Saturated Fat Controversy

[The Grand Nudger]

Why would it make any difference whether it's food, medicine, or electronical products. It's a product America produces, which many Americans can't afford to buy, so it's sold to rich people elsewhere in the world. The same is true for food in Ethiopia. And it's not immoral to buy food from there, for the same reason it's not immoral to buy computers from America.

There's no need to defend the morality of your food purchases with me, lol.  

And don't you think that raising chickens may be a slightly better idea than raising cows in the developed world?

Depends on your market and your land.  It can be.  Out here, for the large part, no. We've got guys trying goats and sheep though. For awhile deer made a blip - but that turned out to be a bad idea.

Or, even better, grasshoppers? Grasshoppers almost certainly don't feel pain, so there are no welfare concerns. And raising grasshoppers for food is even more efficient than growing demanding plants such as tomato and lettuce for food.

If someone were buying grasshoppers, and they were fetching a better price than lettuce or tomatoes...then yeah.  If not, no.  

Anyway, done a little reasearch, and it still seems to me that it's true that most of the grain that can be consumed by humans is given to animals. Estimates vary, but if we take the estimate that 85% of grains worldwide is given to animals, and that 80% of that grain isn't edible by humans (and those appear to be the mean estimates), that means that ((100-80)/100*85)/((100-85)+(100-80)/100*85)=53% of human-edible grain is given to the farmed animals today.

No one gives the animals anything.  Producers purchase feed.   If their purchasing power is greater than some hungry persons, then it actually wouldn't matter whether or not a person could eat whatever they're feeding their livestock.  That's the free market for you.  

I don't think that's the right analogy here. For all we know, fish probably don't feel pain. C-type neurofibres are necessary for pain in humans (people with congenital insensitivity to pain have very little of them them), and they are absent or nearly absent in fish. And if they do feel pain, they don't feel it the way we do, so what works for reducing pain in humans and animals related to us may be counter-productive in fish.

Analogy?  What the fuck, lol?  I can tell you with certainty that fish feel pain. Anesthetizing them reduces that..but, more importantly, it makes them just that much easier to handle.  That saves you time, and time is money.  Something similar at play with reducing environmental stress...and here, fish are much more sensitive than cattle. Stressed fish are underweight and/or dead fish, and dead fish stress the remaining fish. That constrains our choices when it comes to what we're going to stock. That's one of the things we're working on. There's less room for error, and it takes a bit more knowledge and a closer eye to operate a recirculating aquacultural system than it does to manage pasture.

Well, yes, most of the people here who have chickens and pigs don't slaughter them themselves, they pay for somebody else to slaughter them when they don't see it. That's, if you ask me, insane.

You appear to be working off of a novel definition of insanity.  Much the same occurs here.  It's rare to find someone equipped to raise livestock and slaughter it within regs.  They're two very different businesses.  We use onsite processing so that we can market our products direct to consumer.   It's a better setup for small operations, if they can swing it.  There are also mobile units geared towards smaller producers, that will come out to the site.  If I weren't doing it, I would be paying someone else to do it - but that would be an additional labor cost for me.  We experimented with live sale, but most of the people who buy fish don't want to clean fish.  Ideally, we'd sell them whole on ice - but here again that just wasn't something that our market responded well to, for the same reason.  Additionally, processing opens you up to liability.

It's a fairly straightforward decision.  If the added risk and costs don't amount to offsetting margins, you don't do it. The majority of american consumers don't kill what they eat, and since they don't have to, you have to have a pretty good pitch to saddle them with the job. Honestly, even if you could, it would just add to waste, and..remember, waste is actually one of those main contributors to hunger. I like to think that people probably should give more thought to what they could and couldn't, in good conscience, kill and process. I understand paying someone to do something you don;t want to do, and aren't any good at - but maybe we shouldn't eat anything that we -wouldn't- kill or process. I'm entirely certain that no one should have anything on their plate that makes them uncomfortable, for any reason - and I remind people that the best way to know what goes into what you eat with confidence is to know the person who made it. Go local.