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Why is chicken so cheap? [video]

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Re: Why is chicken so cheap? [video]

#121

Post by perfmode »

toasterlovin wrote: post #74
perfmode wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

blacks weren't people then, either. back then, blacks didn't occupy the same moral category as the humans who bred and traded them. afterwards, blacks were upgraded to 2/5ths human. now, we still struggle for acceptance and parity. morality is a process.

Animals are categorically not humans. This is a scientific fact which you can quantify and measure. Blacks are humans. That is another scientific fact which you can quantify and measure.

blacks being humans didn't stop us from slotting them into an inferior moral category. and back then, we asserted as scientific fact that they were inferior. the apparatus of justification is something which changes over time. it is interesting to me to observe your invocation of our present day apparatus of justification. :)

Re: Why is chicken so cheap? [video]

#122

Post by perfmode »

Creationer wrote: post #91
perfmode wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

are you really attempting to justify transatlantic slave trade?

Re: Why is chicken so cheap? [video]

#123

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #7
vbuwivbiu wrote: post #4

That man and his automatic shed. How depressing. I'd much rather pay 3x as much, eat chicken 1/3 as often and actually enjoy it instead of eating it every day and hardly noticing it. All those cheap chickens may as well have stickers on saying "1/3 the enjoyment"

> 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…

Hah! I used to give away my surplus eggs when we had too many. Once I asked a co-worker if he wanted any more since I figured he had used up the last dozen I gave him. He laughed and said "no thanks. The wife complained that they were muddy and probably weren't pasteurized and how did we know they were safe to eat. I told her that they were from free range chickens that just went outside and got muddy feet when they were looking for food, but she wasn't having it."

So that's my anecdote: give away delicious eggs (the taste really is night and day different from supermarket eggs) and people complain that they don't look like the ones in the supermarket!

Right now I have a basket of eggs on my kitchen counter ranging from spotlessly clean to 40% mud covered and some with a fair amount of chickenshit on them. It's all good: having this many eggs is an excuse to come up with new uses for them. Made a batch of lemon bars (filling is mostly eggs and lemon juice/zest) and they were awesome.

Re: Why is chicken so cheap? [video]

#124

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

a1369209993 wrote: post #39
781 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are quite a few (relatively) famous pigs on Instagram. Try suggesting to someone that maybe they should be turned into bacon this Christmas. I'm not talking about vegans, but regular meat-eating people. Study reaction.

That's a entirely reasonable position; those pigs are more useful as entertainment than food, by a rather large margin too.

As someone with a rack of ribs currently slow cooking in the oven, I beg to differ!

Re: Why is chicken so cheap? [video]

#125

Post by toasterlovin »

perfmode wrote: post #121
toasterlovin wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Animals are categorically not humans. This is a scientific fact which you can quantify and measure. Blacks are humans. That is another scientific fact which you can quantify and measure.

blacks being humans didn't stop us from slotting them into an inferior moral category. and back then, we asserted as scientific fact that they were inferior. the apparatus of justification is something which changes over time. it is interesting to me to observe your invocation of our present day apparatus of justification. :)

Yes, but we came to see blacks as equal because they are, in fact, humans, just like whites. Animals will never be humans, no matter what. They will always remain a separate moral category. Here's a simple thought experiment that should illustrate this:

Imagine a scenario in which you can save one of two lives: a human or a dog. You can't pick both. Just one. The question is not, "Which would you save?", but instead, "Would you final moral fault in a person who chose to save the dog?". Almost everybody would hold a person who chose to save the dog morally culpable for the death of the human. But they would not hold them morally culpable for the death of the dog if they chose to save the human.

That will never change. Because animals are not humans.

Re: Why is chicken so cheap? [video]

#126

Post by Gibbon1 »

avar wrote: post #119
RandallBrown wrote: post #2

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.

The same reason a T-shirt made and shipped from China is cheaper than one manufactured next door to you. The contribution of international transport to the cost of pretty much any consumer good is minuscule compared to other factors, so the starting premise that something should be cheaper just because it's grown locally is false from the outset.

One thing that's very informative is to look at the HP per ton of various modes of transport.

Emma Mærsk: 156,907 DWT, 150000 HP total, or about 1HP per ton fully loaded.

With the engines running full tilt she'll make 29.3 mph.

Compare with a truck that weighs 20 tons with 400 hp, so 20 hp per ton.

100 miles by truck == 2000 miles by ship.

Re: Why is chicken so cheap? [video]

#127

Post by Joakal »

mikeash wrote: post #59
Reason077 wrote: post #11

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.

A flying saucer lands in front of the UN. The aliens’ speech to the General Assembly is the most watched live broadcast in history. The world listens to this speech and learns: - The UFO craze of the mid 20th century was real. Aliens really were abducting and probing humans. - Their evaluation established that we are not clever or strong enough to be useful, but we are delicious and cheap to feed. - A fleet of transp…

You need to breed out intelligence in humans. Because that comes with boredom etc. Its also why we're not farming any intelligent animals. Hunting them ie dolphins, etc doesn't count because the process cannot be industrialised unless they can be farmed.

Re: Why is chicken so cheap? [video]

#128

Post by captainredbeard »

13of40 wrote: post #105
_hardwaregeek wrote: post #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…

I've noticed the same thing with tomatoes and apricots. I've got a good friend whose family have an apricot farm in the Kurdish part of Turkey, and their apricots are amazing, but the same variety grown in Western Washington tastes like plastic. There's something seriously pathological with the "terrior" in the western part of north America. (Luckily it doesn't extend to wine.)

I’ll push back on that a bit.

(A) The terroir for wine is probably the pickiest of all mass produced fruit, at least according to White’s Understanding Vineyard Soils.

(B) The soil of the Western US is extremely varied but it’s hardly the only factor involved in the taste and cultivation of fruit. The most obvious wildly differing factor is climate. The high deserts of E. Oregon would produce very different fruit compared to Washington’s coastal region even if you used identical soil, due to rainfall, mean/median temps, diurnal temp variation, etc.

Re: Why is chicken so cheap? [video]

#129

Post by a1369209993 »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #124
a1369209993 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a entirely reasonable position; those pigs are more useful as entertainment than food, by a rather large margin too.

As someone with a rack of ribs currently slow cooking in the oven, I beg to differ!

Unless you mean that you don't find the pigs on Instagram entertaining, I don't see your point. Clearly there is no grave shortage of food pigs if you're eating one, so the marginal benifit of having a few extra food pigs is much less than the benefit of using those few pigs for entertainment. Kind of like how it's better to use marble for statues or architecture than for landfill, because there's plenty of landfill rock already available.

Re: Why is chicken so cheap? [video]

#130

Post by jawarner »

Someone wrote: post #61
jawarner wrote: post #40

Land usage per chicken, difference between free-range vs. intensively reared: 1/12 m^2 vs. 1/17 m^2 Consumer cost, difference between free range vs. intensively reared: 4 euros/lb vs. 2 euros/lb. Does the difference in production costs explain the drastic consumer cost difference between these two methods? Why can't free-range farming be automated like it is in the intensive rearing model?

Chickens do not eat in the dark. That’s why the light in stables for intensively reared chicken is on way longer than the sun is up (I’m not up to date on what’s considered optimal today, but I think 24 hours a day was abandoned because it caused too much stress (and stress harms growth, or even kills chicken) for weird things such as “40 minutes on, 20 minutes off”) Some of the large factors that affect production c…

Thank you for an interesting comment.
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