re: Food processing facilities destroyed (arson) - eat ze bugs

This was brought up before. I tried to do some digging to look at just chickens. It appeared that I was able to find a trend in more chickens being destroyed over time, for the past few years, but it's hard to say that's concrete evidence.

I think it's more likely we are seeing some effects of consolidation into fewer major processors / processing facilities. Like Boeing, they are trying to skirt the margins to max profits while getting sloppy in their operations, and thus we see some issues with fires and such.

I'm more concerned about the senseless and cruel treatment (and deaths) of these animals.

There is a definite effort to control food, but I think it's pretty inefficient to do that by destroying facilities. Much easier to do it through regulation, buy up the smaller pieces, consolidate to create choke points in the supply, etc. Some states like Oregon are making regulations that will force small dairy farms to spend $100k or more handle the water they use, which is effectively going to put them out of business.

The way forward is less government, more competition, less regulation, and more farmers able to take their products from farm to consumer directly. That is good for consumers, does not put the farmer under the thumb of the processor or gov, and decentralized food supply is certainly more robust if sabotage is indeed happening.