An anti-animal cruelty group says it has secretly recorded Tyson Foods workers punching, throwing and pulling the heads off of live broiler chickens at one of the mega meat producer's plants in Mississippi

This has historically been an unpopular stance for me to take, but.

I really don't think lab meat is the answer. It's quite an instance of having our cake and eating it - meat comes from the dead. It is the dead. Their body, in your mouth. As it stands that is the reality of what meat is. To say that you want their dead body in your mouth without killing them is to skip quite a few logical steps. It divorces a cause from effect.

You could hold out for the lab meat, yes, a possible but notoriously unscalable solution. When you get it, will you be willing to pay $25 a burger? I doubt it-- but that's the way things are looking, because creating a (naturally impossible) food instead of harvesting from the dead is by definition more expensive.

Can you really harvest billions of dead while respecting their life? At a certain point, your cause (the need for cheap, plentiful meat) creates the effect (the painful death of living beings turned into commodities). How exactly is it supposed to be possible to respect a life when it coexists with a scale almost-literally unimaginable to the consumer? You can't kiss each animal on the head before lulling it gently to death. The animals become numbers, the numbers have no faces, and you kill them however you can.

Billions. B-illions dead, annually, great multiples of the entire human population. That's what it takes to have meat in every city, every restaurant, almost-every building in town. Lab meat needs to get 10x, 20x more efficient to overtake traditional meat production, and then what? Will it taste good enough? Will people pay more for a less tasty burger, on the principle of ethics? If the principle of ethics truly matters, I wonder then why we would strain against all realities just to maintain a dietary staple. It's a dietary staple, yes, but it is a dietary staple and not a necessary aspect of survival.

My point here is that if you want to eat meat, eat it. But don't lie about what it is. It is the living, now dead, slaughtered to fill a stomach. The entire birth and death was for you. And not just for you, but to please your palate. If you don't think it's worth it to birth, raise, and kill them for your palate - don't eat it. Not eating it is infinitely easier than engineering a godly process to combat reality. But if you're going to eat it, own it. Look right at your burger and accept that it probably lived poorly, and died painfully, and you're OK with that, or at the very least tolerant, because your dollar voted to maintain status quo. There's really no other logical approach to this situation. All of the components of this situation exist by consequence, from the factory farm to the abusive workers, and at the bottom of it all is buying the stuff.

/r/news Thread Parent Link - kcentv.com