis for it?
The trap is that if we "support the small farmer" we are raising the price of food. The cheap food comes from the factory farms.
So, what to do? We either screw the poor or screw the animals.
This is a false choice. Right now we are putting tons of money into subsidizing agribusiness that could be used to directly subsidize the cost of food on the consumer end. Ending or reducing these subsidies might raise the price of food that is naturally expensive to produce (animal products, especially meat) relative to food that is cheaper (plant products).
I think that we could choose to subsidize small farms rather than factory farms, and I have a sense that this could improve the environment. Factory pig farms seem reall awful.
Or we could give up on the idea of super-cheap food ans work on raising the incomes of the poor and lower-middle class.
Re 27 and animal rights groups -- I agree. Check out the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a PETA-funded litigation shop that sponsors campaigns saying, for example, that osteoporosis is a myth. I'm lactose-intolerant and love trial lawyers, yet their "milk makes me sick" campaign still makes me mad.
Obviously this doesn't affect the truth or falsity of their claims, but it makes me wonder how strong their arguments really are.
Then again, I've got a rather skeptical view of animal consciousness anyway. Kill 'em all and let the Iron Chef sort 'em out, I say.
Or we could give up on the idea of super-cheap food ans work on raising the incomes of the poor and lower-middle class.
I think this is right -- food is much cheaper in the US than anyplace else in the industrialized world (wild generalization, but I think I'm right), and that by itself doesn't make poor people better off. I'd be perfectly satisfied with a society that had higher food prices due to food production that was less cruel and more environmentally sustainable, but with better income support and other services for people in need.
"Ultimately, though, I think there is probably no way to continue meat, egg, and dairy consumption on the scale we do in this country and keep it ethical. People have to eat fewer animal products, and the only way you make that happen is to make them more expensive. That would have lots of positive effects not only on animal treatment, but on the environment and human health as well."
I just think this is wrong on many, many levels. First, I'm not sure that Americans eat more meat than, say, Europeans. We definitely eat more starches. I don't think the answer to this problem is that we have to eat less animal products. But that's the way animal rights organizations always try to frame the issue.
This is, frankly, why I don't trust all of the accounts PETA gives about cruel conditions in farm facilities. I'm sure the conditions are bad, but PETA wants you to draw the inexorable conclusion that you can't eat meat, and they would want you to draw that conclusion regardless of the conditions. There is a real incentive to overstate the problem, and I wouldn't be surprised if that's the case. If conditions are bad, and we think they should be changed, we could change them and still eat meat. Americans don't spend much on food, under the current system. Maybe we should spend more on food, less on other stuff.
Second, eating less meat would be good neither for the environment nor for human health. Eating lard is bad for you. But eating a normal meat inclusive diet is not. The larger danger in America comes from our heavy consumption of processed starches. Which in turn is directly correlated to our over-production of grains, specifically corn.
Corn production is actually pretty bad for the environment. We use petroleum to fertilize our corn fields. A lot of that corn is used in feed for animals, but the reason for that is that corn is cheap, and the reason corn is cheap is we subsidize it like crazy for no good reason.
If the market were to demand lots of grass fed beef, that would not at all be a bad thing for anyone -- cows, humans, all the happy denizens of the ecosystem.
This is a false choice. Right now we are putting tons of money into subsidizing agribusiness that could be used to directly subsidize the cost of food on the consumer end. Ending or reducing these subsidies might raise the price of food that is naturally expensive to produce (animal products, especially meat) relative to food that is cheaper (plant products).
I think if there were good evidence that humans were as tasty as, say, bacon, I'd be OK with killing people for food. I note that a subsidiary effect would be a strong incentive for the individual to stay lean and stringy.
It's my understanding that we subsidize grain production, not cattle, chickens, or foe gras.
If the price of grain were to increase, that would affect animal products in as much we feed them grain, but I don't think it would increase more than the price of grain itself.
Ideally, grain prices would increase such that feeding them grass becomes a viable alternative. Not sure that's realistic.
Re 20: "I don't think it's a plus to make options like meat, eggs, and milk more expensive; that's not going to help out anyone's health, cause if beef is super-expensive, prepackaged macandcheese is going to look a lot better."
Well... wait a minute. Nutritionists say that as a society, we are eating WAAAAAY too much meant right now. If we ate a LOT less, we would be healthier. So if raising the price of meat and animal products pushed down our meat consumption, that would probably help improve national health. So I guess I think you are dead wrong.
Re 28: there actually are USDA definitions for "free range"; they were promulgated in 2000 or '01, I can't remember. Anyway, the point is that they are too loose, and that chickens can still be wildly overcrowded and mistreated and still be "free range", whereas consumers see this phrase and tend to mentally translate it into "happy and healthy." But you couldn't put them in cages outside and call it free range.
We subsidize corn because it was an issue back when sugar was really cheap. Because sugar doesn't grow well in the heartland, a lot of farmers were pissed off. So they started getting subsidies so that corn would be cheaper to grow than sugar (and therefore cheaper to sell) thus providing Americans with the unhealthy thing I like to call: High fructose corn syrup!
Also, I don't know that it's a question of whether Americans eat more meat than foreigners. I think Americans, in general, eat more than foreigners. Ergo the solution is to eat more foreigners.
Americans eat more than foreigners -- and perhaps we should eat foreigners -- but my point was that Americans don't necessarily eat more animal products that foreigners. At least not as a percentage of their diet.
The French, Germans, British, I would imagine all eat more.
Also, was it here where I heard that Wal-Mart water-injects their steaks to make them weigh more (and taste worse) and now people everywhere are asking for water-injected meat because their tastes have grown accustomed to it?
The corn subsidy has probably screwed up the American diet in ways that we don't ever think about. Corn syrup is pretty bad for you. Many of the cheap, calorie dense, empty snack foods are corn-based, and we eat so much of them because they are so cheap, and so very tasty.
tweedledopey, subsidizing corn is a bad idea, because, as you say, high fructose corn syrup is generally bad for you.
I said before that I thought that the Dadamo blood type diet was garbage, but I have taken one of its recommendations, namely to try to limit my intake of corn.
I have a vague suspicion that the foie gras outrage is like banning fur -- a publicity stunt rather than a real attack on the worst abuses.
I think this is pretty much right. I'm pretty sure that foie gras production is nasty--though not more nasty than some other things--but foie gras is so clearly a luxury item that it's politically easiest to try to ban.
One under-discussed consequence of not eating meat is death. I would very quickly die without meat. Brisket, chorizo, chicken, steak, eggs, ribs—these are the stuff of breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Regarding 1) I don't think a meat-inclusive diet can't be healthy, and I, at least, am not arguing for excluding all mean, but reducing consumption. I don't think meat consumption at the level of the average American is typically healthy. There are countless studies showing that vegetarians/people who consume limited amounts of meat are healthier, in America, than people who eat a lot of it. Everytime I do a medline search because someone tells me I should get more protein I confirm that this is true. I can look into some of them to see if they adequately controlled for other lifestyle factors; I would hope some of them did. Processed starch is also very bad for you; more on big corn, etc. in a moment.
Regarding 2) Some people just choose to dismiss this consideration. I think that's unethical. Animals have interests that wheat, corn, lettuce etc. don't have.
3) Big corn is nasty, and also gets excessively subsidized. However, pretty much by definition no matter how bad plant-agribusiness is for the environment it's better than animal agribusiness, because animal agribusiness requires so many more resources, because it uses up all of the resources of plant agribusiness to feed the animals and then some.
I have no particular objection to grass fed, ethically treated beef, but that means money for pasture and no feed lots. I.e. it would have to be produced differently than it is now. The status quo has also has some pretty entrenched interests and lobbies.
You know, I've seen videos of (low producing artisanal) foie gras farms, and the geese looked pretty happy to me--even running and shoving to have the tube put down their throats. Like any other ag product, I suspect that knowing who you're buying from is more important than you might htink. We buy the bulk of our meat and eggs at the local farmer's market from producers who practice sustainable, ethical treatment of their animals (although, I confess, that it's as much because the meat TASTES better as anything else). We aren't as good about dairy, however--I'll have to work on that.
One of my friends who is in finance had to tour a poultry processing plant as part of determining whether to issue a buy recommendation for the company. She said the tour was hysterical because her yuppie colleagues kept making complete fools of themselves in front of the good old boys who ran the plant. She said the chickens were suspended upside-down from an assembly line by their feet and that killing them involved dunking their heads in a pool of water and then slitting their throats. One woman remarked that the chickens looked really peaceful before they were killed and earnestly asked the tour guide if he thought it was because the chickens realized they were going to die and saw God in their final moments. Their tour guide stared at her for a long time and then said "Well, it could be that. Or it could be the electric current we got runnin' through that tub of water."
Tia, re your point the first, this may be because vegetarians tend to be health freaks in general. The average american will tend to ingest anything put on his or her plate. While there may be a correlation between health and the amount of meat, I am pretty sure it's not a cause-effect relationship at a one-to-one level.
3) Big corn is nasty, and also gets excessively subsidized. However, pretty much by definition no matter how bad plant-agribusiness is for the environment it's better than animal agribusiness, because animal agribusiness requires so many more resources, because it uses up all of the resources of plant agribusiness to feed the animals and then some.
While I agree with your 1 and 2, I think you're missing that big livestock agribusiness is a byproduct of corn subsidies. If the corn subsidies get shut down, than the economics of keeping 10,000 hogs in a giant building suddenly change completely, and introducing less cruel methods of onimul husbandry becomes more practical.
Cala and Tripp touched on the stupidity of chickens; shouldn't that be the guiding principle here? Very few people on this thread seem to object to eating fish. It's true, the life of a fish is probably more pleasant than that of a factory chicken, but even if it weren't, would we care? I doubt it. Fish are stupid.
The extent of the cruelty visited on an animal seems irrelevant unless there's a consciousness to experience it. And of course, we don't really know to what extent animals are conscious. But a pretty good guess (based on the ratio of brain:body mass, among other things) would indicate that pigs are the smartest animals that we regularly kill for food. But I rarely hear nonreligious concern over eating pork. Maybe this is just because pigs have it better on the farm. I suspect their deliciousness might factor in as well.
It should be said that the Big Meat industry treats its employees nearly as poorly as the animals. A friend told me about a case on which she was working about Tyson: the company deducted the amount of time it took slaughterhouse ("showroom floor") employees to put on necessary protective gear against their minimal daily breaks. It can be extremely dangerous work that pays next to zilch.
I've seen where some plants are located smarsher. They look like they are the only jobs (other than like gas station attendent) around for a hundred miles.
Before I read 62, I didn't know it would be possible for me to hate big business more than I did, but I was wrong.
I would be lousy in the corporate world, really. I couldn't justify paying people poverty-level wages to squeeze out more millions for myself. I lack the cold, capitalist killer instinct, I suppose.
At least we don't have Pinkertons busting the heads of striking workers these days, but we'd have to have a labor movement for that to happen, I suppose.
They're notorious for unionbusting and labor law violations. Who knows, if the laws were enforced to protect workers, people might be making enough money to afford slightly more expensive, but less cruel, food.
re: 61. "Maybe this is just because pigs have it better on the farm."
I would like to laugh at this, but I feel sick to my stomach instead. The ignorance revealed in this statement is the reason animals are treated so very cruelly in modern agribusiness (which affects the quality of our foods, our health, as well as our morality). People are just completely ignorant about what is put on their plate (apart from "how many calories?" and "how many grams of fat?").
Tom: go visit a hog farm. Pigs are probably the most abused and mistreated animals in modern agriculture. And yes, you are right -- they are (probably) by far the most intelligent. Much more intelligent than your family dog.
But you loooove the taste of bacon, so I guess this isn't something you want to think about too much? Better to pretend they "have it better on the farm"...
Very few people on this thread seem to object to eating fish. It's true, the life of a fish is probably more pleasant than that of a factory chicken, but even if it weren't, would we care?
Yes.
It's not the eating of animals per se that distresses me, it's the treatment of them. This is why I have as much of a reservation about eating dairy as I do about eating meat, though I still do both.
this is from the American Dietetic Association. It's something of a roundup. I recognize that lifestyle choices can influence health outcomes for vegetarians, but I think the nutritionists probably thought of that too, and did at least some studies that controlled for lifestyle before these recommendations became so commonplace:
There is a growing appreciation for the benefits of plant-based diets, defined as diets that include generous amounts of plant foods and limited amounts of animal foods. The American Institute for Cancer Research and the World Cancer Research Fund call for choosing predominantly plant-based diets rich in a variety of vegetables and fruits, legumes, and minimally processed starchy staple foods and limiting red meat consumption, if red meat is eaten at all (16). The American Cancer Society recommends choosing most food from plant sources (17). The American Heart Association recommends choosing a balanced diet with an emphasis on vegetables, grains, and fruits (18), and the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada recommends using grains and vegetables instead of meat as the centerpiece of meals (19). The Unified Dietary Guidelines developed by the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association, the National Institutes of Health, and the American Academy of Pediatrics call for a diet based on a variety of plant foods, including grain products, vegetables, and fruits to reduce risk of major chronic diseases (20).
But you loooove the taste of bacon, so I guess this isn't something you want to think about too much? Better to pretend they "have it better on the farm"...
Actually, as I was trying to express, pork is the meat about which I am most uneasy. My comment was asking why there is relatively little attention paid to the conditions surround pork production relative to other meats. Yes, I am ignorant of the conditions at hog farms, so I suggested that perhaps they might be better, which would account for the difference in concern. Apparently that's not the case. I guess I have to conclude that people just like baby cows. I still have no idea why so many prioritize saving the idiot chickens, however.
And yes, I eat pork. But I'm not trying to avoid thinking about anything.
Ok, before we get too many "you're a bad person for eating meat," comments, let's remember that the Bible gives man dominion over the earth and its animals. That's good enough for me. There's also Sorry, Cow.
Re: 63. Hmm... well I guess if there aren't a lot of other jobs around then it is okay that, according to a report earlier this year by Human Rights Watch, owners of meat and poultry plants in the US are guilty of widespread human rights violations.
Read this Wash Post. article on the subject (complete with a link to the actual report, for the truly curious):
My comment was asking why there is relatively little attention paid to the conditions surround pork production relative to other meats.
Pigs aren't perceived as cute at all -- the main association with pigs is fat, dirty, and bad-smelling. This is an idiotic reason not to be concerned about them, but I think it's why they don't get attention.
Re 63: But there could be the same jobs on smaller, disaggregated farms and ranches—I imagine that the decrease in efficiency would actually lead to an increase in jobs.
So if raising the price of meat and animal products pushed down our meat consumption, that would probably help improve national health. So I guess I think you are dead wrong.
As text pointed out, that depends on which nutritionist you talk to. (French are pretty healthy with all the meats and cheeses and butter.) I submit that depends entirely on what you replace the meat-that-you're-not-eating-due-to-cost with. If you replace it with vegetables and tofu and legumes, it would improve national health, probably, to have meat be more expensive.
But given current purchasing habits, people already gravitate towards overprocessed crap; I suspect if chicken doubles in price, it's not going to lead to people buying less organic chicken and supplementing with black beans, but more likely eating cheaper prepackaged junk. And that we know ain't good for health.
Okay, I was wrong about the term free range. On the other hand there is a legal definition for "range" when referring to birds used for meat. It means Birds raised in the United States for meat--mainly chickens and turkeys--if they have USDA certified access to the outdoors. Like I said - this doesn't mean a lot. Usually the birds are too stupid to use the access.
I've been to dairy farms. PETA uses grotesque imagery to sway people's emotions similar to what the anti-abortion people do.
Appealing to emotion may work in some cases but I don't like the tactic.
And regarding "raise the income of the poor," etc. This is a nice sentiment and would allow us to enjoy the foods we like guilt free - but it is totally unrealistic. We are talking about the worldwide poor. Without modern farming methods about three billion people would starve to death, assuming you don't enforce some kind of rationing.
The sad fact is that, without rationing, or without modern farming the Earth cannot support the population we have.
re: 69: Sorry Tom if I sounded aggressive. This is one topic that makes my blood boil.
I'm not sure I agree that people prioritize chickens -- I know many people who won't eat pork solely because pigs are horribly absued and very very intelligent, social creatures.
But if anyone prioritizes them I would guess it would be because there are about 9 billion chickens slaughtered for food in the US every year, vs. about 1 billion of all other animals combined. Plus chickens are right up there with pigs in terms of atrocious living conditions. So it's probably a numbers thing, simple utilitarianism, I would guess.
[And chickens, like all birds, are smarter than people give them credit for being. But that's a side point. As Jeremy Bentham noted so long ago: "The question is not, "Can they reason?" nor, "Can they talk? but rather, "Can they suffer?"
Conflating 'modern farming' with 'modern livestock farming', in terms of being necessary to feed the world, is not defensible. Whatever you say about how healthy or unhealthy eating meat is, it is simply inarguable that a cow eats more calories than it contains, and devoting the land that feeds the cow to growing plant-based foods for people will feed more people than the cow will.
While that may be true, there aren't that many ranches in this area (the Virginia/Maryland/Delware Rt 13 corridor). And there are some farms in the area, and I'm sure they are staffed to capacity as well. Blah. I'm not going to defend myself for merely stating that the job is the only large employer for miles and miles. I wasn't condoning the business practices. If anything, I'd rather there were more good jobs in teh area.
80 - you are right about meat taking more calories, etc, but so what?
The sad fact is that we are all dancing around the real issue, which is how you allocate the food resources the planet has - meaning rationing.
Currently food is rationed by money, and we are also sacrificing animal suffering and using non-sustainable farming to lower the price of food in order for more people to eat and more people to eat the way they want to eat - meaning meat.
My literally poor grandfather's definition of having a "good" life was being able to eat meat once a day and being able to take a one week vacation every summer.
So what do you propose? Do we ration meat by making it illegal? Do we outlaw modern farming, raising the price of food to the point where billions starve? How should we ration the food we have?
Silvana: It's not the eating of animals per se that distresses me, it's the treatment of them.
Would you be equally upset about equally inhumane treatment of two animals that more than likely differ in awareness? To me, doing so would make no sense -- it'd just be squeamishness. After all, nobody objects to killing plants, although they have internal systems that detect and respond to distress. But they're clearly non-conscious -- so who cares? They're just very complicated machines.
I don't think we have enough scientific knowledge to develop hard rules about where it's appropriate to draw the line, although I've got a hunch it'll end up somewhere between carrot and dolphin.
Umpire: "The question is not, "Can they reason?" nor, "Can they talk? but rather, "Can they suffer?"
Yeah, but only two of those questions can be definitively answered*. It's not unreasonable to think that they might suggest the answer to the third.
* Yeah, I realize I'm asking for it. Bring on the qualia!
Tripp -- I'm stil not understanding your point. Modern, cruel livestock raising practices make meat cheaper, but they don't increase the food supply. If we regulate cruelty to livestock more extensively, the price of meat goes way up, the supply of meat goes way down, and the world becomes able to produce more calories because resources that had been devoted to producing meat are now devoted to producing more efficient plant foods.
You can say that it would be esthetically sad to have meat be less available, but making meat more expensive will not make food scarcer.
There's a good passage on the conditions at big meat processing plants/ factory farms in the generally so-so What's the Matter With Kansas?. I'm currently involved at a low-level (proof-reading selected passages) in editing a law review note on the environmental impact of CAFOs (Confined Animal Feeding Operationss) and how the law could be changed to force the farm operators to internalize the massive externalities they impose on the surrounding populace.
And I've been trying and failing to find or come up with an ethical theory which makes non-consumption of animals a...what was that word I misspelled last week...supererogatory duty.
Finally, I wrote an article for the humor section of my high school paper suggesting the creation of a group called the "better-than-vegans"(BTVs) which would only eat products made from things which had never been alive. I believe, according to the article, this limited them to salt and twinkies.
devoting the land that feeds the cow to growing plant-based foods for people will feed more people than the cow will.
I question this conclusion, to an extent. Here's my line of reasoning. If we were to move largely away from a corn, grain, and bone meal (mmm, sweet, sweet prions) feed system for our cattle/other beef type animals (e.g. bison), let them roam over a large area (100+ square miles) in herds, living off prairies grass, I suspect we would find a net increase in calories available for consumption, in that the cattle/bison are foraging for what they need rather than having it grown (with chemicals!) and shipped (with oil!) and delivered in a concentrated area (manure slurry ponds!). The animals would likely be healthier, and would likely lead happier lives in a more natural setting. Of course, on a per-acre basis, you would get more raw calories from growing crops using modern farming practices--but have you ever been to Eastern Montana, or Alberta? There is plenty of land. The issue isn't land--it's the resources devoted to using the land.
These hog farms seem like an environmental travesty. I know that Bobby Kennedy Jr. has gone kind of nutty on the thimerosol in vaccine autism claims, but I trust him on this. And the hog farms seem like a terrible nuisance to their neighbors. The stench is unbelievable. (I did once visit a small hog farm with a restaurant in central New York (Fingerlakes region), and that was fine, but the ones in North Carolina and TEXAS are horrendous.)
re: 88 Even short of cruelty regulation, just ending the subsidies for factory farms would do a lot.
It may even be that there are relatively cost-effective ways to improve animal welfare; I seem to recall reading something about this once; I will attempt to google.
Modern agribusiness increases the food supply over what you'd have if the same amount of land were used for the same animals, e.g., free-range chickens vs caged-up chickens.
If you put the same amount of money into, say, a field of soybeans, you get a lot more soybeans that can feed more people.
I'm not sure what this does for the argument. If everyone switches to growing soybeans because they can't make enough off of beef, then yes. If it means they have less cows and much higher prices, then there's less food.
Re: a much earlier comment. Is it possible to subsidize smaller farms/sustainable farming to the extent that it would bring the costs of organic food down to a reasonable level? ($8 per gallon of milk is a bit much to ask.)
But there you aren't disagreeing with me, and you say here:
Of course, on a per-acre basis, you would get more raw calories from growing crops using modern farming practices
You're disagreeing with, I shouldn't say Tripp, because I'm understanding him poorly enough, I think, that I don't want to characterize the point he was making, but anyone who thinks that stopping cruel methods of animal husbandry will make it more difficult to feed the worldwide poor.
Appealing to emotion may work in some cases but I don't like the tactic.
I think appealing to emotion is a good thing, as long as the emotions being appealed to are noble ones. Compassion and the visceral abhorrence of cruelty are excellent emotions to appeal to.
Yeah, my argument evolved as I was writing. Something in what you wrote set it off. I should have gone back and made it clearer, but I'm having enough trouble keeping up with this thread that I wanted to comment before it became irrelevant.
My first point is that if we end the subsidies to big farming, for example, the price of food in general goes up and some people starve as a result. I suppose those starving will be in third world countries so most people here won't really care.
If we raise the price of meat more people won't starve, but less people will have access to the food they want, meat. We've been there before - "peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot five days old."
So you want to ration meat using money as the criteria? That is the way it is currently rationed, but do you want to make it less available to the poor?
A lot of this discussion (calories for creating food) is dealt with in Collapse. The book mostly deals with scarcity, and there isn't much of it in the U.S.
So you want to ration meat using money as the criteria? That is the way it is currently rationed, but do you want to make it less available to the poor?
Um, we do this now. There are billions of people worldwide who can't afford meat regularly. There are also plenty of people who can't afford enough food, whether meat or plant-based. If the price to pay to make more people able to eat a healthy sufficient diet is to make fewer people able to eat as much meat as they want, I'm good with that.
My first point is that if we end the subsidies to big farming, for example, the price of food in general goes up and some people starve as a result. I suppose those starving will be in third world countries so most people here won't really care.
I really don't think the third world poor would be hurt by ending American farm subsidies. I think they would rather be helped by the improved market for their own agricultural products. I think we need to get an economist into this discussion, stat.
In 87, Tom wrote: "The question is not, "Can they reason?" nor, "Can they talk? but rather, "Can they suffer?"
Yeah, but only two of those questions can be definitively answered*. It's not unreasonable to think that they might suggest the answer to the third.
---
Here's what we'll do. We'll hook both you and a pig (and a chicken!) up to an painful electric current. We'll sit back and observe. On a silent video you both seem to react the same -- you jerk and shake and try to get away from the shock. Your physiologic responses will mirror each other as well -- blood pressure changes, breathing changes, you will both sweat, your brains will both start dumping the same "panic" hormones into your systems. You nervous systems are virtually identical, after all, so you will have the exact same "impulses" going back and forth between the point of injury and your brains.
Then we will unstrap the two of you. Since we can speak your language we will ask: "how was it?" And you will say "IT FUCKING HURT! IT WAS HORRIBLE!" We will ask: "did you suffer?" and you will say "OF COURSE -- YOU WERE ELECTROCUTING ME!!!"
Now we will go over to the pig and look at it's chart. On the chart, everything about its physical and neurological responses looks exactly like yours. But, alas, as you say, the pig can't talk to us, and we can't even be sure it has the capacity for reason.
What is the most logical conclusion? What you you speculate is the answer to the question: can it suffer? [I don't mean this in terms of experiencing existential agony, I just mean can it feel pain and discomfort? And does it wish to avoid said pain and discomfort?]
So is the most logical response to say "fuck it, we can't be sure it even reasons, so lets throw it in a tiny cage and let it live with broken legs for the next several months?" (as far too many hogs do)? After all, it can't talk to us, so how can we even know it's broken leg hurts it? It's cramped and sick, but how can we be sure it even minds? Sure, it acts just like us when in we have a broken bone, but......
...well bacon is tasty and we wouldn't want it to be any pricier.
If the price to pay to make more people able to eat a healthy sufficient diet is to make fewer people able to eat as much meat as they want, I'm good with that.
Do you care what these other people feel about the matter? The one's you are asking to sacrifice?
If not, then how do you differ from those sending troops to Iraq?
Um, Tripp, the reason everyone's rushing to donate to the Katrina victims is because of an emotional identification with the victims. I'm sure that if no one showed us pictures or told us stories that helped them to feel it, donation levels would be much lower.
I really don't think the idea of letting the experience of compassion influence one's policy ideas is the road to hell.
She's asking the U.S. poor (and the rest of the U.S. population to sacrifice for the world poor). Many proposals which are commonly batted around and are considered mostly unobjectionable. Certainly, some kinds of immigration proposals would have this effect, and yet they don't seem obviously morally wrong.
How would you feel about the flip side of the argument?
Do you care what the people who are fucking starving to death think about it, as compared to the people who won't be able to afford meat if we switched to growing more plant-based food? If not, then how do you differ from Stalin in the Ukraine?
My god, I don't! The blood, the blood on my hands! (Shoots self, collapses offstage.)
Seriously, I think that having insufficient food is a worse situation to be in than having insufficient meat. I am entirely comfortable with a world where more people have enough food and fewer people have enough meat.
You implicitly make the truthful point that I, personally, am not in either of these situations, and should keep my overprivileged mouth shut rather than advocating that anyone else make any sacrifices at all. Under that standard, of course, not only everyone posting here but pretty much the entire blogosphere should shut up.
99: My first point is that if we end the subsidies to big farming, for example, the price of food in general goes up and some people starve as a result.
Isn't it a blogospheric commonplace that this is backwards? The effect of subsidizing big farming in the US is that farmers in Third World countries are shut out of the US markets, and so they remain really really poor, and they starve to death. The world produces enough calories to feed everyone, we just don't (that pesky money thing) distribute them to those in need.
I'm just about positive that US ag subsidies don't wind up leading to the production of foodstuffs that eventually feed the world's poor.
I think it's fairly reasonable to think that the capacity to suffer is correlated with the capacity to reason. I'm sure animals suffer, but it's not really anything we can comprehend. You seem to imply that it is ridiculous to even pose the question: they must suffer like we do because . . . why exactly? The physiological responses are the same? Do you even know that to be true? If so, does that really do the work you say it does?
I'm with 104. I heard a story about how our Aid to India involved giving them a bunch of soy or canola oil, but the people there were accustomed to eating mustard seed oil, and the women didn't know how to cook with what we gave them. It wasn't their culture.
And our subsidies put indigenous farmers out of business.
Economist here regarding 104. No question the 3rd world is being crippled by our ("our" meaning not just America, but Europe and most of the developed world's) farm subsidies. I don't have sources in front of me, but this has been so well researched that google would probably prove more than adequate. (It's econ 101 stuff, really). Indeed it has been repeatedly suggested that there is probably nothing the rich world could do that would provide greater benefit to the world's poor than dropping their ag subsidies.
That much is unassailable. The animal rights stuff? Eh.
I don't know much about the farm subsidies except that it's next to impossible to make a living as a farmer without them.
In order to make a living as a farmer, you'd have to charge substantially more. The people most likely to bear the brunt of the price of milk doubling are the poor. We spent quite a lot of American history trying to get away from this; we've been successful to some extent.
Not that I'm arguing that our farm subsidies system should not be revised or steered toward more sustainable systems of farming, but that cutting all big agribusiness subsidies is going to do absurd things to the price of food, and the farmers still won't be able to make ends meat. (hehe)
"My first point is that if we end the subsidies to big farming, for example, the price of food in general goes up and some people starve as a result. I suppose those starving will be in third world countries so most people here won't really care."
Yglesias, get your ass over here!
Matt will explain that US farm subsidies actually harm third world farmers and reduce third world food production, keeping them dependent on US products which are being dumped below cost.
I'm not sure I agree with Matt, but that's his argument, and the standard free-trader POV.
In terms of poverty, almost any kind of meateating reduces actual food production, since the feed given animals almost always has more food value than their meat. The exceptions would be wild game and some grazing animals not fattened with grain.
the price of corn is actually artificially high -- if we were to end the subsidies, it would drop, and lots of american corn farmers would go out of business. Their corn doesn't make its way to the third world, so I don't know that it would matter. The price would eventually go back up, with fewer producers in America.
OK, what I said was what 104 said. Good on Tia. I'm not an economist, so don't take that as expert.
Tom, the question "can we know whether pigs suffer?" is kind of ridiculous, as Umpire's 105 points out in a rather heated manner. You don't even need to do neuro scans. Hang around with mammals and birds long enough and it's freaking obvious that they suffer. If you're going to doubt that you might as well start doubting whether other people really have minds.
The reason farmers in America can't make a living without the subsidies is that there are too many farmers in America. The supply/demand curve is all fucked up -- more corn is produced than anyone wants. Which is why they try to convert it to gasoline.
122: I'm somewhat talking out of my ass here, I should admit. I read this somewhere, and it must have to do with the way the subsidy operates -- the government pays for actual corn, or something.
If someone wants to refute me, won't be the first time. Think I will google it.
I don't think the important question is 'do animals suffer'; it seems pretty clear they do; but whether their suffering should trump eating them. I don't think that question's as easy to answer. I'm mostly vegetarian, but I still think we get to eat the chickens.
115: the perception of pain is controlled by our nervous systems. Our nervous system is a very early evolutionary adaptation, shared in very large part by a wide variety of animal species. Of course this doesn't prove that they feel pain just like we do, but doesn't it make it the most reasonable assumption? What else makes sense? Why does it make sense to you to say that the capacity to feel pain is tied up with the capacity to reason? I've read Descartes too, but I think our understanding of evolutionary biology has progressed enough since then to make his thinking on this more or less irrelevent.
123--yes and no. Another part of the reason is the subsidies go disproportiately to large agri-business, which achieve economies of scale unvavailable to the small farmer, driving down prices. I suspect that if the large agribusinesses were to lose their subsidies, the ROI would drop to the point that most of them would collapse, making more room for the small farmer who is just looking to make a living.
text, i think the corn does make it to other countries. but that's not the point here.
To run an efficient corn farm (or wheat farm) takes a lot of money. You have to fertilize and harvest. While you could do this the old fashioned way (by hand), that's inefficient and the cost of goods would increase.
So the government oversubsidizes, because we can use corn in America as a substitute for a lot of things we can't grow as efficiently (like sugar). The problem then becomes that if we started importing sugar, we wouldn't have enough sugar (I'm guessing here) to meet the demand for sugar-type products. I don't know how much excess production capacity of sugar exists in the world. But the price of sugar would be just as high as the price of corn, which is still less good. As for the poor African farmers, they could start farming again, but I don't know that without subsidies they could be successful. This is all a case of what's good for me isn't good for you, and in the end may end up killing us both. Business is now international, but individuals and governments still think with their heads up their collective national pride asses.
105: everything about its physical and neurological responses looks exactly like yours
What text said in 115. The pain response is very old. A prawn would no doubt share many of the same responses to physical stress that we do. Yet I can't even begin to imagine losing sleep over shrimp fishing. Perhaps this is just my own moral failing.
Do you care what these other people feel about the matter? The one's you are asking to sacrifice?
If not, then how do you differ from those sending troops to Iraq?
Oy gevalt. Right now we are making the price of bad food artificially cheap. We aren't even to the point of talking about regulation yet.
The choice to eat a lot of factory-produced meat especially, eggs and dairy somewhat less so on the environmental front, but moreso on the cruelty front, at least for eggs, and agribusiness plant foods somewhat less so still, sustainable everything least of all, has lots of negative externalities and thus is not an individual choice without consequence. I don't think the government should be in the business of actively promoting a relatively negative choice.
I'm going to reiterate a point I made earlier. Being poor means not having everything you could possibly want. I am familiar with this phenomenon, since I don't have health insurance and rarely buy new clothes. I think the govt. should do something about the former, not only because I think a rich country should , but because my lack of health insurance might have some other nasty externalities down the road. The latter, however, I just have to suck up. You favor worker-safety regulations that might make the price of goods more expensive, even goods that you, personally, can afford? How do you differ from those asking people to send their sons and daughters to Iraq? Capitalism means everyone doesn't get the same stuff. Regulated capitalism means some stuff gets more expensive, but we get to live a better life in lots of other ways.
You are basically making a cultural and aesthetic argument that a decent life is eating meat every day, and the government should be actively engaged in promoting the eating of meat, any other externality be damned. On no other grounds does your argument make sense.
Here's a question for the vegans. If you hunted down an animal to eat, would you be okay with that? I mean, that's what the rest of the carni-/omnivorous animal planet does. Do you not like that we have tools to help us do that?
Cala in 118, I don't think (and I'm talking out of my ass too) that the ag subsidies have a dollar-for-dollar effect on the price of food for the US poor. Basically, if we dropped ag subsidies we'd be importing food from the Third World, and it wouldn't be much more expensive. Or what text said in 124. I hope his googling is illuminating.
Maybe this doesn't apply to dairy farming, because it's too perishable. I think it's most important to end subsidies on things where US farmers are competing with the third world--that's really hurting the poorest of the poor, and I'm under the impression that ADM is the biggest beneficiary (but talking out of my ass here). I also, and this is my own private crank project, think we should be subsidizing solar panels on the land we now use for farming. That'd be a much more economically productive use of Western Nebraska, everything between Amarillo and Lubbock, etc.
Some philosophers identify supererogation with imperfect duty, or with a weak duty, or with duty that is personal and non-universalizable, or with duty that has no correlative right, or with an ethical rather than legal duty, or with an "ought" which is not enforceable. Some even use the oxymoronic term "supererogatory duty" in trying to do justice to the phenomenon of supererogation without giving up the typically Kantian framing of all moral judgments in terms of duty.
27. LB: I have a vague suspicion that the foie gras outrage is like banning fur -- a publicity stunt rather than a real attack on the worst abuses.
My understanding about furs is that the animals are electrically shocked and then hung and their fur ripped off by machine. The reason some people are outraged by this is that the eletric shock machine is notoriously inefficient, and many animals are left not only alive but conscious when their fur is ripped off them. I still don't know much about foie gras, though.
11, sp: I'm sure some rBGH cows get udder infections, but I don't think that's the milk you end up with, it might just be PETA propaganda to show you those particular pictures.
The video I saw was on the DVD The Corporation, and I believe was TV news video, entirely unrelated to PETA.
Tripp, The sad fact is that, without rationing, or without modern farming the Earth cannot support the population we have.
Cows consume about 8 times more calories than they provide. OTOH, we still seem to have excess farmining capacity. So, I'm not sure about all this. There are other reasons, however, that factory farms are bad for the environment. The huge pools of shit coming out of them are one. It's causing very real problems in the areas where some of these farms are, poisining the ground water. (That's legit news info again, Salon I think, not PETA.)
I have been told that many European countries have passed laws against factory farms and have handled it fairly well.
Personally, I have for the last year cut out mammals from my diet. The distinction is probably not a good one, but it's based on what I perceive as the higher cognizant functions of these animals. I give their preferences more consideration than chickens, for instance, though when it comes to the latter I do buy free range. (Since you can only buy the whole bird when it comes to free range, and buying the whole bird is always cheaper, price is nearly a wash compared to buying farmed chicken already cut up.)
I feel free to make exceptions for wild game, or even beef if I can know that the cows lived normal cow lives, outside, grazing on the grass, before being taken to the slaughterhouse. However, my desire for flesh has really dropped off, and so I very rarely even look to making an exception.
BTW, I'm way away from the cruelty to animals argument here--I'm in the "try not to think about it" camp. I'm mostly concerned in this argument with what would be best for the world's and US's poor.
the US, China, Brazil and the 15 countries of the European Union between them consume over 60% of the world's beef, more than 70% of the world's poultry and over 80% of the world's pork. Of the world's ten most populous nations, five (China, the US, Brazil, Russia and Japan) each consume large amounts of meat (ranging from 40 kg per person in Japan to 123 kg per person in the US), whereas the remaining five (India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nigeria) all consume less than 5 kg per person per year. Overall, per capita meat consumption is three times as high in developed countries as in developing countries.
I personally have no objection to hunting. I think some people might make a non-violence argument, i.e. that there is an obligation to interfere as little as possible with sentient beings, and that humans, by virtue of an ability to reason, and thus an ability to forebear lots of things for ethical reasons, are distinct from animals in this respect. But hunting is such a miniscule interference compared with the really grievous stuff happening on factory farms I really don't care at all.
Tom, the question "can we know whether pigs suffer?" is kind of ridiculous... Hang around with mammals and birds long enough and it's freaking obvious that they suffer.
Anthropomorphism is only slightly more reputable than introspection when debating this kind of stuff. If you're using "suffering" interchangeably with "has a pain response", then fine, but it's not clear what that means or what its moral implications are.
Can suffering exist without consciousness? If I extracted the pain centers of an animal's brain (without otherwise causing it harm) and stimulated them mercilessly in vitro, would I be committing an immoral act? If consciousness is a prerequisite for suffering mattering, then just how conscious are food animals? As near as science can tell, only a handful of animals are self-aware in the technical sense, and (excluding bushmeat) none of them are eaten by humans. What sort of consciousness, if any, can exist without self-awareness, and would its suffering matter more than that of the cells in the petri dish?
I can't say I rocked the philosophical world in the semesters I spent pondering these questions (in between sessions of binge drinking), but I am convinced they would have to be answered before we can know just how awful killing animals for food is.
Sorry to just jump in here, but I have a few minor tangential points;
a) Does anyone have a reference for the notion that we subsidize grain and not factory-farmed livestock?
b) there are some very smart fish. especially octopi. sea-fishing is also pretty lousy for the environment, over all.
c) we all have this notion that the cost of food is the main issue in poverty, b/c historically that's been the case and that's even how the poverty index is created. but there's a growing consensus that the cost of housing is much more dominant these days. the poverty index numbers, anyway, assume a dedicated and smart cook--and a dedicated and smart cook can get a lot more protein/calorie/vitamin bang for his or her buck out of a sack of grain and a sack of beans and a pile of cheap vegetables then the standard American diet.
d) re:43--the answer is basically no. See this PDF, page 5. According to this PDF, page 6, most of that is in poultry consumption (17 lbs per capita in 1909 to 95 lbs per capita in 1999), not effectively offset by a tiny decrease in red meat over the same period (148 lbs to1 34 lbs.) PDF 2 is referenced to the report of which PDF 1 is a summary.
re 140: Tom, you may be right that we need to know this in order to know "just how awful killing animals for food is."
But come on -- you're obviously justifying your behaviour here. "Just how awful" need it be in order to have it outweigh your mere aesthetic pleasure for the taste of meat (unecessary for health, and damaging for the environment)?
Furthermore, why is existential self-awareness the key variable here? Does this mean it's okay to torture severely retarded humans? I think not, because they can still feel pain and very obviously don't want to be tortured (just like animals), but according to you this is not enough.
And even if I were to accept this self-awareness criteria, what standard of proof must be imposed? What can I show you to have you accept that these creatures consciously suffer? Unless you can answer that question very specifically it is hard to believe you aren't just making excuses. If you're looking at this philosophically (as people trying to justify their behavior are apt to do), there is nothing I could demonstrate to you to convince you that these animals actually suffer (and are aware of it). After all, there's no philosophical way to prove to you that *I* suffer when you torture me. But you look at my responses and note how they are exactly like yours would be in the same situation, and conclude that like you I must be feeling pain and discomfort when you torture me. Well..... look at an animal that is mistreated. It behaves the same way.
Re: 129 A prawn would no doubt share many of the same responses to physical stress that we do.
Based on what? The fact that Their nervous system is set up completely different than ours? Ignoring the fact that pigs are much more like us? I don't particularly want to cause prawns unnecessary pain either, and try not to, but merely saying that a pig's response is the same as a prawn's and therefore similarly distant from ours does not make it so, and so casting the two together as similarly ignorable seems like like a strawman.
The point of 105 was that we have no idea what a pig's capacity to reason is b/c it cannot talk and has no opposable thumbs, etc., etc. If we were suddenly given a human facing such circumstances and wanted to evaluate the human's sentience, we would use physiological and neuorlogical tests.
Tom, to some extent we'll never be able to answer that question. On the other hand, we might never know if other people exist either.
It seems awfully convenient to be hanging around waiting for an answer to the question of animal suffering, an answer that can never come if the philosophers don't allow us to draw analogies from our own experience or reason out from what we know about the similarities between our neuroanatomies, and in the meantime permanently postpone the question of what to do about it. I'm pretty sure that something pretty unpleasant is going on in the mind of a chicken when its beak gets chopped off without anasthesia based on its behavior and what I know about the structure of its nervous system. It might in some way not be as bad as it would be for me, because I have a whole bunch of other conscious processes that might magnify it, but I'm clear that I ought not to do it to the chicken either.
Do you really think cows have as little consciousness as parts of an extracted brain in a vat? That just seems silly. But if you don't think so, why the hypothetical? I'm a little confused.
Let's say you hold that causing suffering is a moral wrong, but you are genuinely unsure whether or not cows are suffering. If they aren't, then no harm is being done. If they are, because of scale, an awful lot of harm is being done. Since you are uncertain, what is the best way to proceed? Keep doing the potentialy harmful action until you know better? Or err on the side of caution because of the potential consequences?
Anthropomorphism is only slightly more reputable than introspection when debating this kind of stuff.
I'm not sure where you're going with this. It seems as though you've ruled out not only judging whether another creature suffers by its behavior ('anthromorphism') but also judging whether you yourself suffer by introspection. By those standards of proof, it is impossible to tell whether any animal or human suffers.
As for the question of whether suffering can exist without consciousness, surely suffering is a form of consciousness--but it's not obvious that that means self-consciousness. It seems like you're endorsing a view like Peter Carruther's on which " (encyclopedia article) "phenomenal consciousness requires the capacity to think about, and therefore conceptualize, one's own thoughts"; but (same article)
since most developmental psychologists agree that young children before the age of 4 lack a theory of mind, Carruthers' view entails that they are not sentient either — fear of needles notwithstanding! This is a bullet Carruthers bites, although for many it constitutes a reductio of his view (a response Carruthers would certainly regard as question-begging) [but so much the worse for him--MW].
And even Carruthers acknowledges the existence of animal suffering, though he points out (and I agree) that its moral significance does not immediately follow.
But come on -- you're obviously justifying your behaviour here. "Just how awful" need it be in order to have it outweigh your mere aesthetic pleasure for the taste of meat (unecessary for health, and damaging for the environment)?
I really wish people would stop telling me why I'm making these arguments. More days than not, I eat an entirely vegetarian diet. That's not motivated by a half-assed moral decision, but I don't find the idea of life without meat all that horrifying.
Based on what? The fact that Their nervous system is set up completely different than ours?
I didn't say our pain response is the same as crustaceans, just that in some ways it is. Obviously we have much more in common with fellow mammals, but at least some some crustaceans share with us the primary neurotransmitter related to pain. If the ability to suffer is a yes/no proposition, as I think you're maintaining (correct me if I'm wrong), then the plight of the lobster is at least an open question.
You seem to be relying on intuition to determine which animals actually feel pain and which don't, without admitting the possibility of gradations or unexpected results. It seems like making food production less cruel would be a good thing to do if we can, but I don't think it's obvious that it's a moral imperative.
You're right, of course, that zombie arguments apply to animals perfectly well. That doesn't make them wrong, though, it just makes them frustrating.
Look, it's quite clear that animals are mentally inferior to us in many ways. They are incapable of experiencing and understanding the world in the same ways that we can. I'm not sure why it's such a stretch to imagine that there are gradations to an animal's ability to suffer, and that consequently the pain of a cow may be much less important than that of a man or a chimp or a dolphin. It's conceptually tidy to believe in an egalitarian brotherhood of sentient mammals, but I just don't see an awful lot of evidence for it beyond our aforementioned anthropomorphic instincts.
even Carruthers acknowledges the existence of animal suffering, though he points out (and I agree) that its moral significance does not immediately follow.
I'm interested. If one accepts that the difference between us and other animals is a difference of degree rather than kind, how do you justify that position? If pain to a helpless child is objectionable, then why not to a sheep?
Yes, but it's not clear what utility I would be getting from kicking a dog, so I play if on the safe side and forego it. Is it wrong for little kids to gleefully burn ants with a magnifying glass? It's definitely unappealing, but not (to me) because of the ants' suffering. I don't think it's morally significant, except as far as it speaks to how the child might behave in more important situations.
What is the technical sense of self-aware?
I would have to spend a while googling to turn up the word-for-word definition that I have in mind, but if I remember correctly it's something along the lines of recognizing the self as a distinct being with a past and future.
It seems as though you've ruled out not only judging whether another creature suffers by its behavior ('anthromorphism') but also judging whether you yourself suffer by introspection.
Fair enough. I was just trying to drawing a parallel between a dubious way of evaluating an animal's mental state and a (historically) dubious way of philosophizing. Of course in this realm, our options are limited. Among humans I'm perfectly happy to take everyone's word for what they say they experience. And yes, I believe that odds are pretty good that an animal that appears to be in pain is most likely experiencing some phenomenon related to what we consider pain. Maybe not though; and maybe not to anywhere near the same degree.
It seems like you're endorsing a view like Peter Carruther's on which " (encyclopedia article) "phenomenal consciousness requires the capacity to think about, and therefore conceptualize, one's own thoughts"
Well, I was more trying to raise the possibility than specifically endorse it. I think phenomenal consciousness (and therefore suffering) can probably exist without self-awareness, although that's mostly just an intuition drawn from rolling out of bed jetlagged.
My point is just that animal suffering may be (and I think probably is) very different from our own -- perhaps just a dim echo -- and if that's the case, the importance of avoiding it is diminished. Well, probably diminished. I could be convinced otherwise.
152: Sorry, heavy emphasis on "immediately." What I meant was, the move from "animals suffer" to "we should care" isn't immediate. Even the move from "people suffer" to "we should care" isn't immediate. But I do think that in both cases there's a strong impetus from the first to the second. (Agree with 151; I'm not an egalitarian among species. I think lobsters are an open question, FWIW.)
150: it's quite clear that animals are mentally inferior to us in many ways. They are incapable of experiencing and understanding the world in the same ways that we can.
This argument is in danger of proving that we should care less about the suffering of babies and the retarded. (I am not accusing you of thinking we shouldn't care.) I don't think we should say that experiencing and understanding are necessary for suffering. If you're saying that lack of experiencing and understanding is an indication of lack of other capacities, that's fine, but it seems to me that the scientific evidence points the other way with respect to pain.
odds are pretty good that an animal that appears to be in pain is most likely experiencing some phenomenon related to what we consider pain
Well, OK, that's basically what I think, and I agree that we shouldn't assume that animal consciousness is exactly like ours. I shouldn't have made the "obvious" claim that kicked this off. And I agree that we shouldn't care as much about animal suffering as we do about human suffering, though I'm not sure that it's because of phenomenal differences between them. (And I do have a fear that this will, to future times, look like part of a massive moral blindspot; see 136.) I think Michael is right that in these cases it's better to play it safe.
This argument is in danger of proving that we should care less about the suffering of babies and the retarded.
Yeah, I do have to confess that my own beliefs basically chalks up a number of actions that we intuitively (and correctly) consider abhorrent to rule utilitarian justifications. E.g., killing a child is worse than killing an at-that-moment equivalently conscious animal because of the act's implications, not because of some innate difference between the two.
If you're saying that lack of experiencing and understanding is an indication of lack of other capacities, that's fine, but it seems to me that the scientific evidence points the other way with respect to pain.
I'm not sure I'm following you, unless you just mean that almost all creatures have an observable pain response. To what evidence are you referring?
If one accepts that the difference between us and other animals is a difference of degree rather than kind, how do you justify that position? If pain to a helpless child is objectionable, then why not to a sheep?
It's a difference of degree that becomes a difference of kind. Given enough time and proper nurture, that child will develop phenomenal consciousness.
. . . hmm. I'm nearing the shoals of pro-life talking points, and that doesn't make me happy.
I would guess that the per capital consumption of food of all types has increased quite a lot since 1909. The question would be: is meat a greater or lesser percentage of the American diet. My guess is: lesser.
On the subsidies:
Here is why the prices would go down right after removing the corn subsidy. Right now, prices are low -- most corn farmers could not make a profit on those prices without the subsidies. But the subsidy is only part of the reason the prices are low -- the real reason is that too much corn is produced. The subsidy allows the over-production to continue; farmers sell at a relatively low price, and stay in business through operation of the subsidy.
Immediately after the subsidy is dropped, competition would force the price down lower. Some farmers would go out of business. The ones that could stay in business, after the market was weeded out, would then raise prices in accordance with the new, lower, supply.
Crops are subsidized. Livestock is not. I don't know much about the agricultural business: perhaps large companies perform both functions, in which case it's hard to weed out what money goes where. But the way the subsidies evolved was to keep farmers in business during the overproductive periods of the depression; it didn't have much to do with livestock.
159: You might also have a problem with severely brain-damaged/retarded people, who will never develop language use. As Tom said, there can be a push toward rule-utilitarianism here.
Is there anything terribly wrong with being a bit speciesist here? The reason I need to care more about brain-damaged humans than I do about sheep is because humans are humans and sheep are sheep.
161: text, does what you've read take into account foreign corn suppliers? I'm not sure any American farmer could make a decent wage in competition with corn from the third world, for example. Would we lose all our farmers? (Dependent on foreign corn-oil?) Wouldn't the large companies be better off?
And with regard to the second part of 161, I dunno. I get the feeling that we consume a lot more corn than we would without the cheap domestic supply; if the corn we did consume came even in part from the 3rd world, we might lose all or most of our corn farms. Which might be bad.
Then again, agriculture primarily depends on efficient machinery, and not cheap labor. I don't see why our agribusiness should lose out to 3rd world agribusiness without the subsidies, once the oversupply problem is fixed. But maybe it would.
But speciesism is at the root of the problem everyone's trying to resolve. In terms of the debate it amounts to might makes right.
At the end of the day that describes my position pretty well: I know that animals deserve to suffer less and that I shouldn't support the industry that propogates the conditions that cause the animals to suffer, but the guilt is not enough to motivate me to change my lifestyle and deprive myself of a fair amount of pleasure. All those bad things you're saying about Tom, I fess up to!
. . . hmm. I'm nearing the shoals of pro-life talking points, and that doesn't make me happy.
Yeah. I deleted a reference to a fetus from my last post, because I'm sure no one wants to go down that road. But yes, obviously it gets messy if you start talking about potential: next Hitler, etc -- wait, did I just invoke Godwin? Suddenly everything's going to hell.
Anyway, it's at least easier to stick to utility rules, which turn this kind of stuff into a policy question.
Absolutely agree with the speciesism, but that doesn't settle the question about whether we need to care at all about sheep. Also, you're still leaving me hanging on the 'yinz' question.
168: I fess up to the bad things too! I eat meat, but think I probably shouldn't. But don't think it's as bad as eating people.
On the other one, how bad is it if we lose all our corn farms? Better living for the corn farmers abroad, and more room for solar panels. I'm serious. I mean, it's too bad for the people who have to give up their family farming tradition--I mean that--but I don't think those traditions are sustainable without unacceptable costs (mostly to poor farmers abroad).
I know about the freegans who eat only what other people throw away (for moral, not economic reasons). If there was a group which literally only ate plants and only when they were killed in the absence of human interference, that would be a new one for me. Having previewed, the fruitarians are in fact new to me. However, I still await the group fulfilling my tongue-in-cheek exhortation.
I figure it's okay to be speciesist since I think if chickens ruled the world they'd probably eat me.
Matt, which yinz question?
And I think that giving up control of our food supply to another country could spell six kinds of trouble. As long as they don't form a corn cartel! Plus, local grown stuff is nummy.
Yinz question: Link in 132. Food supply: If that's a problem, we're already quite badly fucked on oil, I think, which is I guess the point about the corn cartel. But aren't the food-growing countries little enough for us to boss around?
Local grown stuff, yes, that's an issue, but (aagh! libertarianism! run away!) if it's nummy enough shouldn't there be enough demand for it to support the higher prices for local grown stuff? If there aren't enough food snobs to support local farmers, is it worth subsidizing?
Here we get into complicated questions about fuel/shipping costs (which I can raise, but haven't the knowledge to answer). Isn't there an argument that a more sensible fuel pricing structure (considering all environmental and other externalities) should make local foods competitive in the market regardless of numminess?
A gas tax, for example, isn't a subsidy for local foods but would have a similar effect.
My point was that we earthlings have and will continue to have food rationing. Currently that rationing is in the form of money - those with the money get the best food. Those with the money get the best deals, too.
The only way to make drastic changes to food production is through government action, and any action the government takes will either deprive some people of their liberty (make meat illegal) or increase global starvation.
Now personal choice of Veganism is cool and I support it, but many people have their food choices as an expression of their spirituality and can be as irrantional as any other fundamentalist.
Oh, and personally I think the oil shortage that is coming will force action on this topic a lot sooner than we could get any government action going. The price of food will be rising soon enough, I fear.
161: I'm not sure that's right. That's like saying the price of gasoline will stay lower because there's a lot of gas stations. We've seen that isn't the case. While there is an excess of corn being grown, I'm not sure how much of that is just excess capacity (i.e., stuff that gets burned right after it is grown because you get paid to grow it, but not to sell it). But I understand that you are making the point that there is excess capacity. In that case, it becomes a question of economies of scale on the farm. Can a "small farm" that only grows 10 tons of corn a year effectively compete against a farm that grows 1000 tons of corn? No, probably not. But no farm is going to continue to take a loss on corn, they'll just either have to up the price to their own costs, or get out of the corn business. So larger, more efficient farms will have lower prices, and the small farms (which are already making less profit per ear of corn than the large ones) will go out of business, forcing all the farmers on rt 13 to go work for tyson.
Or the farmers on rt. 13 go into some other kind of business, like boutique-y potatoes or heirloom tomatoes. (How my boyfriend's family's farm manages to compete; new potatoes!)
178: Hells yeah. Tax the hell out of gas, turn the excess farmland to solar power (w/subsidies), and the farmers what's left will all have to turn to nummy boutique stuff. And Tyson will get screwed over and devote its life to charity. And a pony! (from the point of view of political plausibility if nothing else.)
The only way to make drastic changes to food production is through government action, and any action the government takes will either deprive some people of their liberty (make meat illegal) or increase global starvation.
This is false, and I don't understand why the ensuing discussion didn't make you see why. Ceasing to subsidize the production of animal products would neither make meat illegal nor would it increase global starvation; any resources you use to produce meat could produce more plant food by nearly an order of magnitude.
Cala, I've read that there isn't any real conclusive evidence for the fact that high fructose corn syrup thing, i.e. that fructose isn't any worse for you than any other sweetener, and the problem is that we just sweeten our food too much.
180: it might not be right, but it isn't close to the gas station comparison you just made. The number of gas stations does not correlate to the amount of gas. But where gas is more plentiful, the price is lower. I am no econ stud, but I will hold fast to that rule.
The same is true for corn. In the early part of this century, markets were flooded with cheap grain; to keep the grain industry from imploding, we adopted subsidies. After the implosion, we would have had fewer corn producers, and the corn market wouldn't be so screwed up as it is now. There wouldn't have been such a huge glut of corn without use -- probably no cheetos, corn syrup, or ridiculous corn-to-gasoline schemes.
More to the point: lots of a good makes it cheap. Right now there is a kind of statis in the corn price, but if you cut the subsidy, we would get the true price -- which is even lower, due to the overwhelming amount of production. Then corn growers would go out of business, and we would have less production, and a higher price.
Ceasing the subsidy of meat products would increase the cost of meat denying some people the ability to have meat.
I don't think that would be very popular, but you can propose it.
Maybe I'm too heavily into "Urinetown" at the moment. The show deals with this topic and could, I suppose, be summed up as "frigging Malthus." I'm not advocating one idea or another - they all suck.
I think the reason you originally brought up historical comparison of meat consumption was to make the argument that current levels of meat consumption are not unhealthy. I just want to refer back to my 68 and say a broad spectrum of health organizations in this country have all come to the conclusion that diets with limited meat consumption are better for you; with the medical consensus so overwhelming, I think anyone who wants to dispute this needs to argue from evidence.
Assuming there was a substantial livestock subsidy, which I'm not sure there is, I don't think it would be a very effective way of getting meat to poor people.
If the demand is there -- if people like meat -- and there isn't an overproduction problem, then a meat subsidy is unnecessary.
If poor people don't have access to good meat (they may not, as is), the better approach would be to give some sort of tax credit for meat. Food-stamps to the wholefoods butcher section.
I'm just going to be unreasonable about this. Those health reports also indicate that heavy starches and sugar are a greater problem. When people omit meat from their diets, they don't exist solely on legumes -- they eat more starches.
True obesity is rarely caused by too much steak. If we are talking about serious health issues, meat is not the problem in the American diet.
So, even conceding that people would be marignally healthier eating slightly less meat, people would be much healthier eating much less starch. When people eat less meat, they eat less starch. Ergo . . .
Tripp, I'm clear on this, but "eat less meat" =/ "starve", as you asserted in 179. Eating less meat is a good outcome on health, environment, and cruelty measures. It does not meaningfully decrease liberty, except to the extent that not having money decreases liberty in general, but on this point, see my 130. If I argue against a TV subsidy, by your logic, I am arguing for to restrain the poor's liberty to buy a TV.
Me too. I don't eat local foods exclusively or in any kind of organized way, but I could actually be fairly happy eating seasonal NYS foods. Cabbage, broccoli, and root vegetables all winter, tomatoes and berries in the summer, what could be better?
ben, check out The Corporation to see what happened; it didn't air.
Cala, meat consumption in France seems to be about 100kg per person/year, compared to 123 kg/year in the US. Consumption of horse flesh since 1990, though, is down.
Between 65 and 70% of the available agricultural land in France is thus devoted to feeding animals. One can also notice that fruits and vegetables (except for potatoes and vineyards) acount for only 2% of the total.
---
A similar evolution is observed for the average meat consumption on the planet, as the annual weight eaten by an inhabitant of the Earth has increased by 60% over the last 40 years (while the world population doubled, which means that the meat production has been multiplied by 3.2).
I think I said: The only way to make drastic changes to food production is through government action, and any action the government takes will either deprive some people of their liberty (make meat illegal) or increase global starvation.
The eating less meat part came under deprived liberty, not increased starvation.
How do you propose enforcing a reduction of meat consumption? Eliminating subsidies (if they exist) or taxing meat would regressively affect the poor, but they seem to be the pawns for all sorts of do-gooders.
Boy Cala, I agree with you in re beets. I have gotten to the point where there's basically nothing I don't like, including dandelion greens, which require some hard coritude, but beets, man. The beet greens are okay though.
My only experience with beets has been the really pink pickled kind. I don't think I've ever had a parsnip either; those are the ones that look like anemic carrots?
But, re: the health question. It seems the French eat a lot of animal products and are generally healthier than Americans. I'm not sure eliminating meat is the answer to Americans' dietary woes, esp. if such meat is replaced, as text and I noted earlier, by empty starches.
Tripp, legislation to end factory farming would probably, I think, be a good thing, but would also make meat a little more expensive. It would end some jobs, and create some jobs. Plenty of people have land that they can lend out to cattle ranchers. Others would get into the business, which would be easier to enter if the business became smaller scale and more profitable.
There is a great beet-mango-avacado with walnuts and blood orange tea dressing in Moby and Kelly Tisdale's teany book. Never really ate beets before that, love 'em now.
I'm trying not to guess about the percent-of-calories-consumed-per-capita change, but the usda makes it remarkably hard to actually figure it out.
octopodes--cool. i meant seafood.
here's a thought experiment---if the per capita American consumption of meat went drastically down (say, 20%), holding everything else fixed--protein, calories, etc--and the losses in the meat industry were fairly compared to gains in environmental benefits---would anything else be much worse off?
Tripp, making anything more expensive regressively affects the poor. And yet we have all kinds of regulations that make things more expensive. OSHA regulations make products more expensive. Environmental regulations make products more expensive. Except really, the greater expense is just making the producer and the consumer bear the cost of the externalities. Eating lots of meat has negative externalities. Eating less of it has positive ones. Nothing I propose would make it harder for the poor to get healthy, nutritious food. It would only make a smaller portion of their diet animal based, which would be benenficial to society in lots of ways.
It is not restricting liberty not to subsidize a product. It is restricting liberty somewhat to tax a product or regulate an industry, but everyone to the left of George Bush supports this in a number of instances. Once again, being poor means not being able to afford some stuff. Why are you in favor of restricting the poor's liberty to buy televisions by not favoring television subsidies and supporting OSHA regulations for TV manufacturers? Seriously?
I think all of this France stuff is a big red herring. The only meaningful comparison is between groups of people who differ in no way except as to diet. I.e. they have to have the same health care system, the same exercise routines, etc. I really think that the medical establishment would not have performed the huge backflip that they did if it were not supported by some evidence.
218: some ranchers would be worse off, otherwise, no big loss. I wouldn't expect any environmental gain, however. We will continue to grow the same amount of grain, regardless of what it's used for. We have been looking for new uses for corn for the past hundred years or so.
But your hypo is also unrealistic. If we decreaes meat consumption, we will increase starch consumption. My prediction: we would also be a little fatter. Not a horrible outcome. Certainly no closer to eliminating obesity.
Wouldn't we be better off giving the money for tv subsidies to education subsidies for poor people so that they can get a better job and afford the tv at a normal price?
As for whether people would just replace meat with refined starches, as long as I'm attending Social Engineer Fantasy Camp, I'm all for putting some subsidy money into things like grocery stores with fresh produce/farmers markets in poor neighborhoods and 25 cent booklets of easy vegetarian or low meat recipes etc.
(1) I am mostly vegan. I sometimes eat eggs and milk from the Union Square farmers market. Sometimes I eat eggs and milk from other places. I consider that a failure on my part.
I don't think the food pyramid has been around longer than you have. I remember the four food groups when I was a kid, and I'm 25. I also remember the switchover. I'll google for the date.
It's wrong based on what evidence? That's what I'm asking for. How have the AHA, the ACS etc. been so snowed? Give me an article cite.
So it's a fallacy to attack a person's motivation instead of the arguments at hand, but do you think you would be less sure of the negative health impact from eating meat if you did not object to eating meat on other grounds?
Has Tia made any strong claims about the negative health impact of eating meat? I've seen her make supportable claims that meat is more environmentally burdensome than plant-based foods, and that a perfectly healthy meatless diet is possible -- that reducing meat consumption shouldn't have a negative health impact. I think you're expecting her to defend a position she hasn't taken.
I said that I thought that a healthy diet could include meat, but that most Americans consume too much. I do not think eating meat is in and of itself unhealthy; I think eating too large a proportion of it relative to your other sources of calories is, and I think Americans, in general, doing this now.
So it's a fallacy to attack a person's motivation instead of the arguments at hand, but do you think you would be less sure of the negative health impact from eating meat if you did not object to eating meat on other grounds?
Yeah, text, you did identify this as a fallacy, but I think it's not only a fallacy but uncool to ask someone if their prejudices are a cause of their factual beliefs, when they've given you mainstream support (like the link in 68) for those beliefs. That should really be reserved for off-the-wall or obviously unsupported factual assertions, don't you think? When someone's giving you facts, argue the facts, not why they think what they think.
re 231: um, I'm not sure if I can imagine a hypothetical me who does not believe something that I believe strongly. However, (I feel like a doofus sometimes for saying the same stuff over and over), I'm basing my belief on a consensus of experts. Every time I drop by medline, the abstracts I read generally boil down to: it's important to make sure you're getting all the nutrients you need when you reduce animal consumption, but a vegetarian or low meat diet reduces the incidence of a bunch of chronic diseases. I just want people to think otherwise to have compelling reasons to; my mind could be changed; it wouldn't make that much of a difference in my position because there are still strong environmental and cruelty arguments for reducing animal product consumption. So far I haven't seen anything in this thread that changes my mind.
Personally speaking, I suspect that learning anything about the meat production industry might affect my appetite for bacon sandwiches, so I make sure that I stay "out of the room". I demand everyone's respect for my emotional reaction here because clearly I can't help it. I am in no way a pussy.
The thing is, I can't argue the merits of the scientific positions. And I don't have the time to engage in a battle of the experts. But I've found, anecdotally, that the people who tend to think meat is bad for you also don't want to eat it for ethical reasons.
We experienced a surge of obesity in this country, starting in the 70s. It corresponded with people cutting fat, eating more carbs. I think that if the advice continues to be: cut saturated fats, we will continue to get fatter.
(and since not everyone is as obsessive about regurgitating old debates as me I will clarify the above as satire; I have in fact been present at both the birth and slaughter of the same individual animals, though I didn't actually eat them because they had been contaminated by the Chernobyl cloud).
I actually never said that I thought increased meat consumption was responsible for obesity. I think decreasing it decreases your risk of several diseases. I have never been one to conflate weight and health. I'm also a big opponent of refined starches.
245: fair enough. obesity causes some diseases and health problems, but it is by no means the only diet related issue here. There are probably some benefits to cutting meats, but I think there are also detriments. As to how it washes out, we will have to agree to disagree, even with all the various organizations on your side.
And apologies if I made any improper rhetorical moves.
Oh, you're killing me. I love foie gras. And I love veal. So. Maybe I give up foie gras and keep the veal, pretty please?
And I promise to watch less t.v. and eat more vegetables and be nice to old people. Mostly. (I don't love veal that much and old people sometimes totally skeeve me out.)
Posted by moira | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 12:42 AM
We need to hook the geese up to some giant Matrix-style body farm so they can be enjoying a pleasurable virtual-reality goose fantasy world while we fatten their livers.
Posted by Gaijin Biker | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 12:43 AM
My meat policy: kill them all you want, just don't treat them mean.
Practically, this would almost make you a vegetarianism. Wild game and free-range chickens would be OK. Maybe fish. Veal would *definately* be out.
I like Peter Singer's writings on animal rights and vegetarianism. You would too, I'm fairly certain. His arguments are quite close to yours. He lays out the argument that just becase animals don't have the same rights as us, they do not therefore have zero rights. This seems fairly intuitive for a lot of people, which is why most people seem to block out thoughts of what they're consuming. Ever try to bring this up to people? Usually, you'll either be told to shut up directly, or in so many words. Or, the other reaction is to gloss over it in bad faith, and pretend like they think animals have no rights.
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 12:44 AM
A taxonomist's description of the life of a veal calf is usually enough to get people to renounce it, I think. Start here.
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 12:47 AM
just don't treat them mean.
i'd go even further than Michael and say that the logical end of this would probably make you a vegan. by some respects, the treatment of dairy cows in factory farms is a lot worse than that of cows used for beef.
just sayin'.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 1:16 AM
It's certainly difficult to choose meat killed in accordance with one's principles. Almost impossible!
I alternate between cooking without meat, to not giving a hoo and eating an animal that surely had the ugliest of deaths and the most wretched of lives.
Posted by Goofyfoot | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 1:18 AM
the treatment of dairy cows in factory farms is a lot worse than that of cows used for beef.
Oi. I saw some video of cows injected with BGH, and saw the pus-ridden milk, and have been buying organic (not Horizon) since.
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 1:23 AM
I once heard Nick Zangwill give a strong consequentialist defence of meat eating.
Arguing, essentially, that human meat consumption means that there are otherwise more cows, pigs, chickens, etc. in the world than there would be and as long as net cow happiness during its lifetime outweights any unhappiness caused in death then eating meat leads to increased net global happiness. :-)
As a result, we are all obliged to switch from a traditional meat and two veg. diet to '3 meat'.
I suspect this argument may have been slightly tongue-in-cheek, or a subtle reductio of aggregative forms of consequentialism, or both.... :-)
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 3:50 AM
I'm with Michael on this one, except for the part where he turns you into a belief system in that first sentence.
My meat policy: kill them all you want, just don't treat them mean.
If you genuinely feel this way, and I wouldn't judge if on some level you didn't, then if nothing else foie gras and veal are very likely out. KFC too. I'm presently doing my damndest to work out the middle ground you described. I have to think those principled lines exist; my larger concern is giving momentum to a body of activists with whom I disagree significantly on a number of issues.
Posted by Tarrou | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 6:12 AM
Eggs would be out, too; overcrowded laying hens with their beaks cut off.
I think ogged's intuition is basically correct, but it doesn't work terribly well once you really consider that most modern farming methods are unpleasant (and often necessary for large-scale production.) If you can afford organic free-range, that's fine and probably preferable anyway for lots of pertinent health reasons; but I have a hard time telling someone who can't afford the pricier meat that they shouldn't eat any meat because the chicken suffered.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 6:57 AM
I think it would be very easy to hide from a human that you're going to eat him/her. As long as you don't leave around your How to Cook Forty Humans cookbook.
If you keep your meat well sedated while stuffing its liver, is that acceptable? I can see a nice untapped market for anti-depressants.
4: I would have been sympathetic, but the Amazon page images were missing random words, so it's more veal for me.
7: I don't know about the milk thing- as all rBGH packages must state, there's no way to distunguish between milk from treated vs. untreated cows. I suspect the presence of pus might give it away. I'm sure some rBGH cows get udder infections, but I don't think that's the milk you end up with, it might just be PETA propaganda to show you those particular pictures.
Posted by SP | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 7:02 AM
I have a friend who opposes the use of heroin, unless she happens to be dying a slow and agonizing death. So, just give the geese the heroin.
Next question: Does this make the Foie Gras better or worse?
Posted by IF | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 7:20 AM
What is foie gras like? This is something rich bloggers eat that I've heard of, but never encountered.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 7:23 AM
Really, really good. Incredibly fatty and rich.
I have trouble with this -- I don't want to be a vegan, because it's just too much trouble, but I can't find a principled line to draw that doesn't balk at what they do to dairy cattle and laying hens. I end up buying free-range whatever when it's an option, and other than that trying not to thnk about it too much.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 7:30 AM
Okay, silly question: is there a way to get foie gras that isn't forcefeeding-based? (It's been around before modern farming, no?)
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 7:38 AM
I have a hard time telling someone who can't afford the pricier meat that they shouldn't eat any meat because the chicken suffered.
I don't, especially, but one way to address this issue on a policy level would be to stop subsidizing the wrong agriculture and start subsidizing small scale farms.
Also, to my knowledge there are no laws governing the label "free-range" etc. And organic means a few things about the treatment of the animal, but it certainly doesn't mean everything. Considering what the food industry liked to label "lite" before there were laws governing that, I would think that would be reason for pause. Regulations governing this would be a good thing too.
Ultimately, though, I think there is probably no way to continue meat, egg, and dairy consumption on the scale we do in this country and keep it ethical. People have to eat fewer animal products, and the only way you make that happen is to make them more expensive. That would have lots of positive effects not only on animal treatment, but on the environment and human health as well.
Ultimately, though, I think it's not exceedinly meaningful to talk about "policies" that are not backed up in a meaningful way by your consumption habits. Your dollar is one kind of vote you have in this country, and if you would chortle at someone who says "I support gay and reproductive rights" and then votes Republican, then you should consider the same disjunctures in the grocery strore.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 7:45 AM
is there a way to get foie gras that isn't forcefeeding-based?
No -- French peasants have been forcefeeding ducks and geese for ages. The gras means fat, and refers to the forcefedness of the bird. I'm not sure how much less luscious non-forcefed bird liver is, though.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 7:51 AM
I've heard that "free range" means the birds have access to an outside area. Usually they do not take advantage of the area, choosing to cluster together inside, but at least they have access to the outside and are not individually caged.
Unfortunately, that means they fight and the resulting deaths drive up the price of the "organic" food.
People who view the PETA propaganda should also view the anti-abortion propoganda. I think they are produced by the same group.
Posted by Tripp | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 7:57 AM
perhaps there should also be some legislative remedy for excess use of "ultimately, though" to start paragraphs. maybe a "penultimately, though" subsidy.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 7:58 AM
Sure, but it's relatively easy for me to decide to buy only organic meats and free-range soybeans and what have you; the extra expense is more or less mitigated by the fact that I'm single: an extra $0.30 a portion is only an extra $.30.
But it strikes me as a bit wrongheaded to insist that prices should increase so that poor people or middle-class people with families can't afford to eat meat. After all, your (general you here) ability to eat meat won't be hindered.
Support the small farmers and enforce some meaningful regulations about what constitutes organic. But I don't think it's a plus to make options like meat, eggs, and milk more expensive; that's not going to help out anyone's health, cause if beef is super-expensive, prepackaged macandcheese is going to look a lot better.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 7:58 AM
The trap is that if we "support the small farmer" we are raising the price of food. The cheap food comes from the factory farms.
So, what to do? We either screw the poor or screw the animals.
Posted by Tripp | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 8:02 AM
18: A friend of mine whose family are chicken farmers describes chickens as brainless, nasty little bastards. Apparently they only go 'cluck' in cartoons.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 8:02 AM
I think if it comes down to screwing the poor or screwing a nasty bastard of a chicken, the chicken loses.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 8:07 AM
"I wouldn't mind a ban, if I weren't worried about those damn rabble-rousing activists coming next to take away my veal, and then my beef. Then they'll take my chicken, and there will be no one left to squawk for me."
Slippery slope is a fallacy.
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/slippery-slope.html
Whether or not you support a ban on killing chicken should have nothing to do with whether you support a ban on foie gras, unless you believe that banning foie gras will lead to a ban on chicken. Stand up for your beliefs!
Posted by Jamie McCarthy | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 8:07 AM
Cala,
Yeah, in my mind they are barely one step above fish. They are dinosaurs.
One drop of blood and they'll mob, pecking the injured bird to death.
Posted by Tripp | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 8:09 AM
Call me a butcher, but re 21, I'll choose the poor over the animals every time. Though it would be nice if mass production had a leetle more regard for the animals.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 8:12 AM
You know, one problem I have with all of this is that while I sympathize with their goals, I have a real problem with most animal rights groups, including a low opinion of their honesty. (See Tripp's 18.)
I'm not actually sure that the foie gras forcefeeding is particularly cruel by the standards of other things we do to food animals. (Veal I am clear on.) I've seen arguments that it is, but I've also seen arguments that it isn't -- that the forcefeeding isn't traumatic or painful, and the liver condition produced isn't painful either. I have a vague suspicion that the foie gras outrage is like banning fur -- a publicity stunt rather than a real attack on the worst abuses.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 8:14 AM
Mac and cheese also has animal products, so it would not look attractive as an alternative. Plant-based foods would look attractive as an alternative.
This is sort of relevant to that food stamp thread. Being poor sucks, in lots of ways. It means you don't get a lot of the things you want. The government's job is to get you the things you need. Meat, eggs, and dairy are not offered right now at the actual cost to produce them, and there are lots of negative consequences to our national decision to promote agribusiness. If we stopped subsidizing mass meat, egg, and dairy production and put our subsidies into better food (ethically and sustainably produced animal and plant food/moving some of the farm subsidy money into other programs to offset the cost of food, maybe expanded food stamps or EITC), it might mean that one of the ways it might suck is not being able to ingest the same amount of tasty animal goodness as you would given unlimited resources, but it might better for the ethics of animal husbandry, and further better for everyone's health and the environment (and adverse environmental conditions affect the poor more than the rich as well).
I personally don't have some kind of arrogance-guilt about it because a) I am relatively poor, though single and b) I restrict my diet more than anything I'm advocating for other people.
Tripp, there are not laws that say that's what "free range" means. That's my point. You could put them in crates outside instead of inside and there would be no law saying you couldn't call them free range. There used to be no law governing the use of the word "organic." Now there is, and we understand what organic means when we read it on a label (or we can go look it up). As for PETA propaganda, I'm not sure if you're criticizing the sensationalism or its representation of fact, but if it's the latter, do you have a basis for it?
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 8:28 AM
Tia,
Capitalism as practiced in teh U.S. does not allow for ethics. Sorry. Please try Canada or Sweden. We don't want your ethics here.
Posted by tweedledopey | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 8:31 AM
The trap is that if we "support the small farmer" we are raising the price of food. The cheap food comes from the factory farms.
So, what to do? We either screw the poor or screw the animals.
This is a false choice. Right now we are putting tons of money into subsidizing agribusiness that could be used to directly subsidize the cost of food on the consumer end. Ending or reducing these subsidies might raise the price of food that is naturally expensive to produce (animal products, especially meat) relative to food that is cheaper (plant products).
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 8:34 AM
I think that we could choose to subsidize small farms rather than factory farms, and I have a sense that this could improve the environment. Factory pig farms seem reall awful.
Or we could give up on the idea of super-cheap food ans work on raising the incomes of the poor and lower-middle class.
Posted by bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 8:34 AM
Re 27 and animal rights groups -- I agree. Check out the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a PETA-funded litigation shop that sponsors campaigns saying, for example, that osteoporosis is a myth. I'm lactose-intolerant and love trial lawyers, yet their "milk makes me sick" campaign still makes me mad.
Obviously this doesn't affect the truth or falsity of their claims, but it makes me wonder how strong their arguments really are.
Then again, I've got a rather skeptical view of animal consciousness anyway. Kill 'em all and let the Iron Chef sort 'em out, I say.
Posted by J | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 8:40 AM
Or we could give up on the idea of super-cheap food ans work on raising the incomes of the poor and lower-middle class.
I think this is right -- food is much cheaper in the US than anyplace else in the industrialized world (wild generalization, but I think I'm right), and that by itself doesn't make poor people better off. I'd be perfectly satisfied with a society that had higher food prices due to food production that was less cruel and more environmentally sustainable, but with better income support and other services for people in need.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 8:41 AM
"Ultimately, though, I think there is probably no way to continue meat, egg, and dairy consumption on the scale we do in this country and keep it ethical. People have to eat fewer animal products, and the only way you make that happen is to make them more expensive. That would have lots of positive effects not only on animal treatment, but on the environment and human health as well."
I just think this is wrong on many, many levels. First, I'm not sure that Americans eat more meat than, say, Europeans. We definitely eat more starches. I don't think the answer to this problem is that we have to eat less animal products. But that's the way animal rights organizations always try to frame the issue.
This is, frankly, why I don't trust all of the accounts PETA gives about cruel conditions in farm facilities. I'm sure the conditions are bad, but PETA wants you to draw the inexorable conclusion that you can't eat meat, and they would want you to draw that conclusion regardless of the conditions. There is a real incentive to overstate the problem, and I wouldn't be surprised if that's the case. If conditions are bad, and we think they should be changed, we could change them and still eat meat. Americans don't spend much on food, under the current system. Maybe we should spend more on food, less on other stuff.
Second, eating less meat would be good neither for the environment nor for human health. Eating lard is bad for you. But eating a normal meat inclusive diet is not. The larger danger in America comes from our heavy consumption of processed starches. Which in turn is directly correlated to our over-production of grains, specifically corn.
Corn production is actually pretty bad for the environment. We use petroleum to fertilize our corn fields. A lot of that corn is used in feed for animals, but the reason for that is that corn is cheap, and the reason corn is cheap is we subsidize it like crazy for no good reason.
If the market were to demand lots of grass fed beef, that would not at all be a bad thing for anyone -- cows, humans, all the happy denizens of the ecosystem.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 8:49 AM
This is a false choice. Right now we are putting tons of money into subsidizing agribusiness that could be used to directly subsidize the cost of food on the consumer end. Ending or reducing these subsidies might raise the price of food that is naturally expensive to produce (animal products, especially meat) relative to food that is cheaper (plant products).
And this is very true.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 8:50 AM
or what LB said.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 8:52 AM
I think if there were good evidence that humans were as tasty as, say, bacon, I'd be OK with killing people for food. I note that a subsidiary effect would be a strong incentive for the individual to stay lean and stringy.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 8:54 AM
It's my understanding that we subsidize grain production, not cattle, chickens, or foe gras.
If the price of grain were to increase, that would affect animal products in as much we feed them grain, but I don't think it would increase more than the price of grain itself.
Ideally, grain prices would increase such that feeding them grass becomes a viable alternative. Not sure that's realistic.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 8:55 AM
I think if there were good evidence that humans were as tasty as, say, bacon, I'd be OK with killing people for food.
Don't start researching this -- I believe the evidence is there if you look.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 8:56 AM
Re 20: "I don't think it's a plus to make options like meat, eggs, and milk more expensive; that's not going to help out anyone's health, cause if beef is super-expensive, prepackaged macandcheese is going to look a lot better."
Well... wait a minute. Nutritionists say that as a society, we are eating WAAAAAY too much meant right now. If we ate a LOT less, we would be healthier. So if raising the price of meat and animal products pushed down our meat consumption, that would probably help improve national health. So I guess I think you are dead wrong.
Re 28: there actually are USDA definitions for "free range"; they were promulgated in 2000 or '01, I can't remember. Anyway, the point is that they are too loose, and that chickens can still be wildly overcrowded and mistreated and still be "free range", whereas consumers see this phrase and tend to mentally translate it into "happy and healthy." But you couldn't put them in cages outside and call it free range.
Posted by Rudolph | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 8:58 AM
We subsidize corn because it was an issue back when sugar was really cheap. Because sugar doesn't grow well in the heartland, a lot of farmers were pissed off. So they started getting subsidies so that corn would be cheaper to grow than sugar (and therefore cheaper to sell) thus providing Americans with the unhealthy thing I like to call: High fructose corn syrup!
Also, I don't know that it's a question of whether Americans eat more meat than foreigners. I think Americans, in general, eat more than foreigners. Ergo the solution is to eat more foreigners.
Posted by tweedledopey | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 9:00 AM
SCMT, would you mind cutting off a limb and telling us how you taste?
I'm reminded of the Far Side cartoon where the cows are sitting in the barn eating a steak and one says, "We do taste like chicken!"
Posted by tweedledopey | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 9:02 AM
"Nutritionists say that as a society, we are eating WAAAAAY too much meant right now."
We are just not going to agree on this, but I don't think all nutritionists would sign off on the above.
I would guess we eat less meat than Americans consumed, per capita, a hundred years or so ago. And I would guess that we are much less healthy.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 9:02 AM
Americans eat more than foreigners -- and perhaps we should eat foreigners -- but my point was that Americans don't necessarily eat more animal products that foreigners. At least not as a percentage of their diet.
The French, Germans, British, I would imagine all eat more.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 9:04 AM
We are just not going to agree on this, but I don't think all nutritionists would sign off on the above.
I haven't done the research, but my offhand guess is with Rudolph. (Well, except that not 'all' of anyone is going to agree with anything.)
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 9:05 AM
I'm with text.
Also, was it here where I heard that Wal-Mart water-injects their steaks to make them weigh more (and taste worse) and now people everywhere are asking for water-injected meat because their tastes have grown accustomed to it?
Posted by tweedledopey | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 9:05 AM
The corn subsidy has probably screwed up the American diet in ways that we don't ever think about. Corn syrup is pretty bad for you. Many of the cheap, calorie dense, empty snack foods are corn-based, and we eat so much of them because they are so cheap, and so very tasty.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 9:07 AM
CHEETOS!!!!1!!
Posted by tweedledopey | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 9:08 AM
tweedledopey, subsidizing corn is a bad idea, because, as you say, high fructose corn syrup is generally bad for you.
I said before that I thought that the Dadamo blood type diet was garbage, but I have taken one of its recommendations, namely to try to limit my intake of corn.
Posted by bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 9:08 AM
I have a vague suspicion that the foie gras outrage is like banning fur -- a publicity stunt rather than a real attack on the worst abuses.
I think this is pretty much right. I'm pretty sure that foie gras production is nasty--though not more nasty than some other things--but foie gras is so clearly a luxury item that it's politically easiest to try to ban.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 9:12 AM
Well, duh. It would be politcally impossible to ban
chickenbeeflamb!Posted by tweedledopey | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 9:15 AM
Mmmm. Lamb.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 9:15 AM
One under-discussed consequence of not eating meat is death. I would very quickly die without meat. Brisket, chorizo, chicken, steak, eggs, ribs—these are the stuff of breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 9:15 AM
There are three sets of considerations:
1) health considerations
2) animal rights considerations
3) environmental considerations
Regarding 1) I don't think a meat-inclusive diet can't be healthy, and I, at least, am not arguing for excluding all mean, but reducing consumption. I don't think meat consumption at the level of the average American is typically healthy. There are countless studies showing that vegetarians/people who consume limited amounts of meat are healthier, in America, than people who eat a lot of it. Everytime I do a medline search because someone tells me I should get more protein I confirm that this is true. I can look into some of them to see if they adequately controlled for other lifestyle factors; I would hope some of them did. Processed starch is also very bad for you; more on big corn, etc. in a moment.
Regarding 2) Some people just choose to dismiss this consideration. I think that's unethical. Animals have interests that wheat, corn, lettuce etc. don't have.
3) Big corn is nasty, and also gets excessively subsidized. However, pretty much by definition no matter how bad plant-agribusiness is for the environment it's better than animal agribusiness, because animal agribusiness requires so many more resources, because it uses up all of the resources of plant agribusiness to feed the animals and then some.
I have no particular objection to grass fed, ethically treated beef, but that means money for pasture and no feed lots. I.e. it would have to be produced differently than it is now. The status quo has also has some pretty entrenched interests and lobbies.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 9:16 AM
You know, I've seen videos of (low producing artisanal) foie gras farms, and the geese looked pretty happy to me--even running and shoving to have the tube put down their throats. Like any other ag product, I suspect that knowing who you're buying from is more important than you might htink. We buy the bulk of our meat and eggs at the local farmer's market from producers who practice sustainable, ethical treatment of their animals (although, I confess, that it's as much because the meat TASTES better as anything else). We aren't as good about dairy, however--I'll have to work on that.
Also, braised veal cheeks = teh stunningly good.
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 9:16 AM
I really hate this post.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 9:19 AM
One of my friends who is in finance had to tour a poultry processing plant as part of determining whether to issue a buy recommendation for the company. She said the tour was hysterical because her yuppie colleagues kept making complete fools of themselves in front of the good old boys who ran the plant. She said the chickens were suspended upside-down from an assembly line by their feet and that killing them involved dunking their heads in a pool of water and then slitting their throats. One woman remarked that the chickens looked really peaceful before they were killed and earnestly asked the tour guide if he thought it was because the chickens realized they were going to die and saw God in their final moments. Their tour guide stared at her for a long time and then said "Well, it could be that. Or it could be the electric current we got runnin' through that tub of water."
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 9:20 AM
Tia, re your point the first, this may be because vegetarians tend to be health freaks in general. The average american will tend to ingest anything put on his or her plate. While there may be a correlation between health and the amount of meat, I am pretty sure it's not a cause-effect relationship at a one-to-one level.
Posted by tweedledopey | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 9:20 AM
3) Big corn is nasty, and also gets excessively subsidized. However, pretty much by definition no matter how bad plant-agribusiness is for the environment it's better than animal agribusiness, because animal agribusiness requires so many more resources, because it uses up all of the resources of plant agribusiness to feed the animals and then some.
While I agree with your 1 and 2, I think you're missing that big livestock agribusiness is a byproduct of corn subsidies. If the corn subsidies get shut down, than the economics of keeping 10,000 hogs in a giant building suddenly change completely, and introducing less cruel methods of onimul husbandry becomes more practical.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 9:20 AM
57 - Best tour guide ever!
Posted by tweedledopey | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 9:21 AM
Cala and Tripp touched on the stupidity of chickens; shouldn't that be the guiding principle here? Very few people on this thread seem to object to eating fish. It's true, the life of a fish is probably more pleasant than that of a factory chicken, but even if it weren't, would we care? I doubt it. Fish are stupid.
The extent of the cruelty visited on an animal seems irrelevant unless there's a consciousness to experience it. And of course, we don't really know to what extent animals are conscious. But a pretty good guess (based on the ratio of brain:body mass, among other things) would indicate that pigs are the smartest animals that we regularly kill for food. But I rarely hear nonreligious concern over eating pork. Maybe this is just because pigs have it better on the farm. I suspect their deliciousness might factor in as well.
Posted by tom | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 9:23 AM
It should be said that the Big Meat industry treats its employees nearly as poorly as the animals. A friend told me about a case on which she was working about Tyson: the company deducted the amount of time it took slaughterhouse ("showroom floor") employees to put on necessary protective gear against their minimal daily breaks. It can be extremely dangerous work that pays next to zilch.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 9:26 AM
I've seen where some plants are located smarsher. They look like they are the only jobs (other than like gas station attendent) around for a hundred miles.
Posted by tweedledopey | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 9:36 AM
Before I read 62, I didn't know it would be possible for me to hate big business more than I did, but I was wrong.
I would be lousy in the corporate world, really. I couldn't justify paying people poverty-level wages to squeeze out more millions for myself. I lack the cold, capitalist killer instinct, I suppose.
At least we don't have Pinkertons busting the heads of striking workers these days, but we'd have to have a labor movement for that to happen, I suppose.
What were we talking about? Oh, right. Animals.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 9:38 AM
They're notorious for unionbusting and labor law violations. Who knows, if the laws were enforced to protect workers, people might be making enough money to afford slightly more expensive, but less cruel, food.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 9:38 AM
re: 61. "Maybe this is just because pigs have it better on the farm."
I would like to laugh at this, but I feel sick to my stomach instead. The ignorance revealed in this statement is the reason animals are treated so very cruelly in modern agribusiness (which affects the quality of our foods, our health, as well as our morality). People are just completely ignorant about what is put on their plate (apart from "how many calories?" and "how many grams of fat?").
Tom: go visit a hog farm. Pigs are probably the most abused and mistreated animals in modern agriculture. And yes, you are right -- they are (probably) by far the most intelligent. Much more intelligent than your family dog.
But you loooove the taste of bacon, so I guess this isn't something you want to think about too much? Better to pretend they "have it better on the farm"...
Posted by Umpire | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 9:41 AM
Very few people on this thread seem to object to eating fish. It's true, the life of a fish is probably more pleasant than that of a factory chicken, but even if it weren't, would we care?
Yes.
It's not the eating of animals per se that distresses me, it's the treatment of them. This is why I have as much of a reservation about eating dairy as I do about eating meat, though I still do both.
One of these days I'll go vegan.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 9:41 AM
this is from the American Dietetic Association. It's something of a roundup. I recognize that lifestyle choices can influence health outcomes for vegetarians, but I think the nutritionists probably thought of that too, and did at least some studies that controlled for lifestyle before these recommendations became so commonplace:
There is a growing appreciation for the benefits of plant-based diets, defined as diets that include generous amounts of plant foods and limited amounts of animal foods. The American Institute for Cancer Research and the World Cancer Research Fund call for choosing predominantly plant-based diets rich in a variety of vegetables and fruits, legumes, and minimally processed starchy staple foods and limiting red meat consumption, if red meat is eaten at all (16). The American Cancer Society recommends choosing most food from plant sources (17). The American Heart Association recommends choosing a balanced diet with an emphasis on vegetables, grains, and fruits (18), and the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada recommends using grains and vegetables instead of meat as the centerpiece of meals (19). The Unified Dietary Guidelines developed by the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association, the National Institutes of Health, and the American Academy of Pediatrics call for a diet based on a variety of plant foods, including grain products, vegetables, and fruits to reduce risk of major chronic diseases (20).
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 9:46 AM
But you loooove the taste of bacon, so I guess this isn't something you want to think about too much? Better to pretend they "have it better on the farm"...
Actually, as I was trying to express, pork is the meat about which I am most uneasy. My comment was asking why there is relatively little attention paid to the conditions surround pork production relative to other meats. Yes, I am ignorant of the conditions at hog farms, so I suggested that perhaps they might be better, which would account for the difference in concern. Apparently that's not the case. I guess I have to conclude that people just like baby cows. I still have no idea why so many prioritize saving the idiot chickens, however.
And yes, I eat pork. But I'm not trying to avoid thinking about anything.
Posted by tom | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 9:47 AM
Ok, before we get too many "you're a bad person for eating meat," comments, let's remember that the Bible gives man dominion over the earth and its animals. That's good enough for me. There's also Sorry, Cow.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 9:47 AM
Re: 63. Hmm... well I guess if there aren't a lot of other jobs around then it is okay that, according to a report earlier this year by Human Rights Watch, owners of meat and poultry plants in the US are guilty of widespread human rights violations.
Read this Wash Post. article on the subject (complete with a link to the actual report, for the truly curious):
http://hrw.org/english/docs/2005/08/03/usdom11575.htm.
This is sick. And very few people care. I'm no animal rights activist but the more you learn about this stuff the more sympathetic you become.
Posted by Umpire | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 9:47 AM
My comment was asking why there is relatively little attention paid to the conditions surround pork production relative to other meats.
Pigs aren't perceived as cute at all -- the main association with pigs is fat, dirty, and bad-smelling. This is an idiotic reason not to be concerned about them, but I think it's why they don't get attention.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 9:50 AM
C'mon blue. That's a bogus call on me. I never said it was ok. I was just commenting that they look like the only jobs in a hundred mile radius.
Posted by tweedledopey | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 9:51 AM
Re 63: But there could be the same jobs on smaller, disaggregated farms and ranches—I imagine that the decrease in efficiency would actually lead to an increase in jobs.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 9:52 AM
So if raising the price of meat and animal products pushed down our meat consumption, that would probably help improve national health. So I guess I think you are dead wrong.
As text pointed out, that depends on which nutritionist you talk to. (French are pretty healthy with all the meats and cheeses and butter.) I submit that depends entirely on what you replace the meat-that-you're-not-eating-due-to-cost with. If you replace it with vegetables and tofu and legumes, it would improve national health, probably, to have meat be more expensive.
But given current purchasing habits, people already gravitate towards overprocessed crap; I suspect if chicken doubles in price, it's not going to lead to people buying less organic chicken and supplementing with black beans, but more likely eating cheaper prepackaged junk. And that we know ain't good for health.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 9:54 AM
Tia,
Okay, I was wrong about the term free range. On the other hand there is a legal definition for "range" when referring to birds used for meat. It means Birds raised in the United States for meat--mainly chickens and turkeys--if they have USDA certified access to the outdoors. Like I said - this doesn't mean a lot. Usually the birds are too stupid to use the access.
I've been to dairy farms. PETA uses grotesque imagery to sway people's emotions similar to what the anti-abortion people do.
Appealing to emotion may work in some cases but I don't like the tactic.
And regarding "raise the income of the poor," etc. This is a nice sentiment and would allow us to enjoy the foods we like guilt free - but it is totally unrealistic. We are talking about the worldwide poor. Without modern farming methods about three billion people would starve to death, assuming you don't enforce some kind of rationing.
The sad fact is that, without rationing, or without modern farming the Earth cannot support the population we have.
Posted by Tripp | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 9:54 AM
re: 69: Sorry Tom if I sounded aggressive. This is one topic that makes my blood boil.
I'm not sure I agree that people prioritize chickens -- I know many people who won't eat pork solely because pigs are horribly absued and very very intelligent, social creatures.
But if anyone prioritizes them I would guess it would be because there are about 9 billion chickens slaughtered for food in the US every year, vs. about 1 billion of all other animals combined. Plus chickens are right up there with pigs in terms of atrocious living conditions. So it's probably a numbers thing, simple utilitarianism, I would guess.
[And chickens, like all birds, are smarter than people give them credit for being. But that's a side point. As Jeremy Bentham noted so long ago: "The question is not, "Can they reason?" nor, "Can they talk? but rather, "Can they suffer?"
I don't see how any other question is relevent.
Posted by Umpire | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 9:57 AM
71: I don't think that comment implied that anything was ok about human rights violations. It was an observation.
You are being rather uncharitable with the comments here.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 9:57 AM
re, 59, I agree with you.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 9:57 AM
Conflating 'modern farming' with 'modern livestock farming', in terms of being necessary to feed the world, is not defensible. Whatever you say about how healthy or unhealthy eating meat is, it is simply inarguable that a cow eats more calories than it contains, and devoting the land that feeds the cow to growing plant-based foods for people will feed more people than the cow will.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 9:58 AM
Hopefully you don't agree with the typo. Sometimes I look at the things I type and am simply unable to imagine how they happened.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 9:59 AM
Smarsher,
While that may be true, there aren't that many ranches in this area (the Virginia/Maryland/Delware Rt 13 corridor). And there are some farms in the area, and I'm sure they are staffed to capacity as well. Blah. I'm not going to defend myself for merely stating that the job is the only large employer for miles and miles. I wasn't condoning the business practices. If anything, I'd rather there were more good jobs in teh area.
Posted by tweedledopey | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 9:59 AM
I just want to echo LB's 80 with a hear, hear and say that's part of what I meant by (3) in 54.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 10:04 AM
Re 78: Agreed. Sorry.
Posted by Umpire | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 10:04 AM
LizardBreath,
80 - you are right about meat taking more calories, etc, but so what?
The sad fact is that we are all dancing around the real issue, which is how you allocate the food resources the planet has - meaning rationing.
Currently food is rationed by money, and we are also sacrificing animal suffering and using non-sustainable farming to lower the price of food in order for more people to eat and more people to eat the way they want to eat - meaning meat.
My literally poor grandfather's definition of having a "good" life was being able to eat meat once a day and being able to take a one week vacation every summer.
So what do you propose? Do we ration meat by making it illegal? Do we outlaw modern farming, raising the price of food to the point where billions starve? How should we ration the food we have?
Posted by Tripp | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 10:09 AM
s'ok. I'm rather an ass in these comments myself sometimes.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 10:09 AM
Silvana: It's not the eating of animals per se that distresses me, it's the treatment of them.
Would you be equally upset about equally inhumane treatment of two animals that more than likely differ in awareness? To me, doing so would make no sense -- it'd just be squeamishness. After all, nobody objects to killing plants, although they have internal systems that detect and respond to distress. But they're clearly non-conscious -- so who cares? They're just very complicated machines.
I don't think we have enough scientific knowledge to develop hard rules about where it's appropriate to draw the line, although I've got a hunch it'll end up somewhere between carrot and dolphin.
Umpire: "The question is not, "Can they reason?" nor, "Can they talk? but rather, "Can they suffer?"
Yeah, but only two of those questions can be definitively answered*. It's not unreasonable to think that they might suggest the answer to the third.
* Yeah, I realize I'm asking for it. Bring on the qualia!
Posted by tom | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 10:11 AM
Tripp -- I'm stil not understanding your point. Modern, cruel livestock raising practices make meat cheaper, but they don't increase the food supply. If we regulate cruelty to livestock more extensively, the price of meat goes way up, the supply of meat goes way down, and the world becomes able to produce more calories because resources that had been devoted to producing meat are now devoted to producing more efficient plant foods.
You can say that it would be esthetically sad to have meat be less available, but making meat more expensive will not make food scarcer.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 10:13 AM
There's a good passage on the conditions at big meat processing plants/ factory farms in the generally so-so What's the Matter With Kansas?. I'm currently involved at a low-level (proof-reading selected passages) in editing a law review note on the environmental impact of CAFOs (Confined Animal Feeding Operationss) and how the law could be changed to force the farm operators to internalize the massive externalities they impose on the surrounding populace.
And I've been trying and failing to find or come up with an ethical theory which makes non-consumption of animals a...what was that word I misspelled last week...supererogatory duty.
Finally, I wrote an article for the humor section of my high school paper suggesting the creation of a group called the "better-than-vegans"(BTVs) which would only eat products made from things which had never been alive. I believe, according to the article, this limited them to salt and twinkies.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 10:17 AM
devoting the land that feeds the cow to growing plant-based foods for people will feed more people than the cow will.
I question this conclusion, to an extent. Here's my line of reasoning. If we were to move largely away from a corn, grain, and bone meal (mmm, sweet, sweet prions) feed system for our cattle/other beef type animals (e.g. bison), let them roam over a large area (100+ square miles) in herds, living off prairies grass, I suspect we would find a net increase in calories available for consumption, in that the cattle/bison are foraging for what they need rather than having it grown (with chemicals!) and shipped (with oil!) and delivered in a concentrated area (manure slurry ponds!). The animals would likely be healthier, and would likely lead happier lives in a more natural setting. Of course, on a per-acre basis, you would get more raw calories from growing crops using modern farming practices--but have you ever been to Eastern Montana, or Alberta? There is plenty of land. The issue isn't land--it's the resources devoted to using the land.
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 10:18 AM
Re: pigs.
These hog farms seem like an environmental travesty. I know that Bobby Kennedy Jr. has gone kind of nutty on the thimerosol in vaccine autism claims, but I trust him on this. And the hog farms seem like a terrible nuisance to their neighbors. The stench is unbelievable. (I did once visit a small hog farm with a restaurant in central New York (Fingerlakes region), and that was fine, but the ones in North Carolina and TEXAS are horrendous.)
And the run-off is polluting our water.
Posted by bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 10:19 AM
re: 88 Even short of cruelty regulation, just ending the subsidies for factory farms would do a lot.
It may even be that there are relatively cost-effective ways to improve animal welfare; I seem to recall reading something about this once; I will attempt to google.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 10:20 AM
Modern agribusiness increases the food supply over what you'd have if the same amount of land were used for the same animals, e.g., free-range chickens vs caged-up chickens.
If you put the same amount of money into, say, a field of soybeans, you get a lot more soybeans that can feed more people.
I'm not sure what this does for the argument. If everyone switches to growing soybeans because they can't make enough off of beef, then yes. If it means they have less cows and much higher prices, then there's less food.
Re: a much earlier comment. Is it possible to subsidize smaller farms/sustainable farming to the extent that it would bring the costs of organic food down to a reasonable level? ($8 per gallon of milk is a bit much to ask.)
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 10:21 AM
But there you aren't disagreeing with me, and you say here:
Of course, on a per-acre basis, you would get more raw calories from growing crops using modern farming practices
You're disagreeing with, I shouldn't say Tripp, because I'm understanding him poorly enough, I think, that I don't want to characterize the point he was making, but anyone who thinks that stopping cruel methods of animal husbandry will make it more difficult to feed the worldwide poor.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 10:21 AM
Sorry, that was to 90.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 10:22 AM
Appealing to emotion may work in some cases but I don't like the tactic.
I think appealing to emotion is a good thing, as long as the emotions being appealed to are noble ones. Compassion and the visceral abhorrence of cruelty are excellent emotions to appeal to.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 10:22 AM
Yeah, my argument evolved as I was writing. Something in what you wrote set it off. I should have gone back and made it clearer, but I'm having enough trouble keeping up with this thread that I wanted to comment before it became irrelevant.
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 10:24 AM
See?
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 10:25 AM
LizardBreath,
Yes, I was putting two points together.
My first point is that if we end the subsidies to big farming, for example, the price of food in general goes up and some people starve as a result. I suppose those starving will be in third world countries so most people here won't really care.
If we raise the price of meat more people won't starve, but less people will have access to the food they want, meat. We've been there before - "peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot five days old."
So you want to ration meat using money as the criteria? That is the way it is currently rationed, but do you want to make it less available to the poor?
Posted by Tripp | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 10:27 AM
A lot of this discussion (calories for creating food) is dealt with in Collapse. The book mostly deals with scarcity, and there isn't much of it in the U.S.
Posted by tweedledopey | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 10:29 AM
The book mostly deals with scarcity, and there isn't much of it in the U.S.
Not yet. Poor third world countries will feel the brunt first.
Posted by Tripp | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 10:32 AM
So you want to ration meat using money as the criteria? That is the way it is currently rationed, but do you want to make it less available to the poor?
Um, we do this now. There are billions of people worldwide who can't afford meat regularly. There are also plenty of people who can't afford enough food, whether meat or plant-based. If the price to pay to make more people able to eat a healthy sufficient diet is to make fewer people able to eat as much meat as they want, I'm good with that.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 10:33 AM
Tia,
I think appealing to emotion is a good thing, as long as the emotions being appealed to are noble ones.
Sigh.
Sadly, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
Posted by Tripp | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 10:34 AM
My first point is that if we end the subsidies to big farming, for example, the price of food in general goes up and some people starve as a result. I suppose those starving will be in third world countries so most people here won't really care.
I really don't think the third world poor would be hurt by ending American farm subsidies. I think they would rather be helped by the improved market for their own agricultural products. I think we need to get an economist into this discussion, stat.
Posted by Anonymous | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 10:35 AM
In 87, Tom wrote: "The question is not, "Can they reason?" nor, "Can they talk? but rather, "Can they suffer?"
Yeah, but only two of those questions can be definitively answered*. It's not unreasonable to think that they might suggest the answer to the third.
---
Here's what we'll do. We'll hook both you and a pig (and a chicken!) up to an painful electric current. We'll sit back and observe. On a silent video you both seem to react the same -- you jerk and shake and try to get away from the shock. Your physiologic responses will mirror each other as well -- blood pressure changes, breathing changes, you will both sweat, your brains will both start dumping the same "panic" hormones into your systems. You nervous systems are virtually identical, after all, so you will have the exact same "impulses" going back and forth between the point of injury and your brains.
Then we will unstrap the two of you. Since we can speak your language we will ask: "how was it?" And you will say "IT FUCKING HURT! IT WAS HORRIBLE!" We will ask: "did you suffer?" and you will say "OF COURSE -- YOU WERE ELECTROCUTING ME!!!"
Now we will go over to the pig and look at it's chart. On the chart, everything about its physical and neurological responses looks exactly like yours. But, alas, as you say, the pig can't talk to us, and we can't even be sure it has the capacity for reason.
What is the most logical conclusion? What you you speculate is the answer to the question: can it suffer? [I don't mean this in terms of experiencing existential agony, I just mean can it feel pain and discomfort? And does it wish to avoid said pain and discomfort?]
So is the most logical response to say "fuck it, we can't be sure it even reasons, so lets throw it in a tiny cage and let it live with broken legs for the next several months?" (as far too many hogs do)? After all, it can't talk to us, so how can we even know it's broken leg hurts it? It's cramped and sick, but how can we be sure it even minds? Sure, it acts just like us when in we have a broken bone, but......
...well bacon is tasty and we wouldn't want it to be any pricier.
Posted by Anonymous | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 10:35 AM
Sorry, 104 was me
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 10:36 AM
104: yup, and yup.
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 10:37 AM
LizardBreath,
If the price to pay to make more people able to eat a healthy sufficient diet is to make fewer people able to eat as much meat as they want, I'm good with that.
Do you care what these other people feel about the matter? The one's you are asking to sacrifice?
If not, then how do you differ from those sending troops to Iraq?
Posted by Tripp | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 10:37 AM
Sorry that was me in 105. Not that anyone knows who *I* am, but I didn't mean to post anon.
Posted by Umpire | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 10:39 AM
re 103
Um, Tripp, the reason everyone's rushing to donate to the Katrina victims is because of an emotional identification with the victims. I'm sure that if no one showed us pictures or told us stories that helped them to feel it, donation levels would be much lower.
I really don't think the idea of letting the experience of compassion influence one's policy ideas is the road to hell.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 10:39 AM
She's asking the U.S. poor (and the rest of the U.S. population to sacrifice for the world poor). Many proposals which are commonly batted around and are considered mostly unobjectionable. Certainly, some kinds of immigration proposals would have this effect, and yet they don't seem obviously morally wrong.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 10:40 AM
Wow, Tripp. That's not cool.
How would you feel about the flip side of the argument?
Do you care what the people who are fucking starving to death think about it, as compared to the people who won't be able to afford meat if we switched to growing more plant-based food? If not, then how do you differ from Stalin in the Ukraine?
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 10:41 AM
My god, I don't! The blood, the blood on my hands! (Shoots self, collapses offstage.)
Seriously, I think that having insufficient food is a worse situation to be in than having insufficient meat. I am entirely comfortable with a world where more people have enough food and fewer people have enough meat.
You implicitly make the truthful point that I, personally, am not in either of these situations, and should keep my overprivileged mouth shut rather than advocating that anyone else make any sacrifices at all. Under that standard, of course, not only everyone posting here but pretty much the entire blogosphere should shut up.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 10:41 AM
99: My first point is that if we end the subsidies to big farming, for example, the price of food in general goes up and some people starve as a result.
Isn't it a blogospheric commonplace that this is backwards? The effect of subsidizing big farming in the US is that farmers in Third World countries are shut out of the US markets, and so they remain really really poor, and they starve to death. The world produces enough calories to feed everyone, we just don't (that pesky money thing) distribute them to those in need.
I'm just about positive that US ag subsidies don't wind up leading to the production of foodstuffs that eventually feed the world's poor.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 10:42 AM
105:
I think it's fairly reasonable to think that the capacity to suffer is correlated with the capacity to reason. I'm sure animals suffer, but it's not really anything we can comprehend. You seem to imply that it is ridiculous to even pose the question: they must suffer like we do because . . . why exactly? The physiological responses are the same? Do you even know that to be true? If so, does that really do the work you say it does?
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 10:43 AM
I'm with 104. I heard a story about how our Aid to India involved giving them a bunch of soy or canola oil, but the people there were accustomed to eating mustard seed oil, and the women didn't know how to cook with what we gave them. It wasn't their culture.
And our subsidies put indigenous farmers out of business.
Posted by bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 10:43 AM
Economist here regarding 104. No question the 3rd world is being crippled by our ("our" meaning not just America, but Europe and most of the developed world's) farm subsidies. I don't have sources in front of me, but this has been so well researched that google would probably prove more than adequate. (It's econ 101 stuff, really). Indeed it has been repeatedly suggested that there is probably nothing the rich world could do that would provide greater benefit to the world's poor than dropping their ag subsidies.
That much is unassailable. The animal rights stuff? Eh.
Posted by Jim | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 10:43 AM
I don't know much about the farm subsidies except that it's next to impossible to make a living as a farmer without them.
In order to make a living as a farmer, you'd have to charge substantially more. The people most likely to bear the brunt of the price of milk doubling are the poor. We spent quite a lot of American history trying to get away from this; we've been successful to some extent.
Not that I'm arguing that our farm subsidies system should not be revised or steered toward more sustainable systems of farming, but that cutting all big agribusiness subsidies is going to do absurd things to the price of food, and the farmers still won't be able to make ends meat. (hehe)
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 10:45 AM
"My first point is that if we end the subsidies to big farming, for example, the price of food in general goes up and some people starve as a result. I suppose those starving will be in third world countries so most people here won't really care."
Yglesias, get your ass over here!
Matt will explain that US farm subsidies actually harm third world farmers and reduce third world food production, keeping them dependent on US products which are being dumped below cost.
I'm not sure I agree with Matt, but that's his argument, and the standard free-trader POV.
In terms of poverty, almost any kind of meateating reduces actual food production, since the feed given animals almost always has more food value than their meat. The exceptions would be wild game and some grazing animals not fattened with grain.
Healthwise no one needs any meat at all.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 10:46 AM
the price of corn is actually artificially high -- if we were to end the subsidies, it would drop, and lots of american corn farmers would go out of business. Their corn doesn't make its way to the third world, so I don't know that it would matter. The price would eventually go back up, with fewer producers in America.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 10:46 AM
OK, what I said was what 104 said. Good on Tia. I'm not an economist, so don't take that as expert.
Tom, the question "can we know whether pigs suffer?" is kind of ridiculous, as Umpire's 105 points out in a rather heated manner. You don't even need to do neuro scans. Hang around with mammals and birds long enough and it's freaking obvious that they suffer. If you're going to doubt that you might as well start doubting whether other people really have minds.
w/d, isn't "supererogatory duty" an oxymoron?
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 10:47 AM
Text--Can you explain 120? How would dropping the subsidies cause corn prices to go down?
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 10:48 AM
The reason farmers in America can't make a living without the subsidies is that there are too many farmers in America. The supply/demand curve is all fucked up -- more corn is produced than anyone wants. Which is why they try to convert it to gasoline.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 10:49 AM
122: I'm somewhat talking out of my ass here, I should admit. I read this somewhere, and it must have to do with the way the subsidy operates -- the government pays for actual corn, or something.
If someone wants to refute me, won't be the first time. Think I will google it.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 10:51 AM
I don't think the important question is 'do animals suffer'; it seems pretty clear they do; but whether their suffering should trump eating them. I don't think that question's as easy to answer. I'm mostly vegetarian, but I still think we get to eat the chickens.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 10:51 AM
115: the perception of pain is controlled by our nervous systems. Our nervous system is a very early evolutionary adaptation, shared in very large part by a wide variety of animal species. Of course this doesn't prove that they feel pain just like we do, but doesn't it make it the most reasonable assumption? What else makes sense? Why does it make sense to you to say that the capacity to feel pain is tied up with the capacity to reason? I've read Descartes too, but I think our understanding of evolutionary biology has progressed enough since then to make his thinking on this more or less irrelevent.
Posted by Umpire | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 10:51 AM
123--yes and no. Another part of the reason is the subsidies go disproportiately to large agri-business, which achieve economies of scale unvavailable to the small farmer, driving down prices. I suspect that if the large agribusinesses were to lose their subsidies, the ROI would drop to the point that most of them would collapse, making more room for the small farmer who is just looking to make a living.
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 10:55 AM
text, i think the corn does make it to other countries. but that's not the point here.
To run an efficient corn farm (or wheat farm) takes a lot of money. You have to fertilize and harvest. While you could do this the old fashioned way (by hand), that's inefficient and the cost of goods would increase.
So the government oversubsidizes, because we can use corn in America as a substitute for a lot of things we can't grow as efficiently (like sugar). The problem then becomes that if we started importing sugar, we wouldn't have enough sugar (I'm guessing here) to meet the demand for sugar-type products. I don't know how much excess production capacity of sugar exists in the world. But the price of sugar would be just as high as the price of corn, which is still less good. As for the poor African farmers, they could start farming again, but I don't know that without subsidies they could be successful. This is all a case of what's good for me isn't good for you, and in the end may end up killing us both. Business is now international, but individuals and governments still think with their heads up their collective national pride asses.
Posted by tweedledopey | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 10:55 AM
105: everything about its physical and neurological responses looks exactly like yours
What text said in 115. The pain response is very old. A prawn would no doubt share many of the same responses to physical stress that we do. Yet I can't even begin to imagine losing sleep over shrimp fishing. Perhaps this is just my own moral failing.
Posted by tom | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 10:56 AM
Do you care what these other people feel about the matter? The one's you are asking to sacrifice?
If not, then how do you differ from those sending troops to Iraq?
Oy gevalt. Right now we are making the price of bad food artificially cheap. We aren't even to the point of talking about regulation yet.
The choice to eat a lot of factory-produced meat especially, eggs and dairy somewhat less so on the environmental front, but moreso on the cruelty front, at least for eggs, and agribusiness plant foods somewhat less so still, sustainable everything least of all, has lots of negative externalities and thus is not an individual choice without consequence. I don't think the government should be in the business of actively promoting a relatively negative choice.
I'm going to reiterate a point I made earlier. Being poor means not having everything you could possibly want. I am familiar with this phenomenon, since I don't have health insurance and rarely buy new clothes. I think the govt. should do something about the former, not only because I think a rich country should , but because my lack of health insurance might have some other nasty externalities down the road. The latter, however, I just have to suck up. You favor worker-safety regulations that might make the price of goods more expensive, even goods that you, personally, can afford? How do you differ from those asking people to send their sons and daughters to Iraq? Capitalism means everyone doesn't get the same stuff. Regulated capitalism means some stuff gets more expensive, but we get to live a better life in lots of other ways.
You are basically making a cultural and aesthetic argument that a decent life is eating meat every day, and the government should be actively engaged in promoting the eating of meat, any other externality be damned. On no other grounds does your argument make sense.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 10:57 AM
Here's a question for the vegans. If you hunted down an animal to eat, would you be okay with that? I mean, that's what the rest of the carni-/omnivorous animal planet does. Do you not like that we have tools to help us do that?
Posted by tweedledopey | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 10:57 AM
Cala in 118, I don't think (and I'm talking out of my ass too) that the ag subsidies have a dollar-for-dollar effect on the price of food for the US poor. Basically, if we dropped ag subsidies we'd be importing food from the Third World, and it wouldn't be much more expensive. Or what text said in 124. I hope his googling is illuminating.
Maybe this doesn't apply to dairy farming, because it's too perishable. I think it's most important to end subsidies on things where US farmers are competing with the third world--that's really hurting the poorest of the poor, and I'm under the impression that ADM is the biggest beneficiary (but talking out of my ass here). I also, and this is my own private crank project, think we should be subsidizing solar panels on the land we now use for farming. That'd be a much more economically productive use of Western Nebraska, everything between Amarillo and Lubbock, etc.
Agreed with 125, anyway. But--why you leave me hanging?
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 10:57 AM
122 - it's not the subsidies that make corn more expensive, it's the associated tariffs and quotas on imports.
Posted by Mr. T | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 10:57 AM
121: Yes and no.
Some philosophers identify supererogation with imperfect duty, or with a weak duty, or with duty that is personal and non-universalizable, or with duty that has no correlative right, or with an ethical rather than legal duty, or with an "ought" which is not enforceable. Some even use the oxymoronic term "supererogatory duty" in trying to do justice to the phenomenon of supererogation without giving up the typically Kantian framing of all moral judgments in terms of duty.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 10:59 AM
27. LB: I have a vague suspicion that the foie gras outrage is like banning fur -- a publicity stunt rather than a real attack on the worst abuses.
My understanding about furs is that the animals are electrically shocked and then hung and their fur ripped off by machine. The reason some people are outraged by this is that the eletric shock machine is notoriously inefficient, and many animals are left not only alive but conscious when their fur is ripped off them. I still don't know much about foie gras, though.
11, sp: I'm sure some rBGH cows get udder infections, but I don't think that's the milk you end up with, it might just be PETA propaganda to show you those particular pictures.
The video I saw was on the DVD The Corporation, and I believe was TV news video, entirely unrelated to PETA.
Tripp, The sad fact is that, without rationing, or without modern farming the Earth cannot support the population we have.
Cows consume about 8 times more calories than they provide. OTOH, we still seem to have excess farmining capacity. So, I'm not sure about all this. There are other reasons, however, that factory farms are bad for the environment. The huge pools of shit coming out of them are one. It's causing very real problems in the areas where some of these farms are, poisining the ground water. (That's legit news info again, Salon I think, not PETA.)
I have been told that many European countries have passed laws against factory farms and have handled it fairly well.
Personally, I have for the last year cut out mammals from my diet. The distinction is probably not a good one, but it's based on what I perceive as the higher cognizant functions of these animals. I give their preferences more consideration than chickens, for instance, though when it comes to the latter I do buy free range. (Since you can only buy the whole bird when it comes to free range, and buying the whole bird is always cheaper, price is nearly a wash compared to buying farmed chicken already cut up.)
I feel free to make exceptions for wild game, or even beef if I can know that the cows lived normal cow lives, outside, grazing on the grass, before being taken to the slaughterhouse. However, my desire for flesh has really dropped off, and so I very rarely even look to making an exception.
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 11:00 AM
BTW, I'm way away from the cruelty to animals argument here--I'm in the "try not to think about it" camp. I'm mostly concerned in this argument with what would be best for the world's and US's poor.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 11:00 AM
The video I saw was on the DVD The Corporation, and I believe was TV news video, entirely unrelated to PETA.
It was -- the local Florida Fox News crew investigating Monsanto.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 11:04 AM
the US, China, Brazil and the 15 countries of the European Union between them consume over 60% of the world's beef, more than 70% of the world's poultry and over 80% of the world's pork. Of the world's ten most populous nations, five (China, the US, Brazil, Russia and Japan) each consume large amounts of meat (ranging from 40 kg per person in Japan to 123 kg per person in the US), whereas the remaining five (India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nigeria) all consume less than 5 kg per person per year. Overall, per capita meat consumption is three times as high in developed countries as in developing countries.
Also, handy tables here. Scroll to the bottom.
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 11:21 AM
re: 131
I personally have no objection to hunting. I think some people might make a non-violence argument, i.e. that there is an obligation to interfere as little as possible with sentient beings, and that humans, by virtue of an ability to reason, and thus an ability to forebear lots of things for ethical reasons, are distinct from animals in this respect. But hunting is such a miniscule interference compared with the really grievous stuff happening on factory farms I really don't care at all.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 11:36 AM
Tom, the question "can we know whether pigs suffer?" is kind of ridiculous... Hang around with mammals and birds long enough and it's freaking obvious that they suffer.
Anthropomorphism is only slightly more reputable than introspection when debating this kind of stuff. If you're using "suffering" interchangeably with "has a pain response", then fine, but it's not clear what that means or what its moral implications are.
Can suffering exist without consciousness? If I extracted the pain centers of an animal's brain (without otherwise causing it harm) and stimulated them mercilessly in vitro, would I be committing an immoral act? If consciousness is a prerequisite for suffering mattering, then just how conscious are food animals? As near as science can tell, only a handful of animals are self-aware in the technical sense, and (excluding bushmeat) none of them are eaten by humans. What sort of consciousness, if any, can exist without self-awareness, and would its suffering matter more than that of the cells in the petri dish?
I can't say I rocked the philosophical world in the semesters I spent pondering these questions (in between sessions of binge drinking), but I am convinced they would have to be answered before we can know just how awful killing animals for food is.
Posted by tom | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 11:49 AM
Sorry to just jump in here, but I have a few minor tangential points;
a) Does anyone have a reference for the notion that we subsidize grain and not factory-farmed livestock?
b) there are some very smart fish. especially octopi. sea-fishing is also pretty lousy for the environment, over all.
c) we all have this notion that the cost of food is the main issue in poverty, b/c historically that's been the case and that's even how the poverty index is created. but there's a growing consensus that the cost of housing is much more dominant these days. the poverty index numbers, anyway, assume a dedicated and smart cook--and a dedicated and smart cook can get a lot more protein/calorie/vitamin bang for his or her buck out of a sack of grain and a sack of beans and a pile of cheap vegetables then the standard American diet.
d) re:43--the answer is basically no. See this PDF, page 5. According to this PDF, page 6, most of that is in poultry consumption (17 lbs per capita in 1909 to 95 lbs per capita in 1999), not effectively offset by a tiny decrease in red meat over the same period (148 lbs to1 34 lbs.) PDF 2 is referenced to the report of which PDF 1 is a summary.
Posted by Saheli | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 12:00 PM
re 140: Tom, you may be right that we need to know this in order to know "just how awful killing animals for food is."
But come on -- you're obviously justifying your behaviour here. "Just how awful" need it be in order to have it outweigh your mere aesthetic pleasure for the taste of meat (unecessary for health, and damaging for the environment)?
Furthermore, why is existential self-awareness the key variable here? Does this mean it's okay to torture severely retarded humans? I think not, because they can still feel pain and very obviously don't want to be tortured (just like animals), but according to you this is not enough.
And even if I were to accept this self-awareness criteria, what standard of proof must be imposed? What can I show you to have you accept that these creatures consciously suffer? Unless you can answer that question very specifically it is hard to believe you aren't just making excuses. If you're looking at this philosophically (as people trying to justify their behavior are apt to do), there is nothing I could demonstrate to you to convince you that these animals actually suffer (and are aware of it). After all, there's no philosophical way to prove to you that *I* suffer when you torture me. But you look at my responses and note how they are exactly like yours would be in the same situation, and conclude that like you I must be feeling pain and discomfort when you torture me. Well..... look at an animal that is mistreated. It behaves the same way.
Posted by Truman | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 12:07 PM
Re: 129 A prawn would no doubt share many of the same responses to physical stress that we do.
Based on what? The fact that Their nervous system is set up completely different than ours? Ignoring the fact that pigs are much more like us? I don't particularly want to cause prawns unnecessary pain either, and try not to, but merely saying that a pig's response is the same as a prawn's and therefore similarly distant from ours does not make it so, and so casting the two together as similarly ignorable seems like like a strawman.
The point of 105 was that we have no idea what a pig's capacity to reason is b/c it cannot talk and has no opposable thumbs, etc., etc. If we were suddenly given a human facing such circumstances and wanted to evaluate the human's sentience, we would use physiological and neuorlogical tests.
Posted by Saheli | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 12:07 PM
there are some very smart fish. especially octopi.
Obligatory pedantry follows. Take no offense.
1. An octopus is not a fish.
2. The plural of octopus is octopuses, though if you wanted to get technical, it ought to be octopodes.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 12:11 PM
The solution to ogged's quandary:
When meat is not murder
Posted by ogmb | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 12:14 PM
Tom, to some extent we'll never be able to answer that question. On the other hand, we might never know if other people exist either.
It seems awfully convenient to be hanging around waiting for an answer to the question of animal suffering, an answer that can never come if the philosophers don't allow us to draw analogies from our own experience or reason out from what we know about the similarities between our neuroanatomies, and in the meantime permanently postpone the question of what to do about it. I'm pretty sure that something pretty unpleasant is going on in the mind of a chicken when its beak gets chopped off without anasthesia based on its behavior and what I know about the structure of its nervous system. It might in some way not be as bad as it would be for me, because I have a whole bunch of other conscious processes that might magnify it, but I'm clear that I ought not to do it to the chicken either.
Do you think it's wrong to kick a dog?
What is the technical sense of self-aware?
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 12:17 PM
tom,
Do you really think cows have as little consciousness as parts of an extracted brain in a vat? That just seems silly. But if you don't think so, why the hypothetical? I'm a little confused.
Let's say you hold that causing suffering is a moral wrong, but you are genuinely unsure whether or not cows are suffering. If they aren't, then no harm is being done. If they are, because of scale, an awful lot of harm is being done. Since you are uncertain, what is the best way to proceed? Keep doing the potentialy harmful action until you know better? Or err on the side of caution because of the potential consequences?
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 12:18 PM
re: 145
*awesome*
prime rib, here I come!
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 12:19 PM
Anthropomorphism is only slightly more reputable than introspection when debating this kind of stuff.
I'm not sure where you're going with this. It seems as though you've ruled out not only judging whether another creature suffers by its behavior ('anthromorphism') but also judging whether you yourself suffer by introspection. By those standards of proof, it is impossible to tell whether any animal or human suffers.
As for the question of whether suffering can exist without consciousness, surely suffering is a form of consciousness--but it's not obvious that that means self-consciousness. It seems like you're endorsing a view like Peter Carruther's on which " (encyclopedia article) "phenomenal consciousness requires the capacity to think about, and therefore conceptualize, one's own thoughts"; but (same article)
And even Carruthers acknowledges the existence of animal suffering, though he points out (and I agree) that its moral significance does not immediately follow.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 12:27 PM
But come on -- you're obviously justifying your behaviour here. "Just how awful" need it be in order to have it outweigh your mere aesthetic pleasure for the taste of meat (unecessary for health, and damaging for the environment)?
I really wish people would stop telling me why I'm making these arguments. More days than not, I eat an entirely vegetarian diet. That's not motivated by a half-assed moral decision, but I don't find the idea of life without meat all that horrifying.
Based on what? The fact that Their nervous system is set up completely different than ours?
I didn't say our pain response is the same as crustaceans, just that in some ways it is. Obviously we have much more in common with fellow mammals, but at least some some crustaceans share with us the primary neurotransmitter related to pain. If the ability to suffer is a yes/no proposition, as I think you're maintaining (correct me if I'm wrong), then the plight of the lobster is at least an open question.
You seem to be relying on intuition to determine which animals actually feel pain and which don't, without admitting the possibility of gradations or unexpected results. It seems like making food production less cruel would be a good thing to do if we can, but I don't think it's obvious that it's a moral imperative.
You're right, of course, that zombie arguments apply to animals perfectly well. That doesn't make them wrong, though, it just makes them frustrating.
Look, it's quite clear that animals are mentally inferior to us in many ways. They are incapable of experiencing and understanding the world in the same ways that we can. I'm not sure why it's such a stretch to imagine that there are gradations to an animal's ability to suffer, and that consequently the pain of a cow may be much less important than that of a man or a chimp or a dolphin. It's conceptually tidy to believe in an egalitarian brotherhood of sentient mammals, but I just don't see an awful lot of evidence for it beyond our aforementioned anthropomorphic instincts.
Posted by tom | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 12:35 PM
the pain of a cow may be much less important than that of a man or a chimp or a dolphin
Agreed, but that doesn't make it zero, or insignificant.
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 12:41 PM
even Carruthers acknowledges the existence of animal suffering, though he points out (and I agree) that its moral significance does not immediately follow.
I'm interested. If one accepts that the difference between us and other animals is a difference of degree rather than kind, how do you justify that position? If pain to a helpless child is objectionable, then why not to a sheep?
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 12:44 PM
No one has any thoughts on better-than-vegans? I'm crushed. High-school-me (hooray for time-slicing!) thought the article was funny.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 12:51 PM
Do you think it's wrong to kick a dog?
Yes, but it's not clear what utility I would be getting from kicking a dog, so I play if on the safe side and forego it. Is it wrong for little kids to gleefully burn ants with a magnifying glass? It's definitely unappealing, but not (to me) because of the ants' suffering. I don't think it's morally significant, except as far as it speaks to how the child might behave in more important situations.
What is the technical sense of self-aware?
I would have to spend a while googling to turn up the word-for-word definition that I have in mind, but if I remember correctly it's something along the lines of recognizing the self as a distinct being with a past and future.
It seems as though you've ruled out not only judging whether another creature suffers by its behavior ('anthromorphism') but also judging whether you yourself suffer by introspection.
Fair enough. I was just trying to drawing a parallel between a dubious way of evaluating an animal's mental state and a (historically) dubious way of philosophizing. Of course in this realm, our options are limited. Among humans I'm perfectly happy to take everyone's word for what they say they experience. And yes, I believe that odds are pretty good that an animal that appears to be in pain is most likely experiencing some phenomenon related to what we consider pain. Maybe not though; and maybe not to anywhere near the same degree.
It seems like you're endorsing a view like Peter Carruther's on which " (encyclopedia article) "phenomenal consciousness requires the capacity to think about, and therefore conceptualize, one's own thoughts"
Well, I was more trying to raise the possibility than specifically endorse it. I think phenomenal consciousness (and therefore suffering) can probably exist without self-awareness, although that's mostly just an intuition drawn from rolling out of bed jetlagged.
My point is just that animal suffering may be (and I think probably is) very different from our own -- perhaps just a dim echo -- and if that's the case, the importance of avoiding it is diminished. Well, probably diminished. I could be convinced otherwise.
Posted by tom | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 12:54 PM
145: Ogged already covered that.
152: Sorry, heavy emphasis on "immediately." What I meant was, the move from "animals suffer" to "we should care" isn't immediate. Even the move from "people suffer" to "we should care" isn't immediate. But I do think that in both cases there's a strong impetus from the first to the second. (Agree with 151; I'm not an egalitarian among species. I think lobsters are an open question, FWIW.)
150: it's quite clear that animals are mentally inferior to us in many ways. They are incapable of experiencing and understanding the world in the same ways that we can.
This argument is in danger of proving that we should care less about the suffering of babies and the retarded. (I am not accusing you of thinking we shouldn't care.) I don't think we should say that experiencing and understanding are necessary for suffering. If you're saying that lack of experiencing and understanding is an indication of lack of other capacities, that's fine, but it seems to me that the scientific evidence points the other way with respect to pain.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 12:55 PM
odds are pretty good that an animal that appears to be in pain is most likely experiencing some phenomenon related to what we consider pain
Well, OK, that's basically what I think, and I agree that we shouldn't assume that animal consciousness is exactly like ours. I shouldn't have made the "obvious" claim that kicked this off. And I agree that we shouldn't care as much about animal suffering as we do about human suffering, though I'm not sure that it's because of phenomenal differences between them. (And I do have a fear that this will, to future times, look like part of a massive moral blindspot; see 136.) I think Michael is right that in these cases it's better to play it safe.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 1:01 PM
This argument is in danger of proving that we should care less about the suffering of babies and the retarded.
Yeah, I do have to confess that my own beliefs basically chalks up a number of actions that we intuitively (and correctly) consider abhorrent to rule utilitarian justifications. E.g., killing a child is worse than killing an at-that-moment equivalently conscious animal because of the act's implications, not because of some innate difference between the two.
If you're saying that lack of experiencing and understanding is an indication of lack of other capacities, that's fine, but it seems to me that the scientific evidence points the other way with respect to pain.
I'm not sure I'm following you, unless you just mean that almost all creatures have an observable pain response. To what evidence are you referring?
Posted by tom | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 1:03 PM
w/d, that did sound funny. Aren't there actually some people who eat only windfalls?
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 1:03 PM
If one accepts that the difference between us and other animals is a difference of degree rather than kind, how do you justify that position? If pain to a helpless child is objectionable, then why not to a sheep?
It's a difference of degree that becomes a difference of kind. Given enough time and proper nurture, that child will develop phenomenal consciousness.
. . . hmm. I'm nearing the shoals of pro-life talking points, and that doesn't make me happy.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 1:05 PM
To what evidence are you referring?
The pain centers, neurological stuff etc. that Umpire talked about, basically. Higher animals only, perhaps. I could be wrong about this.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 1:05 PM
on the per capita meat increase since 1909:
I would guess that the per capital consumption of food of all types has increased quite a lot since 1909. The question would be: is meat a greater or lesser percentage of the American diet. My guess is: lesser.
On the subsidies:
Here is why the prices would go down right after removing the corn subsidy. Right now, prices are low -- most corn farmers could not make a profit on those prices without the subsidies. But the subsidy is only part of the reason the prices are low -- the real reason is that too much corn is produced. The subsidy allows the over-production to continue; farmers sell at a relatively low price, and stay in business through operation of the subsidy.
Immediately after the subsidy is dropped, competition would force the price down lower. Some farmers would go out of business. The ones that could stay in business, after the market was weeded out, would then raise prices in accordance with the new, lower, supply.
Crops are subsidized. Livestock is not. I don't know much about the agricultural business: perhaps large companies perform both functions, in which case it's hard to weed out what money goes where. But the way the subsidies evolved was to keep farmers in business during the overproductive periods of the depression; it didn't have much to do with livestock.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 1:06 PM
159: You might also have a problem with severely brain-damaged/retarded people, who will never develop language use. As Tom said, there can be a push toward rule-utilitarianism here.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 1:07 PM
Is there anything terribly wrong with being a bit speciesist here? The reason I need to care more about brain-damaged humans than I do about sheep is because humans are humans and sheep are sheep.
161: text, does what you've read take into account foreign corn suppliers? I'm not sure any American farmer could make a decent wage in competition with corn from the third world, for example. Would we lose all our farmers? (Dependent on foreign corn-oil?) Wouldn't the large companies be better off?
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 1:13 PM
158: Fruititarians, aren't they?
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 1:15 PM
158&164: Fruitarianism.
Apparently unhealthy in the long term, due to problems with getting vitamins.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 1:18 PM
I entirely agree with the speciesism.
And with regard to the second part of 161, I dunno. I get the feeling that we consume a lot more corn than we would without the cheap domestic supply; if the corn we did consume came even in part from the 3rd world, we might lose all or most of our corn farms. Which might be bad.
Then again, agriculture primarily depends on efficient machinery, and not cheap labor. I don't see why our agribusiness should lose out to 3rd world agribusiness without the subsidies, once the oversupply problem is fixed. But maybe it would.
In which case, more room for free-range bison.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 1:20 PM
166: Definitely the case with high-fructose corn syrup, which is killing us slowly.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 1:22 PM
But speciesism is at the root of the problem everyone's trying to resolve. In terms of the debate it amounts to might makes right.
At the end of the day that describes my position pretty well: I know that animals deserve to suffer less and that I shouldn't support the industry that propogates the conditions that cause the animals to suffer, but the guilt is not enough to motivate me to change my lifestyle and deprive myself of a fair amount of pleasure. All those bad things you're saying about Tom, I fess up to!
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 1:22 PM
. . . hmm. I'm nearing the shoals of pro-life talking points, and that doesn't make me happy.
Yeah. I deleted a reference to a fetus from my last post, because I'm sure no one wants to go down that road. But yes, obviously it gets messy if you start talking about potential: next Hitler, etc -- wait, did I just invoke Godwin? Suddenly everything's going to hell.
Anyway, it's at least easier to stick to utility rules, which turn this kind of stuff into a policy question.
Posted by tom | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 1:24 PM
Absolutely agree with the speciesism, but that doesn't settle the question about whether we need to care at all about sheep. Also, you're still leaving me hanging on the 'yinz' question.
168: I fess up to the bad things too! I eat meat, but think I probably shouldn't. But don't think it's as bad as eating people.
On the other one, how bad is it if we lose all our corn farms? Better living for the corn farmers abroad, and more room for solar panels. I'm serious. I mean, it's too bad for the people who have to give up their family farming tradition--I mean that--but I don't think those traditions are sustainable without unacceptable costs (mostly to poor farmers abroad).
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 1:27 PM
I know about the freegans who eat only what other people throw away (for moral, not economic reasons). If there was a group which literally only ate plants and only when they were killed in the absence of human interference, that would be a new one for me. Having previewed, the fruitarians are in fact new to me. However, I still await the group fulfilling my tongue-in-cheek exhortation.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 1:29 PM
A beakless chicken is like a cock with no pecker: an abomination.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 1:33 PM
I figure it's okay to be speciesist since I think if chickens ruled the world they'd probably eat me.
Matt, which yinz question?
And I think that giving up control of our food supply to another country could spell six kinds of trouble. As long as they don't form a corn cartel! Plus, local grown stuff is nummy.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 1:47 PM
Mmm. Jersey tomatoes. Mmmmmm.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 1:54 PM
Yinz question: Link in 132. Food supply: If that's a problem, we're already quite badly fucked on oil, I think, which is I guess the point about the corn cartel. But aren't the food-growing countries little enough for us to boss around?
Local grown stuff, yes, that's an issue, but (aagh! libertarianism! run away!) if it's nummy enough shouldn't there be enough demand for it to support the higher prices for local grown stuff? If there aren't enough food snobs to support local farmers, is it worth subsidizing?
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 1:56 PM
Anyway, here I think the local grown stuff runs to cotton, which is not nummy at all. And cows, from the smell.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 1:58 PM
I was thinking corn from Trax Farms. mmmmmmmmm. corn.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 2:00 PM
Here we get into complicated questions about fuel/shipping costs (which I can raise, but haven't the knowledge to answer). Isn't there an argument that a more sensible fuel pricing structure (considering all environmental and other externalities) should make local foods competitive in the market regardless of numminess?
A gas tax, for example, isn't a subsidy for local foods but would have a similar effect.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 2:05 PM
Tia and LizardBreath,
My point was that we earthlings have and will continue to have food rationing. Currently that rationing is in the form of money - those with the money get the best food. Those with the money get the best deals, too.
The only way to make drastic changes to food production is through government action, and any action the government takes will either deprive some people of their liberty (make meat illegal) or increase global starvation.
Now personal choice of Veganism is cool and I support it, but many people have their food choices as an expression of their spirituality and can be as irrantional as any other fundamentalist.
Oh, and personally I think the oil shortage that is coming will force action on this topic a lot sooner than we could get any government action going. The price of food will be rising soon enough, I fear.
Posted by Tripp | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 2:08 PM
161: I'm not sure that's right. That's like saying the price of gasoline will stay lower because there's a lot of gas stations. We've seen that isn't the case. While there is an excess of corn being grown, I'm not sure how much of that is just excess capacity (i.e., stuff that gets burned right after it is grown because you get paid to grow it, but not to sell it). But I understand that you are making the point that there is excess capacity. In that case, it becomes a question of economies of scale on the farm. Can a "small farm" that only grows 10 tons of corn a year effectively compete against a farm that grows 1000 tons of corn? No, probably not. But no farm is going to continue to take a loss on corn, they'll just either have to up the price to their own costs, or get out of the corn business. So larger, more efficient farms will have lower prices, and the small farms (which are already making less profit per ear of corn than the large ones) will go out of business, forcing all the farmers on rt 13 to go work for tyson.
Posted by tweedledopey | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 2:08 PM
Or the farmers on rt. 13 go into some other kind of business, like boutique-y potatoes or heirloom tomatoes. (How my boyfriend's family's farm manages to compete; new potatoes!)
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 2:12 PM
It was -- the local Florida Fox News crew investigating Monsanto.
Color me surprised.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 2:14 PM
178: Hells yeah. Tax the hell out of gas, turn the excess farmland to solar power (w/subsidies), and the farmers what's left will all have to turn to nummy boutique stuff. And Tyson will get screwed over and devote its life to charity. And a pony! (from the point of view of political plausibility if nothing else.)
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 2:17 PM
The only way to make drastic changes to food production is through government action, and any action the government takes will either deprive some people of their liberty (make meat illegal) or increase global starvation.
This is false, and I don't understand why the ensuing discussion didn't make you see why. Ceasing to subsidize the production of animal products would neither make meat illegal nor would it increase global starvation; any resources you use to produce meat could produce more plant food by nearly an order of magnitude.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 2:17 PM
And the pony produces useful fertilizer! I'm going to name her Cinnamon.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 2:21 PM
re 167
Cala, I've read that there isn't any real conclusive evidence for the fact that high fructose corn syrup thing, i.e. that fructose isn't any worse for you than any other sweetener, and the problem is that we just sweeten our food too much.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 2:22 PM
180: it might not be right, but it isn't close to the gas station comparison you just made. The number of gas stations does not correlate to the amount of gas. But where gas is more plentiful, the price is lower. I am no econ stud, but I will hold fast to that rule.
The same is true for corn. In the early part of this century, markets were flooded with cheap grain; to keep the grain industry from imploding, we adopted subsidies. After the implosion, we would have had fewer corn producers, and the corn market wouldn't be so screwed up as it is now. There wouldn't have been such a huge glut of corn without use -- probably no cheetos, corn syrup, or ridiculous corn-to-gasoline schemes.
More to the point: lots of a good makes it cheap. Right now there is a kind of statis in the corn price, but if you cut the subsidy, we would get the true price -- which is even lower, due to the overwhelming amount of production. Then corn growers would go out of business, and we would have less production, and a higher price.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 2:22 PM
Mmmmm, Cinnamon-infused fertilizer.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 2:23 PM
please read "last century" for "this century." I'm a relic.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 2:23 PM
Tia,
Ceasing the subsidy of meat products would increase the cost of meat denying some people the ability to have meat.
I don't think that would be very popular, but you can propose it.
Maybe I'm too heavily into "Urinetown" at the moment. The show deals with this topic and could, I suppose, be summed up as "frigging Malthus." I'm not advocating one idea or another - they all suck.
Posted by Tripp | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 2:28 PM
re 161
I think the reason you originally brought up historical comparison of meat consumption was to make the argument that current levels of meat consumption are not unhealthy. I just want to refer back to my 68 and say a broad spectrum of health organizations in this country have all come to the conclusion that diets with limited meat consumption are better for you; with the medical consensus so overwhelming, I think anyone who wants to dispute this needs to argue from evidence.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 2:33 PM
Assuming there was a substantial livestock subsidy, which I'm not sure there is, I don't think it would be a very effective way of getting meat to poor people.
If the demand is there -- if people like meat -- and there isn't an overproduction problem, then a meat subsidy is unnecessary.
If poor people don't have access to good meat (they may not, as is), the better approach would be to give some sort of tax credit for meat. Food-stamps to the wholefoods butcher section.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 2:34 PM
Tia: the French, maybe? Do we have data on how much meat they eat other than what meat they eat is delightfully prepared?
(eatmeatmeetmeateat. friggin' english.)
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 2:36 PM
191:
I'm just going to be unreasonable about this. Those health reports also indicate that heavy starches and sugar are a greater problem. When people omit meat from their diets, they don't exist solely on legumes -- they eat more starches.
True obesity is rarely caused by too much steak. If we are talking about serious health issues, meat is not the problem in the American diet.
So, even conceding that people would be marignally healthier eating slightly less meat, people would be much healthier eating much less starch. When people eat less meat, they eat less starch. Ergo . . .
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 2:37 PM
re: 190
Tripp, I'm clear on this, but "eat less meat" =/ "starve", as you asserted in 179. Eating less meat is a good outcome on health, environment, and cruelty measures. It does not meaningfully decrease liberty, except to the extent that not having money decreases liberty in general, but on this point, see my 130. If I argue against a TV subsidy, by your logic, I am arguing for to restrain the poor's liberty to buy a TV.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 2:38 PM
that is, more starch.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 2:38 PM
187: that is only true if the going price of corn now is higher than the price to produce it for all comers. i don't think it is. but IANAFarmer.
Posted by tweedledopey | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 2:44 PM
Ah yes, but they're only eating more starch because corn is so heavily subsidized. Without that, everyone would live on stir-fried cabbage. Mmmm.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 2:44 PM
I kind of like cabbage. To the glorious future!
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 2:45 PM
Hey! Now we're eating what my grandparents ate! Except they had corned beef with their cabbage. Mmmm, corned tofu.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 2:48 PM
Tia, the correct compuspeak for not equal is !=.
I'm a nerd.
Posted by tweedledopey | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 2:48 PM
Me too. I don't eat local foods exclusively or in any kind of organized way, but I could actually be fairly happy eating seasonal NYS foods. Cabbage, broccoli, and root vegetables all winter, tomatoes and berries in the summer, what could be better?
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 2:49 PM
Corn!
I try to shop at the farmer's markets, but I draw the line at beets. I have no idea what to do with such weird food.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 2:51 PM
ben, check out The Corporation to see what happened; it didn't air.
Cala, meat consumption in France seems to be about 100kg per person/year, compared to 123 kg/year in the US. Consumption of horse flesh since 1990, though, is down.
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 2:51 PM
Beets are a problem. Parsnips, though? Rutabagas? And nature's most perfect food, the potato? Seasonal food is pretty good.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 2:53 PM
add in the cheese consumption, and the french are eating more animal products than we are.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 2:54 PM
Between 65 and 70% of the available agricultural land in France is thus devoted to feeding animals. One can also notice that fruits and vegetables (except for potatoes and vineyards) acount for only 2% of the total.
---
A similar evolution is observed for the average meat consumption on the planet, as the annual weight eaten by an inhabitant of the Earth has increased by 60% over the last 40 years (while the world population doubled, which means that the meat production has been multiplied by 3.2).
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 2:54 PM
as a percentage of their diet, much more.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 2:54 PM
Beets are easy. Roast or boil, slice, add butter, salt, and pepper. If you're going nuts, a little grated ginger is nice.
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 2:55 PM
Beets.
Parsnips are cool, expecially mixed with some russets for mashed parsnippotatos.
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 2:55 PM
That's a lot of meat. 250+ pounds a person? No wonder there are so many 250-pound persons.
Thanks for the link. :)
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 2:56 PM
Tia,
I think I said: The only way to make drastic changes to food production is through government action, and any action the government takes will either deprive some people of their liberty (make meat illegal) or increase global starvation.
The eating less meat part came under deprived liberty, not increased starvation.
How do you propose enforcing a reduction of meat consumption? Eliminating subsidies (if they exist) or taxing meat would regressively affect the poor, but they seem to be the pawns for all sorts of do-gooders.
Posted by Tripp | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 2:56 PM
Boy Cala, I agree with you in re beets. I have gotten to the point where there's basically nothing I don't like, including dandelion greens, which require some hard coritude, but beets, man. The beet greens are okay though.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 2:57 PM
My only experience with beets has been the really pink pickled kind. I don't think I've ever had a parsnip either; those are the ones that look like anemic carrots?
But, re: the health question. It seems the French eat a lot of animal products and are generally healthier than Americans. I'm not sure eliminating meat is the answer to Americans' dietary woes, esp. if such meat is replaced, as text and I noted earlier, by empty starches.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 2:59 PM
Tripp, legislation to end factory farming would probably, I think, be a good thing, but would also make meat a little more expensive. It would end some jobs, and create some jobs. Plenty of people have land that they can lend out to cattle ranchers. Others would get into the business, which would be easier to enter if the business became smaller scale and more profitable.
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 3:00 PM
I don't think I've ever had a parsnip either; those are the ones that look like anemic carrots?
Yes, excellent roasted, or in any kind of stew.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 3:02 PM
This is an interesting study of African tribes and their different diets.
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 3:04 PM
There is a great beet-mango-avacado with walnuts and blood orange tea dressing in Moby and Kelly Tisdale's teany book. Never really ate beets before that, love 'em now.
I'm trying not to guess about the percent-of-calories-consumed-per-capita change, but the usda makes it remarkably hard to actually figure it out.
octopodes--cool. i meant seafood.
here's a thought experiment---if the per capita American consumption of meat went drastically down (say, 20%), holding everything else fixed--protein, calories, etc--and the losses in the meat industry were fairly compared to gains in environmental benefits---would anything else be much worse off?
Posted by Saheli | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 3:06 PM
Tripp, making anything more expensive regressively affects the poor. And yet we have all kinds of regulations that make things more expensive. OSHA regulations make products more expensive. Environmental regulations make products more expensive. Except really, the greater expense is just making the producer and the consumer bear the cost of the externalities. Eating lots of meat has negative externalities. Eating less of it has positive ones. Nothing I propose would make it harder for the poor to get healthy, nutritious food. It would only make a smaller portion of their diet animal based, which would be benenficial to society in lots of ways.
It is not restricting liberty not to subsidize a product. It is restricting liberty somewhat to tax a product or regulate an industry, but everyone to the left of George Bush supports this in a number of instances. Once again, being poor means not being able to afford some stuff. Why are you in favor of restricting the poor's liberty to buy televisions by not favoring television subsidies and supporting OSHA regulations for TV manufacturers? Seriously?
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 3:13 PM
I think all of this France stuff is a big red herring. The only meaningful comparison is between groups of people who differ in no way except as to diet. I.e. they have to have the same health care system, the same exercise routines, etc. I really think that the medical establishment would not have performed the huge backflip that they did if it were not supported by some evidence.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 3:22 PM
218: some ranchers would be worse off, otherwise, no big loss. I wouldn't expect any environmental gain, however. We will continue to grow the same amount of grain, regardless of what it's used for. We have been looking for new uses for corn for the past hundred years or so.
But your hypo is also unrealistic. If we decreaes meat consumption, we will increase starch consumption. My prediction: we would also be a little fatter. Not a horrible outcome. Certainly no closer to eliminating obesity.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 3:22 PM
220: what backflip? The food pyramid has been around longer than I have. But it's wrong.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 3:24 PM
just out of curiosity, Tia, two questions, and I mean no offense:
(1) are you a vegetarian?
(2) are you a vegetarian partly due to ethical concerns?
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 3:25 PM
Wouldn't we be better off giving the money for tv subsidies to education subsidies for poor people so that they can get a better job and afford the tv at a normal price?
Posted by tweedledopey | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 3:25 PM
As for whether people would just replace meat with refined starches, as long as I'm attending Social Engineer Fantasy Camp, I'm all for putting some subsidy money into things like grocery stores with fresh produce/farmers markets in poor neighborhoods and 25 cent booklets of easy vegetarian or low meat recipes etc.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 3:26 PM
None taken
(1) I am mostly vegan. I sometimes eat eggs and milk from the Union Square farmers market. Sometimes I eat eggs and milk from other places. I consider that a failure on my part.
(2) yes
Posted by Anonymous | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 3:27 PM
We're all ignoring the big bad wolf in the room. Fast food.
Posted by tweedledopey | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 3:27 PM
ack, 226 me, obviously.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 3:28 PM
I only eat burger-style fast food from in'n'out.
In Haskell, not-equals is spelled "/=", and there are some languages in which it's ">".
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 3:31 PM
I don't think the food pyramid has been around longer than you have. I remember the four food groups when I was a kid, and I'm 25. I also remember the switchover. I'll google for the date.
It's wrong based on what evidence? That's what I'm asking for. How have the AHA, the ACS etc. been so snowed? Give me an article cite.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 3:31 PM
So it's a fallacy to attack a person's motivation instead of the arguments at hand, but do you think you would be less sure of the negative health impact from eating meat if you did not object to eating meat on other grounds?
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 3:32 PM
The pyramid changed around 1992 or so, I think. I remember the flip.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 3:34 PM
Has Tia made any strong claims about the negative health impact of eating meat? I've seen her make supportable claims that meat is more environmentally burdensome than plant-based foods, and that a perfectly healthy meatless diet is possible -- that reducing meat consumption shouldn't have a negative health impact. I think you're expecting her to defend a position she hasn't taken.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 3:35 PM
She did make a defense that vegetarian was more healthy than meat, IIRC.
Posted by tweedledopey | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 3:36 PM
Okay, I just read back through, and there's more than I thought, but still, nothing all that dogmatic.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 3:37 PM
no, she has claimed that reducing meat intake would increase national health. Which isn't a crazy position, though I disagree.
Here is an article from Harper's about agribusiness that I remember finding quite interesting: http://www.harpers.org/TheOilWeEat.html
It isn't a medical report, and I don't claim it to be that conclusive, but worth a read.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 3:37 PM
68.
Posted by tweedledopey | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 3:38 PM
I said that I thought that a healthy diet could include meat, but that most Americans consume too much. I do not think eating meat is in and of itself unhealthy; I think eating too large a proportion of it relative to your other sources of calories is, and I think Americans, in general, doing this now.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 3:39 PM
So it's a fallacy to attack a person's motivation instead of the arguments at hand, but do you think you would be less sure of the negative health impact from eating meat if you did not object to eating meat on other grounds?
Yeah, text, you did identify this as a fallacy, but I think it's not only a fallacy but uncool to ask someone if their prejudices are a cause of their factual beliefs, when they've given you mainstream support (like the link in 68) for those beliefs. That should really be reserved for off-the-wall or obviously unsupported factual assertions, don't you think? When someone's giving you facts, argue the facts, not why they think what they think.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 3:43 PM
re 231: um, I'm not sure if I can imagine a hypothetical me who does not believe something that I believe strongly. However, (I feel like a doofus sometimes for saying the same stuff over and over), I'm basing my belief on a consensus of experts. Every time I drop by medline, the abstracts I read generally boil down to: it's important to make sure you're getting all the nutrients you need when you reduce animal consumption, but a vegetarian or low meat diet reduces the incidence of a bunch of chronic diseases. I just want people to think otherwise to have compelling reasons to; my mind could be changed; it wouldn't make that much of a difference in my position because there are still strong environmental and cruelty arguments for reducing animal product consumption. So far I haven't seen anything in this thread that changes my mind.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 3:46 PM
Personally speaking, I suspect that learning anything about the meat production industry might affect my appetite for bacon sandwiches, so I make sure that I stay "out of the room". I demand everyone's respect for my emotional reaction here because clearly I can't help it. I am in no way a pussy.
Posted by dsquared | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 3:47 PM
well, here's a guy from MIT who would disagree with Tia's assertion:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/diet/interviews/taubes.html
The thing is, I can't argue the merits of the scientific positions. And I don't have the time to engage in a battle of the experts. But I've found, anecdotally, that the people who tend to think meat is bad for you also don't want to eat it for ethical reasons.
We experienced a surge of obesity in this country, starting in the 70s. It corresponded with people cutting fat, eating more carbs. I think that if the advice continues to be: cut saturated fats, we will continue to get fatter.
So if that was out of bounds, sorry.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 3:48 PM
I mean people who think otherwise.
arg. also I know that modal verbs don't take the "to" with the infinitive that follows. I did that in a previous post and I sounded like a furriner.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 3:49 PM
(and since not everyone is as obsessive about regurgitating old debates as me I will clarify the above as satire; I have in fact been present at both the birth and slaughter of the same individual animals, though I didn't actually eat them because they had been contaminated by the Chernobyl cloud).
Posted by dsquared | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 3:50 PM
I actually never said that I thought increased meat consumption was responsible for obesity. I think decreasing it decreases your risk of several diseases. I have never been one to conflate weight and health. I'm also a big opponent of refined starches.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 3:52 PM
Man, you really get around. ("There I was, assisting in a difficult calving while radioactive gases billowed about my head."
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 3:53 PM
And text, there's not a simple equivalence between a meatless diet and a low protein/fat high-carb diet.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 3:55 PM
245: fair enough. obesity causes some diseases and health problems, but it is by no means the only diet related issue here. There are probably some benefits to cutting meats, but I think there are also detriments. As to how it washes out, we will have to agree to disagree, even with all the various organizations on your side.
And apologies if I made any improper rhetorical moves.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 4:00 PM
247: not simple, but I think that the advice to cut back on meat products leads directly to fewer protein calories and more carbohydrate calories.
There are vegetarian sources of protein, but people don't generally replenish the steak-source.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 4:04 PM
250?
Posted by Matt Winer | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 4:17 PM
Yes!
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 4:18 PM
But I had to misspell my own name to get there. Auto-pwned!
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-15-05 4:18 PM
What's the all-time record for an unfogged thread, anyway? And does anyone have any suggestions for how to get this one to beat it?
Posted by