Hacker News Reader

Comment by Clownshoesms | Hacker News Reader

Yes fair enough, maximizing what we do with the carcass once the animal is dead is only fair. I guess I was leaning more towards the lengths we've gone to, for something that doesn't make a whole lot of sense in the first place (i.e. we waste more on the animals' inputs than we get out).

Although in this case getting parts of the spinal cord/fluid/brain in with sausages also sounds like a hazard.

View on HN

part of that optimization is also disease prevetion, if we maximize "product" but produce more expenses in the form of diseases, we'd be losing money, not making any.

the meat industry is a horror show, tbh, and they don't maximize product extraction because they want to save every last piece of protien, they do it for the cash.

This is a good point, and is probably related to our general tendency to let industry externalize consequences

Well, scale tends to even things out. These companies won't disappear, but climate and anti meat movements will force them to transform, probably soon.

By soon I mean not I our life time, but Certainly the few coming generations. We've been eating meat for millenia. I give till the end of the century.

> we waste more on the animals' inputs than we get out

Is this true? Plenty of humans are reaping the benefits of this industry existing. While beef, dairy et al may be disturbing from multiple points of view, few industries are as subsidized as the corn industry in the united states.

If there was a single vulnerability to be used as an entry point to tear apart the elaborate farming empires and thoroughly tackle waste with respect to output, it'd be corn. It just doesn't make sense, irrespective of animals.

That's a different kind of waste. It's indisputable that meat production is a waste of land, crops, and resources, if your main metric is producing as much food as possible.

If you're talking about money waste instead, it works pretty well. But while corn may be over-subsidized, I'd rather eat it than starve.

That metric only applies under the assumption that all land can be used equally to feed livestock or for crops. However, humans don't eat grass, and some land cannot be used to grow vegetables on. There, grazing livestock is one of the few methods available to generate food for humans.

Grazing is also better for biodiversity than planting crops.

Please cite how grazing is better for biodiversity than agriculture! Also, hardly any of the meet produced in the US now is grazed. The cows are fed corn in a cage.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com