General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region Forums"All children should be taken by their schools to visit a factory pig or chicken farm..."
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/16/perpetual-denial-food-meat-production-environmental-devastation?CMP=fb_guIf you must eat meat, save it for Christmas
George Monbiot
What can you say about a society whose food production must be hidden from public view? In which the factory farms and slaughterhouses supplying much of our diet must be guarded like arsenals to prevent us from seeing what happens there? We conspire in this concealment: we dont want to know. We deceive ourselves so effectively that much of the time we barely notice that we are eating animals, even during once-rare feasts, such as Christmas, which are now scarcely distinguished from the rest of the year.
It begins with the stories we tell. Many of the books written for very young children are about farms, but these jolly places in which animals wander freely, as if they belong to the farmers family, bear no relationship to the realities of production. The petting farms to which we take our children are reifications of these fantasies. This is just one instance of the sanitisation of childhood, in which none of the three little pigs gets eaten and Jack makes peace with the giant, but in this case it has consequences.
Labelling reinforces the deception. As Philip Lymbery points out in his book Farmageddon, while the production method must be marked on egg boxes in the EU, there are no such conditions on meat and milk. Meaningless labels such as natural and farm fresh, and worthless symbols such as the little red tractor, distract us from the realities of broiler units and intensive piggeries. Perhaps the most blatant diversion is corn-fed. Most chickens and turkeys eat corn, and its a bad thing, not a good one.
The growth rate of broiler chickens has quadrupled in 50 years: they are now killed at seven weeks. By then they are often crippled by their own weight. Animals selected for obesity cause obesity. Bred to bulge, scarcely able to move, overfed, factory-farmed chickens now contain almost three times as much fat as chickens did in 1970, and just two thirds of the protein. Stalled pigs and feedlot cattle have undergone a similar transformation. Meat production? No, this is fat production.
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HereSince1628
(36,063 posts)No matter how a person might feel about eating animals, everyone needs to understand their relationships to the ecosystems they drawn on and interact with.
Major Nikon
(36,827 posts)Along with all the rest of the processing steps of livestock.
HereSince1628
(36,063 posts)isn't quite the same as 1,000,000 households morning toilet flushes for a family of four.
Nor is mucking out stanchions in a dairy barn.
And many members of farm families balk at the notion of non-point pollution.
Population is a multiplier on all activities required for daily living. Generally speaking the scale required to meet those things are met using mechanization and pumping out the septic tank is really unlike the steps of tertiary treatment.
Similarly bacteria free water with safe levels of radium and other minerals for a city is often quite unlike moving water from a home well through a water softener and into Kool-Aid.
The infrastructure society depends upon must be understood and appreciated or people will be unwilling to pay the taxes, water bills and sewage assessments. They won't understand why storm and sewage can't drain in the same pipes. They won't understand that treated water going into a lake or river is going to be drunk by other people. And so they won't want to spend more than minimum for treatment.
Major Nikon
(36,827 posts)Perhaps, but the initial steps of many treatment plants are not at all unlike septic tanks.
The scale of these things are different, but the objectives are the same. Clean water goes in and unclean water goes out. Anyone who owns and manages their own supply and wastewater system for very long undoubtedly understands more about what is required than your average Joe-sixpack.
I'm not sure why we would want to spend more than the minimum for treatment. The EPA already enforces the federal standards on municipal supply and wastewater, which relative to pretty much everywhere else on the planet are quite high.
HereSince1628
(36,063 posts)Settling and letting untreated water be discharged isn't usually a problem for home septic systems so long as they are situated suitably to prevent contamination of a home well.
When you have sewage from millions of households emptying into a body of water the nutrients in the waste cause population explosions of organisms which die and whose decomposition creates BOD, added to COD caused by chemicals in primary waste water the combination create dead zones in rivers, lakes and even embayments of the ocean
Preventing the overload of nutrients and chemicals requires advanced treatment. That treatment costs money for the creation maintenance and operation of the infrastructure. People need to understand the processes so that as citizens they can make educated decisions about voting on things like taxes and municipal bond issues that lend money to make such facilities possible
Major Nikon
(36,827 posts)A properly constructed, maintained, and operated home sewage system is highly unlikely to produce excessive BOD and will in almost all instances reduce BOD to negligible levels. COD is more of a function of industry.
Where I think people should be better educated is to what extent they are subsidizing water and wastewater management of commerce and industry.
HereSince1628
(36,063 posts)Major Nikon
(36,827 posts)But if that's what you meant I'm not going to question the clarification.
I think we agree that people should be better educated on where their water comes from and goes. I just think those who live on a farm probably already have a much better handle on the problem because they are effectively doing those things for themselves rather than by proxy. For people on a municipal supply, all they really care about is hot is on the left, cold is on the right, and shit is rolling downhill.
kimbutgar
(21,155 posts)I put down my drain.
After seeing a lamb being slaughtered I have a hard time eating lamb to this day. Chickens not so much because they can be annoying at times and difficult to keep as a pet.
HereSince1628
(36,063 posts)tabbycat31
(6,336 posts)It was part of our chemistry class. I now use a lot of 'gray' water on things like watering plants.
Brickbat
(19,339 posts)olddots
(10,237 posts)This sysyem needs a total redo before it crumbles further .
upaloopa
(11,417 posts)and put them on the window sill and come back in a couple of weeks and they haven't even begun to rot.
They also don't taste like tomatoes nor do they smell like tomatoes.
I use to work in produce and we used all our senses to judge vegetables. We felt them looked at their color smelled them lasted them and at times shook them to listen to a rattle of seeds inside. You can't do that now unless it is at a farmer's market.
helpmetohelpyou
(589 posts)I remember going to my grandmothers house when she just picked some fresh tomatoes
from her garden, what a smell they had
Pick up a tomatoes in a grocery store and they smell... really like nothing
Like something artificial
appalachiablue
(41,136 posts)frazzled
(18,402 posts)Was the food under Communist regimes better? I think not! That was industrial farming on a huge scale.
I think technology (and the attendant scale it allows) has more to do with bad farming than any particular economic system.
CBGLuthier
(12,723 posts)Hence the popular saying about laws and sausages.
world wide wally
(21,743 posts)show them the movie " Food Inc"
It was really an eye opener for something they had quite honestly never thought about before.
Bosso 63
(992 posts)Well, the school didn't actually take them to the chicken plant,
but it was the first stop after they left school.
In SW Missouri it was an "opportunity" .
Jesus, Chicken and Meth,
but not necessarily in that order.
LWolf
(46,179 posts)raise their own meat, or hunt it, or both.
AnalystInParadise
(1,832 posts)all it did was make me swear off of grains in favor of tasty meat.
I like these kinds of threads, any crazy thing can be said and taken as truth.
GGJohn
(9,951 posts)cattle, chickens and hogs, and we also hunt our own meat, grow our own veggies and fruits.
I visited a factory farm one time and that day, I swore I would never buy meat in a store again.
MineralMan
(146,316 posts)Very informative.
nichomachus
(12,754 posts)To show them how farm workers are treated -- and the sanitary conditions there.
easychoice
(1,043 posts)just have a bucket handy for them to lose their lunch in.
Some of these places you can smell 5 miles away.Check out the amish puppy mills too.
NickB79
(19,246 posts)It amazes me to no end that there are people, even here on DU, that have a problem with people hunting their own meat, yet don't bat an eye when it comes time to buy some beef or chicken at the grocery store.
Just recently, I got chewed out by someone here because I stated that I hunt for rabbits and squirrels. Apparently, killing the little fuzzies in the woods was a far worse sin than letting someone slowly torture a cow or pig to death on a factory farm.
FWIW, we have a 5-chicken flock, a fruit orchard, and a 1,000-sq. ft vegetable garden. I'm amazed by how mature and intelligent my daughter is when it comes to caring for it; she practically raised the chicks herself this spring, and she's only 4 yr old: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10152224967771847&set=pb.574696846.-2207520000.1418782166.&type=3&theater
KinMd
(966 posts)you think that would work in Chicago?