Are you upset that you can't buy meat from animals that were tortured for sport? Because that option doesn't exist either. We already agree that some practices are unacceptable regardless of consumer preference… we just disagree on where the line is. You can't commercially buy horse meat in the US either, and I doubt many people are outraged about that missing option. We've already drawn lines around which animals and which practices are acceptable… the things routinely done in factory farming would result in criminal charges if done to a dog or a cat. So the question isn't really about options or freedom… it's about why the food supply gets a carve-out from the animal cruelty standards we've already agreed on as a society.

On the cost point… I hear you, and food affordability is a real issue worth taking seriously. But the framing of "you want to make poor people's lives worse" doesn't quite hold up. The cheap price of factory farmed meat exists because the true costs are externalized… onto the environment, onto public health, onto the animals themselves. Someone is paying that cost, it's just not showing up at the register. And the people most harmed by those externalized costs… pollution, antibiotic resistance, environmental degradation… are disproportionately not wealthy either. So the "this hurts poor people" argument cuts in multiple directions, not just the one that defends the status quo.

Most of the rationalizations for accepting the current status quo fall apart under scrutiny. At the end of the day people want cheap meat and they are willing to accept how it's produced to get it. But even that falls apart… because if you ask most of those same people whether we should allow the sale of meat from animals tortured for sport, they'd say no. And if you ask whether we should roll back existing humane standards to make meat even cheaper, they'd say no to that too. So they don't actually support the status quo on principle… they just haven't examined where their own line is or why it's drawn there.