> And that life keeps getting shorter and shorter – four to seven weeks, to be exact. In the 1950s, a broiler chicken lived a full 16 weeks. The faster and heavier method that won the contest was amplified by confinement, and while the chickens come out of those cages fatter, they tend to get sicker, too. They have insatiable appetites, which leaves them stressed, as evidenced in their poor reproduction capabilities, cardiovascular failure and skeletal problems. They’ve been pumped with so many antibiotics, they’ve developed resistances. The chickens’ weak legs and overworked hearts strain every week their lives are extended.
Chickens are meant to be able to live to around 10 years old as well which makes this even worse to me. There's nothing humane or natural about it. I think consumers need to take more personal responsibility in what kind of practices their wallets are supporting.
> I think consumers need to take more personal responsibility in what kind of practices their wallets are supporting.
Consumers aren't making the choice to treat the animals that way, the business are. And (most likely) without regulation, that will not change. Not enough people/consumers have enough discretionary spending to make a change (I believe). I for one don't even know where I can buy meat from well-treated chickens. Sure I can look it up, but most consumers will need to as well, which will probably not happen. It's about high time we stop putting things on the consumer (see recycling) and make the businesses do better for our ecosystem. I hope not to add too many more regulations, the fewer the better IMHO, but damn, there still needs to be some.
Consumers are totally making the choice. You could make the same argument that the consumer's demand for lots of meat is causing the businesses to have to do this.
In reality it's a chain of choices made by multiple groups of people. The consumers, the industry, and whatever governmental regulatory bodies are involved. One group can't just give up responsibility of the choices they are making.
In the end, consumers drive the market. If there's no consumers of unethical meat, no one will unethically raise meat. Out of the groups of people involved, it's only the consumers participation that keeps the cycle alive.
Eating meat isn't a required activity for humans. If the treatment the chickens are going through doesn't seem ethical to you, continuing to eat it is hypocritical. You can totally reduce your meat consumption in order to afford eating ethically raised meat, or just not eat meat at all.
There are literally 10s of thousands of little things like this in your life. Most of them you will not be aware of. Some of them require huge amounts of effort to figure out.
On top of that what you're saying isn't true for huge swathes of the population. They can't afford to eat ethically raised meat, they can't afford to not eat meat protein, and even if there is some (probably imaginary) way for them to do that, it requires a disproportionate amount of effort for them to do so.
Most people will think chicken is just chicken. They may be peripherally aware that there's some sort of intensive farming going on, but not really what that entails, or how horrific it is.
And so some governments around the world have stepped in and stopped those practices.
But not the US. Hence the trade arguments you may have heard about chlorinated chicken. It's not the chlorination that's the problem, it's WHY they need to be chlorinated. Because you need to do that to chicken to make it safe to eat if you grow them in those sort of horrific conditions.
So next time you think about blaming the consumer, stop and think. You've been dead wrong once. Government intervention works.
>they can't afford to not eat meat protein, and even if there is some (probably imaginary) way for them to do that, it requires a disproportionate amount of effort for them to do so.
Didn't know eating beans instead of meat for protein was a disproportionate amount of effort. It's even cheaper to boot. Those people are not invalids, they just don't care about the lives of farm animals. They may say they do, but their actions prove otherwise.
While you are not wrong about beans as a protein source, this argument always strikes me as a sort of "let the poor people eat bland mush their entire life, and if they want better food they can get rich like me and have meat from ethical sources." A large part of why factory farming exists is to drive down costs as demand rises, but you gotta keep in mind that the demand rises because eating beans and rice for every meal your entire life is miserable.
I find it fascinating that as soon as vegan diet option is up to conversation, people just presume cuisine, cooking and recipes are thrown out of the window. "eat boiled beans with rice", is like claiming all there is to meat is to rip the package open and chew on raw meat with no seasoning is the default way meat is consumed, and make a case from that presumption
The are/became vegan, not Gollum that claim everything should be eaten raw to Sam.
Your point is well taken; I recognize that there are many ways to make beans a staple protein without being a tasteless mush. I am just not sure that every person who says "just eat beans instead of meat" is considering that at the time. Both "meat" and "beans" are obviously reductive, so I can only guess there's some assumption that the reader/listener will adjust accordingly... but it still gives me strong classist vibes when someone associates low wealth/frugality with beans.
I'm a vegan so they would be eating the same food I do. I never eat out and barely ever try the expensive vegan faux-meats.
Adding a few spices and a can of tomatoes make beans and rice delicious. Chana masala, black bean bowls, navy bean soup, the number of dishes you can create from a base of rice and beans is innumerable and they're all relatively simple.
The same could be said about unseasoned chicken meat on rice.
I have a challenge for you. Try live a month eating nothing except for seaweed as your protein source and test how easy and enjoyable it is to completely replace one protein source for an other which has completely different taste, smell, texture, and cultural place in your diet. Bonus points if you actually do not like the smell and taste of seaweed and have to work really hard with seasoning to eat it.
It is vegan. It simply just a very different diet from what you are used to.
Almost every culture has had a bean based dish, and eating meat with every meal is a relatively recent phenomenon in the last hundred years.
There's a reason why I replaced meat with beans and thats due to the flexibility and variety of dishes you can cook with it, across and within cultures.
And there we have it. It is about culture, taste, smell and texture.
All environment and cultures do not have beans in the center. The easiest examples are cultures which predominantly lived on fish.
In North America the three main agricultural crops are winter squash, maize (corn), and climbing beans. It should be no surprise that if you live there, cultural beans are great to you.
Like fish, seaweed is primarily part of the cultural diet in coastal locations. Look at the Māori people and there is a distinct lack of beans in their diet, but seaweed is used just as bean are in north America.
What you call "a hilarious false equivalency" is something I would call a lack of understand and empathy of different cultures.
Nevertheless, that’s the actual change facing most people if you asked them to switch to a vegan diet today. It’s not like they’re eating food characteristic of the 1900s today.
If you can afford meat protein, you can afford protein from plants. There is really no excuse why anyone who is already able to afford a life of the basic comforts cannot do so on at least a plant-based diet, if not a vegan lifestyle.
Plant-based diets being prohibitively expensive is a myth, and nothing more. We know this. Nutrients, proteins, etc. It's all there, and for the same price or less than animal products.
Consumers have driven the market into a race to the bottom. There is effectively no way for the consumer to really know about the comparative difference in living conditions between two packs of meat. There is really no way at all to know the provenance of chicken from a restaurant. Expecting consumers to either do this research or not eat chicken at all is completely unrealistic. If we want to fix this problem it will have to be through regulation. A start would be nasty labeling on unethically generated foods, like the surgeon general’s warning on cigarettes.
No they are not making the choice. There is way too little information to make that choice. Which chicken package tells you how many weeks the chicken lived?
And this type of demand is pretty inelastic. You can make a pound of chicken 25 cents cheaper or expensive an demand won't budge at all.
What you are subscribing to is market fetishism - something that works only in Econ 101 classrooms, not the real world.
Consumers want rainforests to not be destroyed for example. But how many consumers know that they are destroyed due to palm oil production? And which customer has the ability to track down globalized supply chains when choosing an ice cream, when their kids are screaming nearby?
I'm on EBT (food stamps). So I can't always make the choice given a fixed income, even if I could find well treated chicken. So, is it the consumers fault here too?
That's the price we pay for making everything an interchangeable commodity.
If you go to the grocery store, there might be some organic chicken and non organic chicken, but not that much of a choice otherwise. There's no real way to know whether the place treats their chickens and workers well, what kind of feed or environment the chickens live in, if it's a local farm or a mega factory, and so on.
On the upside, the prices are lower and we get any kind of produce year round. On the downside, that produce might come from across the world, be specific breeds that survive shipping well and look good at the expense of taste, and generally not come from local farms but rather large factory farms.
Of course consumers are making the choice. These places don't sell to nobody, they sell to folks who want these products. And so many of the issues with factory farming, like all the issues listed in the article, are a result of supply trying so desperately to meet demand.
When consumer's stop buying, suppliers will stop supplying. As a general rule-of-thumb for whether not any meat is the result of inhumane practices, a safe bet (_very_ safe bet), is that it _all_ is. Just don't buy meat at all and you don't need to worry about whether or not you're ethically sourcing the meat.
I'm on a fixed income. I can't afford the better treated chicken option (usually). I still want to eat chicken, so I'll grab something from the low cost options. I (again, usually) cannot vote with my wallet. I know vegetarian diets can be delicious, but I don't want to ONLY eat vegetarian.
Also, Vote with your wallet works if the consumer has 100% information (usually assumed, but isn't the case in the real world) and enough money to do so (typically this is assumed as well, and again is untrue in practice, e.g. fixed income, low income, etc).
Its so fast now, we're killing 50 billion chickens per year to eat. 136 million per day. 1585 per second. More than 1 chicken per millisecond. Start the stopwatch on your phone and watch those milliseconds fly by. Living breathing creatures raised in tiny cages and never seeing the sky or scratching dirt with their feet.
I get that this is probably mostly sarcastic humour, and
I'm not trying to dispute the kernel of truth. No serious person loses sleep over our mass murder of malaria-carrying mosquitoes.
But there is a line _somewhere_ on the natural spectrum of life forms, from microorganisms, to plants, to bugs and vermin, to dogs, pigs, primates, and humans, where our attitude about loss of life and/or a miserable life changes. Where are you suggesting we put that line?
Well at least those microorganisms had a chance of a normal life, and you did the killing yourself. What gets me about factory farming is the complete hopelessness of an animal born into a factory, reduced by us to being an inconvenient ingredient and nothing more, and how all of that is hidden from the consumer as much as possible, outsourced to a faceless machine.
What's a normal life? I've seen the chicken scene, and I've killed a chicken with my bare hands. I've clubbed a fish and cleaned it. I'm not afraid of where my food comes from. Chickens don't have hope, and I don't project that feeling onto them, just like I don't with microorganisms. Why do you think what you're saying is negative? If this trend tends to infinity we raise chickens instantly and vaporize them into cooked chicken in a blink of an eye.
Chickens want things. They want to walk around the scratch the ground. If you make a noise they'll run away from you - they dont want to get eaten by a fox.
Your comment about microorganisms is about 'where to draw the line' and your comment about 'tend to infinity' implies you like the 'appeal to extremes' form of argument.
I'm interested in what we're doing in the world now and I'm happy to suggest where a line should be drawn. I'm not worried about absolutes.
Aren't they still microorganisms at that point? Don't they have hopes and dreams like animals? Or do we not know about either and are drawing a magical line at some point?
No. A randomly arranged amorphous mass of protein is not a drumstick. There is no bone, there is no skin, there is no cartilage, there is no connective tissue.
Would it not make sense to re-use the circulatory, filtration, energy production, digestive, and excretory systems that evolved over millions of years to locomote chicken flesh, rather than try to re-engineer these systems? Just ditch the brain. If there’s no sentience, what is the ethical difference between this and vat-grown synflesh?
> Your comment about microorganisms is about 'where to draw the line' and your comment about 'tend to infinity' implies you like the 'appeal to extremes' form of argument.
I would say that's accurate. I think extremes can bring out honest positions in an argument. Where would you suggest we draw a line? How long should a chicken live before we decide to kill it?
We could do a lot worse than go with EU Regulation 889/2008 (i.e european definition of organic)
See Article 12 for poultry. There are details about how they should be kept, density, materials (e.g. straw or turf), lighting conditions, access to perches, access to outside space. Minimum age at slaughter is 81 days.
We can barely get people to care about their fellow man, I'm pessimistic about getting people to care about the genocide we commit towards animals on an hourly basis.
Still not quite right; still centers on destruction being the intention. The problem, I think, is that you're reaching for the most emotionally-charged words when they don't actually fit. We don't hate animals; they just taste good. So it's just slaughter on an industrial scale.
Chicken is relatively friendly to climate. I would consider it a good thing if people ate more chicken and less red meat. They are our top animal protein source at scale for least greenhouse gas emissions [1].
The Impossible Burger is supplemented with a ton of B vitamins (for thiamine, several weeks' supply).
Most vegans eat lots of other B containing foods, including yeast (which is after all how plant-eating animals manufacture B vitamins in the first place, by fermentation during digestion). But for those who want to get it along with their protein source, the plant-based meat-simulacra also contain it.
The only reason most meats have B12 is because the animals are supplemented with it as well, because modern farming has sterilized to the point where even these animals don't get enough naturally.
So either way your B12 is coming from supplements. It's either in a pill already, or the flesh of animal who didn't want to die, and they simply took the pill on your behalf.
This is silly. The solution to a vitamin deficiency is vitamins. Clearly they're deficient while eating meat too, so that doesn't seem like a strong argument against plant based proteins.
No, they are not "clearly deficient while eating meat" as you claim. There's a documented B12 deficiency in vegans and vegetarians that isn't present in meat eaters.
Cherry picking one vitamin deficiency in vegans. Omnivores are deficient in other vitamins. The answer is supplementing, not changing foods you eat.
> Omnivores had the lowest intake of Mg, vitamin C, vitamin E, niacin and folic acid. Vegans reported low intakes of Ca and a marginal consumption of the vitamins D and B12.
That does not seem to be a matter of 'practical' but rather a matter of eating preferences.
Honestly our food habits are just out of whack. If you go to any Asian or African country (outside the touristic areas) you'll find how many classical/common dishes taste great without meat. From Chinese noodle soups to Thai curries to Ethiopian bean dishes or Indian anything, you miss neither nutrients nor flavour without meat.
I would argue the vegetarian movement has made a huge impact in reawakening many 'western' recipes which disappeared when near became cheap. From beetroot to Brussels sprouts to pickles to lentil stews and grilled vegetables - lots of things are back on the plate.
All that long said for a short message: yes it can be very practical if we collectively (or individually) want it to be.
That is not the argument, though. I firmly believe that an overwhelming majority of people who read HN would be able to practically remove meat from their diet. It's not about everyone, it's about individuals, and individuals should strive to do their best given their circumstances.
I don't like the dogmatic absolutism as well. All meat? I can't eat sustainably farmed, smoked mussels? And if we are talking vegan I cannot eat sustainable honey or cheese? It's asinine and arbitrary. The vegan/vegetarian cause would create more pragmatic change if it were more welcoming and respected those who are willing to cut back.
You get slammed for people not liking your response, but yet your point is spot on. The number of vegetarians has been pretty steady over the last decades in the US. Hoping people become all vegetarien isn't practical. If I was a dictator I'd ban meat eating, but I am not and that's good.
As always: it's not allowed to ask for better people! We need to create a system that makes the wrong people do the right thing.
People aren't liking the response because it seems like it is saying "it isn't practical for me to take on this tiny inconvenience for the betterment of the world".
I have to admit as a meat eater that Impossible ground beef substitute is “there” on a taste basis now.
If they can get it to 25% of its current cost, I could see it become viable to replace many uses of ground beef now. If they get it to 12-15% of its current cost, I think it would displace a massive percentage of purchases of meat protein. It really is good, not just “edible” and I can imagine they’re nowhere near the economic minimum cost to produce.
It's just one step on the way to growing muscle tissue in a controlled environment without the actual animal.
But, not be pedantic, but chicken evolved as a domesticated, food-producing animal. They're "meant" to make food, either via eggs or meat, not to have a specific lifespan.
> But, not be pedantic, but chicken evolved as a domesticated, food-producing animal. They're "meant" to make food, either via eggs or meat, not to have a specific lifespan.
I think it's slightly more complicated than that. The history of domestication is one of long-term relationships: we have historically bred animals not only to produce food, but also to serve roles (foodwaste removal, fertilizing, haulage) that aren't necessarily best served by rapid growth. Industrial agriculture has removed the need for most of those roles, but they're still very visible in the selected features of popular breeds.
>I think it's slightly more complicated than that. The history of domestication is one of long-term relationships: we have historically bred animals not only to produce food, but also to serve roles (foodwaste removal, fertilizing, haulage) that aren't necessarily best served by rapid growth.
What can you do with a pig other than eating it? As for chickens/cows, I'm fairly certain that the males are basically only useful for meat.
Pigs have historically served foodwaste and sanitation roles. But you bring up a great point, and it’s one that anthropologists have remarked on as a potential source for religious taboos around pork (pigs just aren’t that useful compared to other animals).
Male cows are best known in their neutered form (a surprising number of people think that oxen are their own species). They’re instrumental beasts of burden. But again, industrialized agriculture doesn’t have much use for them.
>Pigs have historically served foodwaste and sanitation roles.
But that's not the primary function right? In other words, once the pig is fat enough to eat, it's slaughtered. This is as opposed to something like a chicken where it's deliberately kept around even when it's ready to be eaten.
>Male cows are best known in their neutered form (a surprising number of people think that oxen are their own species). They’re instrumental beasts of burden
Are those the same breed? Presently we have different breeds of cattle for different purposes (eg. the black and white kind for milk production). Is that a relatively recent development? Or were there "milk cows" and "beef cows" back in the day as well?
> But that's not the primary function right? In other words, once the pig is fat enough to eat, it's slaughtered. This is as opposed to something like a chicken where it's deliberately kept around even when it's ready to be eaten.
Nobody said anything about it being their primary function! As the original article mentioned, most chickens weren't kept for meat purposes until the 20th century. We're talking about what domesticated animals are "meant" to do; the answer to that is a multiplicity (with perhaps one "primary").
> Are those the same breed?
There are lots of different breeds of cattle, but yes: the word "ox" specifically refers to any male cattle breed that's been neutered. The distinction between "beef cattle" and "dairy cattle" is a modern one (with modern breeds), contemporaneous with industrialized production of both dairy and meat.
> They're "meant" to make food, either via eggs or meat, not to have a specific lifespan.
By this standard, there is no such thing as abusing a domesticated species. They're "meant to" satisfy human need X, and everything else is irrelevant.
Just changing that around a little kind of reflects what's happening in the office the past few decades.
>amplified by confinement, and while the developers come out of those cubes fatter, they tend to get sicker, too. They have insatiable appetites, which leaves them stressed, as evidenced in their poor reproduction capabilities, cardiovascular failure and skeletal problems. They’ve been pumped with so many antibiotics, they’ve developed resistances. The Developers weak legs and overworked hearts strain every week their lives are extended.
" I think consumers need to take more personal responsibility in what kind of practices their wallets are supporting"
Ok. So, has the market gotten to the point that even in small towns, people can choose more humane meat? They have "free range eggs", and I pay for, basically, "free range plus", but these aren't really humane, only better: Are there other commonly available options? (Im personally pescetarian leaning heavily into vegetarian: I don't know about meat options available)
I don't think everyone is going to go vegan (it is hard to balance the nutrition) and even vegetarian isn't going to be everywhere if there is a culture of meat-eating, so the best thing we can do is less* meat, and the meat we have is humane.
But we are back at the beginning: There is realistically no way to speak with your wallet since a lot of places simply have no choice - and no way to verify claims (they might be as misleading as free range eggs).
This pretty much put us at the point where if you are moneyed enough, you can source it: Everyone else has to hope that government changes rules enough so that everyone can choose humanely produced meat.
Chickens can achieve the age of ten under special circumstances (pet chicken protected from predators)
Chickens in their wild habitat will live a year, two maybe three before succumbing to predators or disease.
So if you have a hen and it’s over 3 years old, it’s older than most chickens in the wild. You should feel as guilty as a fox feels if you have it for dinner.
“Upon examining poultry carcasses from Britain’s Iron Age and Roman and Saxon period, the archaeologists discovered these chickens of yore lived between two and four years”[1]
Edit 2: another article that seems legitimate suggests 10 years as the lifespan for the Junglefowl.[4]
I had difficulty finding the lifetime of wild Junglefowl, but they live longer than domesticated chickens e.g. “In captivity, the lifespan of the Red Jungle Fowl averages 15-20 years”[2] which suggests that the wild ancestors lived longer than you might suspect. Edit: Following the link shows that number is made up, sorry “Maximum longevity: 30 years (captivity) Observations: Chickens are considered a relatively short-lived and fast ageing species (Holmes et al. 2003). The maximum longevity in captivity of these birds, however, has been reported to be 30 years (http://www.demogr.mpg.de/longevityrecords). This is not impossible considering the large number of animals kept in captivity, yet remains unproven. For comparative analyses the use of a more conservative value for maximum longevity, such as 15 or 20 years, is recommended. Domestic chicken reach sexual maturity before six months of age.”[3].
An increase in size and growth rate has caused the meat of the muscles to become harder and rigid in texture, giving a distinctive bulge to the breast and becoming known as woody breast chicken. The chicken, even when cooked well, is harder and chewy.
The white stripes that occur visually look like white lines running across the breast, tendons and thigh. A woody breast will feel firmer, like an incredibly tough muscle. When touching regular chicken breast the flesh is soft, you can press into it. Woody breast is simply firm to the touch, you cannot press into it (Kuttappan, V.A., et al., 2016). Occurrences of the woody chicken breast, as well as white stripes on chicken, have increased from around 1.4-8.7% in 2012 to a shocking 25.7-32.3% in 2015.
It's really hard to avoid. It seems like every package of chicken has one of these thrown in with a few good ones. I usually end up checking them all and throwing the bad one out. It's terrible.
After learning about this and how to look at it I look at chicken closely now before buying. Most of the time I can’t even get chicken that isn’t woody, just less woody than the other packages around it. Even the more expensive “organic” chicken seems to suffer from it.
I gave up on chicken years before I went vegie. They we treat these creatures is disgraceful and disgusting.
Now, I am not the type to advertise my diet unless it comes up at lunch with people who don't know me or something like that. But I am not ashamed to share that cultured meat is something I've been looking forward to with great interest for all sorts of reasons.
Do what usually happens is there's at least one person to point how unnatural cultured meat sounds and that I will never work because it's disgusting.
Can't help but lol every time. I guess eating sick young chickens, who have never seen the sun, is more natural an healthy.
Eating chickens is natural. Just like fish eat other fish, or cows eat grass. We eat all sorts of meat because the nutrition helped (and helps) our brains to develop into the big squishy ones we need.
Will cultured meat have the same outcome? Who knows.
Here I thought this was going to be a literally true headline, i.e. a report on a taste test of a new cell-ag product wherein preserved tissue samples from the 1948 chickens were used for the cell line that was cultured into the reporter's meal. It'd be a happier story, too.
(One of the chickens who contributed tissue for Eat Just's cultured chicken product lived out his life at an animal sanctuary near the Bay Area. But due to the breeding practices referenced in the article, it was, sadly, a short life.)
Aurochs[1] were large wild cattle that went extinct. The meek domesticated chicken on the other hand has done extraordinarily well, evolutionarily speaking. The same goes for corn, which couldn't survive in its current state without human cultivation. If rhinos and other threatened species were somehow domesticated to be used for food or leather, like cattle, we'd probably have a lot more of them around.
I am not sure that the lens of what you label "evolutionary success" is useful in any way. Would you rather a billion humans in Elysium or a trillion humans in Hades?
The big question: did we cultivate agriculture or did agriculture cultivate us? There wouldn't be 7 billion humans without industrial agriculture. You wouldn't exist. I wouldn't exist.
Ants have a symbiotic fungus in their gut that they use to digest food. We have corn that we use to digest sunlight. Chickens that could not survive on their own now are the way we can turn carbohydrates into protein. Computers turn electricity into cognition. We will probably take chickens and corn with us to other planets.
A farmer friend of mine told me that the chickens must sent to the slaughterhouses at a certain time, since beyond that, the chickens have heart attacks... the heart can't support the load placed on it.
I somehow doubt that. My mom raises chickens for eggs and they live a couple of years. She used to free range them but lost too many to coyote attacks, so now she keeps them cooped.
The ENTIRE point of the story is that industrial meat farmers raise a breed of chicken which has been engineered to only live a short lifespan before consumption. Laying hens are a completely different breed, so your mother's experience is not relevant.
If you have ever killed and eaten a laying hen you would know how tough that meat is. We definitely bred some mighty tasty chickens. I do think we could maybe refine them a bit for flavor and extend the time a bit more or less to get a more or less gamey flavor depending on preference.
Also air chilled chicken is where it’s at. So much better than the water bath cooled ones
Chickens are meant to be able to live to around 10 years old as well which makes this even worse to me. There's nothing humane or natural about it. I think consumers need to take more personal responsibility in what kind of practices their wallets are supporting.