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Why is chicken so cheap? [video]

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Re: Why is chicken so cheap? [video]

#91

Chickens are one the most successful animals on earth! By evolving to become fatter, more succulent, and delicious, they have convinced humans to feed and house them, and in doing so have multiplied to vast numbers and spread their genes almost everywhere across the globe.

black people, too! we were so strong and resilient and good at labor that humans paid for our travel across the seas and gave us the opportunity to help build America! we were fed and housed and everything, oh my! gosh > Shadow with me while I'm steppin' on my own resentment > Life scatter in all directions, I was overzealous > Overcurious, Momma worry her days get better > I know she heard me, a timid voice in her s…

I realise this is satire, but the quality of life of Africans living in the USA now is substantially higher than their ancestral cousins who remained in Africa.

Re: Why is chicken so cheap? [video]

#92

Wow, 39 is much shorter than I expected. I guess it makes sense, because how else could you keep up with demand, but my view of animal lifecycles only has stuff like bugs fully maturing so quickly. Interesting stuff. Now my question is why are bananas so cheap? They come all the way from like Brazil, but they're still cheaper than the apple that is grown just a couple hours from me.

Terrible pay and work conditions for the people who work the fields and huge economies of scale.

Recommended documentary: bananaland: blood, bullets and poison

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoRmtQht8-E

Re: Why is chicken so cheap? [video]

#93
post #20

Wow, 39 is much shorter than I expected. I guess it makes sense, because how else could you keep up with demand, but my view of animal lifecycles only has stuff like bugs fully maturing so quickly. Interesting stuff. Now my question is why are bananas so cheap? They come all the way from like Brazil, but they're still cheaper than the apple that is grown just a couple hours from me.

Apples are also more expensive than oranges, which I too find strange.

;)

Re: Why is chicken so cheap? [video]

#94
post #82

Maybe Farmers should be required to print a photo of the actual living bird and their habitat on the packaging. When consumers would see those scruffy chicken for $2 compared to the healthy $7 they might choose the organic ones more often. Killed and unfeathered they all look the same.

This reminded me of the "Colin the Chicken" skit on Portlandia where a couple ordering chicken gets to see its birth certificate, diet, emotional profile, heritage and family... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G__PVLB8Nm4

Unavailable in my country :-/

Probably the same as this one?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAlWrT5P2VI

Re: Why is chicken so cheap? [video]

#95

Maybe Farmers should be required to print a photo of the actual living bird and their habitat on the packaging. When consumers would see those scruffy chicken for $2 compared to the healthy $7 they might choose the organic ones more often. Killed and unfeathered they all look the same.

the trend to "free-range" chicken reminds me of similar half-hearted efforts against the climate crisis; we can't decrease CO2 levels just by collecting plastic trash separately if it is shipped to the incinerator all the same. And despite the animal welfare theatre, the organic farm chicken will be killed just the same. But we feel a bit better about it.

Re: Why is chicken so cheap? [video]

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> eating it every day and hardly noticing it Our distant relationship with where meat comes from is one of the most bizarre things about humans. Especially next to our psychopathic relationship with our own pets. I've seen people freak out with disgust because there's a tiny feather or some dirt in their carton of eggs. Or disgusted by the hanging, swinging corpses behind the butcher when they go to order something t…

Interestingly enough, rural people (and earlier generations) with a closer relationship with their meat source and who see animals being slaughtered regularly (although perhaps not on industrial scales) seem to be more okay with it and see it as part of how life works. I guess being distant from it creates more (theoretical) passion for animals, because you just haven't developed this "emotional immunity" due to ever…

It's the other way around for me. I raise my own chickens and rabbits for meat because it allows me to make sure the animals had a quality of life that surpasses industrial farming by quite a lot. The chickens also keep the back yard fairly free of bugs and flies while they ignore pollinating insects like bees and bumblebees.

I eat less meat now since I don't really want to eat meat from the store anymore. Not only is the animals treated well (apart from the obvious killing part), but the quality of the meat is much higher, and obviously it's much fresher.

Also, eggs. Lots of them.

Re: Why is chicken so cheap? [video]

#97
Whenever I travel outside the US, I'm always struck by how different the chickens look. Chickens in the US have a pale appearance, with flabby, almost mushy meat. They look as if they were grown on a tree, never alive and running. While chickens in say, Italy or Mexico tend to look like they were alive at some point. There's color in the meat, often a yellow tint. Their skin and muscle look used and not atrophied.

I wonder how these differences extend to nutritional value?

Re: Why is chicken so cheap? [video]

#98
post #37
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends how you define success. > By evolving to Being selected to by us > they have convinced humans to feed and house them No, humans have constructed chickens to meet our requirements, minimising the amount we need to house them (e.g. killing them at a few weeks old).

Human are part of nature too, so yes they evolved.

Evolution and selective breeding are opposites.

Evolution is designed to increase the chances of survival by introducing genetic diversity and adapting to an environment in order to maximize life expectancy.

Selective breeding actually reduces the chances of survival and introduces massive defects. It's much more likely all of the chickens will die of a single disease with selective breeding, while evolution allows them to survive.

Re: Why is chicken so cheap? [video]

#99
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What sort of lives do you think birds living "in nature" in Africa have? Instead of being painlessly gassed to death like farmed chickens they'll be eaten alive by some predator, or instead of being provided with antibiotics as hatchlings perhaps worms will eat most of their siblings alive before they leave the nest. Romanticizing factory farming is ridiculous, but so is romanticizing the lives of wild animals. From…

This discussion really depends on how animals experience the world, if we can assign them consciousness and value to their experience, etc. But if we give them some degree of conscious experience, it seems the jungle is far preferable to factory farming. Would you rather live in a tiny cage stuffed with other people, doing nothing during your short life except eating, or living with a tribe in a jungle/savannah (more…

The video we're discussing talks about how it's an "achievement" for chickens that there's 23 billion of them at any given time, making them by far the most populous bird species. For comparison the red-billed quelea is the most populous wild bird species, with around 1.5 billion individuals.

So the question if you're going to pose an ethical conundrum isn't to suppose that all 23 billion would otherwise be living happily in the wild, but rather the antinatalists argument that chickens would be happier as a species if they were all dead instead (well, except maybe some low number of millions who'd make it in the wild).

Of course it's rather hard to have that conversation with a chicken. Assigning human motivations to animals of that intelligence doesn't make any sense. Would you rather spend your life as a bird eating trash from a landfill, or take your chances in the open skies?

We know what most humans would pick in that scenario, but we can also see that there's wild seagulls that voluntarily choose to live their whole lives doing not much of anything except eating trash in the same small place, and they're pretty intelligent compared to chickens.

As ethical trolley problems go comparing the intelligence of a single chicken v.s. a single cow doesn't make sense either, as you need a lot more chickens to produce the same amount of meat.

If we're going to suppose some linear no-threshold model of cognition for farm animals we'd thus be better off if we killed 100 human-level intelligence animals if they were so large as to give us the same amount of food as those 23 billion chickens. After all we're killing a lot more humans than that yearly just from exposure to a chicken population that large, nevermind the ethical calculus.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red-billed_quelea

Re: Why is chicken so cheap? [video]

#100

Whenever I travel outside the US, I'm always struck by how different the chickens look. Chickens in the US have a pale appearance, with flabby, almost mushy meat. They look as if they were grown on a tree, never alive and running. While chickens in say, Italy or Mexico tend to look like they were alive at some point. There's color in the meat, often a yellow tint. Their skin and muscle look used and not atrophied. I…

Anecdotal, but from watching food/travel videos on YT, meat in general outside of the U.S. tend to taste better too apparently.
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