>Unless you're eating a ridiculous amount of chicken at every meal, which you probably shouldn't, the cost of chicken could be higher if it means better working conditions and humane treatment of the animal.

This is a privileged viewpoint.

When dealing with food policy you need to view the food system from the perspective of those impoverished.

Cheap food is a big deal, and often it's the only thing keeping millions of people in this country from starving. As such, keeping food cheap is an cornerstone of governmental policy because hunger=revolution.

Yes and the reason many of those people are poor are low paying jobs.

Keeping food cheap, or rather, as cheap as possible makes good food a luxury item. Redistribution of wealth would be much more effective.

Funny how animal welfare activists, environmentalists opposed to factory farming, and minimum wage increase labor reformers should all be working together on this. I would've never thought of that coalition.

Redistribution of wealth faces the problem of fleeing capital from your country.

Remember that the global elite (people who control the vast majority of the capital) is highly mobile and from their perspective there's no difference between being robbed and having their wealth "redistributed".

It should also be taken into account that even if the wealth was redistributed, each poor person would only receive a minute amount, for example let's say 1 share of Google, Amazon and a few more shares.

They would almost immediately have to sell this wealth to transform it into income for current needs.

In this case, redistribution would be raising wages. It doesn't matter if "the global elite" is mobile. They're not going to move their factory farming operations outside of the US, and if they do, you tariff them when they ship the product back in.

Cheap food isn't necessarily bad food.

Luxury food isn't necessarily good food.

No matter the political climate, or income inequality. People need to eat. The idea of cheap food is to completely remove it from the spectrum of politics.

Your full dinner should never be subject to political whims. It should be a constant.

That always blows my mind.

It's an animal's whole damned life. It was born, raised to a large-enough size to eat, housed, fed, slaughtered, plucked, shipped, cooked, and served to the customer, plus profits at every step of the way. For $5.

you just summarized why i stopped eating meat in one line. thank you for this. I will quote it in the future.

There seem to be a lot of factors, besides competition, pushing poultry prices down. Most notably, numerous government subsidies: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-shapiro/the-chicken-indus...

Have you found any commodity where there isn't a push to lower the cost? That's pretty much what capitalism does.

Given that capitalism is a balancing act, I wish there is a drive towards incorporating externalities like employee happiness, safety, environmental friendliness, etc., on to the products by introducing some sort of ratings and making sure that all the products include that.

Whole Foods provides ratings on its meat[1] -- but instead of $5 for an entire chicken from Safeway, it's more like $7/lb for boneless/skinless breasts at Whole Foods. It turns out that social responsibility is expensive.

[1] - https://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/mission-values/animal-welfa...

Collage tuition or CEO pay? CD's are older, but used to fit.

None of those 3 examples are commodities.

I think that's arguable but how about: hardwood, crab meat, wolf pelts. Basically, anything with a finite supply and limited ability to mass produce.

It's not at all arguable, by definition each instance of a commodity is equivalent. Each CEO's value is not equivalent, nor is the music on any CD or each degree program available at every university.

Every cow is different that does not prevent them from being treated as a commodity. "In economics, a commodity is a marketable item produced to satisfy wants or needs. Often the item is fungible. Economic commodities comprise goods and services. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity

Staff ex:Nurses are generally treated as a commodity in many economic models.

Music/Books/Movies can also be treated like this. Sure, as a consumer I might pick A over B, but movie theaters don't individually price movies based on quality.

They can be treated as a commodity as they are graded on value. How would a commodity market work if each instance of the commodity had a different value? Both live steers, and their resulting leather, beef and other byproducts are sold based upon weight and/or grade.

For example, 'a cow' is not a commodity... but a grade 3 live steer is.

Movie theatres do not price films based upon quality, but the distributors certainly do (I managed a movie theatre). You cannot commoditise a movie ticket, each theatre provides different facility and presentation quality.

Sure, cattle auctions sell the animal for an individual price based on health, weight, body size etc. At the extreme end animals can sell for 150,000+ if they seem to have good DNA for breeding. http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2013/03/bovine_beauty... Even if there just being butchered people make bids based on expected yields. This gets back to meat grades etc.

However, animals are also sold in bulk without individual prices.

So you make a Chicken processing company. Pay your workers $20 an hour and plenty of breaks. You sell Chickens for $4.

Another company pays workers $4 an hour and makes them wear diapers. Sells Chickens for $3.75.

Barring an outside force (regulation, feel good marketing campaign, ethics badge), which one gets 100% of the market, and which one gets 0%?

Sometimes, free market sucks.

It's the winner-take-all paradox, which was mentioned in an article here on HN earlier today.

Given only a small incremental competitive advantage, a company is able to capture the overwhelming majority of the market, essentially becoming a monopoly.

Hence the sad world we live in with ever decreasing wages ;(

Possibly rotisserie chicken is a bad example, at least there is an urban legend that the smell of roasted chicken makes people buy more at grocery shops. That means it makes them money even if they sell it for $1 or any other price - if the urban legend is true it is subsidized by increased sales of everything else you would buy there.

It's a loss leader -- something sold at a loss for the sake of attracting customers to a store. Maybe they go to the store with the specific intention to buy a chicken, or they choose the store over another because they can get a chicken along with other stuff that they need. Either way, they end up spending more money on other (profitable) things.

well the effect I heard is that even people who don't buy the chicken (ever, they just aren't chicken buyers) buy more of everything else due to the smell. So the store doesn't need to sell any at all, it just needs to be there. Though come to think of it this actually wouldn't affect price (because that smell effect would hold true if it's too expensive, right?) so perhaps it's a combination of both your effect (which affects chicken buyers) and the one I heard about (which affects non-buyers).

That doesn't really make much sense in a massive warehouse store like Costco. You're not going to smell the chicken unless you're very close to it.

Its also a somewhat common practice to cook raw food right before its self life is up to give it another shot at being sold. So by going through the expense of cooking it, they prevent the loss of having to throw it out. Not all stores do this though.

There are over a billion people who would have to spend 100% of their income for four days or more to afford that $5 chicken.

But they don't buy the $5 chicken, they buy their local chicken equivalent at their market rates. Maybe their market rates aren't as a screaming deal as $5 is for an american, but they also have a much better chance to raise their own chickens without an H.O.A. shutting them down.

Most of them simply don't have chicken at all. There are roughly 800 million people who don't have adequate access to food.

It doesn't seem like it if you like in a developed country, but for over 10% of the people in the world, the price of food actually is of extreme importance.

May be because it's exported to countries where not everybody can afford it at ever this prices?

Those are also (usually) loss leaders for the super markets. Not that that makes this acceptable, of course.

Those are generally subsidized, with the sides having vastly higher markups.

Why is there a push? Cause Machiavellian capitalism is rampant.