Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Price We Pay for Cheap Meat

rollingstone.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 211 posts

Re: The Price We Pay for Cheap Meat

#61

Post by haberman »

contextual wrote: post #26

If the suffering of animals matters, then eating meat is morally wrong. Animals are non-human persons who are aware of their own existence and who feel a wide range of emotions, just like we do. Killing animals may still be acceptable in western society, but it's wrong. It's wrong just as slavery in the United States in the 18th and 19th century was once acceptable but wrong. Just as hanging, drawing and quartering t…

If eating meat is just as wrong as slavery, surely it must also be wrong to fail to intervene in nature when animals eat each other. And the very existence of purely carnivorous species is immoral.

Re: The Price We Pay for Cheap Meat

#62

Post by dublinben »

redidas wrote: post #49
timjahn wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where does the food chain fit in? The idea of certain species and groups of animals being higher and lower on the food chain than others. Do we just ignore that? Genuinely curious.

The animal as people logic doesn't hold up. With this reasoning what do we do about animals that hunt and kill other animals for food. Are they behaving immorally because they must kill to survive?

Animals are only moral actors when we're the ones causing them harm. When they're causing other animals harm, they're not moral actors, just animals doing what they do.

Re: The Price We Pay for Cheap Meat

#64

Post by timje1 »

redidas wrote: post #49
timjahn wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where does the food chain fit in? The idea of certain species and groups of animals being higher and lower on the food chain than others. Do we just ignore that? Genuinely curious.

The animal as people logic doesn't hold up. With this reasoning what do we do about animals that hunt and kill other animals for food. Are they behaving immorally because they must kill to survive?

Animals are not usually described as having immoral / moral actions. However, to foolishly continue your strawman: by allowing the animals to kill one another, are their keepers acting immorally?

Re: The Price We Pay for Cheap Meat

#65

Post by Loughla »

gambiting wrote: post #34
contextual wrote: post #26

If the suffering of animals matters, then eating meat is morally wrong. Animals are non-human persons who are aware of their own existence and who feel a wide range of emotions, just like we do. Killing animals may still be acceptable in western society, but it's wrong. It's wrong just as slavery in the United States in the 18th and 19th century was once acceptable but wrong. Just as hanging, drawing and quartering t…

So is there no middle ground then? Is it a simple case of you can't have one without another? I believe that you can eat meat, provided that animals live in a decent,stress-free environment. I know it's very hard to find meat that carries any sort of a guarantee on it,but at least here in EU "free range" and "organic" mean something that is legally enforceable, so every time I buy chicken/beef/pork that is organic I…

Not all of America falls into the category of being completely ignorant to where their food comes from, or eat food that was raised in factory farms.

Many Americans (in the fly-over states) have access to local butchers that can drive you to the actual field where the animal lived.

We recently bought a side of beef for the family from one of these shops. There are eight within a day's driving distance to me (midwest Illinois). I know the first name of the young man that bottle fed and raised the hamburgers I eat.

A majority of individuals in the communities near my home purchase their meat (beef and pork at least) this way. There are other options for people, they are just more expensive, or are perceived as being more expensive.

Please don't lump the entire country into one box. Do you realize how many people there are in the US, or how very large this country is?

Re: The Price We Pay for Cheap Meat

#66

Post by adamb_ »

mc32 wrote: post #7
CapitalistCartr wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meat in the USA is made in the Farm Industrial Complex, sure. But so is all the mass market food; becoming a vegetarian doesn't change that. And I am a vegetarian.

Meat in a wold with 6-billion+ will come from the FIC, in the USA or elsewhere. Heard about the horsemeat swap in the EU, or the tainted (with industrial chemicals and or cardboard) meat in China? It's not a US or EU or CN thing. It's a feeding 6-billion+ people on-the-cheap thing.

Meat persists not because it's "cheap", but because it's an ingrained part of society. Consider the feed conversion ratio. [1] There's an high cost to feeding livestock in the form of wasted food calories that could be avoided if humans consumed that "feed" directly.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_conversion_ratio

Re: The Price We Pay for Cheap Meat

#67

Post by chollida1 »

contextual wrote: post #26

If the suffering of animals matters, then eating meat is morally wrong. Animals are non-human persons who are aware of their own existence and who feel a wide range of emotions, just like we do. Killing animals may still be acceptable in western society, but it's wrong. It's wrong just as slavery in the United States in the 18th and 19th century was once acceptable but wrong. Just as hanging, drawing and quartering t…

> Killing animals may still be acceptable in western society, but it's wrong. It's wrong just as slavery in the United States in the 18th and 19th century was once acceptable but wrong. Just as hanging, drawing and quartering to an audience of thousands in Europe was acceptable but wrong.

Wow, wait until you watch an animal kingdom video. Your mind is about to be blown but the amount of animal on animal violence you'll see.

I mean blue whales will eat litterally 10 of thousands of shrimp in one meal.

Lions will attack and pick on the weakest of the gazelles. nature must have really gotten it wrong.

Look, you just can't come out and state that eating meat is wrong without providing some sort of rational around it. Just claiming its morally wrong doesn't really make an impressive argument at all.

The biggest problem you make is to lump together the poor treatment of animals and the eating of meat. Many farms treat animals in ways that are considered by the vast majority of people to be fair and proper.

Many people who eat meat have educated themselves and consider you to be wrong about the ethics of eating meat.

TD/DR, you just can't take your own beliefs, state them as fact and then state that they are the correct moral thing to do and any one who dares disagree with your narrow beliefs is just wrong.

Re: The Price We Pay for Cheap Meat

#68

Post by astalwick »

kaoD wrote: post #58
gambiting wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So is there no middle ground then? Is it a simple case of you can't have one without another? I believe that you can eat meat, provided that animals live in a decent,stress-free environment. I know it's very hard to find meat that carries any sort of a guarantee on it,but at least here in EU "free range" and "organic" mean something that is legally enforceable, so every time I buy chicken/beef/pork that is organic I…

No, there's no middle ground. Killing is killing. Would it be moral to kill you if I'd let you live in a decent, stress-free environment before your death? Would it be moral to raise human children, give them a nice childhood and then kill them before they reach adulthood because they're super tasty then? I'm not saying I agree (or don't) with GP, just noting that you missed his point.

So, but, that's just ignoring the reality of the world.

Fact is: people eat meat. People will continue to eat meat, that's not something that's going to change (in the short term, anyway). Given that, how can we improve the treatment of these animals?

I feel that equating eating meat with murder is just sacrificing the good for the perfect.

Lets find a way to give consumers better choice. We should be aware of the treatment of the meat we consume (and articles like these are helpful in that sense), and we should be able to make purchasing choices on that basis. We should be able to buy ethically raised / humanely slaughtered meats at the grocery store.

Re: The Price We Pay for Cheap Meat

#69

Post by famousactress »

Jgrubb wrote: post #54
famousactress wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really wish more people who eat meat would put themselves in a position to experience this. It's awesome that you took away so much respect for the animal and the process. I'd love to see that kind of awareness at scale. (full disclosure: I'm vegan)

Q: How do you know if someone is a vegan? A: THEY'LL TELL YOU. (full disclosure: married to a vegan, I couldn't resist)

FWIW I mentioned it because the conversation is about eating meat, not because I need you to think I'm awesome. In fact, I think the joke has some very relevant truth to it. I think heralding veganism is a ridiculous mission from a practical standpoint, and lots of people and organizations are spinning their wheels converting a tiny fraction of the population to a totally meatless diet when instead it makes so much more sense to focus on even mildly reducing meat consumption (or waste) from a much broader segment of the population.
Post reply on HN