RE: Saturated Fat Controversy
November 2, 2019 at 4:12 pm
(This post was last modified: November 2, 2019 at 4:40 pm by The Grand Nudger.)
No, I don't mean that there are poor people because they make horrible life decisions. I was commenting on how good financial decisions made by producers are not equivalent to decisions that feed starving people, and, in fact, those good financial decisions made by producers actively starve people. The other side of that is that if those producers made some other choice, there's a very real possibility that -they- would then be counted among the starving. Take as an example a producer here in the bluegrass. Half a million USD can pass through their hands in a season. Their chunk of that half a mil, though, can be below poverty wages. We might imagine that they could just switch crops, but it's not that simple. You could grow beans out here until you were buried in a pile of them..The Kentucky Wonder Pole Bean is famous, a garden favorite.....but there's no infrastructure to store, buy or distribute them, and if you're growing beans commercially, you're growing bush beans with a more compact habit and definite maturation period, amenable to mechanical labor rather than a rolling handpick. Blaming this on politicians is lazy and uninformed.
No, I don't think that owning animals is comparable to slavery, not even remotely. Whether the consequences are good..whatever metric were using for good, is a moot point. Livestock is a non negotiable requirement of feeding people....a job that we're not fully accomplishing yet, no less. The consequences could be terrible..and it would still be a requirement. This may change in the future, though at present there isn't the foggiest idea as to how that may change. You may read things about lab grown meat, for example..but that's ad copy. More fundamentally, even if we stopped eating meat entirely, that still wouldn't remove the necessity of livestock.
We use CO2 to anesthetize animals -before- we do anything like behead them. No one...anywhere..thinks that grabbing an animal out of the yard and chopping it's head off is ethical. I don't know why you think that. It's fucking gruesome. I use dry ice and a cooler, myself - obviously this won't work for cattle, they don't fit in a cooler like my fish, lol. It's that simple...plus, I couldn't afford a legit gassing setup and the whole point of what I do is to come up with ways to cut costs so that poor people can afford to do this for food and profit.
As far as safety measures being useless.....yeah, sure. Go ahead and wolf down a big handful on non rei-d veggies and die from a lethal dose of systemic pesticide. Be my guest. Season your food with e-coli, or any number of other things that would be in your food if you ate fodder. Not that you could even chew it if you tried..since it wasn't bred or grown with you or your teeth or your stomach in mind. The simplest way to put this, is that livestock can process things that we can't, and that can be produced more economically and on more meager land than anything for human consumption can be - other than livestock. This is even more pronounced in what I do...since no human being can so much as breathe in water, let alone subsist on fish food. Think of them as nutrient processing fridges with a slow spool up time. I have serious, fact based reservations on the state of cattle production, as an example...but I do understand that cattle production doesn't have to go the way it currently does and that cattle are a useful tool in combating poverty and hunger.
I'd suggest some of Michael Pollans books and essays to you, as a primer, for a consumer interested in figuring out why (and how) we do what we do. You could get more specific information from extension production manuals...but those guys aren't quite as good at writing as he is, lol..so they won't hold a non producers attention. The short version of a long story is that it's damned near magic..and doesn't work anything even remotely near to the way that people imagine it does.
No, I don't think that owning animals is comparable to slavery, not even remotely. Whether the consequences are good..whatever metric were using for good, is a moot point. Livestock is a non negotiable requirement of feeding people....a job that we're not fully accomplishing yet, no less. The consequences could be terrible..and it would still be a requirement. This may change in the future, though at present there isn't the foggiest idea as to how that may change. You may read things about lab grown meat, for example..but that's ad copy. More fundamentally, even if we stopped eating meat entirely, that still wouldn't remove the necessity of livestock.
We use CO2 to anesthetize animals -before- we do anything like behead them. No one...anywhere..thinks that grabbing an animal out of the yard and chopping it's head off is ethical. I don't know why you think that. It's fucking gruesome. I use dry ice and a cooler, myself - obviously this won't work for cattle, they don't fit in a cooler like my fish, lol. It's that simple...plus, I couldn't afford a legit gassing setup and the whole point of what I do is to come up with ways to cut costs so that poor people can afford to do this for food and profit.
As far as safety measures being useless.....yeah, sure. Go ahead and wolf down a big handful on non rei-d veggies and die from a lethal dose of systemic pesticide. Be my guest. Season your food with e-coli, or any number of other things that would be in your food if you ate fodder. Not that you could even chew it if you tried..since it wasn't bred or grown with you or your teeth or your stomach in mind. The simplest way to put this, is that livestock can process things that we can't, and that can be produced more economically and on more meager land than anything for human consumption can be - other than livestock. This is even more pronounced in what I do...since no human being can so much as breathe in water, let alone subsist on fish food. Think of them as nutrient processing fridges with a slow spool up time. I have serious, fact based reservations on the state of cattle production, as an example...but I do understand that cattle production doesn't have to go the way it currently does and that cattle are a useful tool in combating poverty and hunger.
I'd suggest some of Michael Pollans books and essays to you, as a primer, for a consumer interested in figuring out why (and how) we do what we do. You could get more specific information from extension production manuals...but those guys aren't quite as good at writing as he is, lol..so they won't hold a non producers attention. The short version of a long story is that it's damned near magic..and doesn't work anything even remotely near to the way that people imagine it does.
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