I really don't think there's anything morally wrong with eating critters like shrimps. It is just not true that ALL animals are alike. It is mammals that have complex feelings, it is mammals that understand what is happening. It is mammals that are fundamentally just like us, not oysters or tiny fish.
cognitive studies do not support this; fish pass the mirror test for self awareness etc the reality is that all life came from the same source so it's kind of illogical to think only 1 branch can have similarities to us
I don't really know how to feel about this stuff, but the mirror test is pretty suspect. And I'm not even sure self awareness is the same thing as whatever it is we want to measure to determine the moral weight of an entity.
we don't actually know what consciousness is so we have no way to measure it that's why we use self awareness, pain response to negative stimuli etc; technically I don't actually know that *you* are conscious, you might be a philosophical zombie, pure input and output with no cognition in between, but I don't think you should be farmed
You are really rolling out THAT study on the Bluestreak cleaner wrasse? Well, news to you: It really, really doesn't mean what you think it means. That fish has specialized neuronal networks that detect parasites and it detected a parasite, duh. It doesn't have the wetware to process complex emotions, because for hunting parasites you don't need them.
Large fish that hunt/feed in groups have a simple form of social intelligence, think of that what you will, but it's not enough to pass the mirror test.
Dolphins and Orca pass, of course, because they are whip-smart mammals.
And the second branch that passes is birds. They're smart as heck, they are also nothing like us. A very different form of smart, so make of that what you will again.
"Same source"-mumbo jumbo: Yes, GOD made this planet and this planet only utterly special and we're so, so, so sacred and holy because if it. Of course.
I don't see the point of this comment, it detected a nonexistent parasite by looking in a mirror, so it had to be aware that it was itself in the mirror which is the goal of the mirror test
for a long time we assumed other animals like birds could not process similarly to us because they had different brain structures but we see that the corvid NCL functions like our frontal cortex, so assuming that fish aren't processing pain because they have different wetware is a fallacy ; on top of this fish have been shown to have stress reactions to negative stimuli like venom aka pain
The difference is this: specialised parasite-detecting networks were triggered and looking for a solution until they found one. They can make the logical leap given a vexing situation with no other solution. That does not mean the fish is running a permanent self-model in higher consciousness as that would be extremely costly in terms of metabolism, even more costly in the absence of a specialised network evolved for the task.
Stress reaction: yes, just like trees and many other plants fish do have a stress reaction. They can suffer, just like trees.
Physical pain: yes.
Psychological pain: In the case of fish that is mostly a no. No permanent self-model firmly linked into endocrinal pathways.
In the case of birds that is a yes. But while pigs have exactly the same fundamental emotions we have, birds have reached a similar level of complexity so differently, that we should not map our emotions unto theirs. They are complex, they have an emotional life (they mourn) and they are alien.
What makes psychological pain special is that it never stops. It is ongoing and ongoing torture. When you have evolved to operate on the basis of a permanent self-model, you cannot simply shut it down. You cannot simply forget, either.
Shrimp and fish can swim around during their lives. Sure being a vegan is optimum. Most people can’t sustain it. I don’t think we should let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Eat pasture raised eggs and chicken, wild caught salmon, grass fed dairy, pink veal. All these labels do a lot to eliminate the cruelty from our system, and that makes a huge difference.
It is the result of converging goals for the lobby that drives industrial animal farming of pigs, chicken, beef and salmon in factory farms and consumers who believe that cheap food is a human right, as well as weak politicians who dare not tell voters that ethical values come at a cost.
One of the reasons why I am not an automatic friend of big, continent-wide legislation (which, in our case, means federalization of the EU of which some dream).
A sufficiently determined lobby will always try to push through extremely unpopular measures like "You have to allow keeping pigs in tight crates" (which is the topic of this article), or "We will read all of your messages for your own good" (Chat Control, which fortunately failed, but there is a sequel with verification of age on the Internet).
Given how distant the imperial capitals are from the actual people, they may well succeed, and none of the smaller entities, be it states or constituent countries, is allowed to opt out and try something different.
This is a recipe for making catastrophic mistakes (or sins) on a continental scale.
It is not that hard to live on a plant-based diet, even if you slip some of the time. My plant-based friends and family members (and I am plant-based when I am with them) have all chosen the path because of practices like this.
It’s telling that you consider an occasional deviation from a pure vegan diet to be a “slip”. You have turned it into a religious practice. The virtue comes not from strictness of adherence but from the reduction of cruelty for which such deviations are trivial and unworthy of notice.
Yeah, vegans need to live in reality. They will be never convince the general population to stop using animal products, much less stop eating meat. Higher welfare standards for pigs is a worthy, achievable goal.
In addition to knowing that pigs are treated the worst, so paying more for e.g Applegate bacon, it’s also useful to know that cows have the worst environmental impact among the commonly eaten meats. So maybe make your beef go farther with stews, ragus, sauces sometimes. These choices are practical for most people who want to keep eating meat.
Any suggestions for GLP-1 users ? High protein density is the way to go,I think.
One cant eat large volumes. This points toward meat-sorry to say it. I do avoid pork-and cephalopods-as I appreciate how intelligent swine and octopus are.
Plants co evolved with animals. The reason why the soil is so good in places like the great plain states is because of all the buffalo that used to migrate across the plains.
The problem is that we separated the plants from the animals and so now we spend huge amounts of money on synthetic fertilizers
Well, also having a problem with concentrated animal waste in our feedlocks
This is the argument Michael Pollan gives against vegetarianism. He admits though that when you have a healthy ratio of animals and plants, the vast majority of the life is still plants - especially in terms of life cycles and when you can eat them.
But it’s also unclear to me that we can grow enough food for humans under the methods he recommends without destroying even more wilderness for agriculture.
Ain't gonna happen. The mostly GOP Farm States have a lock on the ethanol racket. Just ask Joni Ernst. Ethanol, except maybe hypothetically during a war, is incredibly inefficient and wasteful. A total boondoggle, cynically sold in Blue states like CA through greenwashing.
The US Senate is the core of GOP power; wherein a tiny minority of Red State voters elect a plurality of Senators, with Hawaii & Rhode Island being Dem outliers.
It's also about the suitability of different types of terrain for agriculture. In other words, hilly/rocky/arid terrain is much more suited for grazing. While flat prairie is usually prime land for crops.
It also bears mention that the Save Our Bacon (SOB) Act that reaffirms the Hog industry practice of using gestation crates, and wants to prevent California and other (Blue) states from banning them, was decided on party lines.
I’d be fine with free-range animals raised on marginal land that isn’t suitable for crops, converting inedible biomass (like grass) into meat or milk, and being slaughtered humanely.
Lab grown meat and dairy can’t come soon enough. Greener, cleaner, safer, humane/guilt free/morally superior, and best of all, for meat lovers you can fine tune the meat to come out exactly how you want it. Perfect wagyu steak, bluefin tuna, pork belly, chicken ranging from fat free breast to oily dark meat for all sorts of dishes, you name it. The only barrier is the the famous meat producing regions of the world and their associated lobbies pushing back. But as with everything that is superior in the long term, it’ll prevail if anything eventually due to economics (mass production and distribution) and superior quality, even bringing over those who don’t care about the welfare aspect.
Timely post, we’re staying at a place in rural Fukushima Japan, I asked for no beef as we don’t usually eat red meat and that usually covers it for us, instead they served us….horse 😐🫠
We already have great plant based meat alternatives. Those are affordable, nutritious and in your grocery store NOW. Animal cell cultured meat will likely remain unaffordable for decades more. The technical and cost barriers are VERY high.
All of these folks saying 'I'll go vegan as soon as cultured meat comes along, promise!'. Yeah, what is wrong with impossible burger? It will always be cheaper and healthier than some vaporware 'cultured meat'.
I don't think I've seen that we have healthy alternatives that are on par with meat gram for gram. The alternatives tend to have starches and fillers and then lack naturally a lot of micro-nutrients that meat provides, e.g. very bio-available heme iron, zinc, creatine, B12, etc. Even the protein they provide is inferior (often pea protein or soy). I don't think that current alternatives are healthier than quality pasture raised beef, and likely will be nutritionally inferior to cultured meat when we solve that.
Factory farming has serious moral problems, but meat is something we evolved to eat for pretty obvious reasons. Meat in it's natural form is quite nutritious for humans.
I truly believe that when cost comes down, people will eat cultured or lab grown meat - a lot.
Meat provides a lot of nutrients that most Americans already get enough or too much of. So lots of nutrients (and meat) are good in moderation (a fraction of american dietary levels), but can be problematic at high levels. For example, saturated fat (animal especially), heme iron, leucine, and cysteine. The first is the major cause of heart disease, the last three increase cancer rates. Impossible has plant based saturated fat (appears better than animal fat), leghemglobin (may be as bad as heme, no data yet), and a healthier amino acid profile that is still 'complete'.
B12 and other vitamins and minerals... yeah, plant based eaters get those, like omnivores, from non-meat foods, supplements and fortified foods.
The documented benefits of the low doses of meat micronutrients (creatine and carnitine) are likely less than provided by the fiber in the plant based product.
I'm not really debating the qualities of typical American meat-eating diet vs plant based. Most Americans don't eat well, this is well known.
I'm saying that it's hard to argue that a plant-based burger patty is better than an actual burger patty (especially if pasture raised, grass finished, etc).
We agree that Americans eat too much junk and its not healthy.
But I AM arguing that on a gram for gram basis beef is less healthy than Impossible. The saturated fat composition and fiber content of the latter is likely healthier for CVD, and the amino acid profile is less carcinogenic.
CVD and cancer being the two top killers of Americans, and much less common in folks eating a lot less or no meat.
Plant based meats are higher sodium, that can be problematic for some people, but most folks add salt or a salty seasoning/sauce to meat anyway.
I'm really not sure that the science would agree with you here.
I think if we take into account poor diet, it changes things. But assuming all things equal, i.e. the individual eating the patty is otherwise eating healthy, balanced diet, not obese, exercising, sleeping well, etc etc. So we're only looking at the nutrient profile of the two products, gram for gram, the beef is better: superior protein, better nutrient density, naturally rich in B12/iron/zinc/choline/creatine, low sodium, minimally processed.
The only vitamin that plants do not produce or utilize is B12. There are however, other sources for it, including the vitamins themselves. All the other metabolites that you cited are present in plants. The plant based chorizo that I buy at the store taste just like the traditional one.
You wrote "and then lack naturally a lot of micro-nutrients that meat provides, e.g. very bio-available heme iron, zinc, creatine, B12, etc."
You are contradicting yourself from your original posting. If plant based meat is equivalent to animal sourced one, then the idea of either being healthier to the eater no longer applies.
I am arguing that place based meat alternatives (like Beyond or Impossible, and especially more traditional ones with beans and soy flour) are inferior to meat.
Not that a plant based diet can't get the needed nutrients. We're comparing products.
4 oz of pasture raised beef vs a meat alternative burger. The original poster suggested the meat alternatives were inexpensive and healthy... they are neither.
I don't think they're great. In fact, I've tried all of the widely available ones and while some are better than others, none of them are great. I'm so excited for when they do get to that point, though!
Lots of professional chefs who've been cooking meat at truly elite (Michelin, James Beard etc) levels for their whole careers have been disagreeing in blind taste tests. They've been really positive about the results, it's just the scaling problem we're facing right now.
Lab grown meat will be complicated. If you think of all the tasks that the environment has to perform (metabolism, immune system against invasions of bacteria, removal of waste etc.) and aggregate them together, you end up simulating almost the entire organism. Maybe you can reduce its brain to something insignificant, maybe.
The Amish in our community raise and slaughter pigs. The pigs do take up a lot of room, and it’s not a pretty business from beginning to end. However, nothing is locked away or hidden from view. From anyone, children included. As my neighbor tells me, once you raise your own meat, you find yourself eating it less.
I think that basic understanding has escaped most of us.
I...don't think this is true at all. I live in a rural area. Small holding farmers, including my FIL, raise and butcher their own meat all the time. They don't seem to eat less of it. Maybe even more.
I don't understand how people can deny the suffering when so many slaughterhouse or factory farming expose videos exist. Literal screaming from these animals. It's evil.
I'm not a vegetarian either, but I do only buy meat that is pasture farmed. I'm lucky to live in an area that provides this, though the cost is obviously higher.
Ideally the transition to lab grown products will be quick, but even if they end up being the cheapest option I imagine there will be a persistent cultural aversion, both through naturalism fallacy and the 'back in my day' factor.
When pocket-book collides with abstraction, pocket-book wins for most population other than the kind of economically comfortable well-educated who inhabit these spaces.
It’s not abstraction when you’re actually seeing the videos of the torture. Which is why the defenders of torture have passed laws saying that anyone who films torture without stopping it is guilty of the crime.
Well when you all can force the entire working class population who like eatying cheap piggies meat for a nice video education class - or indoctrination in the true correct way of thinking then it will cease to be abstraction.
In the meantime I take the general population as they are - vanishingly unlikely to sit down for any such thing and placing their immediate pocketbook agenda over abstract concerns
You think somehow I am defending the pig farming - I am not, I dont like it in the least.
But the past 10 years should teach you people a goddamn lesson about how much reach your concerns have in the face of wider population pocket book concerns. They may be morally "deplorable" but they vote.
A reasonable argument. Except that a more traditional diet based on, say, beans and rice, and other plant based staples is both cheaper AND healthier than an american-style level of meat eating.
Americans eat lots of factory farmed meat because they choose to eat lots of meat, and the factory farmed variety is more profitable to sell to them.
The 'choose to eat lots of meat' is due primarily to intensive advertising and influencer campaigns, which have many american men convinced they will waste away to stringbeans or turn into women if they don't.
Supplementing seems fine, but aiming to get rid of all synthetic fertilizer means a material proportion of the human population starving to death. Modern humanity depends on the Haber–Bosch process to be able to feed itself.
Folks have always loved ham and bacon. Before beef and chicken were bred in the last couple decades to have much higher fat ratios, bacon and ham were the fatty meats that people craved most.
Problem: pigs are omnivores, and were historically raised in pastures where they could forage a variety of foods. They grew slowly and were expensive to produce.
So, in the late 1800s folks tried raising them in barns and feeding them corn. Mostly just cheap corn. And surprise, they grew up slowly and sickly on that diet. It didn't work well at all.
So scientists were recruited to study the problem... and voila, they discovered all the major B vitamins. After that, you could raise pigs efficiently on corn and a vitamin cocktail. And factory farming was born.
Oh, it was THEN discovered that a lot of diseases common among poorer HUMANS were actually due to a lack of B vitamins (not them being poor, defective or cursed). And adding the B vitamins to human food worked just as well as adding them to pig food. And fortified foods were born. And improved nutrition among the poor helped remove the permanent underclass.
Yeah, we didn't discover vitamins by studying suffering humans, but rather as a means of building factory farms for pigs.
I completely agree with you. To the degree that their suffering is physiologically possible and observationally likely, animals raised for human consumption should have pleasant lives before a painless death. At the very least, severe physical restraint such as crating should stop. As much as I disapprove of the European Union's suffocating bureaucracy, their Counsel Directive 2008/120/EC requires that pigs have "permanent access to manipulable material" which could range from an abundance of bedding material to toys like inflated balls.
Thank you for raising this issue, which has very low visibility here in Canada and by the sound of it in the USA as well. Properly presented, I think this would be a vote winner.
Thank you for bringing attention to this. As some of the commenters have already evidenced, most attempts to draw attention to animal welfare and alternative foods are met with immediate accusations of virtue signaling or the argument that people won’t do anything that is morally right if there’s any kind of a cost associated with it.
My only further contribution here is going to be to point out that beans and legumes come in dozens of varieties, can be prepared in the culinary styles of dozens of cultures, and are healthier for people and better for the environment, but no doubt someone will heckle me for simply pointing this out. Just because beans haven’t been a part of recent mainstream American cuisine outside of baked beans, chili and refried beans doesn’t mean that those are the only ways to eat them, or the only kinds of legumes in the world.
Probably somewhat hypocritically, pork is the only protein I don't eat. As you point out the combination of smartest and worst treated animals is too much. You mention the economics of not eating pork, that if more people are like me it just makes pork cheaper and more price conscious people will just switch from beef to pork, which does negate the impact I guess. Well, i wasn't going for a social protest, just some peace of mind.
Many analysts have talked about the price of EGGS regarding the outcome of the 2024 election. Even though it the price of eggs was a result of a global zoodemic and not US policy.
So how do politician think? 'A chicken in every pot' has morphed into 'if the price of gasoline or any beloved food staple rises noticeably, I am out of a job'.
I am sure the piles of money from meat packers and other animal ag organizations are also useful for controlling politicians.
Its the same democratic failure mode that leads us to have a puny gas tax that lets us drive much larger cars and adopt EVs slower than other countries. expensive gas == I'm out of a job.
And ofc I would add 'lazy media' to the equation. Its really EASY to track the price of gas/eggs/bacon/beef, and then ask politicians 'what are you going to do about the price of X'? as if its the most important policy question they could ever ask. Or the ONLY question.
Sigh.
Some history:
The greatest achievement of public health policy was the surgeon general's report and the subsequent drop in smoking (40 years later).
The greatest failure was that of the McGovern Committee a few years later than pointed out the ill effects of excessive meat and dairy consumption. The animal ag industry saw what happened to tobacco bc of the SG report, and systematically took over the cmte with shills, retracted the report outcome, disbanded the group, and then discredited the whole thing.
Mainly agree. But I think smoking was curtailed by the messiness of it/second hand smoke issues; eating doesn't have the immediate neighbor effect, except in large, meta ways.
I wouldn't blame meat per se for our life expectancy performance. It's a large vector space of sugars; salts; vegetable fats; amounts; processing; timing; lifestyle; etc. etc.
The McGovern report from 50 years ago aligns quite well with current science. It said to reduce saturated fat, sugar and refined grain consumption, and to increase fiber and vegetables. In 2026, the American diet is now recognized to contain too much saturated fat, too much simple/refined carbs, and not enough fiber or phytonutrients.
As for neighbor effects... we also collectively pay a LOT for the healthcare for folks with all those chronic diseases brought on by the American diet. Smokers that got lung cancer didn't need intensive medical care for decades.
Read more studies. The scientific evidence that excess saturated fat (esp paired with too little fiber) causes elevated LDL cholesterol, atherosclerosis and cardiovascular disease is just as solid as the evidence that smoking causes lung cancer. And nearly as old.
The McGovern report got nutrition right 50 years ago, and the fact that its content is still considered debatable in a comment section in 2026 proves my point above. Industry has successfully been spreading nutrition misinformation ever since to convince people that eating lots of meat and dairy is healthy.
Several commenters here have written about lab grown products solving the whole issue of eating other animals. And that makes perfect sense. But I guess it would ultimately result in the extinction of cows, pigs and chickens as species, right? I guess we could keep some protected so each species still propagates. And maybe it doesn't matter; if pigs have a horrible life from start to finish they'd rather not exist at all? But now I'm getting into the philosophy of pigs, which is pretty unfamiliar terrain.
It's definitely something to consider. But livestock use a LOT of space, and freeing up that land could allow us to return much of it to the wild, providing habitats for a variety of animals and plants.
"...now I'm getting into the philosophy of pigs, which is pretty unfamiliar terrain."
Yeah, I'm wondering. AI tells me that meat pigs nurse for a month; then five months in a crate. Is that a worthy enough life? Or is it better to not have been born? How bad IS the crate? Can we measure cortisol levels? Do we have a baseline?
My wife won’t eat veal. I have eaten veal and may at some point eat it again. Of course, the Bible tells Christians that God gave dominion over the animals. Not an excuse, but just an observation, considering humans kept slaves for centuries.
For myself, I would attack factory farms and, in general, our food production. If you want to know why, in general, Europeans are healthier, it is because they do not live in large countries where factory farming is necessary.
When you have to feed people who might live 2,500 miles away, it has led us to eat 70% highly processed food. I would argue that we need to breakup the four meat packers in the country in lieu of smaller farms.
In Europe, people don’t have large grocery stores in their cities, and they don’t have large refrigerators. They buy their food if not daily, certainly every few days. They buy fresh, unprocessed food.
Sadly, when I was in Amsterdam recently, it was filled with fast-food joints, largely for tourists. It was sad, the Amsterdam I went to in the 90s didn’t have them as they do today. They don’t need factory farms as a country like the Netherlands. Smaller geographic area, smaller population.
California’s central valley is the breadbasket of America, shipping to the East Coast is expensive and requires coatings for fruits and vegetables to limit spoilage.
We do our best to buy free-range chickens and eggs, grass-fed beef. I will endeavor to purchase free-range pigs if I can find them. The key, however, to a healthier America is locally grown food.
One of the reasons I am a vegan.
I really don't think there's anything morally wrong with eating critters like shrimps. It is just not true that ALL animals are alike. It is mammals that have complex feelings, it is mammals that understand what is happening. It is mammals that are fundamentally just like us, not oysters or tiny fish.
cognitive studies do not support this; fish pass the mirror test for self awareness etc the reality is that all life came from the same source so it's kind of illogical to think only 1 branch can have similarities to us
I don't really know how to feel about this stuff, but the mirror test is pretty suspect. And I'm not even sure self awareness is the same thing as whatever it is we want to measure to determine the moral weight of an entity.
we don't actually know what consciousness is so we have no way to measure it that's why we use self awareness, pain response to negative stimuli etc; technically I don't actually know that *you* are conscious, you might be a philosophical zombie, pure input and output with no cognition in between, but I don't think you should be farmed
I didn't make any claims about consciousness.
Notably, there was a study on ants that showed they passed the mirror test!
Disclaimer: I do not eat ants.
You are really rolling out THAT study on the Bluestreak cleaner wrasse? Well, news to you: It really, really doesn't mean what you think it means. That fish has specialized neuronal networks that detect parasites and it detected a parasite, duh. It doesn't have the wetware to process complex emotions, because for hunting parasites you don't need them.
Large fish that hunt/feed in groups have a simple form of social intelligence, think of that what you will, but it's not enough to pass the mirror test.
Dolphins and Orca pass, of course, because they are whip-smart mammals.
And the second branch that passes is birds. They're smart as heck, they are also nothing like us. A very different form of smart, so make of that what you will again.
"Same source"-mumbo jumbo: Yes, GOD made this planet and this planet only utterly special and we're so, so, so sacred and holy because if it. Of course.
I don't see the point of this comment, it detected a nonexistent parasite by looking in a mirror, so it had to be aware that it was itself in the mirror which is the goal of the mirror test
for a long time we assumed other animals like birds could not process similarly to us because they had different brain structures but we see that the corvid NCL functions like our frontal cortex, so assuming that fish aren't processing pain because they have different wetware is a fallacy ; on top of this fish have been shown to have stress reactions to negative stimuli like venom aka pain
The difference is this: specialised parasite-detecting networks were triggered and looking for a solution until they found one. They can make the logical leap given a vexing situation with no other solution. That does not mean the fish is running a permanent self-model in higher consciousness as that would be extremely costly in terms of metabolism, even more costly in the absence of a specialised network evolved for the task.
Stress reaction: yes, just like trees and many other plants fish do have a stress reaction. They can suffer, just like trees.
Physical pain: yes.
Psychological pain: In the case of fish that is mostly a no. No permanent self-model firmly linked into endocrinal pathways.
In the case of birds that is a yes. But while pigs have exactly the same fundamental emotions we have, birds have reached a similar level of complexity so differently, that we should not map our emotions unto theirs. They are complex, they have an emotional life (they mourn) and they are alien.
What makes psychological pain special is that it never stops. It is ongoing and ongoing torture. When you have evolved to operate on the basis of a permanent self-model, you cannot simply shut it down. You cannot simply forget, either.
Shrimp and fish can swim around during their lives. Sure being a vegan is optimum. Most people can’t sustain it. I don’t think we should let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Eat pasture raised eggs and chicken, wild caught salmon, grass fed dairy, pink veal. All these labels do a lot to eliminate the cruelty from our system, and that makes a huge difference.
You may be interested in the Shrimp Welfare Project. https://www.shrimpwelfareproject.org/
It is the result of converging goals for the lobby that drives industrial animal farming of pigs, chicken, beef and salmon in factory farms and consumers who believe that cheap food is a human right, as well as weak politicians who dare not tell voters that ethical values come at a cost.
One of the reasons why I am not an automatic friend of big, continent-wide legislation (which, in our case, means federalization of the EU of which some dream).
A sufficiently determined lobby will always try to push through extremely unpopular measures like "You have to allow keeping pigs in tight crates" (which is the topic of this article), or "We will read all of your messages for your own good" (Chat Control, which fortunately failed, but there is a sequel with verification of age on the Internet).
Given how distant the imperial capitals are from the actual people, they may well succeed, and none of the smaller entities, be it states or constituent countries, is allowed to opt out and try something different.
This is a recipe for making catastrophic mistakes (or sins) on a continental scale.
Yes. What happened to letting states become incubators and laboratories for new policies?
To lower the price of meat?
It is not that hard to live on a plant-based diet, even if you slip some of the time. My plant-based friends and family members (and I am plant-based when I am with them) have all chosen the path because of practices like this.
It’s telling that you consider an occasional deviation from a pure vegan diet to be a “slip”. You have turned it into a religious practice. The virtue comes not from strictness of adherence but from the reduction of cruelty for which such deviations are trivial and unworthy of notice.
Yeah, vegans need to live in reality. They will be never convince the general population to stop using animal products, much less stop eating meat. Higher welfare standards for pigs is a worthy, achievable goal.
In addition to knowing that pigs are treated the worst, so paying more for e.g Applegate bacon, it’s also useful to know that cows have the worst environmental impact among the commonly eaten meats. So maybe make your beef go farther with stews, ragus, sauces sometimes. These choices are practical for most people who want to keep eating meat.
The environmental claims are mostly vegan activist bullshit.
It's not difficult. The problem is that I find all non meat sources of protein that would substitute to be barely edible.
Any suggestions for GLP-1 users ? High protein density is the way to go,I think.
One cant eat large volumes. This points toward meat-sorry to say it. I do avoid pork-and cephalopods-as I appreciate how intelligent swine and octopus are.
Except plants need animals.
Plants co evolved with animals. The reason why the soil is so good in places like the great plain states is because of all the buffalo that used to migrate across the plains.
The problem is that we separated the plants from the animals and so now we spend huge amounts of money on synthetic fertilizers
Well, also having a problem with concentrated animal waste in our feedlocks
This is the argument Michael Pollan gives against vegetarianism. He admits though that when you have a healthy ratio of animals and plants, the vast majority of the life is still plants - especially in terms of life cycles and when you can eat them.
But it’s also unclear to me that we can grow enough food for humans under the methods he recommends without destroying even more wilderness for agriculture.
Get rid of the ethanol mandate. About ten percent of total farmland in the united states is currently being used to put fuel in cars
Then, switch to regenerative farming for the rest of it
Ain't gonna happen. The mostly GOP Farm States have a lock on the ethanol racket. Just ask Joni Ernst. Ethanol, except maybe hypothetically during a war, is incredibly inefficient and wasteful. A total boondoggle, cynically sold in Blue states like CA through greenwashing.
The US Senate is the core of GOP power; wherein a tiny minority of Red State voters elect a plurality of Senators, with Hawaii & Rhode Island being Dem outliers.
It's also about the suitability of different types of terrain for agriculture. In other words, hilly/rocky/arid terrain is much more suited for grazing. While flat prairie is usually prime land for crops.
It also bears mention that the Save Our Bacon (SOB) Act that reaffirms the Hog industry practice of using gestation crates, and wants to prevent California and other (Blue) states from banning them, was decided on party lines.
I’d be fine with free-range animals raised on marginal land that isn’t suitable for crops, converting inedible biomass (like grass) into meat or milk, and being slaughtered humanely.
Yes, are chickens are all pasture raised. Mainly used for eggs.
We also got two Jerseys and were going to milk them, but though we bred one we never got around to milking her.
I should note we also have several bee hives, and love having them. It's so cool to see them buzzing around all the flowers.
Lab grown meat and dairy can’t come soon enough. Greener, cleaner, safer, humane/guilt free/morally superior, and best of all, for meat lovers you can fine tune the meat to come out exactly how you want it. Perfect wagyu steak, bluefin tuna, pork belly, chicken ranging from fat free breast to oily dark meat for all sorts of dishes, you name it. The only barrier is the the famous meat producing regions of the world and their associated lobbies pushing back. But as with everything that is superior in the long term, it’ll prevail if anything eventually due to economics (mass production and distribution) and superior quality, even bringing over those who don’t care about the welfare aspect.
Timely post, we’re staying at a place in rural Fukushima Japan, I asked for no beef as we don’t usually eat red meat and that usually covers it for us, instead they served us….horse 😐🫠
We already have great plant based meat alternatives. Those are affordable, nutritious and in your grocery store NOW. Animal cell cultured meat will likely remain unaffordable for decades more. The technical and cost barriers are VERY high.
All of these folks saying 'I'll go vegan as soon as cultured meat comes along, promise!'. Yeah, what is wrong with impossible burger? It will always be cheaper and healthier than some vaporware 'cultured meat'.
I don't think I've seen that we have healthy alternatives that are on par with meat gram for gram. The alternatives tend to have starches and fillers and then lack naturally a lot of micro-nutrients that meat provides, e.g. very bio-available heme iron, zinc, creatine, B12, etc. Even the protein they provide is inferior (often pea protein or soy). I don't think that current alternatives are healthier than quality pasture raised beef, and likely will be nutritionally inferior to cultured meat when we solve that.
Factory farming has serious moral problems, but meat is something we evolved to eat for pretty obvious reasons. Meat in it's natural form is quite nutritious for humans.
I truly believe that when cost comes down, people will eat cultured or lab grown meat - a lot.
A complex question...
Meat provides a lot of nutrients that most Americans already get enough or too much of. So lots of nutrients (and meat) are good in moderation (a fraction of american dietary levels), but can be problematic at high levels. For example, saturated fat (animal especially), heme iron, leucine, and cysteine. The first is the major cause of heart disease, the last three increase cancer rates. Impossible has plant based saturated fat (appears better than animal fat), leghemglobin (may be as bad as heme, no data yet), and a healthier amino acid profile that is still 'complete'.
B12 and other vitamins and minerals... yeah, plant based eaters get those, like omnivores, from non-meat foods, supplements and fortified foods.
The documented benefits of the low doses of meat micronutrients (creatine and carnitine) are likely less than provided by the fiber in the plant based product.
I'm not really debating the qualities of typical American meat-eating diet vs plant based. Most Americans don't eat well, this is well known.
I'm saying that it's hard to argue that a plant-based burger patty is better than an actual burger patty (especially if pasture raised, grass finished, etc).
We agree that Americans eat too much junk and its not healthy.
But I AM arguing that on a gram for gram basis beef is less healthy than Impossible. The saturated fat composition and fiber content of the latter is likely healthier for CVD, and the amino acid profile is less carcinogenic.
CVD and cancer being the two top killers of Americans, and much less common in folks eating a lot less or no meat.
Plant based meats are higher sodium, that can be problematic for some people, but most folks add salt or a salty seasoning/sauce to meat anyway.
I'm really not sure that the science would agree with you here.
I think if we take into account poor diet, it changes things. But assuming all things equal, i.e. the individual eating the patty is otherwise eating healthy, balanced diet, not obese, exercising, sleeping well, etc etc. So we're only looking at the nutrient profile of the two products, gram for gram, the beef is better: superior protein, better nutrient density, naturally rich in B12/iron/zinc/choline/creatine, low sodium, minimally processed.
The only vitamin that plants do not produce or utilize is B12. There are however, other sources for it, including the vitamins themselves. All the other metabolites that you cited are present in plants. The plant based chorizo that I buy at the store taste just like the traditional one.
I'm not arguing that you can't get all the nutrients needed on a plant based diet. A dedicated vegan can make it work, sure.
I'm just saying you can't argue that a Beyond Burger is healthier than a proper pasture raised burger. It's just not. More moral, sure. Healthier, no.
You wrote "and then lack naturally a lot of micro-nutrients that meat provides, e.g. very bio-available heme iron, zinc, creatine, B12, etc."
You are contradicting yourself from your original posting. If plant based meat is equivalent to animal sourced one, then the idea of either being healthier to the eater no longer applies.
I am arguing that place based meat alternatives (like Beyond or Impossible, and especially more traditional ones with beans and soy flour) are inferior to meat.
Not that a plant based diet can't get the needed nutrients. We're comparing products.
4 oz of pasture raised beef vs a meat alternative burger. The original poster suggested the meat alternatives were inexpensive and healthy... they are neither.
I don’t believe the palate of any vegan.
Palates are not a matter of beliefs. You only have yours and I have mine.
I don't think they're great. In fact, I've tried all of the widely available ones and while some are better than others, none of them are great. I'm so excited for when they do get to that point, though!
The impossible burger tastes like shit and is a highly questionable food science experiment. Also if meat is so awful, why do you want ersatz meat?
I am highly skeptical that cultured meat is going to have the same complexity as real meat.
Lots of professional chefs who've been cooking meat at truly elite (Michelin, James Beard etc) levels for their whole careers have been disagreeing in blind taste tests. They've been really positive about the results, it's just the scaling problem we're facing right now.
Lab grown meat will be complicated. If you think of all the tasks that the environment has to perform (metabolism, immune system against invasions of bacteria, removal of waste etc.) and aggregate them together, you end up simulating almost the entire organism. Maybe you can reduce its brain to something insignificant, maybe.
The Amish in our community raise and slaughter pigs. The pigs do take up a lot of room, and it’s not a pretty business from beginning to end. However, nothing is locked away or hidden from view. From anyone, children included. As my neighbor tells me, once you raise your own meat, you find yourself eating it less.
I think that basic understanding has escaped most of us.
I...don't think this is true at all. I live in a rural area. Small holding farmers, including my FIL, raise and butcher their own meat all the time. They don't seem to eat less of it. Maybe even more.
There should be a word for the sort of person that only consumes what they've killed (butchered, hunted, fished) themselves. Killatarian?
"As my neighbor tells me, once you raise your own meat, you find yourself eating it less."
Not sure about this. I'm in an area where people hunt; fish; trap; and raise their own. Most have two freezers.
You aren’t raising those animals. It’s a different thing.
I very much do; seems quite natural.
What seriously bugs me is all the plastic I throw into the local landfill.
I don't understand how people can deny the suffering when so many slaughterhouse or factory farming expose videos exist. Literal screaming from these animals. It's evil.
I'm not a vegetarian either, but I do only buy meat that is pasture farmed. I'm lucky to live in an area that provides this, though the cost is obviously higher.
Ideally the transition to lab grown products will be quick, but even if they end up being the cheapest option I imagine there will be a persistent cultural aversion, both through naturalism fallacy and the 'back in my day' factor.
Simple
People like to eat meat boradly.
People like to have cheaper food.
When pocket-book collides with abstraction, pocket-book wins for most population other than the kind of economically comfortable well-educated who inhabit these spaces.
Ergo one needs realism
It’s not abstraction when you’re actually seeing the videos of the torture. Which is why the defenders of torture have passed laws saying that anyone who films torture without stopping it is guilty of the crime.
Well when you all can force the entire working class population who like eatying cheap piggies meat for a nice video education class - or indoctrination in the true correct way of thinking then it will cease to be abstraction.
In the meantime I take the general population as they are - vanishingly unlikely to sit down for any such thing and placing their immediate pocketbook agenda over abstract concerns
You think somehow I am defending the pig farming - I am not, I dont like it in the least.
But the past 10 years should teach you people a goddamn lesson about how much reach your concerns have in the face of wider population pocket book concerns. They may be morally "deplorable" but they vote.
A reasonable argument. Except that a more traditional diet based on, say, beans and rice, and other plant based staples is both cheaper AND healthier than an american-style level of meat eating.
Americans eat lots of factory farmed meat because they choose to eat lots of meat, and the factory farmed variety is more profitable to sell to them.
The 'choose to eat lots of meat' is due primarily to intensive advertising and influencer campaigns, which have many american men convinced they will waste away to stringbeans or turn into women if they don't.
Cool story bro.
Oddly though Rest of World is eating more meat and they lack the AMerican Just So Story.
I agree with you about factory farming.
But the solution is regenerative farming, where you bring the animals back to the farms
That way you replace synthetic fertilizer with natural fertilizer which the soil needs
Supplementing seems fine, but aiming to get rid of all synthetic fertilizer means a material proportion of the human population starving to death. Modern humanity depends on the Haber–Bosch process to be able to feed itself.
This is factually incorrect.
Moreover, conventional farming is not sustainable, long term
It is destroying the top soil that we need to grow the plants in
More history from pig husbandry...
Folks have always loved ham and bacon. Before beef and chicken were bred in the last couple decades to have much higher fat ratios, bacon and ham were the fatty meats that people craved most.
Problem: pigs are omnivores, and were historically raised in pastures where they could forage a variety of foods. They grew slowly and were expensive to produce.
So, in the late 1800s folks tried raising them in barns and feeding them corn. Mostly just cheap corn. And surprise, they grew up slowly and sickly on that diet. It didn't work well at all.
So scientists were recruited to study the problem... and voila, they discovered all the major B vitamins. After that, you could raise pigs efficiently on corn and a vitamin cocktail. And factory farming was born.
Oh, it was THEN discovered that a lot of diseases common among poorer HUMANS were actually due to a lack of B vitamins (not them being poor, defective or cursed). And adding the B vitamins to human food worked just as well as adding them to pig food. And fortified foods were born. And improved nutrition among the poor helped remove the permanent underclass.
Yeah, we didn't discover vitamins by studying suffering humans, but rather as a means of building factory farms for pigs.
I completely agree with you. To the degree that their suffering is physiologically possible and observationally likely, animals raised for human consumption should have pleasant lives before a painless death. At the very least, severe physical restraint such as crating should stop. As much as I disapprove of the European Union's suffocating bureaucracy, their Counsel Directive 2008/120/EC requires that pigs have "permanent access to manipulable material" which could range from an abundance of bedding material to toys like inflated balls.
Thank you for raising this issue, which has very low visibility here in Canada and by the sound of it in the USA as well. Properly presented, I think this would be a vote winner.
I am a conservative republican. ( Though also a never trumper)
And I strongly support this message. If you can't do something right, then you probably shouldn't do it at all.
But we can do this right, and it's not that big of an increase in cost
Thank you for bringing attention to this. As some of the commenters have already evidenced, most attempts to draw attention to animal welfare and alternative foods are met with immediate accusations of virtue signaling or the argument that people won’t do anything that is morally right if there’s any kind of a cost associated with it.
My only further contribution here is going to be to point out that beans and legumes come in dozens of varieties, can be prepared in the culinary styles of dozens of cultures, and are healthier for people and better for the environment, but no doubt someone will heckle me for simply pointing this out. Just because beans haven’t been a part of recent mainstream American cuisine outside of baked beans, chili and refried beans doesn’t mean that those are the only ways to eat them, or the only kinds of legumes in the world.
Keep going on this stuff - it is important
I'm surprised by your belief in a god. I'd be curious to read a post where you explain why you believe in such an entity.
I can't actually explain why I believe in God, it's just a feeling. But I wrote a post many years ago arguing that it's OK to believe in God:
https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/76079407981/noah-smith-go-ahead-and-believe-in-god
Probably somewhat hypocritically, pork is the only protein I don't eat. As you point out the combination of smartest and worst treated animals is too much. You mention the economics of not eating pork, that if more people are like me it just makes pork cheaper and more price conscious people will just switch from beef to pork, which does negate the impact I guess. Well, i wasn't going for a social protest, just some peace of mind.
I'm a vegan too, but will skip the Hectoring. :)
Many analysts have talked about the price of EGGS regarding the outcome of the 2024 election. Even though it the price of eggs was a result of a global zoodemic and not US policy.
So how do politician think? 'A chicken in every pot' has morphed into 'if the price of gasoline or any beloved food staple rises noticeably, I am out of a job'.
I am sure the piles of money from meat packers and other animal ag organizations are also useful for controlling politicians.
Its the same democratic failure mode that leads us to have a puny gas tax that lets us drive much larger cars and adopt EVs slower than other countries. expensive gas == I'm out of a job.
And ofc I would add 'lazy media' to the equation. Its really EASY to track the price of gas/eggs/bacon/beef, and then ask politicians 'what are you going to do about the price of X'? as if its the most important policy question they could ever ask. Or the ONLY question.
Sigh.
Some history:
The greatest achievement of public health policy was the surgeon general's report and the subsequent drop in smoking (40 years later).
The greatest failure was that of the McGovern Committee a few years later than pointed out the ill effects of excessive meat and dairy consumption. The animal ag industry saw what happened to tobacco bc of the SG report, and systematically took over the cmte with shills, retracted the report outcome, disbanded the group, and then discredited the whole thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_Select_Committee_on_Nutrition_and_Human_Needs
Result: 50 years later the US has lowest life expectancy among developed countries.
Its not only the pigs who are suffering.
Mainly agree. But I think smoking was curtailed by the messiness of it/second hand smoke issues; eating doesn't have the immediate neighbor effect, except in large, meta ways.
I wouldn't blame meat per se for our life expectancy performance. It's a large vector space of sugars; salts; vegetable fats; amounts; processing; timing; lifestyle; etc. etc.
The McGovern report from 50 years ago aligns quite well with current science. It said to reduce saturated fat, sugar and refined grain consumption, and to increase fiber and vegetables. In 2026, the American diet is now recognized to contain too much saturated fat, too much simple/refined carbs, and not enough fiber or phytonutrients.
As for neighbor effects... we also collectively pay a LOT for the healthcare for folks with all those chronic diseases brought on by the American diet. Smokers that got lung cancer didn't need intensive medical care for decades.
The anti-fat hypothesis is based on reinforced pseudoscience.
Read more studies. The scientific evidence that excess saturated fat (esp paired with too little fiber) causes elevated LDL cholesterol, atherosclerosis and cardiovascular disease is just as solid as the evidence that smoking causes lung cancer. And nearly as old.
The McGovern report got nutrition right 50 years ago, and the fact that its content is still considered debatable in a comment section in 2026 proves my point above. Industry has successfully been spreading nutrition misinformation ever since to convince people that eating lots of meat and dairy is healthy.
Several commenters here have written about lab grown products solving the whole issue of eating other animals. And that makes perfect sense. But I guess it would ultimately result in the extinction of cows, pigs and chickens as species, right? I guess we could keep some protected so each species still propagates. And maybe it doesn't matter; if pigs have a horrible life from start to finish they'd rather not exist at all? But now I'm getting into the philosophy of pigs, which is pretty unfamiliar terrain.
It's definitely something to consider. But livestock use a LOT of space, and freeing up that land could allow us to return much of it to the wild, providing habitats for a variety of animals and plants.
All of our common meat animals live in the wild in at least some places. Their numbers would be far, far smaller, of course.
Have you been to Texas? Pigs are an invasive species in no danger of going extinct.
"...now I'm getting into the philosophy of pigs, which is pretty unfamiliar terrain."
Yeah, I'm wondering. AI tells me that meat pigs nurse for a month; then five months in a crate. Is that a worthy enough life? Or is it better to not have been born? How bad IS the crate? Can we measure cortisol levels? Do we have a baseline?
Here,here! Time for lab grown meat. I still slip up all- too -frequently, but have radically cut meat consumption in recent years.
Morning Noah.
My wife won’t eat veal. I have eaten veal and may at some point eat it again. Of course, the Bible tells Christians that God gave dominion over the animals. Not an excuse, but just an observation, considering humans kept slaves for centuries.
For myself, I would attack factory farms and, in general, our food production. If you want to know why, in general, Europeans are healthier, it is because they do not live in large countries where factory farming is necessary.
When you have to feed people who might live 2,500 miles away, it has led us to eat 70% highly processed food. I would argue that we need to breakup the four meat packers in the country in lieu of smaller farms.
In Europe, people don’t have large grocery stores in their cities, and they don’t have large refrigerators. They buy their food if not daily, certainly every few days. They buy fresh, unprocessed food.
Sadly, when I was in Amsterdam recently, it was filled with fast-food joints, largely for tourists. It was sad, the Amsterdam I went to in the 90s didn’t have them as they do today. They don’t need factory farms as a country like the Netherlands. Smaller geographic area, smaller population.
California’s central valley is the breadbasket of America, shipping to the East Coast is expensive and requires coatings for fruits and vegetables to limit spoilage.
We do our best to buy free-range chickens and eggs, grass-fed beef. I will endeavor to purchase free-range pigs if I can find them. The key, however, to a healthier America is locally grown food.