You're viewing a single thread.
I eat meat but I still won’t buy factory farmed stuff. I went into the supermarket the other day and even the cheapest “value” eggs were free range.
How do you verify what you eat isn't "factory farmed"? Do you eat meat, eggs, dairy, etc. out at restaurants ever? Get store-bought foods created on a production line that have those products? If your barometer says "free range means not factory farmed", then your barometer for this is likely extremely faulty.
A friend of mine has a farm and adopts the occasional "free-range" chicken (which just means there is some outside part accessible from the cage). They are so heavily bred that they kept falling over because their breasts were too large, so they wouldn't move much. This is always what I think about when I read free range. Basically a chicken too fat to move that can look outside an open window.
99% of meat consumed in the US is factory farmed. If you bought it in a supermarket, it came from intensified animal agriculture, regardless of the feel-good marketing language.
It's always so depressingly funny to me that the default response by meat eaters to being presented with the unfathomable cruelty of factory farming is some combination of denouncing it while still:
- saying they don't participate in it but failing to explain how – despite how incredibly difficult and meticulous that would be (arguably somehow moreso than a plant-based diet)
- saying they try not to participate but never explaining what "trying" means or making any indication of concrete goals
- or elaborating only to show through regurgitating industry buzzwords that they live in a fantasy land born from a cocktail of wishful thinking and corporate astroturfing.
... And then, as you point out, after all that, the amount of meat in the US not produced via factory farming is functionally a rounding error. Someone's lying to someone here, and my hot take (as someone who used to say these same things) is that it's carnists to themselves.
Your first point is literally why I went vegetarian. I tried getting meat out of sources that I could ethically comply with but gave up after a while. If you live in a city it is practically impossible.
I say vegetarian, because I eat the occasional egg if I personally know the chickens and their living conditions.
I think most of them know on some level that their arguments don't make sense, but sometimes their cognitive dissonance requires them to type out some self platitude.
I personally think this is part of a growth process. I certainly remember writing things I thought that maybe I was wrong about, but leaving it to someone else to tell me exactly why.
Provided Source: Trust me bro.
I don't blame you for being incredulous. The animal agriculture industry really goes out of their way to misrepresent how poorly they actually treat their animals. That's why there are laws against recording and publishing their practices.
https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-animals-are-factory-farmed
Thanks for the source. I don't expect I'll switch to the diet soon, I'm open. The subsidized protein is really tasty, I'm not in favor of all factory farming. Some factory farms aren't as bad as you think. I have family that farms and many of my friends are family farmers.
Maybe you're in an area with greedy farmers or near something like Tyson.
I buy local when I'm able. Unable to control for everything. Same as any vegan thinking that their fertilizer is all vegan.