oh, everything's fucked

the price of meat! i mean, the price of things in general, but meat in particular! what a circuitous and evil road to the number on a sticker!

this will sound weird, but meat is too cheap. it's evilly cheap. it's too cheap because on it's way to being stuck with a sticker with a number on it lots of things weren't paid for. it's too cheap because spilling 25 million gallons of pig excrement into a north carolina river was free. because every time the meat company smithfield spritzes its neighbors with a mist of feces it's free. because every time someone gets food poisoning from a diseased piece of meat it's free.

i mean, none of those things are actually free. if you own a house that's regularly spritzed with feces your house is significantly less valuable to potential buyers who aren't into that kind of thing. and when you spill 25 million gallons of shit into a river it's wont to kill every single fish in that river as well as make it, you know, lose that appeal for canoeing and romantic contemplation and such. and when you're sick for a day or two, you miss work and it costs something to spend a few hours with your head in a toilet bowl, even if it is hard to quantify exactly.

the problem is that these motley expenses have everything to do with how cheap meat is. they're absurdly varied and often, as with the head in the toilet, super hard to quantify. and they seem awfully far afield of the meat in question; you might not even know it was yesterday's chicken breast that did you in.

but it's because it was too cheap, because it was factory farmed, because it was produced in utterly fantastical conditions --  there's an anecdote (i guess you can call this an anecdote) about a small family working at a factory farm that drowned in a "lagoon" of pig excrement the size of many football fields and about 30 feet deep -- that all those other expenses happened. those externalities.

meat needs to cost more because meat DOES cost more, it's cost is just so sprawling that we can't see it, can't source it. it costs as little as it does because the industry producing it exploits to the last everything that isn't nailed down. this is getting vague now because i'm unprepared to launch into a grand critique of how bargains are never not born of evil and impunity elsewhere -- though sometimes right at home -- i've got all the indignation necessary but none of the organization of thought or specifics of knowledge necessary to definitively damn capitalism, the world, most people, etc. as beyond fixing.

this has been an angry and invigorating day. it's a bit sad how i never feel more alive than when i'm outraged.

stay tuned for my definitive opus on the wickedness of the world, to be completed sometime in the next sixty years; externalities is the key, key word.

the essence of it is that i've got no faith in convincing people, in the whole world eating less meat. this'll only change if it costs more. people will do nice things less if they're expensive. so that's what has to happen