But even if we did, it would still be factory farming (though of course with fewer outbreaks and antibiotic resistance) with other things that people would find problematic for plenty of equally valid reasons.
Also if anything, obesity would skyrocket. Meat isn’t the big cause of that, carbs are, and if you cut out meat you get more carbs. Most people gain weight when they go vegetarian.
This is a ridiculous claim. Vegans and vegetarians on average have lower BMI. Most diet intervention studies demonstrate a drop in BMI on vegetarian or vegan diets.
Sure, avoid the highly refined carbs, like white flour and sugar, but substituting dairy and meat for nuts and legumes is going to only be an improvement for your health and the health of the planet.
That’s not contradictory with what I said. I said that when people switch they gain weight.
Vegans and vegetarians are more health conscious than non-vegans and vegetarians so you can’t compare them like that. It’s like when they said that Diet Coke makes you fat because the average Diet Coke drinker is fatter than the average Coke drinker. But it’s really just because skinny people don’t worry about drinking calories.
Most people don’t switch from meat to nuts and legumes, they switch to baked goods.
There is also no scientific evidence whatsoever that switching to plant-based diets is good for your health. You should read outlive by Dr. Peter Atilla. As he points out, the only thing we know for sure is too many calories is bad. For almost anything else, it’s impossible to tease out correlation from causation.
All I'm saying is that if we're all eating so much to the point of killing ourselves surely we can eat a bit less of meat if it reduces pollution/water use/viral infections.
It's not like eating meat multiple time a day or even every day was a pre requisite for human life. I don't remember last time I ate meat and I'm fitter than 90% of people I meet in my day to day life
But they weren't obese. The person I was responded to claimed obesity is because of less meat.
> and died of a lot of diseases that we now survive easily, so by your logic, I should eat more meat
I didn't know you got your measles vaccine from a plate of pork chops. I got mine via a hypodermic needle, from a nurse who studied anatomy, biology, and germ theory for several years, and washed her hands.
They also didn't eat a lot of fries, sugared beverages, ultra-processed food, etc... which is easily available nowadays and likely to be consumed when one doesn't feel satiated (e.g. due to meat consumption).
That's not to say that there aren't alternatives to meat that also satiate and are nutritious, but most people don't consider them to be equally delicious and therefore they are not as likely to be consumed if meat isn't available.
That means the obesity isn't due to meat or a lack of meat, per se. It's the diet outside of the meat.
> fries, sugared beverages...which is likely to be consumed when one doesn't feel satiated (e.g. due to meat consumption).
You know what goes really well with a juicy hamburger or a steak? Crisp fries, and a cool, refreshing, tall glass of Coke (maybe not the Coke so much with a steak), or a frosty milkshake.
People eat junk food because it tastes good. Period. Not because they didn't get enough meat or some BS like that. Meat-eaters eat fries. Vegetarians eat fries. Everyone eats fries. They're delicious.
If you take the meat out there's a whole world of nutritious and delicious foods out there. You just have to broaden your culinary horizons. I'm not even a vegetarian or vegan, have no plans to be one, and I still recognize this.
> If you take the meat out there's a whole world of nutritious and delicious foods out there.
But most people will not find, enjoy or choose food with both of those qualities, not to mention that they are a minority over what's commonly available -- and even if they are available, they'd probably become too expensive if consumption increased significantly.
Most of the time they'd have to choose between "delicious foods" or "nutritious foods", but not both, and you know they'd choose the former.
If you take out meat, you'll simply reduce the pool of available (good) choices. You'll have a strictly worse outcome than what you had before (except for the animals, admittedly).
> If you take out meat, you'll simply reduce the pool of available (good) choices
Only if we forced everyone to give up meat at gunpoint. Most people who choose to go meat-free, and stick with it, end up finding tasty and nutritious food that works for them.
> even when they are available, they are usually too expensive to become a common staple.
People automatically assume that giving up meat means salads and tofu all day, bought in 2oz packages from Whole Foods while wearing Lululemon yoga pants. And you gotta throw in the $10 artisan kombucha while you're at it.
Beans, lentils, and green peas are far cheaper and healthier than any meat or Impossible burger. You can get them at your local Indian or Mexican grocer for less than $1/lb. Or tofu and seitan from Costco or 99 Ranch Market. A little soybean paste or mushroom broth adds a blast of umami. That's what I mean by "broadening your culinary horizons".
And no beans can never become more expensive than meat, even if more people start eating them. It's simple thermodynamics. Look at the poorest countries on Earth - I guarantee you they eat more beans and lentils than meat. That's what a "common staple" is. If they can afford it, anyone can.
I'll happily concede the expensiveness point, and also say that if we are not entertaining the idea of forcing anyone to give up meat (which is what I thought we were discussing), then we are not in disagreement.
I'll only add that when promoting vegetarianism or veganism, I find most such sources to be akin to propaganda, i.e. they always talk about the benefits but rarely talk about the disadvantages. I suspect this might be because veganism is often tied to political preferences (and certain cultures).
As an example, here's something Wikipedia mentions that you will not usually see entirely discussed in articles promoting such diets:
> [Vegan diets tend to be lower in] omega-3 fatty acid, vitamin D, calcium, zinc, and vitamin B12. As a result of the elimination of all animal products, a poorly planned vegan diet can lead to nutritional deficiencies that counteract its beneficial effects and cause serious health issues, some of which can only be prevented with fortified foods or dietary supplements
This might partly explain why it's about as common to find a vegan bodybuilder as a flying cow... it might not be impossible to find one, but it's about as unnatural. And there are probably good reasons for this, including availability and easy absorption/digestibility of all the essential amino acids, which is important for muscle growth and maintenance, which in turn is very important for health especially in middle and old age.
It could also explain why when I see a random vegan person, they tend to "look" unhealthy more often than a random non-vegan person, although I concede that I may be biased, of course -- I've also seen sources claiming vegan people live longer, although I suspect that if it's true, it may be because vegans tend to be more health-conscious and choose their diet and sources of nutrition more carefully, not necessarily because of the lack of meat itself.
But of course, as long as all such information is reported in an unbiased and accurate fashion, I see nothing wrong with it.
> You know what goes really well with a juicy hamburger or a steak? Crisp fries, and a cool, refreshing, tall glass of Coke (maybe not the Coke so much with a steak), or a frosty milkshake.
That's a disgusting fast-food derived dietary preference. Healthy meat-centric diet does not look anything like that.
That's precisely my point. There are healthy and unhealthy meat-centric diets. There are healthy and unhealthy meatless diets. The absence of meat isn't the cause of a bad diet, as GP was alleging. People have bad diets because they like the taste of unhealthy food and either don't care or don't know about the consequences.
(And I'll quibble about it being entirely fast-food derived. Steak-frites is classic French and Belgian food.)
not my field, but isn't meat pretty lossy compression food-wise? IIRC, feeding an animal to later eat instead of just eating what the animal would eat wastes like 90% (not sure of the exact figure) of the calories. So if we just ate the plants directly and easily cover our caloric needs without going through the cow-middleman.
Kind of like, instead of feeding the cows a bunch of soy and then eating the cow, just eat the soy as tofu or edamame instead.
Of course a lot of people prefer eating meat, but that's besides the point.
You do realize factory farmed animals don't graze the natural farmland right? They are mostly fed either stuff that humans could eat, or food that is grown on farmland that could be used to grow human edible food.
In my country, most of the food that goes into feeding animals is imported, and I can assure you they are not importing soccer fields.
There's reason that life on Earth exists in a food chain. In this case many of the animals humans eat consume and digest things we cannot. This particular discussion was about cattle and humans deriving nutrition from the milk they produce and the meat they yield. From that perspective, cows and steers as intermediaries provide such a distinct advantage that genetic mutation that allows some humans to digest cow milk drove the flourishing of those civilizations.
Grazing animals, properly fed (this is what we need to fix), eat mostly grass. We need that middle step. Just like we need the intermediate steps of plants extracting nutrients from the soil and turning sunlight into usable calories for us. We can't eat dirt and drink sunshine, either. Of course those aren't the only things to eat. But that's the argument I was responding to.
The "cut out the middle man" argument really doesn't work. The argument should be "here are better alternatives."
The original comment specifically mentioned soy and edamame. The reply only mentioned grass.
HN guidelines say: Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
In that case, right back at you on "strongest possible interpretation" - The focus of that first comment wasn't "soy", it was "what the animal eats". That response was both responding to the important portion while correcting them on cow diets.
Animal agriculture uses up 80% of the land and provides humanity 20% of its protein.
All those addicted people will be able to satisfy their food addiction at significantly lower costs and consumption of resources by switching to a plant based diet.
Drastically reduced spread of diseases, reduced overuse of antibiotics, environmental benefits are just bonuses.
Not to mention the fact that your grandkids won’t think you’re moral monsters for torturing and murdering sentient beings.
Meh, I’ve been hearing that for like 30 years (and much of it is empirically correct) but meat consumption has just steadily, slowly increased. I’d bet literally everything that two generations from down from me (which would be basically kids being born starting around now) most people will still be eating meat.
It doesn't need to be produced through the incredible wasteful in-between animal.
People can either eat straight up plant-based food, or alternatively go for lab grown meat. There's no need to go through all the inefficiency and suffering of factory farms.
I’ve seen videos about lab grown meat being in development. Is it actually available and available at scale?
I haven’t looked to see if studies have been done to look at the nutritional profile of lab grown vs normal meat. I’d be curious about that as well before I tried it.
So we have these animals, which eat plants and generate fuel (poop) & food (meat). Our bodies are adapted to eating them, our bodies need the same nutrients, and we’re programmed to enjoy the food. The input to this process is mostly grass and grain, both generated via solar power.
Now instead… we take grain, highly process it and make someone few people enjoy, with less nutrients, and likely some unforeseen by products. They can then sell it at a higher price.
At the end of the day, we know what works. It doesn’t make sense to try and reinvent the wheel without benefit.
Well, it’s not highly efficient, at all, except maybe chicken. The feed ratio (how much food it takes to get one unit of meat) on animals ranges pretty widely. Cows are an order of magnitude more than chicken, with pigs in the middle.
A lot of time, energy, and land goes to just keeping the animal alive and metabolizing. And you’re left with the problem of a lot of the parts of the animal are of low value.
Lab grown meat could, in theory, be much more efficient. Just quickly grow the muscles people actually want to eat.
There are also a lot of potential ethical issues with the way meat is raised at scale.
However the comment implying it’s an option currently is ridiculous. It’s nowhere near ready for scale. Might as well cite that Star Trek meal thingy (replicator?).
Maybe you should stick to plant-based food and lab grown meat before telling other people to stop eating animals and go to plant-based food and lab grown meat.
Are you saying we require this late-stage capitalism style factory farming in order to feed 8 billion people? I'm going to say that there is gamut between having a cheap T-bone on your plate every evening and global starvation.
Desire - yes. Feasibility - not sure, we need to substitute the caloric intake with something of a relatively similar density, profile, and nutrition. "Vegetarian" might do the trick (beans, rice, fresh vegetables) and I suspect there are a number of ways to improve protein and fat uptake that milk, cheese, and butter provide.
This is just for beef, of course. It is hard to overstate how reliant most developed countries are on chicken and, especially, basically every part of a pig.
General rule, when someone brings up that fact that some regulation makes things harder for "poor folks" it is almost never about poor people, but just figleafs for arguing against regulations.
In reality it is the poor who are most affected by climate change, diseases, lack of food safety... If the people really cared about poor folks they would be arguing for more regulations, higher taxes, against credit card programs and lots of other things which effectively end up transferring wealth from the poor to the rich.
When my mom was growing up she had organ meats pretty regularly, as it was cheaper and they didn’t have a lot of money.
Over in Scotland their national dish is haggis, which is a bunch of organ meats minced up, and then they add in some oats to bulk it up and make it go further.
There are solutions to use more of the animal and stretch it. I almost never hear about people eating organ meats in the US anymore. People just find factory farmed cuts at rock bottom prices.
One of the most consistent technological innovations throughout humanity's existence has been in improving how we eat, because eating is by far one of the biggest pleasures a person can have in life.
The invention of fire revolutionized eating, the invention of agriculture revolutionized access to food at a fundamental level, the invention of refrigeration and freezing vastly expanded the reach and safety of food from point of harvest to dinner table, and the past century or so has dramatically democratized the kinds of food a person can choose to eat.
This notion of sacrificing Quality of Eating(tm) is therefore a non-starter, humanity demands and strives for better eating. Any proposal to change how we produce food must accept it must co-exist with continued improvements to eating.
> eating is by far one of the biggest pleasures a person can have in life.
With 70% of the west being obese or overweight I think the pendulum swung way too far.
> This notion of sacrificing Quality of Eating(tm) is therefore a non-starter
When did factory farms meat become quality ?? I think you're mistaking quantity and low price for quality.
You'd have to be blind to not see how the quality of food decreased in the past decades, my grandparents ate much less meat but almost everything was local
Let me put it in terms of tech so the audience here can relate better:
The computers we have at home and in our pockets are inferior in quality to enterprise servers and mainframes, but everyone has computers and nobody is willing to go back to simple Casio calculators and slide rules.
The meats we have at home are inferior in quality to artisan meats, but everyone has meats and nobody is willing to go back to eating other people's refuse (I'm aware organ meats are perfectly fine food, but let's be real for a moment) and porridge every day.
Our access to food today is nothing short of utterly insane to people just a century ago, and rightfully noone is willing to let it go.
You're countering arguments I never made. If you think the only choices we have are modern industrial farming or starving on porridge you seriously lack imagination. Also you're completely ignoring the externalities and the long term consequences both on the environment and on human health, if the question was just about having meat or not having meat we wouldn't have this discussion.
> and rightfully noone is willing to let it go.
A cancer also won't let go even if it means the death of its host.
Your analogy is plain wrong because there is 0 trade off in your example, the right analogy would be to trade your $1500 iphone for five $100 backdoored chinese phones of much lower quality and pretend you're happier because you have more
>If you think the only choices we have are modern industrial farming or starving on porridge you seriously lack imagination.
It's not easy to feed so many people so many different kinds of food at a price most people can afford. When I said the past century dramatically democratized our diets, that was achieved by improving the efficiency of production and transport of food to such an extent that was only possible with modern industrial innovations.
>Also you're completely ignoring the externalities and the long term consequences both on the environment and on human health,
And likewise I would argue you guys are ignoring the benefits to and desires of humanity.
>if the question was just about having meat or not having meat we wouldn't have this discussion.
Except that usually is ultimately the question, because inevitably the discussion degenerates into "we can eat <X> instead of <Y>". I'm saying that such conversations will convince noone because it ignores the reality of humans desiring to eat something and whatever else specifically.
>Your analogy is plain wrong because there is 0 trade off in your example,
The trade off is having a limited diet, possibly enforced from the top down. As I said previously, humanity has striven to widen its diet for as long as humanity has existed. This is a trade off that simply will not receive consensus.
As a description of human behavior and how humans are local optimization machines I think you are spot on. This is where I disagree with you:
…rightfully noone is willing…
I don’t believe this is right in the moral sense or in a global optimization sense. The world’s people are getting richer and as the world’s population begins to live more and more like Americans the world becomes exponentially more polluted. This will eventually affect us all. The world is becoming a toxic shithole. The right thing to do is to make changes now. But for the reasons you stated this isn’t going to happen. As a species we are local optimization machines and we don’t seek to find the global optimum.
Isn’t it a mathematical fact that if Americans consume exponentially more resources than others then as more people gain wealth commensurate with Americans then exponentially more resources will be consumed? Or do you think Americans are especially greedy in this respect? I had not considered that possibility.
It’s interesting to hear someone use the phrase don’t listen to main stream media think that Foxnews, Newsmax, Alex Jones, etc are all cranks who can’t be trusted. Given your implied self professed ignorance you must occasionally wonder if your very limited experience exploring the world is indicative of its true state. Ignorance is bliss so continue to stop watching Foxnews, Newsmax, and other like minded sources.
EDIT: Looking at your past comments it’s clear you do consume news! What a surprise given your comment.
I consider whatever news I do see mainly as a form of entertainment (FSVO entertainment) with no credence given.
>Given your implied self professed ignorance you must occasionally wonder if your very limited experience exploring the world is indicative of its true state.
I can tell you the world is nowhere near as shitty as the powers that be would like you to believe.
Looking at Tesco online in UK: there's a soy protein 'mince' a £3.72/kg. Beef or chicken mince at £5. Quorn mycoprotein at £8.33. Beyond Meat at £13.
Out of the 5 vegan and 8 vegetarian options, only the soy protein is cheaper than meat.
I might replace one meal a week with the soy protein, but I'd be concerned about long term effects of phytoestrogen, especially on growing children? Mind you many foods have some hidden soy 'bulk' nowadays.
Why do you need a "minced meat" substitute anyway? Compare your minced meat to a can of beans which one is cheaper.
Moreover, it is well established research that most modern western diets contain too much animal products. If you think that living vegetarian causes so much problems, you need to explain how many cultures who live almost exclusively vegetarian (e.g. In some areas of India) without significant health problems.
Societal norms changing, government policies, free access to birth control, universal sex education, taxing the wealth of people who have too much, etc. It’s easy to implement once enough support is gained.
This likely wont happen in my lifetime. It will only change when the change is forced. When we’ve made too much of the planet a toxic waste dump then people will be forced to change.
There's more alt-milks than I can count. While cow's milk obviously is used to produce other things, we can drastically reduce the need for it by moving to other kinds of milk for the liquid-consumption part.
The op is likely quoting one of the recent 'hit piece' style articles talking about ultra processed foods and trying to argue nut milk is less healthy because it may not always have calcium. It's pretty absurd, and the basis for the claim is fairly well explained here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8634539/
It is ultra processed in name, not nutrition.
By the way, humans are the only species drinking the milk of another animal, or after childhood.
Nut milks in stores almost always have additives, mainly preservatives, which are questionable in terms of healthiness. Now store sold oat milks in particular are very unhealthy, if I remember right it was oatly that has 30% by calorie percentage of canola oil. Cannot get worse that this but so many vegan products do this exact same thing where they stuff whatever processed meat substitute product they sell with canola oil and other ridiculously unhealthy and gross ingredients.
Canola oil isn't the devil everyone makes it out to be. Study after study demonstrate that replacing dairy fats with canola oil has positive health outcomes.
That said, plenty of oil free alt milks out there.
I love how on HN we regularly talk about terraforming Mars, computer/brain interface, the AI "singularity", or even immortality brought by technology, but "sustainable farming" is an unsolvable problem and is so out of our imagination spectrum that we almost shouldn't discuss the possibility...
But I don't see any alternatives being discussed, like say, sky scraping towers of factory farmed cows that take up a square block and can feed hundreds of thousands. Like apparently the only solution is abstention or restriction. Where are the crazy visions of feeding tens of billions of people through some high tech magic whatevers.
What you call "abstention or restriction" in 2024 would be the dream diet of anyone before the 1930s. We're supposedly smart monkey, we should be able to eat 25% less bacon if it means avoiding all these long term issues.
You can make your own oat milk with organic oats in like 1 minute with a blender and strainer. Not sure that qualifies as ultra processed, but there’s no risk of H5N1 so I think I’ll stick with it.
https://www.ewg.org/foodscores/ might help you target specific brands. Many soy milks count as ultra processed because the additives are (calcium, vitamin b etc.). Less healthy than the unadulterated brands? I think the research is still out on that.
(and cow milk often has similar additives, so this isn't supporting the original claim)
500ml of soy milk has almost twice as many protein and tons of nutrients too. It requires like 5% as much water to produce, 0 antibiotic, and no animals
And when factoring in the negative externalities extremely expensive. When factoring in the moral aspect considering the way the cows are treated it’s an immoral product.
Are you implying cow's milk supports biodiversity? Because it absolutely doesn't. In fact, animal agriculture is the leading cause of biodiversity loss.
You should look up the meaning of the word misnomer and understand how widespread such occurrences are. When that happens you’ll likely reason better and not get sidetracked by pedantic shenanigans.
Do you believe all 8 billion people could live like Americans in a sustainable way? Do you believe we could produce enough meat and animal derived products in a morally sustainable way? Looking at film of the conditions of the animals in factory farms it’s clear the meat portion of our food supply is grossly immoral.
We saw this movie before in the 70s. “The population bomb” etc. All that Malthusian drivel assumed a static state when humanity is anything but.
You are discounting civilizations ability to adapt and invent by an absolutely incredible margin that is not supported by our own history of human events.
You think 8 billion people can live like Americans in a sustainable way? Now by sustainable, I mean that we do so in a way that does not turn the world into a pollution infested shithole. If all 8 billion people lived like Americans where would the pollution be exported too? Who would do the work that people who live like Americans won’t do but depend on people doing?
The distribution of resources in the world is grossly unfair and it is not sustainable that 8 billion people live the way Americans live.
As it stands now the world is already becoming a pollution infested shithole. Imagine what happens when 7 billion more people live like us.
The only reason agricultural yields haven't collapsed is we have printed fertilizer with fossil fuels and dug it out of the ground. Sustaining contemporary agricultural output is just going to become more and more difficult as energy becomes more costly.
For every rich and wasteful person in the world there is a poor person that lives in scarcity and „offsets“ the wasteful lifestyle. So we’re kind of at a limit when you want to make a genuine effort to continue fighting poverty.
Meat is the best food for humans — ruminants, especially, are great at processing out the various anti-nutrients plants produce to ward off being eaten & then processing it into pretty much exactly the food humans need for optimal health. Think of all the land & water that goes into crops that aren't even eaten by humans — run buffalo & cattle over that instead. That would have the secondary benefit of not monocropping (which produces all manner of negative downstream ecological effects). If you don't want healthy, thriving humans, as well as a thriving ecosystem then by all means keep pushing this plant nonsense (take a look at how much water it takes to grow one almond, & then scale that up into what it takes to make almond (or really any other plant) "milk").
Maybe. Meat consumption isn't declining as of yet.
Let's start with treating animals with respect, don't feed them (literal in some cases) trash and take hygiene way more seriously. We have a pretty good idea how disease spreads, and still there is a large fraction of farms, feed and livestock processing facilities that are absolutely disgusting by any standard.
It's not just gross, it greatly facilitates the spread and crossings of disease. We simply can no longer allow these facilities to exist: too dangerous for consumers, and food security as a whole. And the animals themselves of course.
Those are not dairy farms. Those are where cattle are fattened up just before slaughter. Very different situation. Cattle farms also take biosecurity seriously, but so far they have not worried about birds.
Diary cows are kept inside and isolated from everything else since if the cow is sick you have to treat it and dump all milk obtained for a month afterwards.
I don't think it's at all controversial that concentrated monoculture populations are more at risk of spreading infectious pathogens, and there's no evidence that these tests for H5N1 were performed on a bunch of artisanal raw milk producers.
Maybe it should be controversial. Of course there are lots of different ways to do things, but the old ways are not always better. There is a lot of researching into how to raise cows, and as romantic as the open range sounds, the reality isn't all the great for cows either. (little water at times, temperatures that are not comfortable)
Milking parlors tend to be pretty enclosed, and dairy farms being all enclosed was your original claim. Even the ones that let cows out to pasture or use external feed lots may have barns for winter, bad weather, safety at night, etc.
> If we grant an enclosed space then we can also apply air filters.
We could barely be bothered for COVID, let alone here.
Does sr.ht support cross instance patches? Yes. Even better, you don't even need an account on any sr.ht instance to send a patch, or receive one for that matter.
It's just email. And it can do many of the things other forges do. Trigger builds, comment on patches, track issues, etc.
This isn't so much a "trick" as it is the main purpose of xxd. xxd is distributed with vim (as in, I'm pretty sure if you want to send a patch to xxd, you send it to the vim repo). One of it's primary purposes is to allow for the editing of binary files in Vim.
Author here. I rarely use it as a shell personally, though it does work, and sometimes I drop into it for the odd task. It's primarily designed to replace overgrown bash scripts.
Yep, this is mainly used for turning those bash scripts that you let get too large into a real program. You port your script, basically line for line, into this, and then start chipping away at it until you have something less scary.
My main use for this is incremental migration away from bash. I'm not saying this is the best way to do scripts, but it's a pretty great stepping stone. Just following the cargo culting guide [0] can already uplift a bash script without changing the logic too much. From there you can start adding structure.
My secondary use case is little scripts in NixOS/nixpkgs. There are some helpers in there that make it quite convenient.
