On the general topic of regenerative agriculture and "proper food" from Jerry, you might be interested to know some of the reasons that ethically-raised meat is a niche activity. One big reason is that it's illegal.
It's not quite so bad in the UK, but many of the techniques associated with waste minimization, soil regeneration, and natural foodstuffs are simply forbidden by "heath and safety" rules - the same rules, bizarrely enough, which result in animals being kept in unsanitary conditions, dosed up with prophylactic antibiotics, and generally treated like widgets on a production line instead of sentient beings.
This is an old article, but the rules are still very much in force:
npa-uk.org.uk/Do_not_feed_f...
The TL;DR version is that you cannot feed waste food to pigs. Bear in mind that the UK produces about 20,000 tonnes of food waste every day - enough to feed about 6 million meat hogs. To put that in context, the Brits eat about 10 million pigs a year. In other words, we could theoretically raise most of the pigs we eat on food waste (hogs are typically slaughtered at 8-11 months).
But we don't. We feed them on commercial pignuts, because farmers aren't allowed to do anything else.
If one were being cynical, one might think that perhaps the aim is to ensure the suppliers of animal feedstuffs were guaranteed a nice source of income. But of course that can't be it, can't it? No, the government only wants what's best for us. In particular, they want to make sure those pigs don't get African Swine Fever or foot'n'mouth disease (see the article, above).
Now, neither of these diseases pose any risk to humans. Certainly a farmer stands to lose a lot of money in the case of ASF, but the virus is spread by direct contact or via piggy materials - in other words, the only way a British pig can contract the disease is by eating contaminated, uncooked pork. It would be simple enough to impose rules for pigswill QA (fully cooked, and/or no meat scraps) from commercial kitchens - the same way they are held to standards for human food prep. But no; the government solution is to throw it all into a landfill.
The NPA case for foot'n'mouth prevention is completely threadbare. While the article asserts that the 2001 UK outbreak was caused by catering waste, this is incredibly unlikely - not least because it would have been illegal, ie., a very rare and clandestine occurrence. No F&M epidemic in any other country has been traced to food waste. By far the most likely cause was one of the things we all know about: vast herds kept in filthy pig-slums which are guaranteed to generate epidemics, haulage of live animals across large distances to big slaughterhouses, transmission via human movement, and commercial feeds containing ingredients of dubious provenance.
Healthy pastured pigs are not susceptible to F&M for the same reason healthy humans aren't susceptible to every virus drifting on the breeze. The disease is self-limiting in free ranging herds and of minor concern for the ethical farmer.
The disgraceful diet of farm animals (which ends in a disgraceful diet for us) is merely the thin end of a very large wedge. Everything else that farmers do - every instance of abuse, cruelty, and degradation inflicted on their animals - is ultimately mandated by law.
Let's get some sanity back into farming. Food only gets wasted because bureaucrats demand that it must be wasted. Animals are mistreated because bureaucrats have decided that this is "efficient".
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