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"From Cattle To #capital How Agriculture Bred Ancient #Inequality"
I like to get political.
1/many
Related: Greater post-Neolithic wealth disparities in Eurasia than in North America and Mesoamerica
racism from colonial times: 2/
Some quotes on colonial masters' animal-based diets:
Source: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44156624 or https://www.academia.edu/download/52778284/Imperial_Diet.pdf (India)
"The territorial expansion of the British rule in India resulted in an increased interest in the Indian environment and its effects on the health and livelihood of Europeans. Contemporary physicians, historians, naturalists and others contemplated about the ability of the European sto settle in their newly conquered land."
...
"According to Mark Harrison, ‘. . . there was considerable optimism [among the Europeans] in the late eighteenth century about the possibility of acclimatization. Even the high mortality and morbidity experienced by newcomers could be reduced, it was claimed, if they took care to avoid excessive consumption and exercise.’"
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"The British conception of what should be the ‘ideal’ food habits for the novice English officialdom and how these perceptions were linked to specific ideologies of the Raj which helped to evolve the cultural identity of the English ruling class."
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"India and other tropical
countries became synonymous with lethargy, effeminacy and decay. Temperate climate, on the other hand, were believed to breed strong independent types, full of manly vigour."
The first generation of Company surgeon discovered that by observing these, the indigenous people have been able to keep healthy and the Europeans for preserving their health in the tropical climate should follow the same practice. In this regard attention has been directed to the inappropriate #diet of the Europeans. Charles Curtis, a surgeon associated with the naval hospital in Madras in the1780s cautioned the new British recruits to India, against over consumption of #meat. He warned against the “...the European habit of using a great deal of animal food...till some stomach or bowel disorder occurs to check it.”6 And a way of preserving the European health was to forsake “a generous contempt for what they reckon the luxurious and effeminate practices of the country...and accustom themselves to what are called the native dishes which consist for the most part of boiled #rice, and fruits, highly seasoned with hot aromatics, along with meat stews and sauces, but with small proportion of animal matter.”7
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By the end of the 18th Century, many influential authorities were advocating a Hindu diet, consisting mainly of #vegetables, at least to the newcomers to India. The celebrated James Johnson writing some years later also advocated the adaptation of the Hindu #Vegetarian diet. James Johnson argued, “That Vegetable food, generally speaking, is better adapted to a tropical climate than animal, I think, we may admit, and particularly among unseasoned Europeans...”9
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Jayanta Sengupta, however, has argued that this rule was voraciously flouted by the Europeans. The Europeans regularly consumed huge quantities of different kinds of meat including pork and beef. Stomach disorder or even liver dysfunction would be the resultant effect, if this diet was continued daily. But the English blamed the weather for their illness rather than their insatiable appetite.1 The Governor Philip Francis wrote in 1775, “I am tormented with the bile and obliged to live on mutton chop and water. The Devil is in the #climate I think.”12
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George W. Johnson recollected in his memoirs written in 1843, a typical breakfast menu of the English ruling class which “ ... is no mere –slop-and bread- and- butter affair, but fish, curry. Eggs, ale, coffee, tea, are all gathered in together, not omitting the usual subduers cakes and buttered toast. And J. H. Stocqueler narrated a breakfast menu, which included but was not limited to, “... the omelette, the rice, the fish, the muffins, the chitnee, the cold meats, and the fresh and fragrant tea,-all have a tendency to create an appetite beneath the ribs of death, and to render gaunt famine, or penurious scarcity, quite impossible visitants.”
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[Dinner] is usually composed of, in the first instance, an overgrown turkey (the fatter the better) in the centre, which is the place of honour; an enormous ham. . . at the top of the table appears a sirloin or round of #beef; at the bottom a saddle of mutton; legs of the same, figure down the sides, together with fowls, three in a dish, geese, ducks, tongues, humps, pigeon-pies, curry and rice of course, mutton –chops and chicken cutlets. Fish is of little account, except for breakfast, and can only maintain its post as a side dish.”1
"This habit of over indulgence of the English rulers was however not restricted to food only and could be seen in every aspect of British life, particularly during the early decades of the Company rule. There was a conscious attempt to follow the aristocratic lifestyle of the erstwhile Mughal rulers or Nawabs of India. This adaptation was necessary because ‘what they perceived as Indian notions of how a ruling body should behave.’19 The English wanted to adopt a style befitting of the ruling class and to which the Indian subjects could identify with. As representatives of a colonial power, they were to keep a larger number of servants, and live at a greater level of luxury that would not have been affordable in Britain. Moreover, this extravagant lifestyle was legitimized on the ground of ‘superiority’ of the #white ruling class and with the increasing racialization of the British Raj after 1857, it became a powerful signifier of ‘Britishness’, which helped to maintain their difference with the ‘inferior’ Indian ‘native’. Food and dress became the cultural sites on which the bodily difference of the rulers and the ruled was sustained. The lavish eating habits continued even during the late 19th and 20th Centuries as evident from the menus prescribed for English dinner as found in an Anglo-Indian guidebook."
"That English diet in the colonies was now based on French influence rather than on indigenous food habits proved not only the ‘superiority’ of western food habits but also helped to firmly establish the racial assertiveness/arrogance of the European ruling class."
"The cultural symbolism attached with food helped to differentiate the ruling with the ruled. And this bountiful consumption was approved to be the deserving diet of the ruling class. As food became a site of colonial supremacy, the adjustment, adaptation and transformation over the variety, ingredients and styles of recipes had received a connotation of cultural imperialism too."
"When the Nazis Tried to Bring Animals Back From Extinction"
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"Their ideology of genetic purity extended to aspirations about reviving a pristine landscape with ancient animals and forests"
#freerange #grazing #grassfed #pastoral #paleo #fascism #nazi #lebensraum
"According to an article written by Driessen and co-author Jamie Lorimer, Heinz saw the extinction of the wisent as the natural progression of the result of nomadic tribes overhunting. His brother, on the other hand, became more and more interested in what he considered to be “primeval German game”—an interest increasingly shared by Nazis who sought a return to a mythic German past free of racial impurities."
"“Göring saw the opportunity to make nature protection part of his political empire,” says environmental historian Frank Uekotter. “He also used the funds [from the Nature Protection Law of 1935] for his estate.” The law, which created nature reserves, allowed for the designation of natural monuments, and removed the protection of private property rights, had been up for consideration for years before the Nazis came to power. Once the Nazis no longer had the shackles of the democratic process to hold them back, Göring quickly pushed the law through to enhance his prestige and promote his personal interest in hunting."
"“Göring had a very peculiar interest in living a kind of fantasy of carrying spears and wearing peculiar dress,” Driessen says. “He had this eerie combination of childish fascination [with the poem] with the power of a murderous country behind it.” In practical terms, this meant seizing land from Poland, especially the vast wilderness of Białowieża Forest, then using it to create his own hunting reserves. This fit into the larger Nazi ideology of lebensraum, or living space, and a return to the heroic past."
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/when-nazis-tried-bring-animals-back-extinction-180962739/
Thumbnail is pictures of cow flesh. The rest is podcast and text: 5/
Citations Needed
Episode 139 - Of Meat and Men: How #Beef Became Synonymous with Settler-Colonial Domination. Source: https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/episode-139-of-meat-and-men-how-beef-became-synonymous-with-settler-colonial-domination
""Beef. It’s what’s for dinner," the baritone voices of actors Robert Mitchum and Sam Elliott told us in the 1990s. "We’re not gonna let Joe Biden and Kamala Harris cut America’s meat!" cried Mike Pence during a speech in Iowa last year. "To meet the Biden Green New Deal targets, America has to, get this, America has to stop eating meat," lamented Donald Trump adviser Larry Kudlow on Fox Business. Repeatedly, we’re reminded that red meat is the lifeblood of American culture, a hallmark of masculine power."
"This association has lingered for well over a century. Starting in the late 1800s, as white settlers expropriated Indigenous land killing Native people and wildlife in pursuit of westward expansion across North America, the development and promotion of cattle ranching — and its product: meat — was purposefully imbued with the symbolism of dominance, aggression, and of course, manliness."
"There’s an associated animating force behind this messaging as well: the perception of waning #masculinity in our #settler-colonial society. Whether a reaction to the closure of the American West as a tameable frontier in the late 19th century or to the contemporary Right's imagined threats of "#soy boys" and a U.S. military that has supposedly gone soft under liberal command, the need to affirm a cowboy sense of manliness, defined and expressed through violence and domination, continues to take the form of consuming #meat."
"On this episode, we study the origins of the cultural link between meat eating and masculinity in settler-colonial North America; how this has persisted into the present day via right-wing charlatans like Jordan Peterson, Josh Hawley and Tucker Carlson who panic over the decline of masculinity; and the social and political costs of the maintenance and preservation of Western notions of #manliness."
"Our guest is history professor and author Kristin Hoganson."
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Conflict, violence, and warfare among early farmers in Northwestern Europe https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2209481119
"This paper explores the key role bioarchaeology plays in creating meaningful perspectives on human conflict and the emergence of warfare in Neolithic Europe. Skeletal datasets are considered in the context of social, economic, and demographic changes that accompanied the shift to a sedentary farming economy. Increasing competition and inequality are key factors that fostered the emergence of larger-scale human conflict and warfare. Beyond numbers, these insights should allow for more significant engagement with the unique experiential qualities of violence in prehistory."
#pastoralism #conflict #capitalism #inequality
"While “successful” foragers can only share the benefits of their efforts in the short term and with a few individuals, successful farmers can accumulate material wealth in the form of cleared land and livestock that both permit and promote ever larger family sizes. These new forms of wealth were also heritable, meaning that emerging wealth disparities could grow wider across multiple generations. The emergence of “wealthy” individuals, especially in more pastoralist groups, will also have created conditions that favored polygamy––some individual males were now able to support more than one spouse. This change would further increase inequality by producing powerful patriarchs at the head of increasingly large families while also disenfranchising other males who might be unable to marry. The former hypothesis appears to be borne out by the recent aDNA study of remains from Hazleton North chambered tomb, southwest England (83), where a single male progenitor had reproduced with four women to produce a five-generation family, with female exogamy. The combination of material, social, and reproductive inequalities created by the conditions arising from domestication contrasts with former egalitarian perceptions of the Neolithic. These new inequalities would be sufficient to account for both the motivations behind the forms of intergroup violence now prevalent and also the form of such interactions with raiding and the abduction of women as apparent among repeated mass burials, now a recurring feature of intergroup hostilities."
Let's go deeper! 7/
This is from "Explaining the rise of moralizing religions: a test of competing hypotheses using the Seshat Databank" https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2153599X.2022.2065345
" The final hypothesis that we test here was formulated by Peoples and Marlowe . In their analysis of the beliefs in High Gods, using the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample, they found that the incidence of active and moral High Gods to be highest in #pastoralist societies. Their explanation of this pattern invoked instability and violence, characterizing the fraught pastoralist life and the ease with which their primary resource (livestock) can be stolen. “When drought devastates #pasture, disease decimates #herds and constant violence over #grazing rights becomes unrelenting, a bond of cooperation within one group or tribe must provide a survival advantage when challenged by other feuding groups”
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"The main factors affecting MSP are very similar: the warfare proxies (Cavalry and MilTech) and intensity of agriculture. However, the effect of Agri on MSP is nonlinear, requiring a quadratic term to fully capture. Additionally, we detect a moderate effect of Pastoralism (the estimated standardized coefficient is lower than for other strongly supported terms, but the bootstrap-estimated 95% confidence interval does not overlap zero)."
Cavalary and pastoralism tend to go together (not always, but often).
"One of the most important military innovations in history to have shifted the balance of offense/defense in favor of the former, was mounted warfare or cavalry (Turchin, Citation2009). The potential of horse-riding in combat was successfully harnessed by Pontic-Caspian nomads around 1000 BCE (Drews, Citation2004). Together with a powerful but short compound bow (which could be used on horseback) and new iron-smelting technologies (making arrows deadlier), mounted warfare, and the nearly simultaneous spread of iron metallurgy triggered a military revolution in agrarian societies located along the Steppe belt. New forms of warfare spread rapidly through Afro-Eurasia, triggering additional military innovations in areas such as armor to better protect against projectiles (Drews, Citation2004). Agrarian societies that were unable to secure an ample supply of horses for their cavalries were forced to dramatically scale up the size of their infantry armies to survive in the face of the new existential threat (Turchin, Citation2016). Previous work (Turchin et al., Citation2013) modeled these processes in theoretical terms, strongly suggesting that the pressures from cavalry warfare played a significant causal role in the rise and spread of “Macrostates’ (defined specifically as polities controlling at least 100,000 km2 of territory) across Afro-Eurasia (see also Bennett, Citation2020)."
8/
How the alt-right uses milk to promote white supremacy https://theconversation.com/how-the-alt-right-uses-milk-to-promote-white-supremacy-94854
If you think this is a joke, read the rest of this thread.
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Worldwide Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene population declines in extant megafauna are associated with Homo sapiens expansion rather than climate change https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-43426-5
No quotes this time, read the article.
My own conclusion is:
Either humans are a short-lived mammalian species or hunting is not really part of human nature, because that unsustainable behavior means self-destruction, self-extinction. We do not get to live without a biosphere, that's for sci-fi spacefaring species, not us.
10/
The greenwashing of wool, explained
(thanks to @josh for the link)
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Ruminant farming’s hunger for land has made it a prime engine for colonial expansion around the world; we see this in Brazil, for example, where cattle ranching is driving illegal seizures of Indigenous land. Sheep brought by colonists to Australia “immediately trampled and destroyed all of the native yams and edible vegetables that Aboriginal people had. The land that Aboriginal people never ceded was taken for pastoral practices,” said Emma Hakansson, the Australia-based founding director of Collective Fashion Justice, which advocates for what she calls a “total ethics” fashion system: one that’s fair to people, animals, and the planet. “Animal-derived materials in particular are a focus for us because it’s in those supply chains that all three of those groups are consistently harmed.”
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Another nail in the coffin of the theory that climate, not humans, caused mass megafauna extinctions about 100,000 years ago. This debate has been going on under the term of "the Overkill hypothesis", with opponents claiming that the extinctions were due to climate changes, not due to humans coming in and killing large animals.
Here's the article: "People, not the climate, caused the decline of the giant mammals" https://nat.au.dk/en/about-the-faculty/news/show/artikel/people-not-the-climate-caused-the-decline-of-the-giant-mammals
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The new study presents brand new data that sheds new light on the debate. By looking at the DNA of 139 large living mammals – species that have survived for the past 50,000 years without becoming extinct – the researchers can show that the populations of these animals have also declined over the period. This development seems to be linked to the spread of humans and not climate change.
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and
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"We’ve studied the evolution of large mammalian populations over the past 750,000 years. For the first 700,000 years, the populations were fairly stable, but 50,000 years ago the curve broke and populations fell dramatically and never recovered,” he says, and continues: "For the past 800,000 years, the globe has fluctuated between ice ages and interglacial periods about every 100,000 years. If climate was the cause, we should see greater fluctuations when the climate changed prior to 50.000 years ago. But we don't. Humans are therefore the most likely explanation.”
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Paper: "Megafauna extinctions in the late-Quaternary are linked to human range expansion, not climate change" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221330542300036X
- Modern humans (Homo sapiens) drive late-Quaternary megafauna extinctions, with no role for climate change.
- The strong body-size bias of the late-Quaternary extinctions is also linked to modern humans, not climatic change.
- The late-Quaternary extinctions represent the first planet-wide, human-driven transformation of the environment.
In case anyone is looking for fundamental errors...
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3 ways going vegan helped my anti-racism advocacy | Christopher Sebastian | TEDxTUWien https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVIzbOSPL5g
A lecture by journalist Christopher Sebastian on the intersection between animal farming, eating meat, and racism. I've mentioned many of these topics above and there are a lot more writings out there.
I appreciate the emphasis on the culture war.
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Christopher Sebastian explores how historical ideas around race and species influenced racial violence and animal violence and how the rejection of animal products challenges racial hierarchies and white supremacy. The talk discusses the concept of a culture war, examining recent examples related to veganism and meat consumption. Video produced by: Apehouse www.apehouse.at Christopher Sebastian is a technical writer, journalist, and digital media researcher. He has also lectured at Columbia University, Cornell University, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, and Oxford. He writes about food, politics, media, and pop culture. Although his focus lies primarily in animal rights theory, Christopher includes perspectives from a variety of socio-political and economic backgrounds. As human and animal liberation frequently overlap, he says there is no reason to limit the scope of our knowledge to single-issue perspectives. Among others, Christopher examines current and historical connections between Black liberation and animal liberation in U.S. American culture and throughout the global west. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community
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"Climate populism will be the next great conspiracy complex"
Prepare for more denialism in the shape of conspiracy stories, such as those about animal meat going away...
https://aeon.co/essays/climate-populism-will-be-the-next-great-conspiracy-complex
Update your bingo cards? Not sure what the right phrase is here.
13b/
"Farmers are caught in a political brawl over climate and DEI language"
After years of greenwashing the animal farming industry with claims of #regenerative #grazing and similar pseudoscience, all sorts of #greenwashing funds beneficiaries have been caught in the crossfire of the new US "fossilphile" regime's war on anything "green" and or attempting to not turn the climate into a #hothouse #Earth state.
It's probably going to be a one off. In the article, the ranchers admit that it's "branding" trick to get more free money or to help charge more for sales. They will dump the "regenerative grazing" and "climate friendly beef" grift soon enough, as it doesn't really fit their business model. Well, these ones specifically may not change, but the ones who buy their lands and feed lots will change.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2025/03/10/trump-climate-smart-agriculture-dei/
Bullshitting protects the status quo.
For more context on the "regenerative grazing" grift:
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"Prisoners in the US are part of a hidden workforce linked to hundreds of popular food brands"
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As they were shoved through a gate into a viewing pen, the auctioneer jokingly warned buyers “Watch out!” The cows, he said, had just broken out of prison. Within minutes, the Angola lot was snapped up by a local livestock dealer, who then sold the cattle to a Texas beef processor that also buys cows directly from prisons in that state. Meat from the slaughterhouse winds up in the supply chains of some of the country’s biggest fast-food chains, supermarkets and meat exporters, including Burger King, Sam’s Club and Tyson Foods.
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In Alabama, where prisoners are leased out by companies, AP reporters followed inmate transport vans to poultry plants run by Tyson Foods, which owns brands such as Hillshire Farms, Jimmy Dean and Sara Lee, along with a company that supplies beef, chicken and fish to McDonald’s. The vans also stopped at a chicken processor that’s part of a joint-venture with Cargill, which is America’s largest private company. It brought in a record $177 billion in revenue in fiscal year 2023 and supplies conglomerates like PepsiCo.
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During the six-year period the AP examined, surplus raw milk from a Wisconsin prison dairy went to BelGioioso Cheese, which makes Polly-O string cheese and other products that land in grocery stores nationwide like Whole Foods. A California prison provided almonds to Minturn Nut Company, a major producer and exporter. And until 2022, Colorado was raising water buffalo for milk that was sold to giant mozzarella cheesemaker Leprino Foods, which supplies major pizza companies like Domino’s, Pizza Hut and Papa John’s.
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...no comment needed.
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The traditionalist pastoralist view of women is: "domestic livestock", or a fuckable household appliance...
Quotetoot represents a very sexist ad from the 1960s (USA).
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Alright, this one is more contemporary. This is, in indirectly, related to the protests for the farmers (business owners) in EU.
This is about Big Ag and especially Big Meat capital. Note that they will ALWAYS make it seem like it's about jobs, as if jobs are the holiest of sacred divine untouchable things in society.
"What a Meatless Future Could Mean for Farmers" https://getpocket.com/explore/item/what-a-meatless-future-could-mean-for-farmers
thanks to @vcj for posting the article.
For the anti-PBC types. Just imagine that there's no PBC coming, just the collapse of the ABC. It's more or less the same result, liberals just love to make it seem like it's incremental progress that doesn't rock the boat, or green capitalism. If you defend ABC because you hate PBC, don't bother replying.
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According to a USDA-funded report, rising plant-based milk sales could be a factor in the decline of cow’s milk consumption (though overall dairy consumption is on the rise, thanks to cheese).
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This is usually the case. Traditional animal milk had been a local thing because of the lack of a cold chain. Cheese and butter are the value added products made by refining animal milk, and they have a better shelf life (less so for butter).
Value added means that a raw cheap product is used to make a new product that's more expensive and in less supply, instead of selling the raw cheap product. The feed crop sector is *this*.
The problem is, of course, the massive direct and indirect subsidies heading towards Big Dairy, as if cheese and very fat foods aren't already addictive.
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And looking ahead, the CEO of beef giant Cargill said that plant-based meat could make up as much as 10 percent of the meat market within a few years.
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This wouldn't be surprising, but you can't really trust Big Meat. They could buy up lots of small plant-based manufacturers and then turn around and shut them down because it's more profitable to keep selling the more and more expensive animal meat.
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A largely plant-based future would be a win for livestock, 99 percent of which is raised in factory farms
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I appreciate that they mention the fact that makes every "let's end CAFOs, but go grass fed" (animal farming extensivization) proponent sound like a small round clown honking and farting simultaneously.
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But it would also cause a massive shift in a huge part of the economy
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You bet it would. I don't have a perfect figure to show, but I'm attaching one that's in the same vein. "A chronological sequence of various human efforts in addressing climate change." There are many large sectors upstream and downstream of this. Those subsidies and the favoritism, it benefits them too. The input producers (upstream) are regularly behind the "farmer protests"; this means fertilizer and pesticide companies, tractor companies, the chemical and metallurgy giants behind them, and fossil fuels for sure. The downstream corporations are Big Meat and Big Dairy, and many others. Whatever "value added" transformation is added, it means a new layer of corporations. This includes the UPF/UPP corporations too. I would also count Big Pharma as downstream, as they sell a lot of products to treat the symptoms caused by very unhealthful diets.
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one that could lead to dislocation and upheaval for the hundreds of thousands of farmers and meatpacking workers who make their livelihood from raising and slaughtering animals. What does the future look like for them?
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First we need to make the distinction between agriculturist (plant farmer) and zootechnist (animal pharmer). The fact that many animal "raisers" don't do their own animal slaughtering doesn't matter in this, they're responsible for the deaths of those animals.
Mixed farmers can wind down their animal harming operations.
Agriculturalists can switch to food crops, industrial crops, or something else. We're definitely heading for a point where land use needs to be reduced. There are too many farmers trying to commodify land, and it's ruining the planet. There are some strategies for that; in the past, the EU had subsidies for farmers not to farm. I don't really like that, it feels like a hostage situation: "pay up, or the land gets the plow blade!"
One alternative is agricultural extensivization. That's the "land sharing" idea. Practically, it would mean more #veganic agriculture. I repeat, animal farming is a "value added" idea; it causes a perverse incentive to stuff more resources into growing more animals - which would be "organic" in such a land sharing system, though animal farmers absolutely love to cheat their standards, made famous by feed cannibalism and trash feeding (google it).
The problem with the certified standards issue is that people want cheap stuff, and that also creates race to the bottom conditions. You see that reflected in the desire of farmers to ban imports that compete with them, and that is a reasonable desire. Food is easily "green laundered" across the various supply chain steps, so certifications lose their relevance. And distributors can easily import cheaper stuff and try to match the high price of certified foods and make larger profits. The more whole the foods are, as plants, the easier it is to make the supply chain transparent and short.
Agriculturalists can switch the type of crops. The machinery is not that specialized, despite what the article will say. There are things to LEARN and a bunch of tweaking to be done for the machinery, for sure, but that is normal farming activity.
The other side of this is the initial problem: overproduction. Why value added exists. There are too many crop farmers producing too much. If they didn't have these "grain sinks", the grain would be too cheap. Certain countries in the world, famously the US, use this cheap grain for foreign policy. Not cool. So production actually needs to decrease, and that can happen in two ways: land sparing (and rewilding) or extensivization and semi-rewilding (agroecology and veganic). The semi solution would require more jobs and fewer inputs, but there are good arguments in favor of both. It depends on how many people will live in rural areas, because automation will further drop the actual farmer population for many types of crops. And, no, one guy owning an army a robots who do the work isn't "working class".
To be clear, the farmers are a tiny percent of the population, like 1-5% in the developed countries. People living in rural areas aren't inherently farmers, that's a preindustrial condition. After industrialization and especially after the Green Revolution, rural society died, now we're just seeing it's undead corpse twitch towards "blood and soil" fascism.
The people living there are ignorant and trapped, they have no economy, no future, no prospects, and the few big farmers aren't suddenly going to start sharing. That's why conservative politicians love these places: lots of subsidies for business owners, a trapped population dependent on a modicum of welfare who will vote however they are told to vote to keep that going. I'd probably be looking for lots of drugs and drinking lots of refined alcohol in that situation too, it's fucked up. Alcohol, btw, is also a value added product based on cheap crops.
The people in these rural places need opportunities to move away, to escape the poverty trap. That's what the money needs to be for. Or, if we decide that the industrial fossil-fuel agriculture is over, then it's time for the masses to return to the land. That will require land redistribution or something, I'm not into feudalism.
Animal farmers are toast for sure. That's the other side. Are we playing "too big to fail capitalism" here? or what? This protection of small-mid business owners is how you get fascist movements. They get all entitled and land "ownerous" and then try to storm the parliament or something similar. It's not the working class doing that. They need to lose, it's obligatory. What that means is loss of their capital. The bloody shitty (literally) buildings - not sure what else could be done with them. Keep some as museums, demolish the rest, they're a horror on the face of the planet. And, yes, it's fine if these farmers get welfare and retraining.
But someone has to lose. There is no way this improves without someone losing.
We have to get over this idea that businesses failing and rich people losing their wealth is a bad thing, because if every business owner is too big to fail, then you have some type of "socialism for the business owning class" and it's not going to end well.
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A paper from the Breakthrough Institute, a nonprofit that advocates for technological solutions to environmental problems, tried to answer that question.
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Just to be clear, the BI is a bunch of green capitalism apologists. Be very suspicious with what they write. They're core promoters of ecomodernism, the idea that business can go on overall, we just need technological fixes to replace some of the problematic stuff, and nothing really will change. That's well exemplified with plant-based or lab-based burgers which are meant as form and function replacements for animal-based burgers. We don't *need* that; it's fine if such technologies are developed, but those aren't necessary. People changing and systems changing is what is necessary, and that's what these green capitalism apologists abhor: change in the system. You can see how this works out with the Cargill statement above. That's what "ecomodern meat" looks like.
For those unaware of how big business works: start-ups are like feed crops for corporations.
The small players will sell out. Only cooperatives with many members have a better chance of not selling out.
...continues... 17
#meatIndustry #animalFarming #BigMeat #BigDairy #BigAg #supply #foodRegime #climateChange #sustainability of what?
17/
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three types of people whose livelihoods could be most vulnerable: farmers who grow soy and corn for animal feed, contract farmers who grow pork or poultry for Big Meat, and meatpacking plant workers.
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I mentioned farmers above. The feed growers angle is nonsense. The authors there from BI are simply focusing on "business as usual"; like I said, they want change without change, so that means keeping the small players doing the same thing so that the big players are unaffected.
Due to the monopolistic tendencies of the big players, small farmers have little choice, and that is a problem that can be fixed by helping them go bankrupt cleanly or upgrading and getting out of debt. Both feed crop farmers and "contract animal farmers" are contract farmers in this sense, as they tend to limited list of clients to sell to. Some of them have pointed out that this is similar to the plantation model, and this misses that point that it's exactly the same model! And it's way more common. The plantation model is the foundational model for capitalist agriculture. It's even older than capitalism, the Romans called it Latifundium: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latifundium . What they actually want to imply is that the the farmers should be the bosses and it's weird that they're the serfs, since the promises for *entrepreneurship* is to be your own boss. And, yes, it's bad. They are also small business owners who compete with other small business owners instead of creating cooperatives, and they're acting as pro-business agents usually (deregulation, no taxes on capital and so on). That's a problem. A class problem.
<
Their position is not unlike what coal miners and oil workers faced a couple of decades ago before natural gas, wind energy, and solar power took over a big chunk of the market. In more recent years, some have trained to become wind farm technicians or to install solar panels, while others have been unable to find work in the renewable energy sector.
</
Sure. Eventually we'll have to talk about people having a some kind of foundation of welfare, because that's where this is headed, especially with more automation - which is also coming to agriculture (Ag^4.0). Otherwise, all this talk of precious jobs implies a certain proposition: "work or die". Thus, in Europe, with its conservative capitalist culture, the idea of "welfare" tends to be popular only in terms of creating jobs, often bullshit jobs. Jobs as welfare.
<
Meatpacking workers (although probably fewer of them) can pack plant-based burgers or nuggets.
</
And there would be way less slashing and bleeding.
<
If companies like Impossible and Rebellyous continue to scale up their production and steal market share from Big Meat, that could mean a steady hold in demand for soy and wheat, which would be good news for growers.
</
The authors are thinking of it as a "sink" for grains. I don't think that it will work to just swap things as animal farming consumes a lot more and thus wastes a lot more. Again, overall quantity can be reduced, but that requires increasing standards and regulations across the board to get everyone to do it. Food crops already have better standards, so there's room, but this obsession with maximizing quantity needs to end.
<
Jorgensen has seen a few nimble farmers find new business opportunities, and he thinks their success could encourage other farmers to follow in their footsteps. “The early adopters in any new field are always the ones who are the most flexible,” he said.
</
Flexible means a more generic machinery base and not being overleveraged. This is perhaps the main problem. A lot of anguish for farmers is from investing borrowed money into expensive equipment and means that promised to increase production ($$$). This is a bubble.
<
Agricultural commodities are any crop that can be traded at a financial marketplace, like the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, for example. Because the farmer has no say in the price, Tucker had been captive to the price set by the market.
</
One of the most disturbing things on the planet is food is a trade commodity. As in... there are investors that make more money the more the prices of grains go up. This became a problem in 2008, if anyone remembers. I remember. Investors were causing rising famine conditions just by speculating and driving up the prices. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007%E2%80%932008_world_food_price_crisis
Food is perhaps something that needs to be decommodified first. That would be a very big change, but also worthy and a good adaptation for the chaos that climate change will be bringing.
Here's some reading on food decommodification:
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-01-24/to-feed-or-to-profit-to-eat-or-to-consume/
https://one-handed-economist.com/?p=3781
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-022-00933-5
Remember, going local isn't going to work out. It's not just because most people's local is insufficient, but also because there are a lot of people. Anyone promoting "locavore" better be promoting immigration too, at the very least, otherwise this quest for localism or autarky implies that anyone who doesn't live next to land that can be used for food *dies*. If you've been reading international news in recent years, you may have noticed the effect of cessation of grain exports from Ukraine (for example) on various countries that were relying on food aid and cheap grain imports. It turns out that the distance from "local is better" to "cleanse the land of those other people" is very short (ecofascism).
It's very simple: either people go to the food, or the food comes to people. Anyone who stands in between that is promoting famine.
OK, back to the article...
<
Tucker says he’ll get some curious farming neighbors asking what he’s growing. “I tell him it’s chickpeas, and I make more money off that deal with chickpeas than I do anything else, and then, you know, that kind of piques their interest,” he told me.
</
Good. The issue is with the overleveraged farmers. They're trapped by debt. I'm sure you, whoever is reading, have some idea of what that's like. So we need debt relief, debt forgiveness, and the bank and their investors to eat it. There's an economist who speaks clearly on this: https://jacobin.com/2021/12/michael-hudson-interview-debt-forgiveness-cancellation-ancient-rome-christianity (in general)
I'm not really a fan of only reforms, and this kind of thing would be reformist, but it would be a decent reform.
It is important to make sure that mistakes don't repeat, and that needs to be part of the debt forgiveness plan. As an analogy, if someone decides to build a mansion in a wetland next to the rising oceans, and they're in debt for it and screwed by storms and flooding, there needs to be a way to both fix that and prevent it from repeating. And I don't mean insurance, that's going to fail in the face of the kind of risks that are increasing.
<
There’s also the question of whether these farmers will want to grow for the plant-based industry at all. Farmers are an older population
</
Which is why the animal industry subsidies need to end. If they don't want to grow what's necessary, fine, keep the land fallow. If not, they'll sell or their kids will.
The attitude of the writers stinks of undemocratic will, like when only land owners are allowed to vote.
<
Plus, farmers face geographical constraints. While field peas do grow in parts of the Midwest, they’re grown in very small amounts as compared to soy and corn. Water-intensive crops like almonds, the most popular base for plant-based milk, only grow in much warmer climates like Southern California and Florida.
</
See? This is what I mean by "keeping things the same". These clowns can't imagine it and don't want anyone else to try to imagine it. Gotta keep that Capitalist Realism going.
<
Most contract farmers don’t have hundreds or thousands of acres of land like animal feed farmers, but instead own large, climate-controlled steel barns in which they raise their chickens or pigs. This severely limits what they can pivot to growing instead.
</
I mentioned them previously. They're most likely fucked. These are the #CAFO operators. They were always going to be fucked, the whole thing is unsustainable. The amount of sympathy I can muster for them is coalesced into the requirement for a basic welfare floor. Let them fail and learn to do something else, but they don't need to die of poverty.
<
One option could be to continue to raise animals but in higher-welfare conditions — sourcing “heritage” breed animals that weren’t bred to grow so big and fast, and retrofitting barns to give them sunlight, more space, and access to the outdoors.
</
Of course, this is the "free range" grift. This is who they are. CAFO-light. It doesn't matter anyway, it's a grift. The whole point of CAFO is the efficiency is greater than that of the extensive pre-industrial animal raising method revolving around herding and open fields. The only good thing the animal welfarists are doing is pushing the standards enough to cause a few of these contractors to fold.
<
Another is to turn away from animals altogether. Some growers have moved from meat, real and imitation, and started growing things like mushrooms, hydroponic microgreens, and industrial hemp plants.
</
It's certainly a learning curve in such cases. "industrial hemp" heh.
...continued 18...
18/
<
Another major challenge to such a pivot is that the plant-based industry just can’t match the predictability of the contract meat business. With chickens, you grow just one uniform product in the same way and sell it to one guaranteed buyer. The market for alternatives, be it hemp, mushrooms, or microgreens, is more volatile.
</
Not only does pivoting need to be made easier, but this type of issue is always a problem. The contractors traded profit for selling to a monopolistic company. Again, this is a problem with overleveraging and bankers standing on their necks, as part of various "fast growth" scams. A modern debt bondage.
The solution to their lack of predictable market is, first of all, growing what needs to be grown, and, secondly, taking a lesson from Big Dairy: have the government buy it, preferably instead of dairy.
To be clear, this problem is super common, there are solutions in many places.
<
But the biggest constraint contract farmers face in starting a new business is financial.
</
Finally! I haven't read the article this far.
<
contract farmers take out loans worth hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of dollars, to build the steel barns in which they raise them. Some struggle to ever pay off that debt, since every 10 years or so the big meat companies ask for costly upgrades. Plus, if they get one or two sick flocks, they can fall behind on their loans and get trapped in a cycle of debt.
</
the "plantation model"
It's clearly not going to get better, it's getting worse *even now*. Anti-trust laws would help, but they'd also cause uncertainty.
<
Garcés, for one, believes debt forgiveness is the critical first step. And to make that first step, she said, “we’re going to need a big piece of policy.”
</
I swear I didn't read this before. I just enjoy "live asynchronous commenting".
<
That big piece of policy could be the Farm System Reform Act, which was first introduced in 2019 by Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), then in 2020 by Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA); they both reintroduced the legislation in 2021. The act would place a moratorium on new factory farm construction, phase out factory farms by 2040, and create a $10 billion annual fund to help factory farm operators transition to raising animals in higher-welfare settings, growing specialty crops, or pay off debt. It has no short-term prospect of passing, but it’s important for policymakers to start the discussion now.
</
Just to be clear, if such a thing passed, the whining about "cost of living" with regards to the price of animal products would be huge. You can imagine all those "chicken nuggets" memes becoming right-wing populist memes, probably anti-semitic in some way.
<
There are other government incentives that could help, Newton and Blaustein-Rejto found, like subsidies and tax credits for land use conservation, including allowing some farmland to rewild.
</
That's the "hostage policy".
Not much else worthy in the article.
If you like this topic, there's a nice site and podcast that goes into such things, and here's an article worth reading to get a sense of it: https://tabledebates.org/blog/promises-regenerative-agriculture-how-lessons-past-bring-words-warning
They have a lot of educational/introduction materials.
18a /
For context, very needed context, it's important to understand the role of energy. Because some people will claim that the farm owner managing a legion of robots is a *worker*, a *laborer*.
I recommend listening to all of it, it gets extra relevant at the end.
Steve Keen: "On the Origins of Energy Blindness" | The Great Simplification #108
<
Labour without energy is a corpse; capital without energy is a sculpture.
</
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrMWSkzrMYg
This energy blindness relates to what I called #trophicMinimalism - which is about primary energy transformations from ecosystems (usually thanks to the Sun's energy).
18b/
More #astroPasturing going on:
"Revealed: The Climate Denial Network Behind ‘Classic Astroturf’ Farmers’ Campaign"
Related astropasturing efforts were successful in Holland: https://archive.ph/emvmh (use some auto-translate)
18c /
<
Two-Tier Reporting: When Climate Protesters Slow Ambulances They’re Vilified, So Why Are Wealthy Farmers Given a Free Pass? Media outlets rush to condemn climate change campaigners as “middle class” protesters causing “chaos” while ignoring greater disruption by millionaire landowners
</
When business owners do civil disobedience, the get a pass from the law (derogation). See... US 1/6.
When workers and non-business citizens do civil disobedience, they get record prison punishments. https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/14/climate/uk-climate-protests-policing-laws-prison-intl/index.html
19/
The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RYH0_Fv_QE
This interview talks about pronatalism. If you're not ready to think politically about natalism without knee-jerking to a tweet-long critique, this is for you.
This discussion with science journalist Angela Saini does something that I really like: cut through centuries or thousands of years of bullshit diagonally to get to some key sets of connected truths. Her book is "The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule". I haven't read it yet, but it's going to the top of my list.
20/
The Imperial Mode of Living - Ulrich Brand & Markus Wissen, comments by Lucas Poy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-gLESaW2Ik
Because we constantly get into arguments about veganism and consumption, it's important to have a deeper and more structural understanding of the situation. I've *ranted* about it in this thread focusing on Big Ag, but that's just one sector. The patterns repeat across many sectors and are connected systemically.
The authors of the book use cars as the example, but it's more or less the same for animal meat.
If you start to understand this, it's going to become very obvious where the right-wing and also the carnist bullshit is coming from and what else is coming down the bullshit sewer.
Understand this to better understand how to deal with the "JOBS THO!" argument, not just the "NO ETHICAL CONSUMPTION UNDER CAPITALISM".
The authors point out that it's crucial to change the living conditions to actually express solidarity. The "solidarity mode of living" means that we don't live at the cost of others and of nature. And that needs to be made not optional, not up to an individual, but structural.
And, yes, I know that structural changes won't magically get people to do the moral work.
21/
#meatcoin - the original crypto coin, "mined" by burning sentient flesh
a tangential story from the Terror Management Theory book "The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life" by Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski.
#capital #cattle #capitalism #religion #carnism #commodification #animals #bloodSacrifice #surplus #obeloi #TerrorManagementTheory #TMT
<
Thousands of years ago, money originated in religious rituals as consecrated tokens with immortal connotations. The sacred value of the ex change was its primary purpose. In ancient Greece, families held communal feasts in honor of their heroic ancestors. The families believed that ancestors had the character and power of immortal gods and could thus provide protection, advice, and direction for their living progeny. So the living relatives sacrificed bulls (the word "capital" comes from "cattle") and roasted them on spits. Then they distributed the pieces of meat to everyone in attendance, withholding only the "surplus," a piece left on the spit to be "consumed" by the fire as an offering to the heroic ancestors.
The "surplus" meat on the spit was called the obelos, or "coin" (related to the word "obligation"). Obeloi were also made from pieces of metal, bearing images of individual ancestors. Outsiders could use these coins to join the feasts. People would eagerly trade goods in order to obtain these highly valued coins. Because they attributed magical qualities people began to worship them. Carried as amulets, the coins derived their power from "basking in reflected glory" of the heroic ancestors depicted to the coins, on them. In this way, the coins used in the communal feast kept the ancestors' sacred power circulating. Sacrificing the bulls and giving the surplus to the dead ancestors showed reverence for the past. Sharing one's food with ancestors imbued the living with supernatural attributes to ensure prosperity in the future.
</
22/
From who...?
23/
"Christopher Ketcham | The Megamachine and Green Growth Delusions"
An interview with author and journalist C. Ketcham about the "Megamachine" eating up the planet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpdZyXILMOE
He has a book:
You can imagine why it's relevant, but you can also watch a lecture on C-SPAN: https://www.c-span.org/video/?462742-1/this-land
23/
"The CDC and FDA have long warned that consuming unpasteurized milk poses serious health risks" https://www.mediamatters.org/infowars/far-right-figures-are-promoting-raw-milk-amid-bird-flu-outbreak-dairy-cows
The "milk drinker" story has been part of white supremacist narratives for a while now, some may remember the public milk drinking demonstrations. Their core idea for this story is that "the white race" is superior and carrying a baby adaptation like lactase production into adulthood makes "the white race" "superior".
Perhaps most people don't know that most of the human species does not have "baby intestines" after weaning.
This notion probably feeds into paleo-fascist stories, despite pastoralism and milk drinking being a recent (Holocene) feature. I've already pointed out the connections to eating meat and hunting in this thread, including with the Nazis.
The raw milk aspect is the interesting one, at least to me. At face value, they buy into the wellness stories about raw milk as cure for various ailments and as a supplement, because biohacking is the bleeding edge of wellness. Of course, they ignore the dangers of eating raw milk; it wouldn't be a good daily liquid supplement if it had downsides. As a side-note, I hope that everyone here understands how "biohacking" fits into the competitive individualist race of capitalism as a type of health/fitness hoarding (facilitated by monetary wealth).
I don't see it as simply a "white race" aptitude for lactase secretion after they grow up. That's something they may teach children as a starter. They don't really care about science, fascism is about a story, facts are incidental. But they are optimists, as is the tradition in the traditionalism, conservatism, fascism spectrum. Optimism bias means that they think nothing bad will happen to them, that they're special. Others? Well, others don't matter. These are COVID-19 crisis deniers too, of course, and it's unclear how many Herman Cain Awards and Darwin awards their communities have received over the years. An avian influenza pandemic would be a different story, a different outcome (much higher mortality).
So what we're really seeing with these cowboy clowns is an intentional reconstruction of biohazards to fit their stories of biological supremacy. It's a weaponization of pathogens via ecology. As the COVID 2020 pandemic has shown, there are people among us who have no qualms about going around spreading disease to others, even intentionally.
Sure, the InfoWars clowns are probably grifters trying to sell their white supplement 
You can see the evil-grifter dichotomy as being about opportunism. From the bottom up, it's the opportunism of scams, of grifts. From the top-down, it's the opportunism of massive wealth transfers to a few and of massive stealing, usually from an "other" group; sometimes, that's the stealing of an entire land. They called it "Lebensraum". What is an empire if not an armed ponzi scheme trying to grow?
And now we get to how this connects to raw milk, even if they're not very conscious about it. The Lebensraum of nazis was, in fact, a rehashing of settler-colonial expansion, of empire building to make a better world *for a 'superior' group*. And we can look to what happened when European settlers, centuries ago, reached "new" lands and met with indigenous people who were far from the mainland. Disease, epidemics, mass death. Why? Europeans, with a history of pastoralism (includes MENA and parts of Asia), were carriers of deadly diseases from all that contact with non-human animals while already being survivors of those deadly disease (after many generations of dying, probably in childhood) and pronatalist ideologies (having lots and lots of kids). The invasion of the Americas lead to so much death among the indigenous that the atmospheric CO2 dropped. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379118307261 (and if you're wondering how "eco"fascists want to solve climate change... there's your answer)
I think that this is what these fascists are looking for. Essentially, they don't want to get into legal trouble, but they would like to do harm. And, as we've seen with the COVID-19 pandemic, harming others with viral pathogens is pretty much legal; it's not just an added hazard as structural violence, it's a way to harm vulnerable people without getting in trouble (to harm disabled people, immunocompromised people, poor people). If you know a thing or two about the US, you're aware of the class and ethnic/race divide and who those people are. I don't think that I need to point out how "eugenics" fits into this.
Again, this has been made obvious during the first years of the COVID-19 pandemic:
The Amazonian indigenous people are actually living under the threat of Western settler-colonialism right now, it's not even something in the distant past.
If we consider the hypothesis that "every accusation is a confession" (from conservatives), then it's obvious that they are not shy about using biological weapons. What most don't get yet is that the animal industry, both CAFOs and extensive ranches, are acting as pathogen factories; no lab required for this emergent "Gain of function" outcome, just trial and error with numbers; it's low-tech, it's slow, it's happening. Poultry CAFOs are responsible for the "HP" in "HPAI", they made the highly pathogenic part. You don't need a lab, you don't even need a plan. The general biosecurity plans for animal farms are, in fact, trying to counter this.
This situation can be viewed as a biological arms race, and they're optimistic about being resistant to pathogens, be that SARS-CoV-2 or HPAIV or whatever is next, so they weaponize their bodies, as carriers, in an effort to apply "survival of the fittest" to everyone while believing that they're the fittest.
We don't know how an avian influenza pandemic will work out, but it won't be an affluenza pandemic.
Link to actual article about the raw milk fascists:
"Turning Point USA is promoting drinking raw milk amid bird flu outbreak. The organization is selling “got raw milk?” T-shirts"
<
The T-shirt description reads, “Spread the word about the perks of raw milk, like good-for-you bacteria and essential nutrients, that get lost in the pasteurization process with this adorable crop top t-shirt printed using eco-friendly inks!”
Turning Point USA host Alex Clark has also repeatedly promoted raw milk on her YouTube channel.
</
24/
"New Dutch right-wing coalition to cut research, innovation, and environmental protections - Four parties hammer out agreement filled with bad news for scientist"
For context, see my toots above in this thread
back to this article 
<
The nationalist, populist Party for Freedom, led by Geert Wilders, won 23% of the vote in the November 2023 House elections, putting Wilders—once a fringe figure who proposed a “head rag tax” on women wearing headscarves—close to the center of power. Since then, Wilders has been in contentious and often chaotic negotiations to form a government with three other parties, including the center-right party led by outgoing Prime Minister Mark Rutte, which saw its electoral share shrink to 15%. The governing plan endorsed by the four parties, which marks a crucial step in forming a new government, includes a series of harsh anti-immigration measures. Centrist and left-wing parties fiercely criticized the plan during this week’s debate.
</
<
Another sharp turn comes in environmental policy. The Netherlands, a major agricultural exporter, has more farm animals per square kilometer than any other country in Europe, and their waste emits high levels of nitrogen compounds that violate EU rules and harm the country’s ecosystems. Past government plans to tackle the issue have triggered massive protests by farmers and the rise of a new party, the Farmer-Citizen Movement, that won 4.7% of the vote and is part of the new coalition.
</
As I tried to point out months ago, these farmers are bourgeois / right-wing types trying to protect their subsidized businesses at the cost of everyone else on the planet. Here they are in a far right coalition.
If anyone thought that they weren't going to do this, that these are "just workers", please read 
25/
Child Labor in the Meat Industry: "Conditions Are Dickensian"
https://vegnews.com/child-labor-meat-industry-conditions
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It’s hard to say exactly how many children are working in dangerous meatpacking plants right now, but Reid Maki of the Stop Child Labor Coalition estimates it’s a heck of a lot. “The US Department of Labor found earlier this year over 100 children, including some as young as 13, working in meatpacking plants in 13 facilities in eight states,” he told VegNews in 2023. “This might be the tip of the iceberg.”
</
For those unfamiliar with migrant labor schemes, the entrepreneurial trick here is to externalize to contractors. Then those contractors externalize to other contractors. This labor ponzi scheme achieves a type of laundering of responsibility until you get to the bottom where the conditions are edging toward slavery. But lots of entrepreneurs make money at each level, of course.
In the end, the giant corporation, can claim plausible deniability because "it's not their fault, it's those sneaky contractors".
Opaqueness and transparency can both exist in this sector. I've mentioned in previous toots that child labor is feature of animal farming and pastoralism, it's an age old tradition. Even in richer places, the oh so precious "family farm" regularly tasks children with work, especially tasks around the care of domestic animals: cleaning up stables, delivering food, and going out with the animals on the grassland range. This last part, the herding part, is still famous now for slavery and it's a unique type of abuse as the young slave shepherds are coerced (usually with violence) into isolation; as they grow up, they remain deeply and profoundly ignorant and immature, as expected from being isolated and exposed to the elements for years with nothing but non-human animals to talk to (or worse). This is... *traditional family values*, something that's being promoted all over the world, including in the Global North. Of course, the rich family farms are the ones hiring illegal or underpaid workers. The hard work is beneath the young lords and ladies of the land.
The meat processing industry is an interesting coincidence in this context.
<
When it comes to issues with meat production, much attention is rightly given to the environmental and welfare issues associated with the industry. But it’s important to highlight that human rights abuses are also seemingly rife. Last year, it was reported that Tyson Foods and Perdue Farms, two of the biggest meat producers in the US, were under federal investigation for alleged child labor violations.
</
Upton Sinclair made this industry famous a century ago when it was less intensive, more extensive. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/140 I won't attach photos, you can find them online. The animal murder yards and the slaughtering and packing facilities are obviously horrors at any scale, but this industry is much more murderous now.
So why are there children there? Well, the obvious answer is that it's because they can put children there. Like Oompa-Loompas. The slaughter and meat processing technology is so advanced that a child can operate it. There's no more need for muscly adults wielding large knives and axes like an indoor ancient war against fresh cadavers.
The people who've worked in these horror facilities do get paid enough. It's not enough to attract local "middle class" types, but it's enough to attract poorer workers. It's likely that these poorer workers, who usually have rural experience with animal farming when they're migrants, see it as acceptable to send their kids to the meat factories to work, just like sending them to work outside with animals is acceptable. And the factories comply with the usual "don't ask, don't tell" which we now see in action tied to the avian influenza outbreaks in cow farms. If we do see a wider epidemic of HPAI in humans, it will probably break out from these workers, thanks to the business of animal farming.
<
According to Maki, while it is illegal for children to work in meat plants, there aren’t enough inspectors to crack down on the problem. “Wage and Hour has about 800 inspectors for 11 million workplaces,” he says. “That means each inspector is trying to safeguard about 200,000 workers. It’s just not possible.”
</
To me, these examples and many others are a signal that the decriminalization of child labor is coming in the next years. The business owner class would rather see children work than pay adults properly, while they complain on Facebook "nobody wants to work anymore".
26/
<
There is great uncertainty over the timing and magnitude of the termination of the African Humid Period (AHP). Spanning from the early to middle Holocene, the AHP was a period of enhanced moisture over most of northern and eastern Africa. However, beginning 8000 years ago the moisture balance shifted due to changing orbital precession and vegetation feedbacks. Some proxy records indicate a rapid transition from wet to dry conditions, while others indicate a more gradual changeover. Heretofore, humans have been viewed as passive agents in the termination of the AHP, responding to changing climatic conditions by adopting animal husbandry and spreading an agricultural lifestyle across the African continent. This paper explores scenarios whereby humans could be viewed as active agents in landscape denudation. During the period when agriculture was adopted in northern Africa, the regions where it was occurring were at the precipice of ecological regime shifts. Pastoralism, in particular, is argued to enhance devegetation and regime shifts in unbalanced ecosystems. Threshold crossing events were documented in the historical records of New Zealand and western North America due to the introduction of livestock. In looking at temporally correlated archeological and paleoenvironmental records of northern Africa, similar landscape dynamics from the historical precedents are observed: reduction in net primary productivity, homogenization of the flora, transformation of the landscape into a shrub-dominated biozone, and increasing xerophylic vegetation overall. Although human agents are not seen as the only forces inducing regime change during the termination of the AHP, their potential role in inducing large-scale landscape change must be properly contextualized against other global occurrences of neolithization.
</
Thanks to Mic for bringing up this topic again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJTL6ttMXZw
The paper mentioned at the top: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/earth-science/articles/10.3389/feart.2017.00004/full
26.1 /
In the ecological sciences, the role played by pastoralists in destroying forested ecosystems is well known; this includes grassland science.
Forests traditionally die out by human hands in a basic two-hit attack:
1. Cut or burn the forests.
2. Prevent forest regeneration.
Pastoralists, directing herds of ruminants that eat new trees, play a distinct role in the second step.
What ecologists didn't know is that forests make rain by recycling the water and passing it on. That was controversial up until more recent times: https://climatewaterproject.substack.com/p/the-quest-to-figure-out-the-origin
26.2 /
"Evolution of Grasses and Grassland Ecosystems" https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-earth-040809-152402
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The evolution and subsequent ecological expansion of grasses (Poaceae) since the Late Cretaceous have resulted in the establishment of one of Earth's dominant biomes, the temperate and tropical grasslands, at the expense of forests. In the past decades, several new approaches have been applied to the fossil record of grasses to elucidate the patterns and processes of this ecosystem transformation. The data indicate that the development of grassland ecosystems on most continents was a multistage process involving the Paleogene appearance of (C3 and C4) open-habitat grasses, the mid-late Cenozoic spread of C3 grass-dominated habitats, and, finally, the Late Neogene expansion of C4 grasses at tropical-subtropical latitudes. The evolution of herbivores adapted to grasslands did not necessarily coincide with the spread of open-habitat grasses. In addition, the timing of these evolutionary and ecological events varied between regions. Consequently, region-by-region investigations using both direct (plant fossils) and indirect (e.g., stable carbon isotopes, faunas) evidence are required for a full understanding of the tempo and mode of grass and grassland evolution.
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A paper for context, evolutionary context, in case anyone runs into regenerative grazing and "circle of life" bullshit.
And this one:
(science article)
"Wooded grasslands flourished in Africa 21 million years ago – new research forces a rethink of ape evolution"
https://theconversation.com/wooded-grasslands-flourished-in-africa-21-million-years-ago-new-research-forces-a-rethink-of-ape-evolution-203532
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Regarding human origins, our study adds to a growing body of evidence that our divergence from apes – in anatomy, ecology, behavior – cannot be simply explained by the appearance of grassland habitats. Nevertheless, we cautiously remind ourselves that hominin evolution unfolded over many millions of years. It is almost certain that the vast and majestic grasslands of Africa played an important role in some of the many steps along the path to becoming human.
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So, to get a relevant narrative for this, I've been looking at this as a very ancient war. A war between forests and grasslands. It seems that a large segment of humans, especially in the second half of the Holocene, have picked a side in this war, and that choice leads to deserts. Oops.
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I've been trying to polish my understand of fascism a bit and found this nice podcast to help with that:
Fifteen Minutes of Fascism
1. Definition: https://soundcloud.com/user-627234964/ecofascism-episode-one-what-is-ecofascism
2. The pseudo-ethics of forest protection: https://soundcloud.com/user-627234964/ecofascism-episode-two-fascists-speak-for-the-trees-kinda
3. More overviews https://soundcloud.com/user-627234964/ecofascism-episode-four-ecofascism-today-and-tomorrow
4. Ecofascism & pronatalism https://soundcloud.com/user-627234964/ecofascism-episode-three-fascism-gender-and-the-environment-with-diana-garvin
These episodes are relevant to what I often get back to (in this
@veganpizza69 By giving 60% of the adult population gas, bloating, and diarrhea?
Likewise, when rich tax cuts slow or stop healthcare for the poor, that's not how it's spun by media either.
Budgets are statements of priority, and, by implication, of morality.
But with the incoming US administration, this will get so much worse. :(
@veganpizza69 good. I heard it goes well with Ivermectin.
Mayo recipe:
- raw milk: 1 bucket
- raw eggs: 20 (free range, exposed to HPAI)
- Ivermectin: 2 horse doses
- salt: half a cup
- raw butter: 1 bucket, freshly churned
@veganpizza69 Behind a lot of this denial of climate change is The Atlas Network which is supporting far right politicians globally to boost fossil fuel. https://www.psa.org.nz/our-voice/understanding-atlas-how-a-right-wing-network-is-building-global-influence/