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Comment by TaylorJEke | Hacker News Reader

The way chickens are raised today is awful, but I don't feel like there is anything we can really do, because the industry is an absolute giant.

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"Be the change you want to see in the world."

Literally.

If moving to a plant-based diet is too extreme, buy organic meats, or locally-raised meats, or have half a steak (chicken breast) at each meal and increase your vegetable and whole grain brown rice portions.

Do something.

Vote with your dollars. Every dollar you spend is a vote for how you want the world to work. Are you an educated voter?

Where I work, we sometimes have Meatless Mondays where a group goes out for a vegetarian lunch. It's a habit that has the capabilities to become viral and I fully support it.

How is buying 'organic' going to help living conditions?

Great point.

Something being organic itself doesn't necessarily help living conditions, so good point to bring up. My understanding is that even most grassfed beef in the US is brought into the factory farming system and grain-fed the last few months of its life (a process grimly known as "finishing")

The catch22 is even more disturbing than that, when you realize as a sister comment said, the organic/ethical foods are normally far more expensive. While this is an academic problem for most of the people here, for some living on a tight budget, it's a make or break for even _having_ meat on the table. I see similarities between the issues of trying to remove junkfood consumption, in that you see the highest levels of consumption in the poorest demographics simply because they don't have any other options. Until we can provide those options, or assisted accessibility to those options, I do not think we will ever break the market for unethical/unhealthy food, flavor and preferences aside.

> I see similarities between the issues of trying to remove junkfood consumption, in that you see the highest levels of consumption in the poorest demographics simply because they don't have any other options.

What about eating, say, a carrot instead of a bag of chips? I can buy 2 pounds of organic carrots for ~$2.50 (probably cheaper non-organic). How does that compare to the average bag of chips?

In many cases, produce quality is lower, selection is less, and prices are higher for produce in stores in poor neighborhoods where this can be less true of junk food.

It's often expensive to be poor.

For a time a friend of mine lived in a very bad area in Philadelphia, a bit off Diamond street. The local corner stores had, at best, potatos, and the semi-local supermarkets scaled pricewise to the college student population nearby. You could probably go out of your way and find some affordably priced, but what is convenient and available pales in comparison to the amount of really questionable foods like chips. (bag of chips is probably 49c, 99c for a big one, by the way. So you could get a bunch of chips for the price of those carrots, similarly, you could get something like 2-3 burgers instead. The prices are not such that the carrots seem appealing)

I could qualify that I'm no currently living in the US. When I was in the US, I remember being able to get bags of mini-carrots for ~$0.99 (can't remember if they were small/large/organic/non-organic).

Don't buy chickens raised in awful environments?

Fight laws designed to silence those who seek to promote transparency in ag business?

Raise your own chickens or buy from farmers you know and trust?

The industry may be a giant, but they still have to respond to market forces. If people don't buy products raised in bad conditions they will adapt or their competitors will.

The most effective way to influence this as a consumer is 1) Don't buy these products (in any form) 2) Do buy products from people who are doing things differently (in ways you approve of) even if very expensive.

Vegetarians do #1, but not #2 - which doesn't encourage a change in practice at all, just a reduction of amounts.

It can be hard to stick to #2 when faced with a $20 roasting chicken, but that's the nature of this sort of change.

editing additions (above is unchanged) because I was obviously not clear enough.

I was responding to a post asking what can be done to change a market like that, not saying anything about the choice of being vegetarian itself.

If you decide to become vegetarian for whatever reasons, that is a market signal. However, it is not a market signal to change how meat is being processed, it is a market signal to reduce how much is being produced under any method.

DeusExMachina's point is fair, eggs are a valid (for some versions of "vegetarian" [1]. The rest of his comment is exactly the same as what I'm saying - by participating in the market but choosing to buy products that are more expensive because of the way they are raised, you are signalling a value for that practice. This is much more effective for change in how that market produces goods than simply not participating.

So to be clear - I'm not making a value judgment on choosing to be a vegetarian, I'm just pointing out something fairly obivous - that not participating in a market is not a very effective way of changing how that market produces things.

[1] in my lexicon vegetarians don't eat cheese or eggs either, which is different from vegan's who wouldn't eat honey for example - but that's not really important

If everyone quit eating meat, I would assume there would be market research into why that happened. Change would then occur. Now, of course that's never going to happen but on the other hand I don't think buying $20 chickens is in a practical sense going to do much, either.

But one of the reasons I'm a vegetarian is not to effect change (because it probably won't) but to simply not participate. I choose not to pay people to torture animals for me by proxy.

It's all philosophical differences, IMO. Fact remains that there are far more people out there that are concerned about saving fifty cents on their next roaster. But choosing not to play is as valid a reason as any, even if it's just so one can sleep better at night.

I've responded to most of this in the original comment, but to one particular point.

I think you are exactly wrong about the effect of buying the expensive version of something early on if it meets your needs. I think of this as necessary but not sufficient to change. Typically these sorts chickens, to stay with the example, are expensive because they are being raised in small numbers, without the advantages of scale and the sort of research that goes int the big producers. Sometimes the farmers themselves haven't really worked out how to do this as well as they can yet, too. If some people who can afford to don't choose to support these people at the price that makes it viable for them, then it will never get past this point, period. If enough people support it though, the interest will be noted, the scale will start to get better, and the price will come down a bit. Not, obviously, to the levels of the price-is-everything practice, but cheaper.

Much like some tech will never really get off the ground without early adopters supporting it.

I don't really understand your comment about vegetarians not doing #2. First, vegetarians don't buy meat, so yes, they don't do #2 because that's not something they would do. No matter how better animals are treated, vegetarians don't eat meat by definition.

Second, it's not even true that they don't buy more expensive products. I'm vegetarian (not vegan) so I eat eggs, but only if they are biological and from free range chickens. Yes, they cost more, but vegetarians don't buy only on cost.

> but only if they are biological...

Aren't all eggs biological?

The French term for "organic" as used in "organic food" or "organic farming" is "biologique", which in its more general use translates to "biological" in English. So I suspect that the intended meaning is "organic" in the "organic food" sense (I've occasionally seen this in English, not sure if it's a standard use from a different English speaking context then I'm used to or a non-standard use.)

But, yes, all eggs are both "biological" and "organic" in the more general sense of those words.

> I'm just pointing out something fairly obivous - that not participating in a market is not a very effective way of changing how that market produces things.

Everyone participates in the market for buying food. There's probably someone out there who has the very narrow goal of changing how meat (and only meat) is produced, but for everyone else this is a strawman argument.

We want to change food production, and overpaying for similar products is obviously going to be less of a signal than larger dietary changes.

This thread is dead now, but a quick response - it's not (just) less of a signal, it is a very different signal, which is important.

I wasn't addressing at all the issue of whether some group of people want to get rid of a product entirely which I had hoped was clear.

"The market for food" is a very broad category and contains many markets.

You may not personally be able to change a company whose practices you are at odds with. However, every time you consume a chicken that was treated in ways that make you uncomfortable, the company must replace that chicken with another one to sell.

In my view, every time you choose to consume (purchase) a chicken that is treated in a way you disagree with, you are responsible for producing a new chicken treated the same way. And every time you choose not to consume a chicken that is treated in a way you disagree with, you have prevented a chicken from being produced under those conditions.

Of course many people will conclude that they'd rather have cheap chicken than treat chickens well, and many more people will simply not think very much about it. But if you are personally troubled by how chickens are treated then I think it's worth thinking about your role in causing that.

Sorry if all that is obvious and you really just meant you don't feel like there is anything you can do to affect greater change. I am only posting it because I have talked to people who feel a lack of control because they don't believe that their personal consumption has a direct impact on production, which I believe to be incorrect.

That perfectly sums up why I stopped eating meat. There was no great moral outrage, and I don't yell at friends who eat meat. I just decided that I was no longer comfortable with my money funding processes that I found objectionable.

One easy change you can make is to give up meat at restaurants, which rarely use meat raised through sustainable practices.

Well, don't eat them then. In fact, don't eat any industrially-produced meat at all as it is not just the chickens who drew the short straw. If you want to eat chicken and have enough space to keep a few of them, raise your own. If you don't want to raise chickens but still want to eat them, find someone who raises them in a sensible way to provide you. The same goes for pork, beef and whatnot.

In practice this will probably reduce your meat consumption quite a bit, which is a good thing. Good for you, and good for us.

There is plenty you can do right now. You don't have to support the giant chicken industry slaughterhouses if you don't want to.

You can drive to a free-range chicken farm in the countryside and pay double the store price for a raw unplucked chicken... but why would you? When the ones at the walmart across the street from your house are fully defeathered, cooked, and seasoned for $7.87.

I've had plenty of free range chickens, but I've never seen one sold unplucked.

Normally the process is to pop them upside down into a cone, kill them, put them in a plucker, then cut off the neck and remove the innards. It's hard to to that unplucked.

Yes, it's more expensive, but I don't really see how any meat raised in decent conditions can cost anywhere near $1/lb.

Well the problem is that the ones at Walmart that sell for $7.87 taste awful. So, yes, I buy free range organic chicken from the farmer's market.

But I also know that this is a luxury that I can afford because I"m lucky enough to work in a high paying job. I don't believe it's possible to feed everyone organic free range chicken and I appreciate how lucky I am.

Social media had an impact on Perdue Farms, a poultry company, according to the top comment in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8266058 so it's not hopeless.

Awful for who? Not for the people who might not otherwise have an affordable source of protein (meat and/or eggs) thanks to the economies of commercial chicken farming.

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