While I don’t disagree on companies (having always been) getting greedy, getting a whole cooked chicken for 5 bucks is only possible through industrial factory farming of livestock with horrible animal cruelty.
Try raising, slaughtering, plucking, gutting and cooking a chicken for that average price without basically creating a torture concentration camp for chicken.
I wonder if we’ll ever be able to solve the animal cruelty problem through brute force technology. For example, genetically engineer chickens so they simply never grow a brain. Raise the brainless bodies hooked up to an intravenous feeding system. Could cram more of them in a smaller space that way too. Can’t be cruel to a thing that isn’t conscious in the first place. Sort of a poor man’s lab-grown-meat approach.
Amusingly, most people would probably find this a lot more horrifying than factory farms, even though objectively the animals would experience absolutely no suffering whatsoever, as they wouldn’t even have the minds to comprehend anything about themselves or their environment.
As someone who has backyard chickens and has tried raising meat chickens, they are pretty close with the current ones. Regular egg laying chickens don’t have a lot going on upstairs but you can still see them finding (relatively) creative ways to scavenge food and stay safe. Meat chickens just stand there. They can barely move or react to anything. One step above catatonic. They were treated well and given good living situations, but I had to put them out of their misery because they would overeat and had leg problems. It was spooky and sad at the same time.
Honestly I am a bigger fan of vegetarian (vegan) meat supplements. I don’t mind if chemistry gets involved as long as supervision is adequate. In the end, livestock is just a biological “factory” that turns vegetables/grains/grass into tasty meat. No reason that can’t be done without the detour via the living being.
Not everyone’s cup of tea but I was always a huge meat lover and for ~15 years I have committed to only eat meat when I really really want to & focus on quality then. And those times have become less and less, and I can absolutely live with the veggie options.
But I think food chemistry can go a long way and potentially produce artificial meat as well.
Scum-skimming wasn’t hard to learn. You got up at dawn. You gulped a breakfast sliced not long ago from Chicken Little and washed it down with Coffiest. You put on your coveralls and took the cargo net up to your tier. In blazing noon from sunrise to sunset you walked your acres of shallow tanks crusted with algae. If you walked slowly, every thirty seconds or so you spotted a patch at maturity, bursting with yummy carbohydrates. You skimmed the patch with your skimmer and slung it down the well, where it would be baled, or processed into glucose to feed Chicken Little, who would be sliced and packed to feed people from Baffinland to Little America.
There’s that, too. But here in Germany I am pretty sure the rotisserie chicken at a vending truck is not sold at a loss, and I believe you get a half one at 5 EUR, which is still dirt cheap.
While I don’t disagree on companies (having always been) getting greedy, getting a whole cooked chicken for 5 bucks is only possible through industrial factory farming of livestock with horrible animal cruelty. Try raising, slaughtering, plucking, gutting and cooking a chicken for that average price without basically creating a torture concentration camp for chicken.
I wonder if we’ll ever be able to solve the animal cruelty problem through brute force technology. For example, genetically engineer chickens so they simply never grow a brain. Raise the brainless bodies hooked up to an intravenous feeding system. Could cram more of them in a smaller space that way too. Can’t be cruel to a thing that isn’t conscious in the first place. Sort of a poor man’s lab-grown-meat approach.
Amusingly, most people would probably find this a lot more horrifying than factory farms, even though objectively the animals would experience absolutely no suffering whatsoever, as they wouldn’t even have the minds to comprehend anything about themselves or their environment.
As someone who has backyard chickens and has tried raising meat chickens, they are pretty close with the current ones. Regular egg laying chickens don’t have a lot going on upstairs but you can still see them finding (relatively) creative ways to scavenge food and stay safe. Meat chickens just stand there. They can barely move or react to anything. One step above catatonic. They were treated well and given good living situations, but I had to put them out of their misery because they would overeat and had leg problems. It was spooky and sad at the same time.
Honestly I am a bigger fan of vegetarian (vegan) meat supplements. I don’t mind if chemistry gets involved as long as supervision is adequate. In the end, livestock is just a biological “factory” that turns vegetables/grains/grass into tasty meat. No reason that can’t be done without the detour via the living being.
Not everyone’s cup of tea but I was always a huge meat lover and for ~15 years I have committed to only eat meat when I really really want to & focus on quality then. And those times have become less and less, and I can absolutely live with the veggie options.
But I think food chemistry can go a long way and potentially produce artificial meat as well.
Hell yeah, get me some Chicken Little
“The Space Merchants,” Frederik Pohl, good read
And even then, the stores have always been selling rotisserie chickens at a loss to get people in the door.
https://www.seriouseats.com/why-rotisserie-chicken-is-so-cheap-11920596
There’s that, too. But here in Germany I am pretty sure the rotisserie chicken at a vending truck is not sold at a loss, and I believe you get a half one at 5 EUR, which is still dirt cheap.