Don’t miss what Rachel Laudan has to say about the deprecation of industrially produced food in favor of all that is thought to be artisanal, local, seasonal, traditional, and natural. It’s full of policy implications and makes a super-useful gloss on the work of writers like Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman. [Jacobin] She’s also interviewed at shorter length by Todd Kliman at Washingtonian.
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If the politically correct city dwelling proponents of “natural” foods had ever actually slaughtered and dressed animals for cooking, or harvested and canned fruits and vegetables, they might have a bit more respect for food they call “industrial”.
I’ve done those tasks. They are hard, unpleasant, and sometimes dangerous. Anyone who has canned fruits and vegetables, or slaughtered and dressed even one chicken, or cleaned even one freshly caught fish, will understand that.
You have to work very closely with large quantities of boiling water (for fruits, vegetables and chickens), dangerous chemicals (NaOH for various fruits and vegetables), and dangerous sharp pointy tools (for most everything).
Nutritionally there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between the results.
“If the politically correct city dwelling proponents of “natural” foods had ever actually slaughtered and dressed animals for cooking, or harvested and canned fruits and vegetables, they might have a bit more respect for food they call “industrial”.”
1. Most of them are vegan so they don’t eat meat.
2. If they were doing “natural” meat right, there would be no dressing or cooking.
“Nutritionally there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between the results.”
If you don’t think there’s a nutritional difference between a cow raised on grass and then slaughtered at home versus a cow raised on corn, soy, chicken manure, chewing gum with the wrapper on, and chicken/cow carcasses and waste products and then slaughtered in a factory by illegal aliens on meth…you might be right. Or not.
@A Critic, setting aside the issues of flavor, there are roughly 8.3 million people in New York City, alone. Average beef consumption in the US is just under 58# per person according to the USDA (http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/commodity-consumption-by-population-characteristics.aspx) per the data published in late 2012 (64.5g/day). That’s 481,400,000 pounds retail weight of beef consumed by the city.
Rosie Nold of SDSU at (http://igrow.org/livestock/beef/how-much-meat-can-you-expect-from-a-fed-steer/) indicates only about 40% of the live weight of a cow becomes retail weight, so we need a bit over 1.2 billion pounds of beef cow to provide all that meat. Assuming an average cow weight of 1,200 pounds (http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/stelprdb1097070.pdf), we need about a million head of cattle to feed those hungry New Yorkers. The same site provides a rule of thumb that each cow at that size will need between 1.5 and 2 acres on which to graze, or 1.5 to 2 million total acres. For reference, Rhode Island is about .67m acres, Delaware about 1.25m acres.
As a practical matter, the residents of New York city can hardly be expected to graze their cattle in an area the size of two nearby states before taking it home for slaughter. The state of New York would need to convert 15% of its land area over to cattle farming to support the beef consumption of its residents based on the above assumptions. You can do similar calculations for free range poultry, swine, milk and cheese production, etc.
The short answer is, there simply isn’t enough space. Modern farming methods, with their cramped conditions, chemicals, antibiotics, fertilizers, vitamins, etc make modern cities possible. Without them, the world simply doesn’t have the acreage to support the current population, and certainly not the population densities which have become commonplace in first world countries.
Your assumption is that A Critic is unaware of these facts, CarLitGuy. That’s a reasonable-sounding assumption, since his word choices are clearly of the “this is disgusting” variety variety.
Assume, however, that A Critic is aware of these facts and his argument becomes an argument for prohibition of meat.
Bob