A lot of focus on individual dietary choices in the replies. But the point is if you treated workers fairly, regulated in a way to mitigate risk of pandemics, treated animals even a little less horribly… we would not be eating the way we do. Meat would just be too $$$.

— Melissa McEwen (@melissamcewen) April 30, 2020

That’s not even close to true. Meat would only be mildly more expensive if you did these things, especially if you did not allow monopolies and all profits to go to the top 1%.

For instance, when I was a kid my family — when they had money — would buy a 1/4 of a cow and keep it in a freezer. I literally lived next to the field the cow was raised in. It had only a few cows in it and they were treated humanely.

Yet, it was still much cheaper than buying the same meat from a grocery store and the farmer made a good profit on it — and I know this for a fact because the farmer was my uncle (no, we did not get any sort of family discount at all).

Meat would be more expensive if you required the plutocrats to do the right things, but in an even better system for everyone it wouldn’t be.