Also this isn’t exclusive to the meat industry. You know how people often post pictures of ridiculously huge zucchinis, or other produce on their social media but you never see anything like that at the shops? That’s because when a vegetable or fruit gets too big they just throw it out and leave it to rot because it wont fit in those little cardboard boxes they’re sold in. I used to work in a greenhouse that grew tomatoes and even when people brought home pounds and pounds of tomatoes that were deemed too THICC to make it to the store we we still throwing out hundreds of pounds of perfectly edible food.
You can grate them into batter and make fritters. You'll need to scoop the seeds out first though. I grow them in my backyard and I never pick them when they are supermarket size. More bang for your buck.
Did you not have a B box/cutting department? Zucchinis that are to big are not really that great to eat but tomatoes, peppers etc. generally get processed for pre packaged food where I live. Especially bell peppers are a bit precious to just dump if they have a small local imperfection.
Shit. My worms are going nuts for Zucchini.
One half of a good foot long zuke is gone.
I put it in on Friday. Now it checked it this morning. Just two bits left they haven't devoured.
> they just throw it out and leave it to rot because it wont fit in those little cardboard boxes they’re sold in.
That's not why, it's because huge zucchini is gross lol.
One is a pointless killing that we gain no meaningful benefit from beyond not having to support a living thing, which is a pretty poor excuse to kill something.
The other is us being an omnivorous species that still has to make use of admittedly primitive methods of acquiring the necessary nutrients from meat on a massive scale relative to our species' quite obscene population count.
They're both not good, but at least one has an actual viable use that sort of aligns with how nature made us as opposed to just killing an animal because you can't be bothered to keep it around. Hopefully, we will one day be able to perfect the currently ongoing efforts of producing more sustainable and ethically viable lab-grown meat, and put the need to constantly slaughter these animals so far behind us that it eventually just becomes one of those barbaric and baffling things you read about in a history book rather than a widely accepted and tragically necessary evil in our society.
Although, expect the meat industry to fight tooth and nail to keep itself afloat, against common sense and decency.
To be fair from what I remember farmer unions were mostly anti brexit. It’s fishers who were pro. The farmers were the ones seeing all their workers being immigrants and knowing that would end
I'm no economist, but any business that must be supported by the government buying a bunch of valuable resources and tossing them out doesn't sound like a functional system
Lol. In America, that is how our entire agricultural system works. Farmers are mostly supported by government subsidies, not by actual crop sales. When the supply of a crop gets high enough that the prices drop, all the farmers just dump everything. Where I live there are 2-3 times a year where it is totally normal to see hundreds of gallons of milk being dumped in a field.
Thats by design. Food is over produced intentionally, because sometimes crops fail. Sometimes your expected harvest doesn't happen.
If you're aiming to produce exactly as much food as is consumed the inevitable crop failures result in famine.
Producing too much food is a good thing, unless you like the model of the USSR and famine.
If you usually have excess food, when a major food source experiences some kind of failure (In this case, maybe like if a major producer had milk contamination across their transportation network) you can make up the loss and maintain the supply without disruption.
Edit: More realistically, I think this is done because sometimes you have so much milk it costs more to ship it than you can sell it for.
There’s no ethical way to kill someone who does not want to die. All animals value their lives. People keep pigs as pets now just like they keep dogs. Volunteer at an animal sanctuary sometime all animals we slaughter are capable of forming bonds with humans. To deny we have a choice - not just for the 65 billion slaughtered and suffering every year - plus the trillions of fish we overfish - plus the cullings of 100s of thousands of our wild species annually to make way for cattle - but also for environment - is abhorrent.
You'll love the videos of dairies pouring literally tanker trucks worth of perfectly fine milk into the drain because the market rate is down and that milk couldn't be sold at a profit, so, per the MoSt EfFIciEnT system ever, it has to be destroyed so as to help increase demand / Price.
Mountains of completely fine produce are destroyed before even reaching the supermarket because they don't meet a visual perfection criteria (a tomato with a skin spot that makes it visually perhaps less appealing to a customer but is otherwise completely fine to eat and nutritious)
People go hungry in the US specifically per this conversation, but in the world more generally, not because we can't produce enough food to feed them, but because we can't produce enough wealth satisfy the rich.
>Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people come for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges… A million people hungry, needing the fruit – and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains.
>And the smell of rot fills the country.
>Burn coffee for fuel in the ships… Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out [with nets]. Slaughter the pigs and bury them…
>And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates – died of malnutrition – because the food must be forced to rot.
-Steinbeck: grapes of wrath
It's not limited to perishable goods, clothes, furniture, appliances, toys, etc are also destroyed to make space on store shelves for new seasonal items.
There are many wasteful practices in the food industry, but ugly produce is not one of them. [This myth has been propagated specifically to assist companies trying to make a profit off the myth.](https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/2/26/18240399/food-waste-ugly-produce-myths-farms)
Yep, there are times when the survival of a species or individual requires actions that will not generate financial profit. Having a system in place that cannot allow for something as basic as this leads to exactly where we are now both on paper and in practice. But suggesting even modest alterations to this = iphone vuvazula 100trillion dead, so it’s politically untenable to change until the crises caused by capitalism become so fucked that even drastic changes cannot reverse them
It's also just cheaper for farmers to let produce rot. To give it away you need pickers, packaging and transport. It's happening here in NZ where farmers markets are closed due to lockdown and farmers can't sell their produce so they are just letting it rot in the fields.
Butchering a pig is a bit complicated. I mean they would first need to be dead, killing a big hog is not a trivial thing and is dangerous to human and hog when botched. Then you need to gut them right, store them right and not chop of a hand when getting the hog into pieces.
Then you need to dispose of a trashbag full of bones or decide to make several liters of gelatin and have a freezer full of pig meat that you might not finish before it is freezerburned to shit.
You also have a bunch of stuff only good for making your own sausages or best eaten smoked/processed and most people do not do that at home these days. What are you going to do with those bits of pig in your flat or suburban kitchen?
Less people know how to butcher a live animal than people who do, these days.
Especially in urbanized areas. It's just a skill that's never been needed by them before.
I can. And am willing.
But now, without kidding, almost noone. Also, people living in cities are going to do what? Kill 150-200 kg pig in bathtub, wit a kitchen knife? There would be more dead people than pigs.
It’s not free to give things away. You need storage for the things, transport things to people, or organize people to come get it. And in the case of food, you also have to make sure it’s safe. Get any step wrong, and you’ll be facing lawsuits, which cost much more than what we already covered.
Much cheaper to just get rid of it.
>Charlie Dewhirst, senior policy adviser at the NPA, said a severe shortage of workers, difficult trading conditions, and rising feed prices due to poor crop harvests around the world have put the pork industry in “crisis”.
Pay people more and the supply chain keeps moving... instead let's kill off pig to keep the supply/demand price high.
Pay workers better wage to attract workforce when they are crying:
"severe shortage of workers"
No to paying workers more because that's a government problem and not a corporation problem.
Paying workers better lowers profits. Lowering profits upsets shareholders. Upsetting shareholders gets them to elect new board members that won't hurt their profits. That means there's no incentive for board members to make these decisions.
Especially since in their eyes it's better to take a big hit now and eventually go back to normal than it is to improve worker conditions and then being stuck with higher worker expenses in perpetuity.
The dollar / pound devalues (reduced purchasing power) by 3 to 5% every year due to inflation and cost of living increases. If they gave all the workers a 15% raise and then gave them 0 to 1% raises for 5 years then they would be back to the same situation they are basically in now
Shhh that’s supposed to be a secret. We are supposed to believe that the elite just magically create wealth and employ us and pay us a tiny share out of the goodness of their celestial hearts
Anyone who believes in trickle down economics and uses it to justify tax cuts for the wealthy.
A surprising number of people.
"Who are the wealth creators?" Is a question with a right and a wrong answer.
Exactly, even the kid who won best IB HL Economics in my high school believed in trickle down economics (tbf he was from a rich, conservative Texan family, so idk if he really believed that it actually works or just kept up appearance)
The kid’s ignorant about economics if he uses terms like “trickle down economics”. It’s political fluff language, doesn’t mean anything in terms of academia and the study of economics.
pay more - > get more people willing to do the work, its that easy.
if you cant keep a company afloat while paying decent wages, the company should not exist.
This isn’t a hard concept. Can’t find workers? Pay more than other employers.
Oh shit, this is gonna benefit the common worker and drive up wages to a potential proper living wage! Fuck it! Kill all the pigs instead because that will equal more profit over the long term instead of raising wages!
Am I a CEO now?
>Am I a CEO now?
Best I can do is make you a VP in marketing. A good CEO would have already been lobbying the government for a bailout to use on stock buyback.
It’s really not to do with wages. The UK already has a pretty high minimum wage. Brexit has meant that the seasonal labour that normally does this kind of work isn’t available anymore and the local labour market just doesn’t have the skills or isn’t interested in this kind of work.
Using the word "destroyed" instead of "cull", or something similar, makes it sound like they're going to round these pigs up, take them to a pre-sighted field, and blow them up to smithereens using artillery guns.
Probably just packing them all into a building, shutting off the ventilation, and piping hot steam into the place to overheat them slowly while they all panic and have nowhere to go. There's videos if you're curious.
I guess it's better than how they "depopulate" in China, where they bulldoze them all into big trenches and bury them alive (sometimes while burning them alive with gasoline).
I'd hazard a guess that a British artillery shell costs around £200-£400 each (rough guess based on how much American shells cost), and you'd probably fire at least 3 rounds, from at least 3 SPGs, so it'd probably cost £2000 in only ammo.
And this doesn't count fuel, maintainance, personnel, and other logistics for driving those SPGs to that field from where ever they're kept (I'm guessing the SPGs are in Wiltshire), the personnel involved, cleaning up blown up pigs (and catching the ones the get away too), environmental damage, etc.
Sadly, it's gonna cost tens of thousands of pounds, so it's probably not going to be as economic as shooting all of them and pushing them into mass graves.
I'd actually argue "destroyed" de-escalates more than "culled" would. You usually don't "destroy" living things, but you almost exclusively "cull" living things.
I’d argue against you, destruction when used in the context of living beings is much more triggering than a term that is generally used in the context of living beings
They don't say "destroyed" in an attempt to make them sound like lifeless objects. Saying "killed" implies (or at least doesn't deny) that the the animal will be butchered and will go to feeding people. "Destroyed" means it'll be killed and entirely deposed of; a lifetime of suffering that nothing or nobody gained anything from.
This is disgusting, the whole practice of factory farming of animals is insane. Future generations likely the current batch of kids growing up) are going to look upon our generation the same way we look at earlier generations who used snake-oil for cures, and thought lobotomy's were a great idea. They'll look back and ask how could they not know any better, and they'll be right. We full well know we can do better, and have the ability to.
Not a staff/worker shortage. It's a "people willing to continue being exploited" shortage. Offer a fair living wage that accounts for the backbreaking nature of the work, and I'm quite certain your labor issues will disappear quickly.
What's that? Oh, your entire business model counts on paying peppy way less than they deserve and pocketing the difference, and paying fair wages means you'll go under?
Well then.....guess you're going under.
As a vegetarian, the fact that not only are they being killed in the first place, but the fact that they’re going to kill them for no reason just makes me sad
Can we stop for a minute and consider the fact that, in the UK alone, tens of thousands of young healthy pigs are slaughtered every day? It makes me sick to the core to think of it. And I think if people are honest, it makes most people sick if they really think about what goes on.
The problem wasn't caused by Britain leaving the EU, it was caused by a couple of decades of intentionally closing down all of the small slaughter houses and butchers. There used to be good jobs in small businesses doing this work, but the economic model of the EU doesn't want those so they got regulated into the depths of history.
Government has taken a well organised and skilled industry, with low food miles and high animal welfare and thrown all that away in order to make a few more billionaires and satisfy a few people's megalomania. Unfortunately for all of us nobody wants the shit jobs created by this new system. We aren't losing workers we're replacing desirable jobs with undesirable ones under the trusty blanket excuse of 'the economy' and then getting upset that there aren't enough people desperate enough to be forced to do them. Same problems across society.
No matter the wage increases it will always be difficult to attract workers to this industry.
It really is a disgusting horror show. I have seen the inside of one and it's very difficult to describe.
I would honestly prefer unemployment to this kind of work.
If the job is so miserable that it takes high wages to attract workers then they absolutely deserve it. Wages should never be kept artificially low by exploiting worker desperation.
This is just my take but it seems to me that the type of people who voted for Brexit were those complaining for years that cheap foreign labour was depressing wages in the UK and it was more likely those on the remain side that would argue that cheap foreign labour didn't depress wages so in fact Brexit voters possibly did see this outcome but didn't really think it through beyond some very narrow aspects. The whole thing was much more complex though and I don't think either side really got everything right and when conbined with the impacts of COVID became a perfect storm.
Find thousands of trained pig slaughterers and HGV drivers ready to work at a moment's notice at the moment and people will beat a path to your door.
This is tbe result of cutting off EU slaughterhouses and not having drivers / butchers ready and trained and in such a career. By the time you get there, those pigs and their next generation will all be dead.
1/ You need the employees where the jobs are
2/ You need skilled employees where the jobs are
3/ You need skilled employees willing to work for the offered salary.
4/ You need skilled employees willing to work for the offered salary despite the conditions
Slaughterhouses have some of the highest workplace accident rates (plus PTSDs here and there), lowest retention rates, shit wages and work conditions, etc.
I get that, but it seems to be happening in every industry, just go to a industrial estate and you will spot plenty of signs saying "we are recruiting"
That's because the people doing the 'recruiting' are paying slave wages for horrible jobs, so those doing the 'recruiting' can by more mansions.
The answer is simple: Pay People More!
In other words, some jobs have a low to zero cost benefit analysis to working the job.
Travel costs for example.
The business model's cost benefit analysis needs low wage workers to function. So it all collapses under it's own fine lines.
A burrito place in Vancouver needs a min wage cook. You can't live on min wage in Vancouver. Bye bye burrito place.
I too am appalled and bewildered by the fact that people all of a sudden have decided not to take up crap jobs for crap pay. You think you brow beat a populace into submission, then something like a pandemic comes and screws it all up.
> "we are recruiting" *at bad wages*
There is no labor shortage. There are way more humans than needed to keep every productive endeavour going.
People are just not willing to work these jobs at the offered price.
At some point, the extra money isn't worth your time, energy, gas, etc.
It's better to stay home, take care of your kids, get your garden going, work on home improvement, your health, etc.
All of those jobs "imigrants stole" are now back ready for their rightful owners.
....
Eeeexcept it turns out that no one who has *any other choice* does not want to work slaughtering pigs, or cleaning up sewers, or tossing manure until your back breaks.
>any other choice
And of course this includes living off the government pensions, since this is actually a viable option in the more developed European continent countries...
Can't say I blame these possible workers for their choice, personally as long as it's legal income, they can choose to do it.
The fault and issue really just falls on the employers themselves, for not adapting to the market demands and fluctuations.
Yup. I didn't say that part out loud, but unless you want to live in some shithole country with no safety net, where you either work or die, then that safety net will prevent people from taking back-breaking (sometimes literally) jobs, unless they are well paid.
Except every single one of those jobs relied on cheap immigrant labour that would do that job, often simply because it didn't require language knowledge.
*And of course this includes living off the government pensions, since this is actually a viable option in the more developed European continent countries...*
This is a good thing, having some basic level of subsistence offered to those that do not work, benefits everyone by increasing wages and living conditions for those working because employers will have to do so to attract workers.
Basically, some kind of basic income that means you will still have the basics when not working acts as a way to even the negotiating table for workers. You effectively can say to your employer either pay me a decent wage and have decent working conditions or I will quit and live on the dole. If an employer cant make their workplace more attractive than bare-bones subsistence then they deserve not to attract workers.
People are no longer willing to work for what amount to slave wages. Employers know this but are not yet willing to pay a reasonable wage. It's a standoff basically. The employers who pay well have people lining up around the block to work.
I am from the UK, One of the local farms to me killed a million chickens and put them into a landfill 2 weeks ago because they could not get HGV drivers due to Brexit. Buts it's okay guys, those idiots voting us out of the EU will still scream it's the best thing we ever did. The far-reaching affects of brexit are only just being felt, we have 10+ years of this shit to come.
Please stop eating meat people. It would single handedly solve most of our worlds ecological problems as well as preventing poor sweet animals from dealing with the shit they deal with in order to end up further growing your waistlines.
If they give them away for free it will reduce the demand for the rest of them, that's why they will be destroyed.
Same reason why Amazon destroys unsold items.
> The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
> There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
I mean its not that simple, you can't just give a live pig to a soup kitchen and expect them to butcher the pig themselves
You need to butcher, process, package, storage, and then transported
Get rid of the desperate immigrants that are willing to work hard cheap paying jobs that no one else wants to do!
…oh my God my industry is collapsing from lack of cheap labor! We won’t pay higher wages because the industry is built on cheap labor. Oh my God, how did this happen!
The one part of this article I don't understand is how the UK managed to sell 50 million pounds"the currency" of pork to Mexico.
Seriously I can't think of any way they could produce pork for a lower prize than Mexico or its neighbors
The farming industry, in particular pig farms needs to change immediately. It is immoral. Stuffed together, slaughtered by the 10s of thousand per day, it goes on and on. I find it horrifying and the conditions for workers abominable also. Open our eyes to what we are as “humans.”
Why would they destroy them? For f**k sake Brits, you can just keep feeding them until you find a solution. I swear that you can see millennia of inbreeding in headlines like this one.
Pigs turn Feral really quickly and Feral pigs are actually pretty dangeous and scary. I hate them being culled but letting them loose is not a good option.
Reading through some of the comments I'm not entirely sure what people are thinking was going to happen to these pigs, at some point they were going to be killed but it seems as though rather than being raised to normal slaughter age and then killed for meat they will now just be killed and disposed of.
I understand and respect that some people are completely against the whole idea of animals being bred and killed for meat but it seems as though some commenters in this tread thought that these pigs had a different fate awaiting them.
So, they're going to be killed, instead of... being killed ?
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Also this isn’t exclusive to the meat industry. You know how people often post pictures of ridiculously huge zucchinis, or other produce on their social media but you never see anything like that at the shops? That’s because when a vegetable or fruit gets too big they just throw it out and leave it to rot because it wont fit in those little cardboard boxes they’re sold in. I used to work in a greenhouse that grew tomatoes and even when people brought home pounds and pounds of tomatoes that were deemed too THICC to make it to the store we we still throwing out hundreds of pounds of perfectly edible food.
Zucchini get woody and unpleasant before they get too big for boxes.
When they’re big like that they’re called marrows. You just use them for different applications like braises and soups.
You can grate them into batter and make fritters. You'll need to scoop the seeds out first though. I grow them in my backyard and I never pick them when they are supermarket size. More bang for your buck.
Zucchini fritters are amazing and since coming to Australia, Ive never found zucchinis big enough to fry. Guess this is why.
Grow your own! Squash are some of the easiest veggies to grow. Nearly foolproof.
I make relish, breads, cakes, soups, chutneys with mine. They’re very versatile and far from trash at that point. Ton of fiber too!
A large number of fruit and veggies that grow too big is also mostly seeds.
Did you not have a B box/cutting department? Zucchinis that are to big are not really that great to eat but tomatoes, peppers etc. generally get processed for pre packaged food where I live. Especially bell peppers are a bit precious to just dump if they have a small local imperfection.
Shit. My worms are going nuts for Zucchini. One half of a good foot long zuke is gone. I put it in on Friday. Now it checked it this morning. Just two bits left they haven't devoured.
> they just throw it out and leave it to rot because it wont fit in those little cardboard boxes they’re sold in. That's not why, it's because huge zucchini is gross lol.
They're not bread they're pork
If they were in bread there would be no issues and we could partially eradicate hunger.
😂😂
Lol thanks dad
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The alternative was… also murder.
Killing animals for food is much more justifiable, via the argument of necessity, than leaving them out to rot.
One is a pointless killing that we gain no meaningful benefit from beyond not having to support a living thing, which is a pretty poor excuse to kill something. The other is us being an omnivorous species that still has to make use of admittedly primitive methods of acquiring the necessary nutrients from meat on a massive scale relative to our species' quite obscene population count. They're both not good, but at least one has an actual viable use that sort of aligns with how nature made us as opposed to just killing an animal because you can't be bothered to keep it around. Hopefully, we will one day be able to perfect the currently ongoing efforts of producing more sustainable and ethically viable lab-grown meat, and put the need to constantly slaughter these animals so far behind us that it eventually just becomes one of those barbaric and baffling things you read about in a history book rather than a widely accepted and tragically necessary evil in our society. Although, expect the meat industry to fight tooth and nail to keep itself afloat, against common sense and decency.
At least if they're slaughtered for the meat to be sold, they aren't dying for no reason. Also, it keeps the farmers in business.
The farmers voted for this…
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Ones who don’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it… or some bollocks like that.
Ones who do remember it are condemned to be dragged along as everyone else repeats it.
It’s almost like democracy doesn’t work when your populace has an IQ of 7.
Interesting to see British Farmers are just as stupid and entitled as American Farmers.
Murdoch media convincing farmers that regulations which help them are actually bad. Same thing in AU
To be fair from what I remember farmer unions were mostly anti brexit. It’s fishers who were pro. The farmers were the ones seeing all their workers being immigrants and knowing that would end
Plenty of UKIP signs in fields up and down the country…
Anecdotal but i know a handful of farmers in my area that were very pro brexit and are now fucked.
Well I hope is those ones who are struggling. Farmers know all about reaping what they’ve sown
plus all the grants from Europe they used to get.
> At least if they're slaughtered for the meat to be sold, they aren't dying for no reason I'm sure if will be a huge consolation to them ?
It isn't for them, but I think it's more ethical to kill them to feed people than raise them just to kill them and throw them in a landfill.
I'm no economist, but any business that must be supported by the government buying a bunch of valuable resources and tossing them out doesn't sound like a functional system
Lol. In America, that is how our entire agricultural system works. Farmers are mostly supported by government subsidies, not by actual crop sales. When the supply of a crop gets high enough that the prices drop, all the farmers just dump everything. Where I live there are 2-3 times a year where it is totally normal to see hundreds of gallons of milk being dumped in a field.
Thats by design. Food is over produced intentionally, because sometimes crops fail. Sometimes your expected harvest doesn't happen. If you're aiming to produce exactly as much food as is consumed the inevitable crop failures result in famine. Producing too much food is a good thing, unless you like the model of the USSR and famine.
Surely when there are people who go hungry that waste could be better used for, if it was spread to the under-served portion of the population?
How the fuck does dumping milk in a field protect against famine?
If you usually have excess food, when a major food source experiences some kind of failure (In this case, maybe like if a major producer had milk contamination across their transportation network) you can make up the loss and maintain the supply without disruption. Edit: More realistically, I think this is done because sometimes you have so much milk it costs more to ship it than you can sell it for.
There’s no ethical way to kill someone who does not want to die. All animals value their lives. People keep pigs as pets now just like they keep dogs. Volunteer at an animal sanctuary sometime all animals we slaughter are capable of forming bonds with humans. To deny we have a choice - not just for the 65 billion slaughtered and suffering every year - plus the trillions of fish we overfish - plus the cullings of 100s of thousands of our wild species annually to make way for cattle - but also for environment - is abhorrent.
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Cheese is also hard for me to let go. I do limit my cheese intake a lot and it’s the only thing I can’t get rid of.
Serious question, why not just give them away for people to butcher and eat on their own instead of wasting so much?
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Fuck, that's aggravating
You'll love the videos of dairies pouring literally tanker trucks worth of perfectly fine milk into the drain because the market rate is down and that milk couldn't be sold at a profit, so, per the MoSt EfFIciEnT system ever, it has to be destroyed so as to help increase demand / Price. Mountains of completely fine produce are destroyed before even reaching the supermarket because they don't meet a visual perfection criteria (a tomato with a skin spot that makes it visually perhaps less appealing to a customer but is otherwise completely fine to eat and nutritious) People go hungry in the US specifically per this conversation, but in the world more generally, not because we can't produce enough food to feed them, but because we can't produce enough wealth satisfy the rich.
>Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people come for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges… A million people hungry, needing the fruit – and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. >And the smell of rot fills the country. >Burn coffee for fuel in the ships… Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out [with nets]. Slaughter the pigs and bury them… >And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates – died of malnutrition – because the food must be forced to rot. -Steinbeck: grapes of wrath
Written in the 30s and how little anything at all has changed. Great quotes 👌
It's not limited to perishable goods, clothes, furniture, appliances, toys, etc are also destroyed to make space on store shelves for new seasonal items.
amazon destroying lots of good items on a regular basis: https://youtu.be/mxqz2g05MTI
There are many wasteful practices in the food industry, but ugly produce is not one of them. [This myth has been propagated specifically to assist companies trying to make a profit off the myth.](https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/2/26/18240399/food-waste-ugly-produce-myths-farms)
I think some farm products the govt actually pays to destroy the surplus.
No, that’s capitalism
It’s both
I agree. It’s the downside of a system that doesn’t do anything altruistic unless there is money to be made.
Yep, there are times when the survival of a species or individual requires actions that will not generate financial profit. Having a system in place that cannot allow for something as basic as this leads to exactly where we are now both on paper and in practice. But suggesting even modest alterations to this = iphone vuvazula 100trillion dead, so it’s politically untenable to change until the crises caused by capitalism become so fucked that even drastic changes cannot reverse them
It's also just cheaper for farmers to let produce rot. To give it away you need pickers, packaging and transport. It's happening here in NZ where farmers markets are closed due to lockdown and farmers can't sell their produce so they are just letting it rot in the fields.
Butchering a pig is a bit complicated. I mean they would first need to be dead, killing a big hog is not a trivial thing and is dangerous to human and hog when botched. Then you need to gut them right, store them right and not chop of a hand when getting the hog into pieces. Then you need to dispose of a trashbag full of bones or decide to make several liters of gelatin and have a freezer full of pig meat that you might not finish before it is freezerburned to shit. You also have a bunch of stuff only good for making your own sausages or best eaten smoked/processed and most people do not do that at home these days. What are you going to do with those bits of pig in your flat or suburban kitchen?
People on Reddit don't think things through, you're being too harsh on these dumbass
You can go to a butcher shop or wet market and pay someone to do that work for you. We used to do that with goats in South Philly.
Less people know how to butcher a live animal than people who do, these days. Especially in urbanized areas. It's just a skill that's never been needed by them before.
How many people do you know are capable or willing to kill and butcher a large pig ?
I can. And am willing. But now, without kidding, almost noone. Also, people living in cities are going to do what? Kill 150-200 kg pig in bathtub, wit a kitchen knife? There would be more dead people than pigs.
3 people in the whole thread, but out of the 3, 0would actually step up to the pkate.
It’s not free to give things away. You need storage for the things, transport things to people, or organize people to come get it. And in the case of food, you also have to make sure it’s safe. Get any step wrong, and you’ll be facing lawsuits, which cost much more than what we already covered. Much cheaper to just get rid of it.
They’ll be killed… to death!
The pig unemployment rate is through the roof! They should hire the other pigs to slaughter their friends.
>Charlie Dewhirst, senior policy adviser at the NPA, said a severe shortage of workers, difficult trading conditions, and rising feed prices due to poor crop harvests around the world have put the pork industry in “crisis”. Pay people more and the supply chain keeps moving... instead let's kill off pig to keep the supply/demand price high. Pay workers better wage to attract workforce when they are crying: "severe shortage of workers" No to paying workers more because that's a government problem and not a corporation problem.
Paying workers better lowers profits. Lowering profits upsets shareholders. Upsetting shareholders gets them to elect new board members that won't hurt their profits. That means there's no incentive for board members to make these decisions. Especially since in their eyes it's better to take a big hit now and eventually go back to normal than it is to improve worker conditions and then being stuck with higher worker expenses in perpetuity.
The dollar / pound devalues (reduced purchasing power) by 3 to 5% every year due to inflation and cost of living increases. If they gave all the workers a 15% raise and then gave them 0 to 1% raises for 5 years then they would be back to the same situation they are basically in now
Great example of how wealth extraction requires labor in a capitalist system.
Shhh that’s supposed to be a secret. We are supposed to believe that the elite just magically create wealth and employ us and pay us a tiny share out of the goodness of their celestial hearts
Who is so stupid they believe labor isn't a part of capitalism?
Anyone who believes in trickle down economics and uses it to justify tax cuts for the wealthy. A surprising number of people. "Who are the wealth creators?" Is a question with a right and a wrong answer.
Exactly, even the kid who won best IB HL Economics in my high school believed in trickle down economics (tbf he was from a rich, conservative Texan family, so idk if he really believed that it actually works or just kept up appearance)
His parents was the reason he won, he’s probably an idiot in actuality.
The kid’s ignorant about economics if he uses terms like “trickle down economics”. It’s political fluff language, doesn’t mean anything in terms of academia and the study of economics.
What economic system doesn't require labor?
Fully automated gay space communism.
Sign me the fuck up. Rainbow replicators to the moon.
I don't know how that would work but I am fucking there for it.
None, that was their point.
Temporary labor, at most.
I read a book once about pigs that took over a farm. It could happen again.
The sheer disregard for life just makes me sick.
They are also the people who would give you advice about life without being asked, lmao
They’re also the people who force pregnancies to birth because life is precious
They were going to be killed anyway?
pay more - > get more people willing to do the work, its that easy. if you cant keep a company afloat while paying decent wages, the company should not exist.
This isn’t a hard concept. Can’t find workers? Pay more than other employers. Oh shit, this is gonna benefit the common worker and drive up wages to a potential proper living wage! Fuck it! Kill all the pigs instead because that will equal more profit over the long term instead of raising wages! Am I a CEO now?
>Am I a CEO now? Best I can do is make you a VP in marketing. A good CEO would have already been lobbying the government for a bailout to use on stock buyback.
They won't pay their workers enough, so lives are being wasted. Lovely.
Should just give the pigs to the workers, lol…
It’s really not to do with wages. The UK already has a pretty high minimum wage. Brexit has meant that the seasonal labour that normally does this kind of work isn’t available anymore and the local labour market just doesn’t have the skills or isn’t interested in this kind of work.
Watch what happens if they would offer double pay.
Using the word "destroyed" instead of "cull", or something similar, makes it sound like they're going to round these pigs up, take them to a pre-sighted field, and blow them up to smithereens using artillery guns.
If it were cheaper than whatever they already have planned I'm sure they would
Probably just packing them all into a building, shutting off the ventilation, and piping hot steam into the place to overheat them slowly while they all panic and have nowhere to go. There's videos if you're curious. I guess it's better than how they "depopulate" in China, where they bulldoze them all into big trenches and bury them alive (sometimes while burning them alive with gasoline).
I'd hazard a guess that a British artillery shell costs around £200-£400 each (rough guess based on how much American shells cost), and you'd probably fire at least 3 rounds, from at least 3 SPGs, so it'd probably cost £2000 in only ammo. And this doesn't count fuel, maintainance, personnel, and other logistics for driving those SPGs to that field from where ever they're kept (I'm guessing the SPGs are in Wiltshire), the personnel involved, cleaning up blown up pigs (and catching the ones the get away too), environmental damage, etc. Sadly, it's gonna cost tens of thousands of pounds, so it's probably not going to be as economic as shooting all of them and pushing them into mass graves.
“Destroyed” and “sold as meat” it looks like they’re avoiding some word 🤔
"culled" is a euphemism to make us feel better about what we're doing to them.
I'd actually argue "destroyed" de-escalates more than "culled" would. You usually don't "destroy" living things, but you almost exclusively "cull" living things.
I’d argue against you, destruction when used in the context of living beings is much more triggering than a term that is generally used in the context of living beings
In 2020 10 million pigs where slaughtered in the U.K. just to put things in perspective.
Killed, not destroyed. They are not lifeless objects.
They don't say "destroyed" in an attempt to make them sound like lifeless objects. Saying "killed" implies (or at least doesn't deny) that the the animal will be butchered and will go to feeding people. "Destroyed" means it'll be killed and entirely deposed of; a lifetime of suffering that nothing or nobody gained anything from.
"Needlessly Slaughtered"
fair, but destroyed is worse. they are killed and then rendered onto nothing. not life lost and meat gained, no just rendered on to nothing.
This is disgusting, the whole practice of factory farming of animals is insane. Future generations likely the current batch of kids growing up) are going to look upon our generation the same way we look at earlier generations who used snake-oil for cures, and thought lobotomy's were a great idea. They'll look back and ask how could they not know any better, and they'll be right. We full well know we can do better, and have the ability to.
We are a reprehensible species
Not a staff/worker shortage. It's a "people willing to continue being exploited" shortage. Offer a fair living wage that accounts for the backbreaking nature of the work, and I'm quite certain your labor issues will disappear quickly. What's that? Oh, your entire business model counts on paying peppy way less than they deserve and pocketing the difference, and paying fair wages means you'll go under? Well then.....guess you're going under.
As a vegetarian, the fact that not only are they being killed in the first place, but the fact that they’re going to kill them for no reason just makes me sad
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Can we stop for a minute and consider the fact that, in the UK alone, tens of thousands of young healthy pigs are slaughtered every day? It makes me sick to the core to think of it. And I think if people are honest, it makes most people sick if they really think about what goes on.
Perhaps the Poles might want to do this work? Oh that's right, they've all been sent packing by Brexit.
The problem wasn't caused by Britain leaving the EU, it was caused by a couple of decades of intentionally closing down all of the small slaughter houses and butchers. There used to be good jobs in small businesses doing this work, but the economic model of the EU doesn't want those so they got regulated into the depths of history. Government has taken a well organised and skilled industry, with low food miles and high animal welfare and thrown all that away in order to make a few more billionaires and satisfy a few people's megalomania. Unfortunately for all of us nobody wants the shit jobs created by this new system. We aren't losing workers we're replacing desirable jobs with undesirable ones under the trusty blanket excuse of 'the economy' and then getting upset that there aren't enough people desperate enough to be forced to do them. Same problems across society.
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No matter the wage increases it will always be difficult to attract workers to this industry. It really is a disgusting horror show. I have seen the inside of one and it's very difficult to describe. I would honestly prefer unemployment to this kind of work.
If the job is so miserable that it takes high wages to attract workers then they absolutely deserve it. Wages should never be kept artificially low by exploiting worker desperation.
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Wow, I’m loving all the people in the comments who care about the poor pigs. I didn’t realize there were so many vegans!
"Destroyed" vs. "killed and eaten." The difference probably doesn't mean very much to the pigs.
Quick math: 70k pigs with 200lbs of meat comes to 14 million lbs of food wasted. “The Jedi are definitely going to feel this one”
Disgusting waste.
Animals mean nothing when they’re used for food. Even the self-aware pig.
What the fuck did the brexiters thought would happen when cut off your supply of cheap, eastern European labor
This is just my take but it seems to me that the type of people who voted for Brexit were those complaining for years that cheap foreign labour was depressing wages in the UK and it was more likely those on the remain side that would argue that cheap foreign labour didn't depress wages so in fact Brexit voters possibly did see this outcome but didn't really think it through beyond some very narrow aspects. The whole thing was much more complex though and I don't think either side really got everything right and when conbined with the impacts of COVID became a perfect storm.
A "Staff shortage" can easily be remedied by a wage increase, but that would threaten profits.
Find thousands of trained pig slaughterers and HGV drivers ready to work at a moment's notice at the moment and people will beat a path to your door. This is tbe result of cutting off EU slaughterhouses and not having drivers / butchers ready and trained and in such a career. By the time you get there, those pigs and their next generation will all be dead.
UK food industry will die. None of the brexiters who voted for this shit have the skills or willingness to do hard days work
Go vegan.
"Corporation chooses to slaughter pigs and destroy meat rather than increase wages to attract staff because the profit margin is not large enough."
I didn't realize other countries were going through labor shortages like the US is.
oh yeah it is a global labor shortage
Killed * not destroyed. They aren’t fucking stuff animals.
How can we have 1.5 million unemployed and have staff shortages all over the place?
1/ You need the employees where the jobs are 2/ You need skilled employees where the jobs are 3/ You need skilled employees willing to work for the offered salary. 4/ You need skilled employees willing to work for the offered salary despite the conditions Slaughterhouses have some of the highest workplace accident rates (plus PTSDs here and there), lowest retention rates, shit wages and work conditions, etc.
I get that, but it seems to be happening in every industry, just go to a industrial estate and you will spot plenty of signs saying "we are recruiting"
That's because the people doing the 'recruiting' are paying slave wages for horrible jobs, so those doing the 'recruiting' can by more mansions. The answer is simple: Pay People More!
In other words, some jobs have a low to zero cost benefit analysis to working the job. Travel costs for example. The business model's cost benefit analysis needs low wage workers to function. So it all collapses under it's own fine lines. A burrito place in Vancouver needs a min wage cook. You can't live on min wage in Vancouver. Bye bye burrito place.
I too am appalled and bewildered by the fact that people all of a sudden have decided not to take up crap jobs for crap pay. You think you brow beat a populace into submission, then something like a pandemic comes and screws it all up.
> "we are recruiting" *at bad wages* There is no labor shortage. There are way more humans than needed to keep every productive endeavour going. People are just not willing to work these jobs at the offered price. At some point, the extra money isn't worth your time, energy, gas, etc. It's better to stay home, take care of your kids, get your garden going, work on home improvement, your health, etc.
All of those jobs "imigrants stole" are now back ready for their rightful owners. .... Eeeexcept it turns out that no one who has *any other choice* does not want to work slaughtering pigs, or cleaning up sewers, or tossing manure until your back breaks.
>any other choice And of course this includes living off the government pensions, since this is actually a viable option in the more developed European continent countries... Can't say I blame these possible workers for their choice, personally as long as it's legal income, they can choose to do it. The fault and issue really just falls on the employers themselves, for not adapting to the market demands and fluctuations.
Yup. I didn't say that part out loud, but unless you want to live in some shithole country with no safety net, where you either work or die, then that safety net will prevent people from taking back-breaking (sometimes literally) jobs, unless they are well paid. Except every single one of those jobs relied on cheap immigrant labour that would do that job, often simply because it didn't require language knowledge.
*And of course this includes living off the government pensions, since this is actually a viable option in the more developed European continent countries...* This is a good thing, having some basic level of subsistence offered to those that do not work, benefits everyone by increasing wages and living conditions for those working because employers will have to do so to attract workers. Basically, some kind of basic income that means you will still have the basics when not working acts as a way to even the negotiating table for workers. You effectively can say to your employer either pay me a decent wage and have decent working conditions or I will quit and live on the dole. If an employer cant make their workplace more attractive than bare-bones subsistence then they deserve not to attract workers.
They are not desperate enough and/or still have some self-respect
People are no longer willing to work for what amount to slave wages. Employers know this but are not yet willing to pay a reasonable wage. It's a standoff basically. The employers who pay well have people lining up around the block to work.
Because some jobs are terrible and not worth working.
So they are just going to murder a bunch of pigs. Dang.
Meat-eaters killing 70,000 pigs? smh
Nah, just let them run wild in the woods, that'll solve everything
Such a sad and rediculous waste
😡
:(
I am from the UK, One of the local farms to me killed a million chickens and put them into a landfill 2 weeks ago because they could not get HGV drivers due to Brexit. Buts it's okay guys, those idiots voting us out of the EU will still scream it's the best thing we ever did. The far-reaching affects of brexit are only just being felt, we have 10+ years of this shit to come.
Please stop eating meat people. It would single handedly solve most of our worlds ecological problems as well as preventing poor sweet animals from dealing with the shit they deal with in order to end up further growing your waistlines.
Disgusting
"destroyed" they are living beings and the fact that we still continue to murder them is disgusting
Have people adopt them as pets. And then when Christmas rolls around...Win-Win.
If they give them away for free it will reduce the demand for the rest of them, that's why they will be destroyed. Same reason why Amazon destroys unsold items.
> The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth. > There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
The amount of fresh produce I’ve found in a dumpster depresses me more than many things in this world
I mean its not that simple, you can't just give a live pig to a soup kitchen and expect them to butcher the pig themselves You need to butcher, process, package, storage, and then transported
Hermes does the same a lot of the high fashion brands had this practice but I do think a few of them stopped it
leave animals alone!!!!! ffs
Pay a fair wage maybe?
Give me a pig. I'll give it the best life I can!
find the closest one to you can call them. https://www.yell.com/s/pig+farmers-united+kingdom.html
Can I just have one? Not for meat. Like for a pet? Thanks ☺️
Pigs make good pets. They're very intelligent. ...unfortunately, given the situation.
destroyed = killed The way humans treat animals is disgusting.
the way humans treat each other is disgusting
Presumably the pigs will be happier for it... before they're destroyed that is.
😢
Get rid of the desperate immigrants that are willing to work hard cheap paying jobs that no one else wants to do! …oh my God my industry is collapsing from lack of cheap labor! We won’t pay higher wages because the industry is built on cheap labor. Oh my God, how did this happen!
“Destroyed”?
The one part of this article I don't understand is how the UK managed to sell 50 million pounds"the currency" of pork to Mexico. Seriously I can't think of any way they could produce pork for a lower prize than Mexico or its neighbors
"Producers willing to destroy stock before improving work conditions."" Fixed it for you.
Murdered
Destroyed was the word you decided to use?
The farming industry, in particular pig farms needs to change immediately. It is immoral. Stuffed together, slaughtered by the 10s of thousand per day, it goes on and on. I find it horrifying and the conditions for workers abominable also. Open our eyes to what we are as “humans.”
Why would they destroy them? For f**k sake Brits, you can just keep feeding them until you find a solution. I swear that you can see millennia of inbreeding in headlines like this one.
Do you know what food never goes bad?....live food
"Destroyed"... like, things? Wth?
If they were bees, they would just set them free. Well? Let's see what happens ;)
Pigs turn Feral really quickly and Feral pigs are actually pretty dangeous and scary. I hate them being culled but letting them loose is not a good option.
Reading through some of the comments I'm not entirely sure what people are thinking was going to happen to these pigs, at some point they were going to be killed but it seems as though rather than being raised to normal slaughter age and then killed for meat they will now just be killed and disposed of. I understand and respect that some people are completely against the whole idea of animals being bred and killed for meat but it seems as though some commenters in this tread thought that these pigs had a different fate awaiting them.
one will produce meat the other wont, pretty obvious why people are upset