| Reads like a weak paper. Instead, here's an obligatory PSA to eat your lifestyle and social responsibility "vegetables": industrial meat agriculture is undesirable for 6 factual reasons. 0. Opportunity cost: It's an inefficient use of capital and resources that could be more effectively spent producing a greater volume of calories and nutrition as crops. 1. Pandemic evolution at the agricultural worker<-->CAFO<-->wildlife interface. 2. Antibiotic resistance evolution of harmful pathogens. 3. GHG emissions driving a large fraction of anthropogenic climate change. 4. Vast amounts of air, water, and soil pollution. (Ever seen or smelled a hog farm spraying liquid shit into the air over a waste lake?) 5. Meat agribusinesses from farms to meat processing plants exploit undocumented people, including children too young to legally work, in dangerous and sometimes slavery-adjacent conditions. In fact, meat processing plants advertise salaries in Central and South American newspapers precisely to increase the number of workers they can hire illegally and exploit. Undocumented children are exploited in foster care by being put to work illegally (too many hours, too young) where foster parents take some or all of their wages, or accept kickbacks. (It's a terrible reason to list animal cruelty because no one cares as evidenced by their actions as most people are willing to pretend animal suffering doesn't exist if they don't see it and they get their tasty Big Mac out of it. And too many people will violently argue "MEAT is required for life" and will often present a cacophony of tired, false, dogmatic nonsense to justify their high-consumption lifestyle choices.) |