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Supermarkets destroy food if it doesn't sell. We can always feed the world. We just don't.
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this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2026
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A lot of that "destroyed food" is animals who lived their entire lives in tiny, filthy cages just so that they could be killed and rot in a plastic bag.
I consider that just morally outrageous. To kill something so we can survive is nature's law of predator and prey.... But to kill and not have it consummed seems like the cruelest evil.
I mean the cow probably doesn't care if you needlessly killed it to throw away the meat or to eat it.. both are unnecessary and both result in the same outcome for the cow. Both are also destroying the planet. "Predator/prey" is a great appeal to nature that I am sure many people use to justify themselves lazily shuffling through Walmart to throw frozen burgers into their cart.
i mean lots of wolves, lions etc only eat half the sheep ... have you ever seen a half-eaten sheep? i have
Not even, there's no biological need to eat animals or what they produce. We've established that much. It's just a choice, a preference, a form of cruelty ("I don't need to eat you, but I will chose to do so because it pleases me, now suffer and die without bothering me"). Throwing their corpses to waste is just the cherry on top.
Based on our growth as a species/taking over ecosystems, if certain animal populations in the wild aren't culled (have a certain number of their population killed), it will be bad for the local ecosystem.
There are arguments that allowing animals to do this, instead of humans, will not always guarantee the impact we want, either.
(Fun wolves in Yellowstone video in case you like video essays and want to go off on this tangent: https://youtu.be/Y9sQdMrEX2g )
Personally: I don't hunt and I rarely buy meat, but I still eat it from time to time and am upset when it goes to waste. I don't like the idea of a factory farm, but "here we are."
Final thought: the best way to decrease meat consumption is to make the alternatives easy to prepare and alluring to more of the population.
I learned long ago that ethics won't win out. It comes down to cost and convenience. Alternatives need to be cheap and easy.
Nothing cheaper and easier than a can of pulses. And yet...
I agree. We've created quite the fast paced and frantic society. A cheap an easy alternative could shift our consumption if we scale it properly. I'd argue it should be a primary focus of anyone passionately against factory farming. We can worry about moral messages as an aside: busy, poor, and hungry families will respond better to successfully launched vegetarian and vegan fast food options at existing establishments. We're not culturally there yet.
This isn't relevant to farmed animals. Farmed animals can't overpopulate because we are the ones controlling their population.
I agree. If we could replace that system with something healthier for the planet, and our species, we would stand to benefit.
So you agree we should replace animal agriculture with plant based agriculture?
Yes (with some exceptions like eggs, milk, and other animal products like wool).
It makes sense environmentally. I would change my mind on this if there was some need to eat meat that couldn't be replaced by a vegetarian diet. I don't see the point in eating them, though.
It's not going to change until it becomes more lucrative/economical to do so, though, of course.
Ftfy
capitalism is responsible for that we can easily establish ethical farming
I think unethical farming is present in every large system, no?
Yes. This isn't a "capitalism" problem, this is a "see animals as products" problem.
It's two different problems. We started seeing animals as beings fairly recently, and the movement to actually not make them suffer is fairly new. In previous generations the reason we didn't do it properly was mainly "we don't want to", now enough of us do want it, and profit driven reality prevents it.
The same can be said for it all. Big grocery is a cancer. But so are over priced farm to table country stores. We need pricing to make sense because in the end we all lose.