This is a YouTube video titled "The Cost Of Our Cheap Meat" containing a discussion between two speakers, including Ask AI Mark, about the environmental, economic, and social costs of cheap meat production in America. The conversation highlights issues such as food waste, animal welfare, environmental damage, and hidden societal costs associated with factory farming, recorded in February 2021.
We throw away almost, I hear somewhere between 35 and 45% of the meat that's produced in America goes into the trash. So I think there's a lot of waste. Why is that? Well, when you have a really cheap product, you're not very conscious. I'll trust, you know, trust me that the numbers on like caviar usage in American restaurants are not nearly as egregious. People don't throw away stuff that's expensive. Meat's very, very cheap. And so it's a, you know, we feature it heavily in buffets. We feature it in, you know, it's a giveaway effectively. We make it We do abundant portions that people don't finish. So food waste in meats, egregious. And so we raise animals in torture. They die in torture. It's bad for the environment the way that it's produced and then it ends up in the trash can. So tell me that. We're feeding them human grade food the whole way, right? There's just elements of that that are so broken and wrong. So I think that there's the big piece that we need to talk about is that raising beef the way that I raise it is three to five times more expensive than the conventional method. and one of the great privileges of being American is cheap meat, you know? And so we've- well, let's talk about it.
Is it really cheap though? Is it really cheap? Because when you look at who's paying the cost of a factory farm animal, who's paying the cost of the destruction of the soil, the pollution of our waterways through the production of food that goes into rivers, lakes and streams and kills our fish supplies like 212,000 metric tons in the Gulf of Mexico, the loss of pollinators which have dropped 75%, half of all birds have from America because of our agricultural industrial system. The incredible damage is happening to the climate as a result of destroying the soil and the way we grow food. Who's paying those costs? I don't think we're actually paying the real cost of the food. What about the antibiotic resistance and the 700,000 deaths a year from antibiotic resistant organisms, much of which is coming from farms that cost trillions of dollars? Who's paying that cost? It's not the price you pay at the checkout counter. It's what I call socializing the cost, meaning we as citizens, as countries pay the cost while the corporations who produce those meats actually privatize the profits.
