Good riddance to foie gras. What about other food made from animal suffering?
Consuming smaller animals tends to lead to far more suffering per calorie, because they are so easily factory farmed. In fact, chickens and fish make up 95% of all farmed animals.
JACY REESE: ‘New York City Council just passed a ban on foie gras, the French delicacy made by force-feeding ducks and geese, to go into effect in 2022. From the perspective of animal-rights activists this is a long time coming. Foie gras has transformed many animal lovers from conscious consumers to passionate protesters. The production process of foie gras is particularly disturbing: a bird is force-fed three times a day with a long, metal pipe down its throat, all to satiate the gastronomic whims of Wall Street’s 1 per cent in posh Manhattan restaurants. Foie gras causes understandable outrage. But countless other foods are made from animal suffering. So which are the worst offenders?
In my book The End of Animal Farming I try to determine which foods are most unethical by doing the following maths. First I calculate three things: the calories per animal (you get 200 times more meat from a cow than a chicken); the lifespan of each animal on the farm; and an economic factor called elasticity, which is the estimate of how much a change in quality affects the quantity produced. Putting these together, we get that eating just 500 calories of chicken meat leads to three days of factory-farm suffering, and eggs lead to 6.3 days. Farmed fish ranges from 27 to 159 days. Compare that to pork at 7.6 hours, beef at 3.8 hours, and cow’s milk at only about 17.5 minutes.
The first thing to notice here is the “small animal rule”. Consuming smaller animals tends to lead to far more suffering per calorie, because it takes far more animals, outweighing most other factors. In fact, chickens and fish make up 95 per cent of all farmed animals. This is worsened by the fact that small animals often endure worse living conditions because they are so easily factory farmed. The second is that the differences are huge. Eggs lead to hundreds of times more direct suffering than milk. If someone eats beef and drinks milk but cuts out all other animal products, they could have more than 99 per cent of the direct impact of a vegan diet…
if we’re banning foie gras, there’s a good case for banning other foods made from birds, as well as fish products, and definitely any food that involves eating live animals. Then again, with plant-based foods getting better and cheaper every year, and cell-cultured meat right around the corner, maybe it’s time to stop eating animals altogether’. SOURCE…
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