Will cows become obsolete? Credit: JOHANNES EISELE/AFP/Getty Images
Factory farming. The words conjure up such unpleasant images: the industrialisation of the countryside; animals treated as mere objects; and of course the pitiless mechanisation of slaughter.
Consider the following, from the BBC‘s Lucy Hooker, on the slaughter of pigs:
“Pigs are stunned using a 70% to 90% carbon dioxide concentrate. They are typically loaded in groups of about half a dozen onto something like a paternoster lift, which lowers them gradually into ever higher concentrations of the gas.
“Once the animals have been stunned, they must be bled within 15 seconds to avoid the risk of them regaining consciousness.”
Remember, that’s in a country (the UK) that does more than most to minimise the distress and suffering of livestock.
Yet, viewed in purely economic terms, one can make an argument that there’s no such thing as factory farming. However much we think we’ve industrialised the production of meat, it is fundamentally unlike the manufacture of most other products.
It’s a case argued by Liz Specht in an eye-opening article for Wired. She explains that the transformative economic power of the modern production line doesn’t just lie in the sheer quantity of goods turned out, but also in three other vital factors.
Firstly, there’s the speed of the manufacturing process from raw materials to finished product. Depending on the industry, a shop-ready item, or batch of items, can be made in hours, minutes or even seconds – allowing supply to match any fluctuation in demand. An animal, though, is different. For all our use of selective breeding, antibiotics and growth promoting hormones, there’s only so far we can go in rushing the rhythms of life:
“Even the fast-maturing chicken is subject to these relentless cycles. Today’s chickens reach slaughter weight about six weeks after hatching, but the lag also needs to account for time in the shell and the hens’ laying rate, meaning the broiler supply must be predicted 18 to 24 months in advance.”
The lead-in time for meat is so long that matching supply to future demand is a risky business.
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SubscribeIt may cause some to question the worlds reliance on China
The problem is that the only possible healthy diet is based on animal foods. No one yet has designed a healthy diet based on fake foods.
In fact, fake foods is the reason we are in the middle of a health epidemic. And the chronic diseases, particularly metabolic diseases, caused by this industrially-processed diet are the main factors of susceptibility to infectious diseases like COVID-19.
Are we really mad enough to continue down this suicidal path? I hope not.
You are joking? Right?
I disagree.
Please cite some evidence, so that this vegetarian with a biology PhD can do more than dispute.
In the meantime: the main co-morbidity for SARS-Cov-2 is age, according to Jordan et al. (BMJ, 2020;368) doi: 10.1136/bmj.m1198. According to that same paper, possible secondary risk factor is hypertension, a condition which a vegeterian diet was found to alleviate in 1986 by Margetts et al. (Br Med J (Clin Res Ed) 1986;293:1468) doi: 10.1136/bmj.293.6560.1468