The staff ate it later

I had always thought it were a generic phrase!

There’s a weird disconnect where people ignore or are wilfully ignorant of cruelty to animals in industrial food production but are sensitive to it in virtually every other context. I saw a woman the other day who was tending to an injured pigeon and had called animal welfare people to come tend to it. Meanwhile, millions of chickens live in appalling conditions and die horrible deaths en masse.

I am genuinely unsure where this disconnect comes from. I was the same for most of my life but a few years ago, I started thinking about the animals I was eating and then I couldn’t eat them any more.

I don’t begrudge people their compassion. A few nights ago I went outside to put some stuff on the barbecue and my wife was in the backyard, concerned for the fate of a female cardinal that had flown into our sunroom window. It was stunned and couldn’t fly. Its mate was worriedly flitting through nearby bushes. “That’s so sad,” my wife said. “Yes,” I agreed, and then I put her skewers of meat on the barbecue.

>I am genuinely unsure where this disconnect comes from

1. Empathy is a base emotional response triggered by nearby animals, not a rational/moral one.

2. Empathy is also an evolutionary tool that "happened" in (some) humans to help survive situations that require some sort of cooperation, like harsh winters. Anthropomorphization is an associated bug, not a feature.

2b. Being disconnected from nature and reality is the #1 cause for such disorder; you don't see any kind of vegetarianism in rural people.

3. People with a brain realize that eating meat is important.

4. People with a bigger brain also realize that that eating other animals is the prerogative of power: humans have simply won the animal kingdom's oldest game and are enjoying its spoils. Things wouldn't (and shouldn't) be different if positions were reversed.

This is just untrue, hundreds of millions of rural South Asians are vegetarian.

> 3. People with a brain realize that eating meat is important.

Everyone has a brain. Both vegetarian and omnivore groups have their share of geniuses and fools. Meat was important as a calorie source but it has many drawbacks in modern society totally unrelated to animal ethics; cancer risk, inefficient land use, methane production, etc.

> 4. People with a bigger brain also realize that that eating other animals is the prerogative of power: humans have simply won the animal kingdom's oldest game and are enjoying its spoils. Things wouldn't (and shouldn't) be different if positions were reversed.

This sounds like manifest destiny rhetoric and deserves just as much consideration.

I think the most important drawbacks which actually threaten modern society are deforestation and zoonoses. Both can be largely avoided by raising only insects for meat, which reduces water and land use by 80%, and CO2 emissions even more if feed is mostly food waste. It is however a hard sell and has to be hidden in products in order to be accepted by consumers.

It is unethical profess a belief in public, especially an unusual belief, but neglect to test that belief when a test would be inexpensive and straightforward.

It is also unethical to propose a radical change to society with only very tenuous basis in reality: people should be able to demonstrate knowledge (and not just knowledge about what beliefs will prove popular or fashionable) before they engage in public policy discussions. If the person I'm discussing with hasn't tried eating insects at least once (preferably a lot more often) he is doing us all a disservice in even engaging in a public discussion of the topic unless perhaps he has deep professional-level knowledge of the nutritional value of insects and the effect of nutrients and anti-nutrients on human health (and "insects are high in protein" alone doesn't begin to be enough knowledge).

Trolling is widely believed to be anti-social. It is approximately just as anti-social to try to whip up a public discussion of some radical social or economic change or some radical change in our daily lives with as little grounding in reality as this discussion of insects as food.