181–187 of 187 posts
My concern for animal welfare ends when it imposes any significant burden on human interests. Billions of people want cheap meat, so let's make sure they keep getting it.
How about climate change? Producing staggering quantities of meat is responsible for an awful lot of greenhouse gas emissions and uses a ton of fossil fuels.
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?
I'm tentatively a fan. I need to dig in deeper.
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This video made me vegetarian eight months ago. Then I watched Cowspiracy. And then I started to read more about the meat industry. There is no going back when you realise how fucked up this industry is. HN fellows, we are willing to make the world a better place, right? How about not taking part in one of the worst crimes in history?
That's about as effective as saying that Americans should stop working so they won't support US wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lybia and Syria with their taxes. In other words, it won't work until you give people a reasonable alternative (lab-grown meat, anyone?).
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You need serums and growth media derived from animals. Not derived as in scraping a few cells with a spatula but as in grinding up foetuses into fetal calf serum, or the like. Synthetic media are nowhere near as cheap or effective, at least from what I remember working in biomed research a couple years back.
> Synthetic media are nowhere near as cheap or effective, at least from what I remember working in biomed research a couple years back. That's an argument against the current capabilities of the technology, not against the concept itself. Given that I raised the possibility of eating your own cultured meat right after that, I think it's fairly obvious I'm not limiting the discussion to current technology (also since…
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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…
Good answer, still makes no sense why you don't eat your dogs. It's hypocritical not to; pigs are smart and they respond to you like dogs do (if you let them of course). It's fine, many people do it and at least you look them straight in the eyes while most buy something in plastic 'which taste nice' and they don't have to think.
For instance, someone might prefer the look of hair on dogs and the feed conversion ratio of swine and thus keep dogs to pet and swine to eat.
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Where on earth did you get the idea that the viscera must be disposed or cannot be safely eaten? Pig intestines, heart, lungs are all part of traditional cuisine. Even the kidneys and liver are "viscera," and those are completely mainstream organ meat. Brain is also eaten (head cheese).
Agreed. Photo of making blood pudding https://goo.gl/photos/fUkkcmUxLXmopAQf6 Photo of preparing the heart before marinating it in olive oil and spices, then grilling it. https://goo.gl/photos/T4MQZDpyEDVLgy7o7 Photo of pressed, sliced, and fried pig ears as a side to a sausage sandwhich https://goo.gl/photos/me1rguNxWKXrmNLQ9 Photo of head cheese https://goo.gl/photos/kHpyoDWJRxvDgHxW9 Photo of dog enjoying pig spin…
Curious, what did you do with the lungs? That's one part that I think was commercially banned for human consumption in the USA in the '70s. Even if it wasn't, it's rarely sold fresh as I understand it does not keep well at all even under refrigeration. Pork lungs are used used in Fillipino (bopis, kilayin) and Cantonese cuisine; Europeans certainly use sheep and cow lungs (Greeks, French, Scottish; haggis, anyone), but I'm not aware of western recipes specifically calling for pork lungs.
Pork intestine, on the other hand, is ubiquitous.
My concern for animal welfare ends when it imposes any significant burden on human interests. Billions of people want cheap meat, so let's make sure they keep getting it.
We could suck Earth dry with such attitude.