The inhumane supply chain is feeding them because it won't allow them to feed themselves. Humans fed themselves for many thousands of years before the modern mechanisms of oppression were introduced. Remove the oppression, and they'll go right back to it.
The point is, without the exploitation, they would care for themselves. The original argument suggested that modern slaves would not be able to feed themselves without their masters providing the food. That's wrong.
The problem is you can't do a full social change. If all you do is stop the undesirable labor, you can end up with people unable to feed themselves. This has happened before with ending child labor.
I do, actually. Human civilization is 3-5 times older than the Romans, and human existence a hundred times older. The Romans had steel (swords and shackles), literacy, and a sophisticated transportation network. What we have today is just refinements on Roman ideas.
On HN, most people think of an iPhone3 as some sort of incomprehensible antique from the Dark Ages.
The point, though, is that Roman slavery wasn't very different from modern slavery. They had all the key elements we do - the tools to both imprison humans en masse and exploit natural resources, a standardized transportation network to move both troops to where the exploitation happened and and remove goods from where the exploitation happened, literacy and bureaucracy to manage large-scale, ongoing enterprises, etc. And of course, they had their moral rationalizations for brutality, especially brutality that happened somewhere out of sight.
Without metal, without roads, without heavy transport, without structured military units, without literacy, the tools for mass enslavement really don't exist.
Going from Hunter Gathers to farmers may have been humanities worst mistake, but we are so far past the carrying capacity of earth as human-gathers that we would have to kill 99.999% of the population to be able to feed the rest without agriculture and even the survivors would have to forgo things like antibiotics.
