In NYC, any random hole or local chain has better fried chicken than KFC or Popeye’s. Cheap too.
If you go upscale, places like Sweet Chick have some of the best fried chicken. But it’s ~3x more money.
We also have a ton of Korean fried chicken, which is crazy good but not actually much more expensive than the cheapo fast-food fried chicken places.
I haven’t had meat in such a while that the taste only exists as a memory.
However I’ve noticed that the sight of meat can still induce salivating.
Beastars is educational.
Do you salivate looking at pigs and cows and chicken, or only when you look at steaks and chops and drumsticks?
Neither, because it’s an instinct that’s mostly suppressed. However if I’m really hungry, cooked meat can seem appetising. Despite no will nor want to eat it.
Cool. I don’t have that reaction either. It just got me thinking that when I see uncooked or unprepared food of all kinds, like fruit and veg and even dried pasta, I’m like nom nom nom. I guess with meat, it has to be dead and have the skin off before I get to that state.
I think it’s because there’s that mental distinction between “Animal” and “Unprepared food”. A cow ain’t unprepared food, it’s not just steak so rare it’s still got an agenda, there’s still plenty of steps between there and the point we even start thinking about it as food that just needs a bit of heat and time. We’d probably think similar things about fruit and veg, if they were a bit more ambulatory.
I’ve had the same thing with some food displays. The food is set out so perfectly that the taste of the actual ingredients is divorced from the experience of looking at it.
On one end there’s something that’s been plated so well it’s a work of art. On the other end is ugly delicious. A line is crossed where I start salivating at the sight.
Oh yeah, I get exactly what you mean, I’ve had similar experiences. It’s weird(but fun!) to think about how we just have all these funny little distinctions on sliding scales, like detents on a slider, and where they all end up on those scales.
I remember Ashley Burch, the voice actor, talking on a podcast once about how she always starts to empathize with a villain much, much more, often to the point of making them a sympathetic character, if she sees them eating something normal, like a sandwich, or a piece of fruit, it just trips some switch in her brain.
OK so while this became the veganism thread I still want to discuss other examples of the ethical conundrums posed by capitalist consumption and the shitty decisions it forces.
So here’s my hum-dinger of the day:_
For anyone who is unfamiliar, Corcraft is a division of New York State Corrections - it’s basically a state-run company whose sole purpose is to use prisoner labor at sub-standard wages (currently 65 cents an hour) to produce below-market-cost items for the use of the state.
License plates are made by Corcraft, as is a variety of furniture used all across the state. Uniforms, trash cans - all kinds of small useful items manufactured by inmates at slave wages. The justification is twofold: “pay your debt to society” and “learn useful skills that will help you on release.” Three guesses how well that works out in reality.
I can’t even begin to really comment on the dystopian nightmare that is “the state incarcerates people and then exploits their labor for its own benefit” but that’s not the real sticky wicket here.
You inherit this flawed thing and then, in the midst of a public health crisis, realize it can be leveraged to give people an improved chance at survival. The situation only exists in the first place because the federal government is run by an incompetent capitalist and extremely soulless capitalists see an opportunity to exploit desperate need, so you a competent capitalist instead exploit the nightmarish hellscape that is your prison-labor economy in order to try to make something that helps people.
Welcome to capitalism, where the money’s made up and your morality barely matters because you’re just gonna be forced to make a shit choice no matter what you do.
I mean, in a way, isn’t this a practical, real-world version of the trolley problem? Either way you’re fucked, it just depends on if you pull the switch or not.
Yeah, it’s pretty much a real-life trolley. It’s a lot less amusing when it’s not a crudely draw cartoon.
So there’s something interesting here. I obviously can offer no solutions other than my standard abolish capitalism make most systems universal on and on it goes.
What I can say is… Ever seen that Tarantino movie Django Unchained? If you haven’t stop reading.
Kinda near the beginning there’s a scene where Christoph Waltz’s character buys Django and doesn’t immediately free him because he needs his help with identifying some terrible people for him to murder for money.
As a younger and much more Liberal person I saw this scene and basically agreed with Waltz 100%. He’s on a righteous mission killing jackasses and he intends to free Django from slavery when the whole thing is over. Textbook no-brainer thought my younger self.
That situation is this situation but on a different scale and some of the details different. Theoretically and according to the logic of younger me, the answer is obvious: Use the terrible slave labor to help with the immediate problem and then get rid of the slave labor concept all together.
I’m at odds with my younger self though. I clearly see the hand sanitizer situation differently. I see it as a terrible no-win situation. And that re-contextualizes what I thought of that scene in that movie.
Younger me was wrong.
Prison labor sounds theoretically less bad than slavery under some framework where it basically just boils down to regular labor. It can’t be at a reduced price. It can’t be mandatory. The profits need to be vested into interests that do not encourage more demand for prison labor. That’s not the situation here, obviously, and certainly not at any of these private prisons where the incentive structure corrupts it. I guess that would just be work release at that point.
Nuri and I talked about this on the drive home from work today.
I think the primary ethical issue of using prison labor for any purpose comes down to fair compensation. In theory, giving prisoners jobs that directly benefit society could be a way to build market skills and ease re-integration after release…
But in practice, that’s not how it goes. Prisoners are paid so little it doesn’t matter, and their jobs are often so menial that they are basically being trained to be low-wage laborers for life. Set them back, impede progress, force them into a particular mold.
IF prison labor paid a fair wage, and equipped prisoners with the skills needed to succeed after release, we would have a solid foundation on which to rehabilitate. A work-release program, in a capitalist economy, is probably the least we owe to people deprived of liberty. And I mean, you need effective workers, so equipping them with skills is just good for the economy.
But the US doesn’t want that, we want to punish people, and so long as we do that prison labor will always be exploitative.
I think it’s less bad to produce a non-commercial product for government use to solve a public health crisis - as opposed to, say, turning prison labor into private sweatshops for for-profit corporations. That’s probably not arguable, but it’s also not a terribly high bar.
Capitalism builds no-win situations on purpose to normalize making the “less bad” choice, ensuring we never get to make good choices.
And certification. Thinking of the prisoner firefighters in California who couldn’t get jobs as firefighters after they were released.
While reading through Drawing Down the Moon I was floored by how direct and and painful the paradox of ethical consumption is
…most people’s lives were enmeshed in a web of contradictions that clouded true perception. To take one example, an article describes the plight of a Native American farmer whose cattle are dying of chemical poisoning from a nearby Reynolds aluminum plant. Once his cattle begin to sicken, the farmer is forced to find outside work. Where can he find it? Why, at the Reynolds plant, of course, the company that is destroying his way of life. His understanding becomes clouded when he becomes thankful to get the job. “How can you fight something that you work for?” The article adds, “the monster gives you no choice. It pokes you in the eye at the same time that it fills your wallet and it destroys your garden and cattle at the same time that it offers you jobs.”
This was in the 70s, it’s the same alienation we all experience under capitalism. It’s the oppressive structures that make you only able to choose lesser evils and obfuscates any idea that there could be a truly good choice.
You probably won’t ever watch it, but that is kind of the plot of The Good Place once it gets going.
Plus it had that episode about nonmen.