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The fight over transparency in the meat industry

nytimes.com

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Re: The fight over transparency in the meat industry

#121

Post by jasonparallel »

jasonparallel wrote: post #57
ldehaan wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Super cool! My family and I are also looking to buy a small farm and basically do the same thing, use it to provide good healthy food for our kids and hopefully at some point setup a program for other food conscious programmers and do a hackathon every couple months to improve on farming equipment. Did you get a govt loan for your farm? If so did they require a certain amount of food to be sold or grown?

I'm not sure if they are still active, but this group was hacking together some cool stuff for the farm: opensourceecology.org

Also check out farmhack.org/tools

Re: The fight over transparency in the meat industry

#122

Post by eric_the_read »

HSO wrote: post #39
tjic wrote: post #10

As I mentioned in another thread, I live on a farm. (I hack Ruby and C++ as a day job, the farm is just a hobby). One major reason for doing so is animal welfare. I'm a meat eater and will staunchly defend it...but factory farming is terrible. At this point we get most of our meat from our own pastures: chicken, goat, lamb, pork. It's much more expensive than buying factory farmed meat, and even more expensive (in la…

You've just put a new idea about "the good life" into my head… This sounds positively delightful, to combine tech with rural living. I just might give that a try someday! As someone who has struggled with his diet for ethical reasons for a long time, I have a question though. You say > at the end of the season, when it's time to turn living creatures into meat, doing it yourself ensures that it's done well, and with…

There's a great anime on Netflix called Silver Spoon (http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/anime.php?id=15...) about a kid from an urban background who goes to an agricultural high school as a way to give the middle finger to his type-A father.

Anyway, one thing I thought was interesting is all the kids who grew up on farms know you basically don't name your livestock, and they even told him this, and he does it anyway (naming the pig he's raising for class Pork Bowl). A good chunk of the plot of the first dozen or so episodes is him dealing with the reality that he's going to have to slaughter and break down the carcass of what is more or less a pet.

I think the most interesting part is that the kids who grew up on a farm (I'm halfway there; I spent my summers on my grandfather's farm, but he only had a hundred or so head of cattle. Mostly he farmed the Holy Trinity: corn, beans, and wheat.) didn't even think about it; livestock is livestock, pets is pets. Watching him come to grips with it was very well-done and very interesting.

Re: The fight over transparency in the meat industry

#123

Post by PhantomGremlin »

kbenson wrote: post #7

With uBlock enabled some script that removed the semi-transparent white overlay doesn't get loaded, so the article presents as faded and hard to read. I mention this to help people figure out what's going on, and let people that see it make an informed decision whether to visit, not to start a discussion on the merits of this practice. Please , that discussion has been done to death. People have very strong convictio…

the article presents as faded and hard to read

There are many different ways to skin a cat, so to speak.

In my case I read NY Times without any Javascript, courtesy of Noscript. So in order to easily read, I simply needed to

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Re: The fight over transparency in the meat industry

#124

Post by dbg31415 »

I grew up on a ranch.

Watched my dad slaughter cows, chickens, rabbits, goats... watched him put down old / injured horses, dogs, and cats. When I got old enough I helped.

Hardest time was killing and butchering a steer I had trained, and showed in 4H. I think I was like 12 at the time, but you work with an animal all summer... get it trained to follow you around and not pull on the halter... and then the reward is someone buys it to kill it. I ended up being vegetarian for a few years in high school after that.

Anyway my only point here was... nobody, and I mean nobody including the PETA activists, cares more about the animals than the ranchers who raised them. One time we were slaughtering a steer and the guy shooting the animal was a dumbass who shot the animal 3 times in the wrong places. Animal was angry, scared, hurt. Dad saw what was going on, jumped the fence as fast as he could, grabbed the gun from the guy, smacked him hard in the face with the gun handle, and then put the animal down as quickly as he could.

Dad then yelled at the hired man, using the harshest words I had ever heard at the time, and told him to get lost and never come back. Dad pulled out his wallet and threw some money on the ground to settled up with the man, then just turned his back on him. I'm pretty sure Dad broke the guy's nose, the amount of blood coming off his face was a pretty good indicator of how mad Dad was that he wouldn't show respect to the animal.

Similar time, we had been invited over to help a neighbor, and the neighbor's grown son was trying to put a steer down and mistakenly put bird shot in the shotgun instead of a slug -- Dad took the shotgun away from the man. Put the animal down quickly, and then Dad yelled at his neighbor (a man he had known for 20+ years) about what a dipshit his son was. We left and never talked to that neighbor again -- pretty harsh considering we only had about 5 neighbors within 20 miles of us.

Factory slaughter houses are different, but if you can buy meat from a local rancher who slaughtered the animal himself you can be fairly sure he did the job humanely.

Re: The fight over transparency in the meat industry

#125

Post by macandcheese »

tjic wrote: post #10

As I mentioned in another thread, I live on a farm. (I hack Ruby and C++ as a day job, the farm is just a hobby). One major reason for doing so is animal welfare. I'm a meat eater and will staunchly defend it...but factory farming is terrible. At this point we get most of our meat from our own pastures: chicken, goat, lamb, pork. It's much more expensive than buying factory farmed meat, and even more expensive (in la…

Curious what your thoughts on Joel Salatin + Polyface farms are? I've read a small handful of his books and found them enlightening - if a bit preachy. From the perspective of never really farming for profit and only volunteering / taking urban farm courses in college, his writing seems prophetical to me. Any thoughts?

Re: The fight over transparency in the meat industry

#126

Post by jonah »

WalterSear wrote: post #60
titanomachy wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess there aren't enough Americans who are willing to do soul-crushing unskilled labour for minimum wage.

Slaughterhouse jobs correlate with increases in PTSD, domestic violence and violent crime. "Contracting out" the cognitive dissonance of causing suffering and misery has consequences to all involved. https://www.google.com/search?q=slaughterhouse+workers+domes...

And RSI.

In the chicken processing plants near where I grew up, the workers were expendable. You're worked hard until you get injured and then discarded/fired/pushed out and replaced.

Re: The fight over transparency in the meat industry

#127

Post by [deleted] »

pillowkusis wrote: post #30
tjic wrote: post #10

As I mentioned in another thread, I live on a farm. (I hack Ruby and C++ as a day job, the farm is just a hobby). One major reason for doing so is animal welfare. I'm a meat eater and will staunchly defend it...but factory farming is terrible. At this point we get most of our meat from our own pastures: chicken, goat, lamb, pork. It's much more expensive than buying factory farmed meat, and even more expensive (in la…

you seem concerned with animal welfare, or at least the minimization of suffering; how do you justify willfully killing animals (which undoubtedly creates suffering)?

[deleted]

Re: The fight over transparency in the meat industry

#128

Post by [deleted] »

pillowkusis wrote: post #30
tjic wrote: post #10

As I mentioned in another thread, I live on a farm. (I hack Ruby and C++ as a day job, the farm is just a hobby). One major reason for doing so is animal welfare. I'm a meat eater and will staunchly defend it...but factory farming is terrible. At this point we get most of our meat from our own pastures: chicken, goat, lamb, pork. It's much more expensive than buying factory farmed meat, and even more expensive (in la…

you seem concerned with animal welfare, or at least the minimization of suffering; how do you justify willfully killing animals (which undoubtedly creates suffering)?

[deleted]

Re: The fight over transparency in the meat industry

#129

Post by [deleted] »

pillowkusis wrote: post #30
tjic wrote: post #10

As I mentioned in another thread, I live on a farm. (I hack Ruby and C++ as a day job, the farm is just a hobby). One major reason for doing so is animal welfare. I'm a meat eater and will staunchly defend it...but factory farming is terrible. At this point we get most of our meat from our own pastures: chicken, goat, lamb, pork. It's much more expensive than buying factory farmed meat, and even more expensive (in la…

you seem concerned with animal welfare, or at least the minimization of suffering; how do you justify willfully killing animals (which undoubtedly creates suffering)?

[deleted]

Re: The fight over transparency in the meat industry

#130

Post by jessaustin »

howling wrote: post #82
tjic wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glad you're intrigued! Feel free to reach my by email with any questions! > Do you not get cognitive dissonance from killing "your children"? Well, first, they're not my children. I don't mean that flippantly, and it's a great question to ask, it's just that my answer is: my wife is my wife, my dogs are my dogs (and, yes, family), pigs are livestock...and chickens are sort of walking squawking vegetables. :) I should…

If you have to force yourself not to name and play animals to be able to kill them eventually, it is probably wrong to kill them. Disclaimer: I am a vegetarian.

I find it gets easier, the older I get. Right now we're bottle-feeding a hydrocephalic calf named "Georgie". He can't stand up for more than 30 seconds or walk in a straight line (and therefore would have died if left with his mother), but he will produce a fair amount of veal. Probably not enough to make up for the $3500 we could have gotten selling him as a young bull!
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