Thanks for doing the thing you do and writing posts like this.

I've believed for years that it should be required for manufacturers to disclose, and retail stores to post next to products they sell, environmental impact and sufficient information on environmental impact and animal cruelty/testing procedures (numbers and species of animals affected, description of procedures) that consumers can make an informed choice about what they buy. I believe you'd see a lot more sales of range-fed meat and a lot fewer sales of nail polish.

Whenever people can externalize the costs of their consumption and isolate themselves from the effects, they will do it - they'll ignore the long-term costs and the costs to others. And that, of course, is how we get the magnitude of environmental problems and the ever-increasing wealth gap between rich and non-rich.

I demand more humane treatment for lettuce too!

Actually, I wish someone would eat a few of the wild turkeys from around my neighborhood.

You know, I appreciate this post. Even though it sorta is condescending to vegans/vegetarians (which I am), and even though it makes fun of debate (and I am a debate coach).

Speaking of debate and CAFOs, do you know this year's college policy debate resolution?

Resolved: that the United States Federal Government should substantially reduce its agricultural support, at least eliminating nearly all of the domestic subsidies, for biofuels, Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, corn, cotton, dairy, fisheries, rice, soybeans, sugar and/or wheat.

This is what hundreds of college debaters across the country spent their summer, and this entire year, researching and developing. And the year goes on.

So, keep posting great stuff (even though I had already seen that about infant mortality and CAFOs).

Also, if you are interested for something a little less wonkish, and a little more philosophical, I highly suggest Magnus Fiskesjö's The Thanksgiving Turkey Pardon, the Death of Teddy's Bear, and the Sovereign Exception of Guantánamo from Prickly Paradigm Press. You can download it free from the publisher here, http://www.prickly-paradigm.com/paradigm11.pdf
Like the other titles from PPP, it is short, manifesto style pamphlet/book. It is also extremely insightful, grasping the connection between the annual thanksgiving turkey pardon and violence.

Heh. Score a point for Chait, especially for drawing such a defensive response from Klein, who lives in that strange land called "People Who Eat Meat But Bitch And Moan About How Guilty They Feel About It".

Well, I don't know. I'm always grateful when people pay more attention to food production and some of the unbelievable problems engendered by how we produce food, but I wish Ezra weren't such a dilettante about it. Reading yuppies writing to other yuppies about how they perceive the problems is kind of circle-jerkish (reading Michael Pollan doesn't turn you into an ag expert) and in the meantime if you don't actually know any farmers and you live in a city and your food comes from stores there are still some pretty great ag policy blogs out there. If you're actually interested in having the positions you take be at least passably well-informed, that is.

And Chait is doing the same thing, not-so-incidentally. There are a lot of ways to go about getting meat and a lot of different ways of grappling with the various ethical issues around meat production, and Chait's just the flip side of the same old anti-"Green" crap around those.

The world is full of lots of data. There are many relationships between data that are nothing more than a coincidence. The real measure of a study is not finding trends in data, but doing research to determine a mechanism for a link and the causal factors or determining that it nothing more than nothing.

Vidor, are you naturally a low-res reader, or is this a special occasion for you?

It just baffles me that some people assume that people who eat meat don't care where it comes from. Even if a person doesn't care that CAFOs are inhumane and excessively polluting, I would think they would care about the quality of the foods produced by the CAFOs, but special people like Chait and Vidor seem to have a problem with that kind of elementary logic.

I've always found the charge of "defensiveness" extremely baffling. I am defending a position. Presumably I will stick to the rules of the genre.

Klein- You were getting defensive about something in jest. Yes, it was a bit nasty since it was accusing you of hypocriticism, but going into full defensive mode makes you look ridiculous. There's better ways to disarm these situations.

You come off as defensive because Chait never makes much of an argument of any kind -- certainly not that it is outright hypocritical to be concerned about humane meat production methods and to eat meat. He doesn't go very far beyond simply pointing out the juxtaposition of your posts. And your first post doesn't contain any of the nuance of your defense. You're not far in the first post from sounding like we should all be disgusted when presented with any chicken breast at all.

That got cut off. Here's how it was supposed to read:

You come off as defensive because Chait never makes much of an argument of any kind -- certainly not that it is outright hypocritical to be concerned about humane meat production methods and to eat meat. He doesn't go very far beyond simply pointing out the juxtaposition of your posts. And your first post doesn't contain any of the nuance of your defense. You're not far in the first post from sounding like we should all be disgusted when presented with any chicken breast at all.

You filled in a lot of argumentative blanks that Chait really didn't throw a you. You didn't acknowledge the humor that Chait was using to chide you, and this should be lighthearted Thanksgiving blogging, or at least that's what I'd like to be reading tonight.

So that's why you do come off a bit defensive on this -- I don't think Chait meant it as a serious critique of your position, and you have to admit the irony of the posts being adjacent. (Well, I suppose you actually don't.) That's not to say it's not entirely your right to mount a serious defense of you position. Sometimes taking advantage of the levity a situation offers is a good way to do that is all.

In any case, happy Turkeying to all, and especially to Ezra: happy braising!

Um, does the infant mortality study control for socioeconomic status of the population?

I'd think that as the animal population increases, the surrounding area becomes less attractive for residential use, so rents and property values would drop and you'd see relatively more affluent residents leaving and being replaced by poorer people, people with substance abuse problems, etc, who are more likely to suffer poverty-related infant mortality losses.

It seems to be a very different matter if infant mortality rises among the insured middle class because of local farming changes, than if the farming changes and related stink drive out the middle class, bring in the meth addicts, and infant mortality increases as a result.

"""equivalent to the folks who attack Al Gore for wanting cap-and-trade even though he uses light bulbs"""

Ohh come now Ezra, setting up such a ridiculous false argument.

Its not because Al Gore uses a few light bulbs, its the fact he flies around the globe in private planes, and the fact he uses as much electricity as a small town for his on home.
And the fact he got rich of of Zinc mining up until 2003.
Or the fact he lies when he claims he's green when he isn't. He claimed his house boat was solar run then it was found to have TWO 220 outlets plug ins on the dock.

Its the hypocrisy of the Gore, not the fact he may use a light bulb.

But being a liberal reqires him to be a hypocrite. No different then the liberals who oppose guns, but then own then, or the ones that argue for hire taxes, but find every possible loophole to not pay them, or those that argue for equal rights for women in the work place and then support a guy sodomizing young interns in his office.

It requires hypocrisy to live the liberal lifestyle.

What about those that support abortion, and then just throw the meat away?

Isn't that super wasteful?

And is it MORE immoral to eat sausage then to support the slaughter of babies?

"Vidor, are you naturally a low-res reader, or is this a special occasion for you?"

Not low-res at all, thank you very much. I just enjoy seeing the Guilt-Ridden Carnivore set being made to feel uncomfortable.

It's easy to not care about CAFOs. You do it like this: by not caring. It also helps to recognize that eating meat involves, at some point, having that cow/pig/chicken/turkey killed. And frankly it seems a bit ridiculous to become emotionally invested in that chicken having a happy and comfortable life before it's decapitated so we can have hot wings. For that matter, the post that drew Chait's attention was not a spiel on how raising meat is bad for the environment or how it supposedly increases infant mortality--that sounds like an extremely dubious notion unless one can show just how it increases infant mortality, but whatever. It was one of Ezra's sermons about how slaughterhouses are SO MEAN and SO IMMORAL and that darn it, if people were more aware of that they'd eat tofu burgers. And that post was right after a post about how to cook a turkey, which was what made it ridiculous.

But by all means, let's hear more about how we can still eat meat as long as we feel appropriately sad about it. At least vegetarians are intellectually consistent.

You were getting defensive about something in jest. Yes, it was a bit nasty since it was accusing you of hypocriticism, but going into full defensive mode makes you look ridiculous. There's better ways to disarm these situations.

Yes, it was a bit nasty since it was accusing you of hypocriticism

hypocriticism?

frankly it seems a bit ridiculous to become emotionally invested in that chicken having a happy and comfortable life before it's decapitated so we can have hot wings.

No, it makes total sense. Animals don't have the mental hardware to care about their long-term future, so depriving them of a future isn't as bad as depriving humans of a future. However, they can feel intense pain, so you need to worry about making sure you don't cause pain to them.

Vidor wrote:
"It also helps to recognize that eating meat involves, at some point, having that cow/pig/chicken/turkey killed."

But what you can't get "ethical" veg*ns to admit is that eating stuff like organic rice involves LOTS of vertebrate animals being killed. Even worse, those deaths are optional, but they don't care.

"And frankly it seems a bit ridiculous to become emotionally invested in that chicken having a happy and comfortable life before it's decapitated so we can have hot wings."

Why? The proper balance is to give more moral consideration to those animals we exploit than to the ones we don't.

"But by all means, let's hear more about how we can still eat meat as long as we feel appropriately sad about it. At least vegetarians are intellectually consistent."

They're anything but. They blather on about "cruelty-free" diets but they neither know nor care how many animals are killed in the process of providing them with their grains and veggies.

Hell, the elk in my freezer involved no cruelty or suffering, and the vertebrate death/calorie ratio is about 1000-fold lower than the ratio for organic rice.

Why do only animals that are eaten after death deserve the moral consideration of veg*ns, Vidor?

Okay, JAM, I'm a vegetarian and I'll bite: why does organic rice cause animals to die?

Humanitarian concern for food animals and the environment isn't in tension with meat-eating, but it is in conflict with the foodie preoccupation with culinary quality. The leisured problematization of perfectly serviceable cooking procedures; the rejection of mainstream tastes and traditional recipes; the economically privileged reveling in an impractical variety of ingredients, and the consequent blurring of the line between the essential and the complementary; the insistence on getting flavors and textures *just so*, which though thinly masquerading as savoir-faire is really just slavish adherence to trends (e.g., turkey brining). Lightly flipping back and forth between ethics and extra-special-just-right yuppie recipes would look frivolous even if you were vegan. The last twenty years or so have been one authenticity-and-quality craze after another: fresh herbs, olive oil, heavy-bottomed saute pans, organic produce, free-range meat. I am far from convinced that the Pollan craze is anything but the latest trend in food as status marker: ethical superiority as the ultimate refinement in taste.

You are a young man with a steady job in an advantageous locale. No family to feed. If you really want to seek ethical, workable solutions you have to put yourself in the shoes of people who are price-sensitive and pressed for time. Women who experience convenience foods as liberation from traditional subservience (hint: just about all of us). People whose bland, mainstream tastes are never going to change; the kind of people who can't taste the difference between butter and margarine. People to whom the perfect appearance of mass-marketed fruits and vegetables is important because, unlike you, they have extensive experience shopping for produce that looks bad because it *is* bad.

I don't buy the argument that those people would be starving without CAFOs etc. But everybody eats, so food policy has to be universally relevant. Sometimes the food awareness movement seems like a masturbatory fantasy of having the nation's food production tailored to the tastes and proclivities of the privileged few; "Pollan for AgSec" being the most egregious example of that insulation and frivolousness. If we're going to compromise efficiency in favor of ethics, how will we keep people at the lower end of the economic spectrum from getting the short end of the stick? Under the present system the lower classes eat better, and more easily, than ever in history. The number of people who are willing to question the trade-offs is small and somewhat self-limiting. Widespread sustainable agriculture would certainly improve *your* access to the kind of food *you* like (mine as well); we can't plausibly say the same for majority, at least not from the present vantage point. How do you get around that?

(Don't say "food stamps.")

If you have own a pet you are part of the problem.

eating stuff like organic rice involves LOTS of vertebrate animals being killed.

And people like me who oppose lives of horrific animal suffering, but don't worry so much about causing quick deaths, are fine with that.

"Why do only animals that are eaten after death deserve the moral consideration of veg*ns, Vidor?"

Don't ask me. I'm perfectly happy to eat my delicious hamburger for lunch without engaging in whiny masturbatory self-flagellating rhetoric about whether or not Bossie had a happy, cozy life before somebody shot a bolt through her forehead.

tomemos asked:
"Okay, JAM, I'm a vegetarian and I'll bite: why does organic rice cause animals to die?"

Animals drown when fields are flooded, animals are dessicated when they are drained, shredded when rice is harvested, and poisoned where it is stored, sorted, and transported.

Moreover, avoiding pesticide use only increases the number of vertebrates who die these deaths.

Neil wrote:
"And people like me who oppose lives of horrific animal suffering, but don't worry so much about causing quick deaths, are fine with that."

Most of these deaths are anything but quick, Neil. What's quick about dessication? What's quick about dying via internal hemorrhaging caused by warfarin?

What's quick about dessication? What's quick about dying via internal hemorrhaging caused by warfarin?

It's quicker than the entire life of a hen in a battery cage.

"Most of these deaths are anything but quick, Neil. What's quick about dessication? What's quick about dying via internal hemorrhaging caused by warfarin?"

Watch out, man. You might take away someone's moral high ground. (Remember, if a mouse dies, it doesn't count.)

Neil wrote:
"It's quicker than the entire life of a hen in a battery cage."

Yes, but both are a lot slower than a bolt to the brain or a shot in the heart. Besides, hens don't suffer to the extent that mice and rats do.

Are you beginning to grasp the fact that the variation in animal and death within the food categories "animal" and "vegetable" is far greater than the difference between the means of the categories?

And since all of us can choose our diets, the means are utterly irrelevant?

Can you show me a single person, who claims to be concerned about animal death and suffering, who uses that as a criterion to choose among nonanimal foods?

But what you can't get "ethical" veg*ns to admit is that eating stuff like organic rice involves LOTS of vertebrate animals being killed. Even worse, those deaths are optional, but they don't care.