[Happydayz]

I usually bring up a similar point when people criticize modern agriculture and food production.

Right now someone can buy a pound of ground beef for around $3-4. After tax that represents around 30 minutes of labor for a minimum waged employee.

It is absolutely remarkable that our lowest skilled, lowest productivity workers, can afford a pound of beef for 1/2 an hour of work.

Obviously there are clear environmental issues here, and we are not taking into account all the externalities associated with meat production. But that figure above, and what it represents in terms of human nutrition, should be breathtaking.

[toothbrush]

That's only because we're exploiting other living species, which are much less able to defend themselves than we are.

A society should be judged by how it treats its weakest members, and if you ask me, that's the battery hens and mass-farmed pigs in their crowded "flats". The atrociously low price of meat is actually not at all a mark of civilisation, but rather of barbarism towards animals. Animals which, might i add, consistently turn out to be more intelligent that we originally thought.

Everybody should read Eating Animals by J.S. Foer, it's surprisingly level-headed and non-ranty, but even so, it's hard to ignore what goes on in the food industry.