There is one cheaper option we shouldn’t gloss over which removes the humanwashing: plants. Beans, lentils, potatoes, chickpeas, tofu, etc. are all rather cheap and rather good!
The reality kinds of end up being that factory farming is the only viable way to scale up to the insanely high per capita consumption in the west. The industry isn’t going to be meaningfully changeable as long as production and consumption levels are as high as they are
No chickens end up being “pampered” before they are slaughtered, no matter how much you pay. It’s just labels about handful of random practices that maybe won’t happen with limited amounts of checking. Even for antibiotic-free labels, there is still more antibiotics than you’d think
In 2022, Price et al. published a study reporting that 15% of RWA-labeled [raised without antibiotics] cattle contained antibiotic residues in urine samples
In 2023, the USDA embarked on the project reported herein to independently determine the extent of antibiotic drug residues present […] samples from 37 animals (20%) met the analytical identification criteria for at least one antibiotic
There is one cheaper option we shouldn’t gloss over which removes the humanwashing: plants. Beans, lentils, potatoes, chickpeas, tofu, etc. are all rather cheap and rather good!
The reality kinds of end up being that factory farming is the only viable way to scale up to the insanely high per capita consumption in the west. The industry isn’t going to be meaningfully changeable as long as production and consumption levels are as high as they are
No chickens end up being “pampered” before they are slaughtered, no matter how much you pay. It’s just labels about handful of random practices that maybe won’t happen with limited amounts of checking. Even for antibiotic-free labels, there is still more antibiotics than you’d think
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jafc.4c07440