Additionally, while (pun intended) I am not religious about this, I try to avoid eating pork - as pigs are among the smartest animals humans eat (with intelligence comparable to dogs). For a similar reason, I avoid eating octopuses as well.

Also, as a rule of thumb, "less meat is nearly always better than sustainable meat, to reduce your carbon footprint", https://ourworldindata.org/less-meat-or-sustainable-meat.

Not exactly. Supermarkets also jack up prices without any improvement at all.

I.e. better conditions require higher prices, but higher prices can mean better conditions or more supermarket profit. And the supermarket is incentivized to pick profit, together with pretty pictures and words that "suggest" better conditions.

Which is why I don't generally trust the wording on packages with regard to animal conditions. I'm not an expert in which exact phrases legally mean substantially better conditions, vs. which ones sound good but aren't meaningful at all. Nor should I be expected to.

I'd much prefer the government just legislated conditions that are humane. Either animal welfare matters or it doesn't. It doesn't make any sense for it to depend on individual consumers. A few people buying top-tier eggs isn't ever going to improve anything for the vast majority of hens.

A consumer can look up certifications like Certified Humane which does audits on farms to ensure they're following the required standards. While I'm sure it's not a perfect system it does hold farms to some accountability. https://www.aspca.org/shopwithyourheart/consumer-resources/c...

At my local supermarkets, even the nicer ones like Whole Foods and Trader Joe's, I don't ever recall seeing any of those logos on eggs, chicken, beef, anything at all. I'd love to know if I just missed them, though.

Case in point, the first result I find on Certified Humane egg brands, is paywalled

https://www.ethicalconsumer.org/food-drink/shopping-guide/eg...

I’m trying to think of a single example where one of these “vote with your wallet” certification movements have ultimately triumphed and become the new norm… I can’t think of one. Organic might be the biggest success, but even then it’s just an alternative, not a consumer-preference-driven revolution in all commercial agriculture.

The "free range" definition is still pretty permissive, and if you go into the local Trader Joes equivalent (Harris Farms) you'll get a chart prominently comparing how various farms treat their chickens as an explanation why some free range eggs cost $6/dozen while others are $16.

Kids toys.

There are a lot of successful wood kids toys brands now that exist as a backlash against plastic toys. Even mainstream retailers now carry an assortment of wood toys.

Melissa and Doug are one of the largest brands, but others exist as well.

> And I'm not even convinced using wood toys has any advantage over plastic toys in terms of environmental impact or exposition to pollutants for the kids

I think you just argued both sides. :D

Regarding meats - Farm fresh meat is meaningfully distinct, it tastes better. You can get meat from different breeds of animals, heritage breeds or breeds that are not normally sold in the US but that are needed to replicate recipes from other countries.

For toys, there is an arguable environmental improvement buying wood toys, similar to buying nicer organic meats.

Lovevery, a fancy higher toy subscription service, has a lot of wood toys as part of their service, and they've been around since 2015.

Melissa and Doug has likewise been going strong for around 25 years, with at least 10 years of mainstream success.

> They are more expansive though, so they may be used less as disposal toys and live longer which is good, but their reusability won't outlive the fashion

Because of how they are gifted to new families, baby and toddler goods have a lifetime that is basically "until they fall apart".

As an example, my son has a playset from 1992! (Plastic for sure, but wow, durable thick plastic!)

He also has some wooden blocks from his grandmother! (I was a bit surprised to find other kids playing with identical blocks from the same 60+ year old set, but I guess I shouldn't have been.)

Both sides of what? Whether the comparison is valid?

Saying "those shouldn't be directly compared but if you do it anyway it goes the wrong way" isn't arguing both sides. (And a few words to specify less confidence don't change that.)

All that said, my initial reply was wrong because I ignored the "certification movements" part of the phrase I quoted (I honestly didn't notice that) and beyond fear mongering amongst parents (which is pretty easy to do from a marketing standpoint), I also cannot think of any other examples!

Which part of the comment did this? I don't see it.

The second line you quoted definitely doesn't do that. It talks about the environmental/pollution factor being small, but the environmental/pollution factor is not why they said the toys are meaningfully distinct. The factors making them meaningfully distinct don't get elaborated on at all, let alone elaborated on in a way that contradicts the original claim.

Regulations exists to avoid misleading or lying to customers. Many years of deregulation, thou, have increased the number of scams and increased the price of goods and services. Maybe it was not a good idea.

I assume you don't live in a country that forms a government based on elections. If animal welfare mattered enough, it'd be political.

Popular sentiment has had some influence on the human animal, at least. E.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Meat_Inspection_Act

There are ways to assess whether a product meets one's standards. They may not be your standards, but it would meet the median for consumers.

I can purchase poultry from a local farm that has an on-site health inspector, where chickens are free-range. In ovo sexing is coming later for eggs. On the poultry side, life in battery cages by far leads to the most suffering. Absent that, given the right conditions, I find the poultry inoffensive and most consumers would too.

I agree there should be legislation, and that has been happening at the state-level.

If the vast majority aren’t willing to use their wallets to back this or that… sacrificing something vastly rarer, for the average HN reader at least, is just nonsensical.

Most people aren't going to voluntarily send money to the FDA, Social Security, or Medicare, or the courts, or the military, out of the goodness of their hearts. Left to their own devices, they'll freeload. But we all agree these things are important (as evidenced by how we vote), so we pay for them with mandatory taxes.

So your idea that something is nonsensical "if the vast majority aren’t willing to use their wallets to back this or that" doesn't hold water at all. Most people won't use their wallets to back anything, if it's left up to them as individuals.

Seems like it would shut down entire swaths of "I don't wanna pay for your <x>" bitterness and resentment.

It's also way easier to game, which is the problem here: the asymmetry of information is almost total as the consumer will never know anything behind what the supplier is regulated into saying, and even when it is, then anything that will present itself as an alternative will be massively overpriced (that's why organic stuff is twice as expensive even though it has less than a 25% difference in actual yield in the fields).

And again, your belief has zero empirical evidence, products never improve on that basis.

Where it kinda make sense is for veggies/fruits that are not grown with lots of water/fertilized and are not of calibrated genetics but that just gives you better tasting products because they are not engineered for productivity and not too water stuffed and thus have a more intense taste. In practice, if you are going to cook the stuff anyway, it doesn't matter much, it really makes a difference on stuff with no/low transformation.

Everything else "organic" is basically bullshit. Very often, they will sell you worse products at a premium (like the trend of "complete" pasta, where you get to pay more for fibers you can't digest and have bad taste).

I don't think paying more leads to anything indeed. What matters is the actual product choice, but it takes time and you need to be informed a lot, so most people are not able or unwilling to make the effort.

Someone who has time/money can make the effort of going to the local butcher, the preselection is almost guaranteed to be better but that's something only the richest can do nowadays.

Our seawater facility had octopus in several tanks. It became obvious that they easily recognized and differentiated among people who entered the lab. They would approach the front of their tanks when their caretakers (who fed them and cleaned their tanks) arrived, and would hide from the grad students who studied them. When I noticed that decades ago, I stopped eating octopus.

Cows recognize people very well too and will definitely flock to their feeder yet we have been eating them for centuries. In fact, one could argue that to allow domestication a minimum amount of intelligence is necessary in the animal otherwise it's impractical.

Animals have various degrees of intelligence but that's hardly relevant. What matters is that they are not our own species and they are less intelligent than us so we can dominate them.

People have been looking at some sort of morals in the food we eat, especially the animals, as if it mattered or made us better in any way (probably looking for some sort of religion replacement).

The circle of life doesn't care about your morals/feelings and if some other species were to become dominant because of their intelligence, they would gladly eat us.

Eating things in relation to their perceived intelligence makes no sense, but I guess you can very much go into the cult of veganism.

At the same time, I think it's kind of telling of the irrationality in your argument here that, in the first line, you claim that someone's line of thinking is weird unless they took it to the extreme logical conclusion of veganism. Then in your last line you call veganism a cult.

Do you realize that you're arguing in bad faith, or is it unintentional?

I have since started donating to the mentioned organization, because I can't really bring myself to stop eating meat for several reasons (although I do avoid octopus just as you do), but at least this way I believe I might make a small difference.

Also, I recommend not reading the linked post about factory farm hell if you'd like to avoid having horrific descriptions planted in your head for weeks.

Meat was then a part of every meal, because doing otherwise would be socially... embarrassing? Not necessarily in a conscious way, but in a way it would be like giving you kids gruel. (Not that I have a problem with savoury oatmeal now :P)

Then my parents grew up in that environment, and it was just part of the landscape of life. Meals have a meat ingredient. Or meat is the meal.

There's a similar resistance to breakfasts that aren't egg-based. (honorable mention oatmeal again for breaking through) Or a similar resistance to eggs as the protein source for dinners, notice it just doesn't happen in north american cooking very much. Happens in other cuisines all the time though.

I don't think it needs to be some deep seated gene-based flaw (at risk of putting words in your mouth) it only needs to be 'normal', and there's massive resistance to changing what's 'normal' when diverging from 'normal' isn't immediately more emotionally or physically comfortable than staying. Sometimes even then, if it makes you an outlier in the social landscape.

Of course something must die, but it's not because of culture. Even the most devout vegan would surely concede that the plants they eat must die in order to render sustenance from them. The reality we live in, even if we don't like it, is the simple fact that something must die for us to continue living.

Let me (far from a vegan) try to disagree: you can sustainably harvest the fruit or the bark of a plant without killing it, and you can certainly argue that those parts aren't alive in themselves. You could stretch the argument to include the sap and the leaves. Does a mother have to die to suckle her baby?

A really enlightened follower of this argument might limit himself not only to renewable parts of the plant, but also of animals: it's OK to eat eggs, dairy products, honey, blood pudding, but not meat, potatoes or carrots.

Of course, we don't farm those products in a way consistent with not killing the non-productive animals, with the possible exception of honey. But in principle one could.

There is no dairy without lots of dead male cows. “Lacto” vegetarians for ethical reasons are frequently unaware or ignorant of this.

Still, there is a clear and significant distinction between killing sentient life (most animals) and non-sentient life (plants or mushrooms), and there are very few people here who could not feasibly switch to the latter.

Plant vs animal makes little difference from rational point of view, both feel pain and we have no clue telling which one more, not that it matters in this topic. Health wise plants are better, but ideal is as always some middle ground.

Biohack our guts and we can go on whole lives without harming much, jainists would probably be interested.

I never understood that dumb argument. After so much evolution lead us to being an empathic species, of course we have clue of others pain.

Tear off some leaves of a tree in a public space

Tear off some pets legs in a public space

Observe people around you reaction. They’ll have a clue.

Is there any entirely artificial food that doesn't require a previously living thing?

Because food is a way to consume order. In Schrödinger's terms, the food chain is "life feeding on negative entropy". As you go up the food chain more and more complex organisms need to consume more low entropy things to maintain their more and more sophisticated internal structure. There's more energy in the matter of a rock than you'll ever need, but you can't gnaw on the thing to sustain yourself.

That said "life" doesn't necessarily mean "sentient animal". You can certainly expend energy to create artificial food sources but they'll always be lifelike, that is ordered for the reason Schrödinger lays out.

Many of us don't eat low-carb because of some internet fad - we do it because we can see the data from our CGM.

That site says ~$25 per month, which is not a lot for engineer salaries. Or $50/month if you want to make up for your past choices too.

FWIW I've donated a lot to The Humane League and Giving What We Can's Animal Welfare Fund.

And I've always found the argument that "more intelligent/sentient creatures deserve more protection and rights" to be basically a post hoc defense against cannibalism. We can't know what "suffering" feels like to less intelligent and "simpler" animals so why make our sentience a criterion for the morality of eating? Just from a safety concern we shouldn't be eating humans, but not because we "suffer uniquely more" than other species.

It's not some veiled aversion to cannibalism, it's because humans have empathy for other humans, and our empathy for non-humans scales with how human-like we perceive those animals to be. If someone sees intelligence as a defining trait of humanity, then they're likely to empathize with animals that display great intelligence. And if you empathize with the animal, you're more likely to be sensitive to its perceived suffering.

We care much more about an animal's biological/genetic similarity to ourselves, which is why people are comfortable eating octopuses but not lemurs, even though octopuses are much better problem solvers and lemurs are relatively dumb.

We also care more about sociability / the animal's ability to communicate with humans. This is why people are more comfortable eating pigs instead of dogs. Pigs might be smarter, but dogs are much better at communicating with us, eager to please, etc.

Same with dogs.

Using the power of the scientific method, we can form hypothesis. Take a bite out of a few hundred people, give them IQ tests. Give surveys. Use induction.

As our ability to communicate with more and more animals improves with technology, start giving them surveys after taking a bite out of them.

My hypothesis is that every animal along the questionnaire wave front will overwhelmingly self report that they prefer not to be eaten.

At some point, we'll all have to wring our hands about an arXiv preprint where somebody convincingly lets us know that the corn doesn't like being eaten either.

We'll find a few really depressed plants and animals that are ready to be eaten, and some people will propose we make the world a more depressing place so there's more consent in all this. That's a bad take, but the argument will last 1000 years. All the while everyone and everything will keep on eating and eating.

Have you ever sat and thought about all the eating that has gone into making this moment for you? Like, all the eating you've done, all the eating of the creatures and plants that you've eaten have done. All your ancestors. So on and so forth back to the simplest primordial chemical reactions. Life is the tip of the spear atop a long cone of death and teeth gnashing. It's quite horrific.

The universe would be a lot more chill if we could just leave the clouds of fluorine to meditate. They're quite serene when they do that.

Pigs are thought to be closer to toddlers in intelligence and they can use tools without any human help. Personally, I never eat them. Too weird.

You're making a common mistake here, in conflating pigs being compatible with toddlers based on a very limited scope test, with being comparable to toddlers in general, which they are not remotely close to being.

Pigs are comparable to dogs, but dogs are much more impressive overall. Lookup dogs like Chaser, for example, and show me a pig that has ever come close.

People think that dogs are special because they have relationships with them. But that doesn't really make dogs special except as far as the relationship is concerned.

The point is when intelligence of animals is evaluated like this, it's evaluated in very limited scopes, e.g. arithmetic abilities, mental time travel capabilities, abstract thinking capabilities, etc.

To generalize the results from one limited scope test to intelligence in general is flawed and wrong.

> The experimental evidence seems to indicate that pigs are probably smarter than dogs.

It indicates nothing of the sort.

[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/05/07/1092127/the-way-...

I would based on my experience say the pigs are more intelligent than dogs, even the sheep dogs which are some of the cleverest I have seen.

The pigs would be solving problems, building things (the first thing in a new place was always a latrine), organizing their environment but then would take well earned rests. There was a social dynamic to them that was also kind of interesting.

It can be hard to compare the two since we can't compare their intelligence overall as one thing, but have to compare specific subsets, showing dogs and pigs are intelligent in different ways.

I think any claim that one is outright more intelligent than the other is dubious.

Chicken per kg costs as much as beef, if not more. But it is so tasty! They are from another farm, which is also open to visit.

Reducing my meat consumption and going for higher quality helped me to appreciate meat more! It's a speciality. I think about the dish days ahead, what side dish I should make, which wine should I pair it with..

But even with quite hefty price increse, the conditions will still be a living hell. And for an individual eating animals and animal produce is about the most environmentally harmful thing conducted regularly regardless of the price.

So, I think there should be much better regulations about minimal living conditions (though this would face strong opposition).

Additionally, it would be wonderful if every animal-derived product had a recent photo (within the last year) from the exact farm of origin. It would be even better if every food product included a CO2e per calorie estimate (see e.g. https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local, https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-kcal-poore).

There sure are, e.g. anything plant-based! ;)

> Additionally, it would be wonderful if every animal-derived product had a recent photo (within the last year) from the exact farm of origin. It would be even better if every food product included a CO2e per calorie estimate (see e.g. https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local, https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-kcal-poore).

Produce animal welfare and environmental impact are orthogonal, and maybe even somewhat opposed. But both would indeed be better.

It would indeed be interesting if packaging from supermarkets put some estimate of environmental footprint on the packaging. I doubt it will happen: It would thoroughly confuse many consumers that the product with the highest price has the worst environmental impact, and could reduce sales of their highest margin products.

I don't particularly care whether people choose to let the environment or animal welfare prevail, but the choice should be well-informed.

All of this makes it very hard for people who are posturing trying to appear virtuous/moral in their choices (food, clothing, whatever). At the end of the day if you think you are a problem the best solution is to get rid of it...

All the studies about plant-based vs animal food are deeply flawed because they don't compare properly the nutritional profile and ressource intensity. Most of what we feed to animals is waste/byproducts or just not fit for human consumption, but conveniently can be grown in less arable land.

Technically correct, but very very misleading. Yes, methan degrades quickly, but it degrates to CO₂.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane#Atmospheric_methane_an...

This isn't as hard as people make it seem. I live in a city. Yet I participate in a local livestock farm share, the farm is about an hour away. They allow members & prospective members to come in and tour the farm, see the conditions, and their processes. They work to be transparent about everything that's going on. It took me about 10 minutes of googling 15 years ago to find it. The only extra work I've had to do since is once a month go about 30 minutes out of my way to the local pickup spot

Yes, this isn't feasible for every American. Nor could the scale of small farms accommodate that. Yes, it's a luxury. But still, people discuss these things like it's fantasy land and it really isn't.

Not immediately, but if the food-buying public started to prefer doing things that way, eventually the industry would reshape itself to accommodate. Over the span of decades, I figure.

Also, farmed livestock don't automatically exist in a "living hell". Factory farms, yeah, but a properly-managed ranch should have happy, healthy animals.

The situations in which this is the case (which are oversimplified by the doc) are so specific and small scale that to think they will address the environmental impact without acknowledging the insane, unsustainable demand for meat is magical thinking. People love to point to ideas like this and stuff like feeding cows seaweed to avoid the reality of the dire need for significant shifts in our consumption behaviors.

> but a properly-managed ranch should have happy, healthy animals.

again - the percentage of meat that comes from these conditions is so small as to be virtually irrelevant in the context of the animal agriculture industry

Scales with population growth, and immigrants don't come to the U.S. just so they can eschew meat. I don't see what's unsustainable about it. Land-use has barely budged. At any rate if the population didn't grow, the demand wouldn't either. As it happens, global population growth is projected to stall in less than 100 years.

Growth in the 1st world means more emissions and land encroachment, until innovation catches up. Electricity is being abated with renewables, but not concrete, ammonia, plastics, etc. There's no free lunch, if we want the juicy GDP growth, that's the price.

> again - the percentage of meat that comes from these conditions is so small as to be virtually irrelevant in the context of the animal agriculture industry

There's the consideration of our own personal choices and options having a place in the conversation, and the other consideration of prescription for improving conditions and/or emissions.

You think 11-20% of GHG emissions[1] coming from livestock and the insanely high water footprint of meat[2] is sustainable?

[1] https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/food-agriculture-environm...

[2] https://waterfootprint.org/resources/Report-48-WaterFootprin...

Notwithstanding that since global population growth is going to stall anyway, demand for meat will stagnate as well. It could only be "unsustainable" on the conceit that it would skyrocket into perpetuity.

Plenty of things you enjoy and "don't need" necessitate emissions, water, and land encroachment. Increases in efficiency mitigate that. Recently, China's fossil fuel use has plateaued. That is quite an accomplishment because demand for energy had been growing fast.

Even in the US it has been rather stable. There are just more people getting out of poverty on the planet and they won't deny themselves consumption of this beneficial product just to fit to the ideology "du jour".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_meat_cons...

Hm..I think that Gabe Brown would like a word. :) https://www.fwi.co.uk/arable/land-preparation/soils/how-gabe...

You have to recognize that the scale of demand for meat REQUIRES the conditions you find in factory farms. You do not get to keep the same demand while having it all come from Happy Healthy Farm™ for a wide variety of reasons.

Manufactured meat can't and won't replace cattle farming. It still needs vast inputs of energy, water and raw ingredients compared to raising a cow.

But on top of that we don't only get meat from animals (quite a few modern things use byproduct of meat production in fact) and the animals help us re/up-cycle things that would be just a waste otherwise.

All the anti-meat anti-animals' thing is just a new kind of religion that is based on the morals of a few alternative types who want to appear more virtuous than anyone else, in a desperate attempt at faux competition (race to the bottom).

Do you think that the evolutionary goal for animals is "make the most edible mass possible"?

> All the anti-meat anti-animals' thing is just a new kind of religion that is based on the morals of a few alternative types who want to appear more virtuous than anyone else, in a desperate attempt at faux competition (race to the bottom).

What an incredibly shallow reading of an idea that has been around for thousands of years. Clearly a strawman to avoid engaging with important questions.

Care to share some data on that?

It's just feelgood greenwashing for people who don't want to consider changing their diet.

Kind of like the allure of finding people to tell you that butter and bacon are actually superfoods. How convenient that you were already eating those every breakfast.

Who is actually doing that? Who has enough time and money to actually do that? I'm confused because in EU it's an extremely rare thing and as far as I'm concerned in the US you have a whole section just for breakfast cereal.

So surely if there are people doing that, there are the minority and considering how in bad health much of the US population is, maybe, just maybe, they are onto something.

But if one goes to the local supermarket, it's easy to find upbranded labels charging more for who knows what. Probably mostly to fund their marketing budget.

Local farmers markets sell animals that had quite happy lives. Some farms even have live webcams where you can check in on the animals 24/7.

Honestly the prices aren't always that much higher, especially for certain cuts, with prices being at worst, about the same as higher end grocery stores, and at best, halfway between fancy grocery stores and a regular supermarket.

I've seen what better farms look like and I disagree. It most closely matches what consumers want and expect. Suffering is non-zero because it necessitate slaughter, but not as egregious as in commercial agriculture.

In other words, there is a threshold of suffering consumers are ok with.

Could our egg farm sold theirs to some big city for big bucks during the eggsistential crisis? Probably, but they didn’t have it setup and just kept selling through normal channels and basically the same price.

Buying local has an outsize influence for the small increase in price.

Then you have hypermarket chain coming in and telling you they will buy 5,000kg per month, regularly, for next 12 months at lower price, just show it into back of that truck in 1 hour. For much lower price. Still farmers sell to them, so even with their additional 20-50% on top of the cost its cheaper for end customers. Or they subsidize some meat for few days to lure you into shop and bus some other necessities to balance this smaller income.

But it does pile on more proof for that theory that on some level we are just "inteligence" personified and tend to instinctively act in the interest of inteligence as a concept. Probably also why we're nice to LLMs on principle despite them having zero ability to suffer, and we like to fantasize about making galaxy spanning alliances with smart aliens.

My deontological take is that animals deserve the right for bodily autonomy. Violation of that, even if painless, is unethical.

Plus we all know that most animals are factory farmed and suffering and pain there is not limited to the time of slaughter.

I said all animals deserve a lack of suffering. It sounds like you agree with that.

I said the reason to avoid (or not avoid) killing animals is a different reason from pain. You gave a reason based on bodily autonomy, so it sounds like you agree with that statement.

We might disagree on the specifics of bodily autonomy, but I made my previous post focused and kept those specifics out of the argument.

Modern educated humans are so smart yet so dumb. The city dweller that has never suffered the relentless drive of nature to fuck with him (and instead, sometimes eat him) is quite a specimen.

If all humans had the IQ of a waffle, then it would be reasonably fine to farm humans.

Matrix is a story were sentient machine use humans as feed for energy so not extra-terrestrial but somewhat close.

In the secular world in the West, even human life in itself isn't considered sacred, as exemplified by sentiment on abortion. The moment we pop out into the world though, we assume personhood and are protected by the social contract.

And even if I bought the more expensive animal products it would also not in any way affect the animal's living conditions.

The price of an animal product in no way affects the way the producer treats the animal. You have the causation completely backwards.

Take poultry as an example, standards vary by county, but the differences between quality labels can be stark. Cheap poultry is often raised in tiny indoor cages and they need to be pumped full of antibiotics due to the unhealthy living conditions. On the other end of the spectrum, organic poultry is free to roam in fields and the coops are regularly moved or kept clean, avoiding the need for antibiotics in the first place.

Even if you disagree that the latter provides a better quality product, it's pretty clear that supporting brands with higher standards results in better living conditions for the animals.

All else being equal, providing betting living conditions should increase the cost to the farmer. But thah A implies B does not mean thah B implies A. Not everything thah increases production cost is better animal living conditions.

I don't care that much about individual carbon footprint personally.

It does not. Farms will happily eat the additional earnings and wont improve animals living conditions just because they have money. What improves animal living conditions are regulations and their actual enforcement. That may raise cost of the meat, sure. But just paying more wont improve nothing.

Also, this article looks extremely deceptive. "Feed and excreta at the bottom of warm, unaerated fish ponds can create more methane than cows" - more than how many cows?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-64814781

Billionaire Egg Baron Pays Contract Farmers Just 26 Cents Per Dozen - https://farmaction.us/exposed-billionaire-egg-baron-pays-con...

Paying more could improve living conditions, but without directly forcing farms to provide better conditions, it won't.

i think there is something to this, it's about being able to relate to the animal more, making it more digusting. At some point also lactobacillaceae are living beings, is it unethical to eat bread then? Plants also have a level of intelligence. To me these living beings are so far removed from us that it's ok to eat them, mammals are much closer to us, we can empathize with them much more than a fish for instance.

The animals we eat can play fetch, go look up cows. We think chickens are brainless. I don't think a single one of them likes being raised at mass scale in the way we do it. Few can look at it, but so many can debate down to the atom of whether we should stop eating literal matter. I'm not trying to be aggressive specifically towards you, I'm just trying to disturb a lurkers mind that thinks in this way.

No one is going to look at the factory farm videos today, but they will talk their ass off about this topic. I hope everyone makes the pilgrimage to Youtube at the very least to see it every once in awhile.

Do you also forgo chicken?

But my comment entirely missed the mark. It’s referencing the great Pulp Fiction scene.

This article's take is interesting: economic, environmental and cultural factors that gradually became codified as religious identity markers. The tribality of this tracks, the "us" vs "them" has always been and always will be, and people pick the most random things to differentiate the "us" from "them". It makes perfect sense that these desert tribes, indistinguishable cousins basically, would end up differentiating on something so arbitrary.

Whether it originated from an us vs them ideology or not, there were practical benefits for a population that made those choices that would have reinforced it in pre-modern times.

Does it? I agree that the risk of trichinosis from pigs was pretty great until modern disease research, chickens for example are a huge risk of Salmonella, and yet they are both kosher and halal. Conversely, camels are a relatively safe food, but they are not kosher. Rabbits and similar animals are also not allowed, despite being relatively safe. Tortoises and whales are not allowed either, despite not posing any special risks. Neither are eels or catfish, again relatively safe foods.

It simply could be that it didn't need to be proscribed because it was never done.

Since you aren't answering your own question, this is what I could find:

"A find in Israel shows evidence of chicken consumption from as early as 400 B.C.E." [1]

"The Old Testament passages concerning ritual sacrifice reveal a distinct preference on the part of Yahweh for red meat over poultry. In Leviticus 5:7, a guilt offering of two turtledoves or pigeons is acceptable if the sinner in question is unable to afford a lamb, but in no instance does the Lord request a chicken." [2]

So, depending on how you date the Torah, the timelines may or may not overlap.

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/who-were-first-peo...

[2] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-the-chicken-conqu...

This view of the world is so wrong I can't believe it. Even very poor people would eat meat, in fact in the middle age they created a tax around salt because it was used both for meat conservation (giving "salaison") and also nutrition for cattle.

If salt consumption was just for humans and meat consumption was low, such a taxation would have made absolutely no sense, yet this is what they did.

In any case I think it can't be linked to food safety or disease risk, which I have also always found compelling for most of the other restrictions. How it later grew into a general prohibition on mixing meat and dairy I have no idea though.

A previous poster mentioned boiling in milk as mixing death (boiling/eating) with life (milk), as a sort of generic badness.

As giraffe_lady just reminded us, the original prescription is boiling the baby in it's OWN MOTHER's milk. This is not a "put cheese on hamburger" situation, it is an explicit expression of cruelty to the mother and to her baby.

And the prohibition was put in place because boiling babies in their mother's milk was considered a delicacy back then. People used to do horrific shit, celebrating cruelty.

Besides, it clearly seems to have been a “don’t copy the ritual process of this other tribe” rule.

I’m pretty sure I - as an ignorant person in this area - could figure out if people around me sometimes ate something, and then got sick within a few days, that maybe I shouldn’t eat that thing.

I doubt I’d be able to figure out that I should eat something on the basis of people getting sick after not eating a whole bunch of things for a few months.

0 - at least one source I found claimed scurvy symptoms could show up as soon as one month after “severe” vitamin C deficiency, but that “more noticeable symptoms would appear later.

Scurvy became a problem with the age of sail, and even in the 1500's sailors were recommending citrus, making pine needle teas, and similar efforts.

I think it is amazing that people figured out how to treat and prevent scurvy without a functional understanding of biology, and 300 years before Vitim C was discovered.

I think the fact that they DID figure it out supports the theory more than a couple hundred year delay undermines it.

How many tens of thousands of years did people have to figure it out?

Science always has a find an issue, then resolve it any other path is just luck. The sailors of other countries other than Europe did have ways of remedying this issue through various ways.

Detecting a pattern between 2 things that did happened (everyone but Dave ate pork, and everyone but Dave got sick) is orders of magnitude easier than detecting a pattern between something that did happened (this patient got sick) and something that didn't (everyone washed their hands).

If you believed the gods were sadistic bastards, whose power you could call on with an act of cruelty - it wouldn't be such a strange thing to believe, after a rough period of hundreds of years where cruel people rewarded again and again - then a little symbolic cruelty to whet Baal's appetite might seem like a clever move.

https://www.eara.eu/pigs-and-animal-research

Pigs are used when we need models of physiology, like entire organ systems --- to know how something will affect large organ systems (this is also why xenotransplantation focuses on pigs so heavily). They aren't otherwise special when it comes to animal models of human disease. In terms of popularity as disease models they are a footnote. They're so infrequently used that the average survey of animal models of human disease will mention them only in passing, at best. https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/24/21/15821

Pigs are not more likely to give us zoonotic diseases than other animals. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7563794/ They are no more carriers of diseases that we're vulnerable to than cattle or chickens.

> “The primary risks for future spillover of zoonotic diseases are deforestation of tropical environments and large-scale industrial farming of animals, specifically pigs and chickens at high density,” says the disease ecologist Thomas Gillespie of Emory University in the US, an expert reviewer of the report.

This article doesn't include a comparative risk assessment. Why are you confident that pigs and chickens have a similar risk? Do you think that the idea that we are more at risk from more similar animals is mistaken?

I imagine that the risks are very different in the modern factory farming context compared to when we lived intermingled with our livestock. The disease risk may be more in the animal behavior than its physiology, for instance if pigs are more friendly or curious or dirtier than chickens or cows, or if their shit is less solid. Or if their wallows are disease reservoirs.

Secondly, if the health consequences were so obvious, I don't think it'd be one of the world's most popular meats millennia before we had such effective treatments for the parasites that come with swine. Furthermore any persistence in eating it despite knowledge of health concerns would surely point to such a taboo being less likely to be effective.

Third, there's a lot of medical practices we know from the time was known to archaeology and virtually none of it was preserved in the Torah. Even if it is medical advice, it's a rather odd way (rhetorically) to specify a specific danger. Whatever medical policy is there seems to serve the goal of social cohesion. Food preparation has been noted multiple times for confirming long-lost branches of the jewish community when knowledge of hebrew, prayers, circumcision, and other rituals faded.

Finally, this just feels like the wrong way to approach these texts as a primary tool to deconstruct them—without comparison of "sibling" cultures (and the best we can do is what samaritanism? Zoroastrianism at a massive reach?), without archeological positive evidence, there's little room for strong conclusions. The question we should be asking is not where this comes from my why it persisted after people forgot the beginning. Religion may serve as a de-facto method of social control, but to think that the people who constructed such a society were just coating secular policy in a hotline-to-god-special is hard to imagine. Whatever cultural event happened to make the taboo stick was clearly very influential.

However—if there is serious danger associated with which god you worship, having strong, difficult-to-hide signals recognized by both man and god to identify friend from foe is pretty compelling to a such a strongly community-oriented faith.

I think this analysis could be theologically consistent as well because that's a pretty smart play by a God who's trying to get us to be successful, but who also has to make compromises for early humans who need clear simple rules and who aren't yet advanced enough to understand the why/nuance behind a lot of them. It also provides a theological basis for the fact that "Cafeteria Catholics" are the norm because we've outgrown / understand better the basis for those rules.

The clear reality is that most of these rules are just various cultural taboos enshrined as religious rites, some of which are beneficial, many of which are not.

In the course of my lifetime, I have witnessed relatively little open dissent, public or private, by persons who profess to be Catholic, regarding christology and other beliefs expressed in the Nicene creed, recited during every Sunday Mass. Sure, there is some, if you have particular conversations. But I’ve never witnessed any fuming on those matters in the local or inter/national news. A huge number of folks in the pews who grew up post 1960s are very poorly catechized thanks to the multi-decade Silly Season that left many of a couple of generations of Catholics (up to today) confused at best. So in many cases, regarding christology, the sacraments, etc., people aren’t sure what a lot of it means, so they’re not in much of a position to dissent on those points (to be heretics re: those teachings), they’re just clueless.

That is in contrast to the open specific informed dissent, even rancor, public and private, around topics such as marriage and premarital sex, artificial contraception, homosexuality, abortion, IVF, and related. And that’s been going on for ~50 years now, so I assert the rampant heresies of our time are clustered around Church teaching on those matters.

And preventing unwanted pregnancies, and partly to stop a few men from monopolising all the women.

I don't think this has changed.

This is actually the reason, though, you've just got the order wrong. People noticed that pigs sometimes gave people worms. They didn't know why, or under what conditions, but in order to keep tribe members safe, they developed rules against eating pigs. People would ignore it, so rather than saying "there's something invisible in pork that sometimes makes you sick" they just said "God said don't eat it." People listen to that more than other people.

"Originated" however, does not mean that this is actually a compelling reason. Just that someone thought it was. Of course you could argue, "no, it's as safe as anything else if you ..., they could have ...". Maybe they could have, but they didn't.

1) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9501363/

1: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-dawn-of-everything-a-new-hi...

Greeks and Romans were associated with pigs, so the Jews decide that not eating pork should be a symbol of national identity. But then it says people continued to eat pork in the area. Why? Islam naturally doesn't like pigs due to geography, but what about the Jews? How does it become pretty much the thing you remember every time you're out with your Jewish friends?

The Levant area was very multinational. This is one of the things people get confused about in the Bible. Just because somebody is referred to as "A Jew" didn't necessarily mean they were of Hebrew descent or practiced the religion. Especially during Roman times the region was just called Judah. People of the era used the term "jew" generically to refer to people from that region. It didn't mean those people were Hebrew or even particularly religious.

Also the Hebrew people frequently drifted in and out of faith and frequently adopted the practices, religions, customs, and wives/husbands of other peoples.

In fact this is a major theme of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible. If not THE major theme. It follows a repeated cycle of the people falling out of faith, bad things start happening, they beg and plead for salvation, God redeems them only to have the cycle repeat in their children's children.

So anybody who has read the Bible shouldn't be surprised when archaeologists discover pork bones or pagan idols among ancient settlements in the region. This is exactly what one would expect.

> How does it become pretty much the thing you remember every time you're out with your Jewish friends?

Because it is so conspicuous. Pork and pork products are used in a huge amount of foods and products. Even food that doesn't list it as a ingredient in restaurants frequently uses lard as part of its production.

So it actually requires a lot of effort to avoid it and one can't help but noticing when friends need to have special convesations with the waiters, etc.

Archeology tells us that common people of ancient Judea/Israel were more flexible in their practice than post-Roman orthodoxy implies.

From Asherah statues to an entire Temple (Elephantine island on the Nile) working in parallel to the Jerusalem Temple.

The matter of strict adherence as a National identity/religious practice became important following the Diaspora following the Rome-Jewish wars.

Sounds like modern politics.

Because it was cheaper. The article mentions how much easier it is to raise pigs than sheep or cattle. It also touches on the Isrealites being primarily sheep farmers and the Philistines raised pigs. Which is why I think the prohibition was a form of protectionism. It forces people to buy from Hebrew farms instead of the foreign pork.

And even communities that are even further away like Ethiopia, Yemen, and India, are mostly following the same pattern?

Modern Judaism is very much connected to the state of affairs of ancient Israel/Judah from 24 centuries ago.

Apparently pigs can be possessed with sprints. I always assumed that was why they were considered unclean.

From Mark 5: So the demons begged him, "Send us among the pigs, so that we can go into them!" So he let them do this. The unclean spirits came out of the man and went into the pigs

https://biblehub.com/isv/mark/5.htm

Logic has no merit when you're talking about the supernatural, because the rules can be whatever you want. Maybe animals can't be possessed by spirits because God only gave "true souls" to humans, and possessing spirits can only replace "true souls." Maybe they require a brain with a certain complexity which only humans possess. Maybe spirits just think it's gross, like bestiality.

Is the above statement true or false? It's about the supernatural, albeit indirectly, so we can't be sure shrug.

I'm interested to know why these were picked out for prohibition.

The oral tradition of the Torah is even older than the written version, possibly even older than the Greeks themselves (though I'm no historian, so I don't cling to that idea stubbornly.)

I had surgery, and I was allowed to handle the part of my body that was resected. It was a bone and there was still some of my muscle.

I smelled like the best piece of pork. Like if you had a piece of pork from a pig, which that pig clearly was loved so caringly before it was slaughtered: it was worshipped, and massaged, and fed all the best food. That's what my growth suggested, odoriuosly.

(Cue the Mike Meyers joke about loving the smell of your own farts, from The Goldmember movie series..?)

My conclusion is, humans smell like pork so it's just kind of yucky to lust after the taste of another person.

There are still people who are cannibals, tribes. At least back in the '80s I understand there were active tribes in North Asia, according to a college professor's (of mine) direct experience.

Perhaps the pork prohibition also has some anti-cannibal echos in it. You're never sure if your pork stew is grandma?

https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority...

I'd be delicious.

https://youtu.be/gOE-q20RcDM?si=CrT9aV6SwutgZsAG