Also the funny tendency humans have to dislike the people who are most similar to them. Someone who is at least recognizing factory farming is bad and willing to even think that far is more similar to a vegetarian than the people who don't give a shit and never even think about where their food is coming from.
Obviously there's the cognitive dissonance aspect to point out, but we are all doing that to some extent.
Not necessarily. I mean, the people who give out an uncomfortable laugh do exhibit signs of cognitive dissonance.
I don't have an issue with accepting both statements: factory farming is awful, and I still eat meat.
There is no cognitive dissonance.
The logic is straightforward: I do not believe that me, an individual, abstaining from meat is going to do much to factory farming, while it will make a huge, adverse impact on my life.
Government regulation is how this problem would be solved (the only way it can get solved), and I'm all for voting for bans on factory farming, heavy taxes on meat products, etc.
One's gotta pick their battles.
I pick ones where my participation won't amount to martyrdom.
My cynical inner pedant compels me to point out that societal collapse will also solve "factory farming is awful". And we're probably closer to that than effective government regulation of it.
You can easily chose 'not factory farmed' and still eat meat. You just don't. I'm guessing unless you grew up rich or very recently, you consume more meat now than you were accustomed too growing up. In that case you choose to actively benefit from the factory farming.
So, you get the point of having legislation like laws prohibiting child labor instead of moral grandstanding calling on people to abstain from purchasing unethically produced goods, right?
>We now eat pigs, animals smarter than dogs, that lived tortured lives while wearing clothing made by children.
Which goes to show my point: the problem of child labor has only ever been resolved by having legislation against it.
Not by passing the (un)ethical choice onto the consumer.
>I'm guessing unless you grew up rich or very recently, you consume more meat now than you were accustomed too growing up.
I grew up in a communal flat in post-USSR-collapse Ukraine with five families to 1 toilet, in case you are wondering, and no, I don't consume any more meat now than I was accustomed to growing up.
I don't see how that is related to anything I'm saying, other than trying to go for another holier-than-thou ad hominem.
>You can easily chose 'not factory farmed' and still eat meat.
Pray tell how.
Let's be specific. I live in California, and while I consider myself well off, I'm not what you'd call rich.
I shop in stores like Lucky, Ralph's, and 99 ranch.
When I go to those stores, how do I tell which meat was "factory farmed", and which wasn't? Honest question, because that information isn't on the label.
Which is, again, a point I am making: it should be illegal to not put this information along with nutrition data.
I eat meat. And I'm highly, highly morally conflicted. I'll leave it at that to avoid sounding hypothetical—except to mention that the only logical reason I don't go vegetarian/vegan is the work and personal development that'd be required of me. (I'll take being called lazy over disingenuous any day, if we're ostensibly virtue signaling here.)
During 10 year I gently removed some ingredients of my diets/habits and added others in the meantime. It was longer but way easier than I imagined.
Good luck, you lazy :-)
Thanks for the encouragement!
You completely missed the point.
In the context of picking battles, martyrdom is (self) sacrifice for the sake of sacrifice, with no direct gain for the cause.
Abstaining from meat, to me, will take away one of the not-so-many joys I have in my life, without possibly making a meaningful impact on unethical farming.
I'm well off. You might be. Most people in the US are not.
And in the end of the day, poor people are going to buy the cheapest products in the grocery store.
So, there's always be a demand as long as there's supply.
More than that. We don't really have a choice for where meat comes from anyway. There's no requirement to put that on the label, along with nutritional data.
That, by the way, is another example where legislation can make a lot of difference.
My point is that abstaining from meat is about as useful as that young man setting himself of fire in the US to help children in Gaza.
Same goes about feeling bad about eating meat (while eating it).
The impact on the cause is zero.
Your energy would be better spent fighting the ag-gag laws, requiring disclosures on the labels, making ethically farmed products cheaper (and factory farmed produce more expensive), and so on.
You having morally conflicted feelings doesn't help anyone.
And it's simple, really: you are complicit in doing a bad thing. But the complicity is not in doing the thing, it's in supporting the system where in doing it is the rational choice for the majority of people.
Your choice in doing or not doing the thing has very little impact on whether the thing happens.
On the first clause, exactly. (The second clause appears to be a bit of ad lib.)
> Abstaining from meat, to me, will take away one of the not-so-many joys I have in my life
I don't think the concept of 'martyrdom' encompasses self-interest. It does however consider the cause/s of other beings. So I maintain, not a very cognitively consonant use of the term.
The original definition of martyr is: "a person who voluntarily suffers death as the penalty for declaring belief in and refusing to renounce a religion"[1].
It's suffering for the sake of being true to one's faith; impact of that decision on anyone else not being a factor in whether one is a martyr.
Abstaining from meat consumption when it's something you really enjoy is martyrdom in that sense: you are sticking to your moral principles while having no impact on the proliferation of unethical farming.
>I don't think the concept of 'martyrdom' encompasses self-interest
You think incorrectly. The concept of martyrdom means forgoing the self-interest of self-preservation and not being in pain. There's no martyrdom without sacrifice.
>It does however consider the cause/s of other beings.
It may, in the modern sense of the word, but it doesn't have to. See the linked definition. The causes for which one martyrs themselves may vary. The unifying factor is suffering in the name of the cause.
Not suffering with the effect of making something happen. It's choosing to suffer in the name of something that makes one a martyr.
Martyrdom is not an efficient way to bring the cause closer to reality.
> So I maintain, not a very cognitively consonant use of the term.
You can maintain it's not the correct usage of the term, dictionaries be damned, but cognitive consonance has nothing to do with that.
Do you even do any grocery shopping where you live?
Not long ago, I could get chicken for $0.99/pound, same as the cheapest tomatoes, whereas quality tomatoes sold for $2.99/pound.
Now the prices for meat are up, but chicken still costs $1.99/pound[1], while decent tomatoes are $3.99/pound[2].
Even if you are thrifty and find cheaper tomatoes, they are incomparable to chicken in nutritional value.
You know the expression "chicken soup for the soul"? There's a reason it's not "tomato soup for the soul" (as much as I love gazpacho).
> I'd assume poor people also like the taste of meat
Try eating on a budget instead of assuming what them "poor people" like.
[1] https://www.safeway.com/shop/product-details.960014952.html?...
[2] https://www.safeway.com/shop/product-details.184570092.html
First off: people don’t swap them in their diet, a better exemple would be wheat or soy - which are what the 0.99/p chicken eat.
Second: the shelf price you mention includes gouvernement subsidies and economy of scale. The grains price should be the one paid by the fermer, adjusted for smaller packaging. Your comparaison may stands where you live because of political choices and societal evolution. It doesn’t in a more liberal and non regulated juridictions, does it?
It's a direct answer to the question asked by the parent.
The answer is: no, vegetables are not cheaper than meat in the US.
It is perverse. Which is my point: what enables the low, low price of chicken isn't merely the laws of supply and demand.
>First off: people don’t swap them in their diet, a better exemple would be wheat or soy
Those are not vegetables. Those are grains and legumes, respectively.
>Second: the shelf price you mention includes gouvernement subsidies and economy of scale.
No shit.
Which is my point exactly: the problem is addressed by government regulation, and exists because of government regulation, including, but not limited to, subsidies to particular forms of farming, and ag gag laws.
>Your comparaison may stands where you live
Well of course I can speak about where I live.
And yeah, we're talking in English on a US-based website (specifically, a Silicon Valley one). I am talking about the US, a country of about 350M people.
It's not like I'm talking about a small state few people have heard of with no impact on anything. The situation in the US matters because it influences a lot.
Canada isn't that different from the US food-wise, for that matter.
> a plant or part of a plant that is eaten as food. Potatoes, beans and onions are all vegetables.
https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis...
I'm don't want to argue on definitions though but the chicken/tomatoes comparaison hardly make sense in an answer to satvikpendem: he mentioned vegatable in comparaison to meat in a poor people diet. In that situation one would certainly aim mainly for cheap and nutritious staples AKA grains and legumes instead of tomatoes.
At least we agree on the regulation impact! I wish you a pleasant Californian day :-)
Aside, I'm not sure why you're being so aggressive in your comments, it doesn't make for good discourse when one says things like "you've completely missed the point" or "no shit" or the oft seen pattern of quoting and rebutting each line. If I were to speak to my friends that way I'd quickly lose friends.
But that is precisely acting as a martyr.
You're "highly morally conflicted", which means you suffer inside. You could stop that suffering by either 1) going vegan, so you don't have to worry about it, or 2) deciding to continue eating meat and no longer worry about it. Right now, you're picking the strictly worse combination of continuing to eat meat and remaining conflicted indefinitely.
I'm starting to realize that internal moral conflicts are a lot like physical pain - it's an important signal from the body, and you should pay attention to it, but in the end, if you know you're not going to do anything about the underlying cause, then there's no point in continuing to suffer - you just make it go away with painkillers, and carry on living. This does not mean denying the problem - quite the opposite. Constant pain makes it hard to think rationally, and suppressing it puts you in a much better position to address its underlying cause.
Vegetarian options got cheap, and I still eat locally produced eggs and some milk products.
But like, awful can be coped with. Everyone thinks factory farming is awful. Few give a shit.
All that is to say: some people act less ethical then others, and should have to accept that fact - instead of trying to produce an image of the self (to themselves mostly but also to others) that conceals it; be it through normalization ("guess we all do that"), rationslization ("if i wouldn't do it someone else would"), or blame shifting (if someone would do this and that i would behave like that, so it's up to them to provide me with xyz)
edit: I apply that to myself. I know that I don't act as ethical as I could regarding the consequences of my diet.
Not that I'm in any position to criticize; I'm in the cognitive dissonance camp.
Have you considered consuming "ethical" animal products (e.g. free range eggs or whatever?) That doesn't seem like martyrdom; compared to what you want (government mandated livestock welfare) it only costs you marginally more (due to missing economies of scale.)
It's not an all-or-nothing thing indeed; there's a huge spectrum between veganism and not at all thinking (or caring) about where the animal products come from.
But yes, I, as a consumer, am not responsible for what is already heavily regulated in favor of factory farmers. Heard of the ag gag laws? You can't vegan them away.
It's not a free market, see.
It's as delusional to blame people for eating the availableunethically produced meat as it is to blame them for starving during the Holodomor (..or Great New Leap, or the Irish Potato Famine, or...).
Radium-based snake oil "medicine" didn't disappear because the consumers boycotted an unethical product. It was because we have FDA.
I really do not feel responsible for what would amount to trying to enforce regulation that doesn't exist.
I am responsible for voting, so when it comes to the ballot, ethical farming does get my vote.
(Not disagreeing with you, just mentioning it because your statement inside made me think of it)
The agricultural market is perhaps the furthest thing from it, given the importance of, well, having food. Farmers get subsidies. Nation-states get involved in the circulation of food around the planet. Geopolitics comes into play.
In some markets, individual choices of consumers matter a lot in shaping them.
Agricultural products are as far from that as it's possible.
I am not convinced that not buying unethical meat does any more than not buying unethical weapons of mass destruction, or not using Palantir's products.
Few of us are hoarding stashes of chemical weapons or signing contracts with Palantir, and yet Palantir still thrives.
Perhaps simply not buying it isn't always the most effective way to end something.
I noted this in another comment, but the "free-range" designation means almost nothing. Hens have access to the outdoors, but that can mean a packed coop with no grass where part is missing a roof.
Look for "Certified Humane" or research the farm directly.
Side note: I've never seen that "certified humane" label. I'll look for it though.
The people who are saying that it's "easier than ever" to be buying ethically farmed products are full of it.
So what if I am? I am responsible for it. I don't care. Though, if it makes you feel better, I will have slaughtered and butchered my own hog before the end of the year is through. I've been nominated to put the rifle to its head. I've seen them slaughtered (and halved, but not butchered) in a university meat science class a decade ago, it only made me hungry.
Your ethics are truly bizarre to me, and the more I hear about them from people who agree with you, the less interested I am in understanding them.
Aren’t they alive too? What if they were conscious? If they aren’t but still a lifeform, that makes it perfectly okay?
No answers, just makes me wonder at times if common ethics is all it’s cracked up be.
Is eating plants not required for sustenance or nutrition really justifiable? (Chocolate, sugar, spices, …)
Well, they're not.
> If they aren’t but still a lifeform, that makes it perfectly okay?
According to Jains: No. Violence against plants, insects, and possibly even certain microorganisms is considered unethical.
IMO as an irreligious person: Yes. Life is just a particular form of self-sustaining and self-propagating system. Those properties are of little to no moral value.
"Cage free" and "no antibiotics" are probably the only USDA-regulated terms worth caring about, but they're fairly low bars. "Certified Humane" designation is a higher, well-audited bar, but many farms that might qualify forgo it due to the costs associated.
What is the answer to feed everyone during these budget constrained times? It can’t be tofu, can it? There are just too many of us.
In the meantime, the US is overrun by dear and boars, and I’ve been learning archery.
You are very wrong here by order of magnitudes. The US produces about 5 billion bushes of soybeans. 1 bushel is around 60 lbs. Having made tofu myself, depending on the type of tofu you make 1 lb of dry soybeans is anywhere from 1.5 to 2 lbs of tofu(remember we are adding water to the mix so we increase weight). If 1 bushel is 60 lbs and we produce 5 billion then we have 136 million metric tons of soybeans which makes 272 million tons of tofu which is enough to feed the entire US several times over.
I'm not suggesting we actually do it but to answer your question of "is tofu the answer," it could be. The vast majority of our soybean crop was sold to other countries until Trump tariffs made China switch from us to Russia. I'm not sure what the current status of our soybean production is but we have the crop production to feed the entire US.
To your first point about the small animals in the fields that are harmed by agriculture, I think that's worth having concern about overall, certainly. But many of the animals that people currently consume are fed large quantities of crops that incur that same cost. The average beef cattle is eating such things for 18 months prior to being slaughtered, breeding sows do the same for 3-5 years, and their offspring 5-6 months on average.
If there are advances in things like cultured meat that can be produced in a sort of industrial setting at a competitive price it might be possible to drastically limit both the conscious and inadvertent harm to animals.
Loads of small field animals are killed when eating vegan. Loads more are killed when eating omnivore, because you have to plow even more field to also feed the factory-farmed animals.
> In the meantime, the US is overrun by dear and boars, and I’ve been learning archery.
Assuming you stick with it, I think that could be a good idea.
I lived for a year in a suburb of Charlotte NC a couple of years ago, and there were herds of whitetails on my dog walks.
I'd like to learn more about "Chronic Wasting Disease" if you have any resources, because on podcasts or r/Archery and the like, "harvesting your own food" is par for the course. Thank you.
It's much more efficient to use land to grow food crops for people to eat directly than it is to grow food for livestock and then have people eating the livestock.
It's one of the reasons that I've been pescetarian for a few decades - it's unsustainable for everyone to eat substantial amounts of meat and there's a lot of deforestation just to sate people's desire for burgers.
Isn't all life sentient?
If not, where do you draw the line? "It has eyes and bilateral symmetry and an endoskeleton looks vaguely human-like so I can anthropomorphize it"? "Only members of the animal kingdom are conscious"?
Sentience is consciousness. I can't imagine what it must be like to be a plant, the plants existence is too different from mine for me to imagine it.
It would be like trying to imagine life in a 12-dimensional space - I'm a human, with a human consciousness, living in 3-dimensional space, that makes sense to me.
I can empathize, and to a certain degree imagine what it must be like to be a dog or a cat or a cow, because they're very similar to me in how they work. They move, they eat, they poop, they reproduce sexually. They have similar mammalian feelings and similar DNA (well, more similar than the plant).
But for all I know a plant, say the spinach I had a few days ago, could be just as conscious, albeit in a way that I absolutely cannot comprehend, and my ripping off the plant's leaves to eat them may be, to the plant, every bit as painful as someone ripping out my lungs to eat them.
Did you mean I acknowledge the sentience of plants but not animals?
I believe that all life might be conscious, but life that is "very different" from me I have a hard time imagining what that consciousness might be like. For animals, especially mammals, I can easily imagine what they must be feeling and empathize with them. I can understand that a cow feels pain when hurt, because the cow is very similar to me. A plant might also feel pain when hurt (even the grass I step on might not appreciate me walking on it), but I'd have a harder time empathizing with that.
'Former' and 'latter' were in reference to the two questions I posed to you.
Though it's been 10 or 15 years, Wikipedia used to have a page that listed 6 criteria for biological life (but it became politically inconvenient). The same ones we all used to learn in school. One of them was "responds to stimuli"...
If there is an objective definition of "sentience", then the only one I've ever heard is "responds to stimuli". Which plants (and even the most primitive unicellular organisms) meet. And if "sentience" doesn't mean this, then I challenge anyone to come up with another better one.
So, to make a long story short, I like eating sentient things, and I'm not ever going to stop. And it tastes even better when it seems to cause distress to vegans.
Odd flex. Try not to worry so much about what other people think of you. It'll make you a better human.
not the person you replied to, but it mostly would for me. Factory farms are among the closest things to hell on earth.
I eat meat, but try to limit it to once a week and have replaced milk with oat and soy in a lot of places. I still love cheese but it does give me conflict when I spend even a second thinking about what it takes to actually get cheese. (Cows dont lactate without pregnancy). That said, my own personal philosophy is that we have likely evolved to consume animal products so I cant dismiss it fully, just reduce my own consumption. ~75% of all agricultural land is used to feed livestock, yet livestock produces only 18% of the world's calories and 37% of its protein, which just seems insanity to me.
factory farms would stop breeding animals to kill them? Did you think you had an argument here?