You'd have to expand on whats absurd about it. If food is a hot button for you, lets take it to a new area. How bout cars?
I recently bought a cheap little commuter car for about $15K. I could have bought a much fancier car for $30K but why waste the money to show off my wealth to people on the interstate whom I don't care about? Besides I'm pretty well off but I can find plenty of fun things to spend $15K on and a fancier car doesn't quite make the top 100 or so.
Can you make a reasonable argument, that given the same manufacturer and roughly the same workers that the $30K car wouldn't by definition cause about twice the environmental damage as its constructed as the $15K car? I think thats an epic engineering fail.
Now lets say I bought a 4WD all terrain $40K pork-mobile commuter instead of a green (paint) $100K quinoa-SUV... I'm sure the planet would be trashed about 2.5 times worse by the SUV than my glorified golf cart. Now then lets step back into the world of farmers and their products...
>Can you make a reasonable argument, that given the same manufacturer and roughly the same workers that the $30K car wouldn't by definition cause about twice the environmental damage as its constructed as the $15K car?
That doesn't make sense at all. There is not a 1 to 1 relationship, or even a linear relationship, between price and environmental damage.
All your arguments seem like you're trying to equate low-cost in dollars with low environmental damage. This is not the case, in food or in cars. In fact in many cases the exact opposite is true.
Your reasoning relies entirely on the ability to quantify environmental damage, but it's not clear how you would quantify this. To me it appears completely arbitrary how you decide "this damage is 2.5x worse than the other damage"
So your argument is you can't compare levels of environmental damage. OK then by that argument there is no way to compare the environmental damage of $4 worth of bratwurst vs $10 worth of quinoa. So I may as well eat what tastes better and is healthier and eat the brat.
I recently bought a cheap little commuter car for about $15K. I could have bought a much fancier car for $30K but why waste the money to show off my wealth to people on the interstate whom I don't care about? Besides I'm pretty well off but I can find plenty of fun things to spend $15K on and a fancier car doesn't quite make the top 100 or so.
Can you make a reasonable argument, that given the same manufacturer and roughly the same workers that the $30K car wouldn't by definition cause about twice the environmental damage as its constructed as the $15K car? I think thats an epic engineering fail.
Now lets say I bought a 4WD all terrain $40K pork-mobile commuter instead of a green (paint) $100K quinoa-SUV... I'm sure the planet would be trashed about 2.5 times worse by the SUV than my glorified golf cart. Now then lets step back into the world of farmers and their products...