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Comment by meric | Hacker News Reader

We could farm the fish we eat or we could eat all the wild fish...

Or get your protein from other sources [e.g. https://silk.com/products/protein-nutmilk] and eat less meat. Its the only sustainable way to support the growing human population.

Plant based proteins are more sustainable. With animal proteins, people don't think about how inefficient it is to have to feed those animals before they end up on your plate. If you want to liken it to computer science, its a O^2 kind of inefficiency.

Or we can make culturing food more productive, with vat grown meat... and fish farms. Newsflash: food production has kept up with population growth through past centuries of development.

> food production has kept up with population growth through past centuries of development

that doesn't mean its sustainable. And what would you feed these fish farms?

Agriculture which has also kept up with productivity improvements. "It must be unsustainable" is not an argument.

It has only kept up because it receives billions in subsidies. Most of the ag subsidies go to animal based agriculture or agriculture for animal's food (soy, corn, etc). The productivity improvements are artificially inflated.

Cows and pigs need lots of water and lots of food (soy, corn, etc). Considering all of the required space for the animals, and the space to grow the food for the animals, and all of the required gallons of water for the animals and to grow their food, and all of the antibiotics the animals are given, then no, its not sustainable or scaleable.

I don't know where you got the idea that they are keeping up with productivity improvements, or if you are simply making assumptions. The meat is the lowest quality its ever been and line speeds are too fast to be properly inspected. Animals have to be given so much antibiotics and medications.

But I didn't ask human population to grow and where I live there's no growth. Why would I do anything about that then?

And where the population is growing they are mostly vegetarian anyway. Eat meat once or twice a month or less.

Do you cut your power consumption because there are rolling blackouts in Nigeria?

Farming also have a negative environmental effect and is not indefinite sustainable. It is generally less harmful than beef, but that don't make it sustainable.

The only sustainable diet is one where the total has a environment zero or even positive effect. Honey would be one such animal product, since the work that the bees does has a net positive effect on the environment. Meat from over populations would also have a net positive effect, and is part of the bigger picture when farms use fertilizers and cause eutrophication.

In order for a biological system to remain diverse and productive indefinitely (the definition of sustainability), we need to look at the whole picture. Animal proteins is part of that chain, but a sustainable diet would look very different from a regular meat rich diet. The species, the amount, and also the plants would all have to be very different.

Given that a cow basically serves as a way to convert salad into steak, it's pretty obvious that meat is less efficient. But it's also more delicious, which is why we eat so much of it. Life is about more than simple proteins.

But farmed fish are fed fishmeal made from wild fish...

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