On Animal Welfare

Adult oysters or mussels are sessile, meaning that their mobile larvae settle into one place and live stuck there for the rest of their lives. The choices afforded to these animals are few. Their nerves are centralized but not to the extent of full brains. They probably have fewer total neurons than, say, an ant. And a hearty mussel or oyster is mu... See more

What to do? I could find a new guy with twenty chickens. I could find a farm where I can go look at the chickens and verify that they aren’t in tiny cages and can do chicken business . But mostly, because I’m on a budget, and because none of my neighbors have twenty chickens, I buy tofu.

We settled on foraging for wild plants and wild fungi. If you could make it nutritionally balanced, that would negatively impact the fewest animals. Beyond that, we started moving down the rankings, and we found that if you can harvest abundant wildlife species in a way that results in a very quick death, that’s going to really yield very few anima... See more

There are no legal mandates anywhere on earth that food fish or shrimp be killed in a minimally painful way. Often, they asphyx -iate after being hauled into boats. It can take hours. Tofu is cheap. So are beans.

I’ll debate the ethics of preserving heritage livestock breeds or bringing beings into existence just to kill them down the line, once we stop amputating body parts without anesthesia .

Chinese people don’t reject common vegetarian foods because there is something fundamentally more valuable about meat. They do so because of perceived value — associations of plants with poverty and meat with prosperity

But let’s talk about at least three ways we can conceive of animal welfare. One is a net balance of positive to negative feelings. A second way of thinking about it is whether animals are performing natural behaviors. The third way is thinking about biological functioning, or just having good health.

The eventual success of solar wasn’t augured by carefully constructed models of possible future outcomes. Rather, the decision to double down during one of solar’s pessi -mistic periods would have been an expression of determination that the future isn’t set in stone, but is shaped by idealists who take bold action in the face of uncertainty. When ... See more

Faced with sloppy, conflicting, and at times disingenuous messaging over a product that still costs more and tastes worse, it seems only rational if consumers continue to fall back on a simple heuristic: What would your grand -mother eat?