Chile’s salmon farms may use more antibiotics than any other meat industry | Hacker News Reader

Chile’s salmon farms may use more antibiotics than any other meat industry

oceana.org

204 pointsokket181 comments

Do you feel helpless to stop the problem of antibiotics use in the meat industry?

You’re not! Here’s a simple easy trick you can use to reduce its impact on the world: eat less meat.

You don’t need meat in 3 meals a day. Reduce it to 1 meal a day and you’ve already reduced your antibiotics impact by 2/3. Cut down to one meat meal a week and that’s a 96% reduction.

You’re not powerless. Vote with your wallet and your stomach.

Not to go totally Adam Smith here, but if everyone did this, wouldn’t this just drive the cost of meat down? Making it even cheaper than it already is?

Wouldn’t it make more sense to explicitly seek out “better” meat?

Anyway, I agree, definitely no need to eat meat more than once a day, if not every other day etc.

Temporarily I guess it would drive the price down, and then production would adjust to meet the lowered demand.

Think about it this way: if the number of meat eaters halved overnight, meat would be really cheap for a while, then a bunch of producers would go out of business and prices would rise again, and prices would stabilise again once production was half what it used to be.

You're assuming that the remaining meat eaters' consumption would remain constant. It would almost certainly increase (I know mine would increase, or rather, I'd eat more expensive cuts of meat more often, like cote de boeuf); and I'd expect substitution effects - it's hard to predict what the final outcomes would be.

Lobbying for regulation would be a more effective use of your time. Or something that converts individual action into collective action with an enforcement mechanism, like group shaming - but it's hard to get these to spread reliably.

What if I don't want to engage in group shaming? What if I don't want to tell other people what to do?

I think it's unlikely that the remainder of the population would double their meat consumption.

The more obvious failing point might be the fact that as the price of meat goes down, people (e.g. in developing countries) who weren't able to afford meat now can afford it and so consumption goes back up, so actually the production doesn't go down, instead standards drop as the consuming population becomes even less discerning as to the way the meat is produced. Grr.

Lower price signals the suppliers to find different work to do.

What if I'd rather eat meat all day? Is there any way to stop the antibiotics use without eating like a rabbit?

Get good meat! If you have the money, you’ve got options. It’ll taste better than antibiotic meat, too.

You're perfectly able to eat organic meat, where antibiotics will not have been used.

humans have huge variety of choice for food which has all necessary nutrients which does not originate from meat, so this comment “eat like rabbit” is not correct if you are concluding vegetarian diet.

If you’d rather eat meat all day, then you’re probably saying this problem is not important enough to you. Which is totally fine, it’s your choice. I just want you to realise you have a choice.

Also, vegetarian food can be really delicious. Go to a good vegetarian restaurant some day and order something that sounds tasty - it probably will be and you may not miss the meat as much as you think!

I'd rather eat meat all day, but also not have it pumped with antibiotics. So, to that end, I support banning the importation of meat grown with heavy use of antibiotics, I'd support certification schemes to guarantee reduced use of antibiotics, and other effective regulations (whether self-regulating or governmental regulation) with teeth that get the job done.

Just don't think that your choice to try and reduce the price of meat will meaningfully affect the use of meat. It's just more meat for me.

Really how well does that scale though? At a minimum, being able to eat a vegetarian diet—depending on geography—is a luxury. Eating at a vegetarian restaurant in place of meat in general is completely out of the question for most. Granted, if it's a choice to eat meat 3 times a day, than you certainly could be in a position to eat at a vegetarian restaurant 3 times a day.

How is eating a vegetarian diet a luxury?

During poverty in Yugoslavia my family and I subsisted on a diet of beans and rice. Complete protein in that combo, enough fiber and calories, we didn't die despite eating that for years.

You make a good point, but that is encompassed in my "depending on geography" bit.

Where exactly is it a luxury? In India? In Africa?

I'm pretty sure ex-Yugoslavia area has a very good geography, if not better than most countries. You can grow soy there, just like in the USA, you can grow corn, wheat, you can raise chickens, you can do practically anything there, olives, oranges, grapes, forest fruit etc.

What do vegetarians elsewhere eat? Is there a place on Earth where it's cheaper to grow protein by feeding protein to animals, or to just eat the protein directly?

I'm not exactly sure where in the world is rice and beans more expensive than meat? If so, then it's heavily subsidized and is not real free market behavior.

There is a lot to it, but Geography is not a hierarchical system. In this case, it seems Yugoslavia, as with much of Europe, is great for agriculture. Despite the poverty, that is a luxury. Similar subsistence strategies have been used all over the world for thousands of years (only about 12000). There are places where farming is either not feasible, less energy efficient, or where exclusively plant-based diets aren't feasible. Knowledge about how to replace every component of what you'd get from meat being a component of your diet is also a luxury. If its not already a cultural norm to rely on what has been tested to work, then you need knowledge, a luxury many people don't have. Lastly, you need the intent to drop meat from your diet. In your case this was no option and it worked out. Great. Otherwise its more or less a luxury to be able to experiment with your diet. I'm not so well versed as to know exactly where this occurs, but Papa new Guinea comes to mind, and a wealth of curiosity abounds with regard to the geography of the agricultural revolution and evolution of humans which would provide some indicators.

> There are places where farming is either not feasible, less energy efficient, or where exclusively plant-based diets aren't feasible.

I guess by this logic, since Sahara exists, eating food is a luxury.

Your definition of luxury has transformed into a supreme being just so you can call vegetarianism/veganism a luxury.

If you live in the first world, eating plants over eating meat is not a luxury. It's the cheapest form of healthy sustaining food there is.

Lab grown meat and genetically modified plant based meat substitute with blood seem to be the two most likely examples.

So you're saying that two technologies which don't actually exist yet are more likely than not eating meat, which 100s of millions of humans already do? Yeah, for the average American, you could be right.

You can spend more and buy hormone-free and antibiotic-free products.

One of the weirdest things, for me, is to spend a few weeks eating cheap, delicious, and relatively natural food in Latin America, and then returning to the USA where people get excited to buy groceries that are "made with real* ingredients!".

Where was this in Latin America? In Argentina, most cattle have gone from eating grass on the open pampas to being fed grain in cramped feedlots just like in the US, because it is more lucrative to use the land to grow soya. In Chile, a hell of a lot of food in the supermarkets is imported from the USA, namely from that country’s lower-end market (Walmart etc.). I can’t speak for other countries, but definitely some of Latin America countries are already basing their diet on relatively unnatural food.

When has this attitude _ever_ been the solution to a shared-resource problem? I'm not being snarky, I want to know. It feels like solving traffic mortality by pasting a "drive carefully"-sticker inside the windshield, doing nothing other than establishing who is morally responsible.

It's like solving traffic mortality by telling people not to drive.

no, it’s like telling people to stop driving cars at 100 miles per hour inside city. makes sense.

We do that, but with laws and signs and police and stuff. Not with stern admonition.

so if there would be a law restricting meat consumption then everything would be fine?

It's been done in the past. Church laws forbidding the eating of meat on certain days have been a thing. Of course, most people who have the means would choose to eat meat as often as possible, and so you get things like fish not being classed as meat (leaving aside other considerations like these sorts of restrictions acting as subsidies to merchant fishing fleets, with knock-on effects for early modern naval preparedness).

Or people just ignore stupid, unenforceable laws and net respect for the law as an absolute is decreased.

Which is enforced through regulation from governing bodies (i.e. Police).

Or otherwise "inconvenience yourself at will, to a degree you can afford or find comfortable, to address some issue you have heard about and believe you understand, on your own time."

10 points for griffindor.

No it's not, it's like educating people to drive only when it's necessary, taking more cars off the road.

your analogy would work if parent comment would say “just eat meat carefully”.

overall it makes sense to reduce meat consumption, because if you look deeper in reasons for antibiotics use in meat industry, mainly it is used as a consequence of high demand for meat, to reduce risk of diseases in overpopulated farms, while feeding animals growth hormones and stuffing as much food as possible to ensure quick growth, so yeah, if people would reduce consumption, then supply would adjust accordingly, and then even organic meat producers would become viable option to meet demands.

I believe you're reading something else out of my analogy than what I tried to say; I was making a point about the effectiveness of the method, not the message as such.

Everybody agrees we should drive carefully, and everybody agrees we should not revert to pre-antibiotic treatment of infections. How did we address the former? Through moral admonition and personal prudence? (That was a rhetorical question)

One way we addressed the former was to put up signs that say "Drive Carefully", so apparently your dislike of that technique is not universal. It's called a "nudge", and it has significant (but limited) effect.

I'm not disputing that, but sometimes when we weigh our actions, significant (but limited) alternatives will not cut it, and if the effect is limited enough (and the problem severe enough), even deliberating on them will waste precious time to enact direct and (hopefully) effective action.

Woah, so even debating this issue is wasting precious time? I know this seems to be super-important to you, but for someone who complained about getting short shrift (in another comment), you might try using different language next time.

It works very well for moderate changes. Look into the history of Boycotts and they have actually changed quite a bit about how several industries work.

Antibiotics is actually a fairly minor benefit to the meat industry, so it's a winning strategy assuming significant popular support.

Boycotting isn't individual choice, however; boycotts, when they work, usually work due to PR and reputational effects rather than market effects.

A call to action on a public forum might not mean much on it's own, but it's still advertising the idea.

Boycotting works through the stubborn minority rule [1]. Sometimes even less than 1% of the total population can enforce their rule for the whole country. This works as long as the rest of population finds the rule does not bother them match.

[1] http://fooledbyrandomness.com/minority.pdf

Wait, wait, wait.

I thought it was universally acknowledged that boycotts, generally, don't work, because you can almost never find and coordinate enough people that care.

The case of Kosher wine from the link shows how about 0.3% of population forced almost all wines in US to be Kosher by boycotting non-kosher wines. The important thing is that the minority should be distributed across the whole population uniformly.

Note that it wasn't proposed as a solution.

Are you saying that no one should do anything good, or encourage others to do anything good, unless it fully solves a problem? I suspect that's not the point you were trying to make, but it sure sounds like that if you read your words.

The suggested action wouldn't actually do any noticeable good, though, because of market effects - price would fall, then consumption would rise again.

It's far more effective to lobby for regulation than rely on individual action to solve collective action problems.

Again, who here was proposing relying on individual action to solve collective action problems? No one.

Your economic argument is naive and pretty wrong, but I'm not going to debate it here because it's not relevant to this sub-thread.

I did interpret it as a solution proposal in order to address a specific issue: The effectiveness of voluntary activism to address shared-resource problems(specifically).

Of course people should do good things, but in some cases this can lead to a false sense of security ("I'm doing the Right Thing and spreading the good word. Next issue, please!")

Where I live, we used to have signs inside the buses that read "Wait until the buss has left the station to cross the road". This was an effort to prevent accidents, but had no measurable effect other than to take the problem of the agenda for public transport officials.

With shared resource-problems, voluntary action can lead to a prisoners dilemma, where you can get ahead by _not_ doing the right thing, even though everyone is individually better off by doing the right thing.

Ah. Well, then I don't think we have anything to discuss; you're either introducing a non-sequitur, or you're shitting on someone who is taking personal responsibility for their actions.

And yes, a person who eats less meat eats less meat, which is another way to say that you're introducing a non-sequitur about something which is nothing like your bus example.

Hmm, I think you're giving me short shrift here. I'm not taking the piss on purpose at least, and (since you seem to hold personal responsibility dearly) I really feel it's important to raise the point of whether we are constructively addressing important issues or not.

I'm confused about the person who eats less meat non-sequitur. It feels like you're shoving me around a bit there.

The person who got short shrift is the person you initially replied to. They proposed individual virtue, and you used that as an excuse to raise a different point that you like talking about.

As for the bus thing, the people responsible for reducing deaths around buses are responsible for actually solving the problem. So I agree that they should not do ineffective things like they did in your story. Meanwhile, a person eating less meat is not responsible for making sure that overall meat consumption falls.

So there's no relationship between the two situations, and that's the non-sequitur. Sorry that I didn't get this point across effectively.

I'm afraid GP literally stated his proposal as related to the general situation (thread topic), and if not then his post would be a non-sequitur making my reply a non-non-sequitur or just a regular old sequitur.

And yes, I used his proposal of individual virtue as an "excuse" to raise a point about the role and reason of individual virtue in the topic at hand, it's called "having a discussion." Why should I leave virtuous people alone on the internet? Is he some kind of unassailable saint of meat-moderation who must be protected from non-sequiturs and sequiturs alike?

Whose toes are sore here?

The toes which are sore are those of "discussion".

Look at how popular organic, ethical and local food has become in the last few years. You have restaurant chains based on these ideas, supermarkets like Whole Foods, and food processors like Amy’s. This is because consumers are voting with their wallet. I like to think it’s been inspired in part by documentaries like Fast Food Nation, What The Health and Supersize Me, certainly that’s how I became a more conscious consumer.

Yes, but farmed salmon is making a killing. How many documentaries before you quit sushi?

Can you be a conscious consumer on all aspects of your consumption, can anyone?

I think we can all can be more responsible in our consumption. I’m vegetarian. I try to buy single-material products that I can recycle. I try to avoid companies that behave particularly egregiously; when Blue Bottle was acquired by Nestle I stopped patronizing them. I only purchase pasture raised eggs. I rarely drive, when I do drive it’s towards parks in rural areas. I’m not perfect, but the idea of a rational consumer optimizing for maximum consumption at the lowest price and inconvenience doesn’t hold true for many.

For a longer term the usage of "killing" here can be quite literal due to potential for disaster with antibiotics. In shorter terms I can clearly see how conscious consumption affects local shelves in supermarkets. Like 5-4 years ago in Norway I has to go a special health food store to bye vegan products. Now the cheapest supermarkets offers it and one can get a vegan burger at local Macdonalds.

This is because the industry knows we are prepared to pay a lot more for less if we believe it is ecological. Look at all chains with their own eco branding that has its own criteria of what eco produced means.

Personal choices play a key role in advancing legislative change and facilitating effective enforcement.

Legislation and enforcement only played a partial role in reducing the rate of driving while intoxicated. DWI was still normal and socially acceptable for decades after we started banning it. We changed our attitudes, we stigmatized the behaviour, we created new norms, we invented the concept of the "designated driver". Millions of people had to be the first person in their bar to say "just a club soda, I'm driving", the first to say "don't you think you've had enough?", the first to take the keys out of their friend's pocket and call them a taxi.

It's absurd to think that we can solve the problem of antibiotic resistance just by personally giving up meat, but it's equally absurd to think that our own choices are irrelevant. Collective problems are just individual problems at scale; the solutions are also the aggregate of lots of small individual actions. Eat less meat, buy better meat, lobby grocers and restaurant chains to sell antibiotic-free meat, write to your representatives, inform your friends and family about the issue - it all helps to move us in the right direction.

I don't know how you define "scale", but if you do define it to encompass externalities then I agree with you.

My point is that some types of problems are more amenable to personal activism (participation in wars come to mind) while other types of problems (shared-resources/commons) have different effective solutions (taxes, legislation, democracy et. al.)

I strongly disagree with the attribution of drunk driving reductions to the culture. The culture is a byproduct of how significant the punishment has become, which is what really led to the reduction.

Back in the 70s getting pulled over drunk was punished like running a red light (i.e. a nominal fine). The punishments were ratcheted up to now where a DUI results in a 10k fine in some states and an immediate license suspension. With life altering punishments for getting caught, drunk driving reduced significantly and the culture of determining a DD emerged so people could continue to get hammered.

The correlation just isn't there.

In the UK, the standard penalty for drink-driving has been the same since the early 70s - a 12 month driving ban and a modest fine for the first offence, a three year ban for a second offence and a possible prison sentence of up to 6 months for further repeat offences.

The penalties haven't changed in years, but the rate of drink driving has fallen drastically. What has changed is the culture. Persistent campaigning from both government and grassroots organisations has made drink driving completely unacceptable. Today, it would be considered perfectly reasonable - perhaps even admirable - to call the police on your own friend if you know that they're drink driving. There's now far less proactive enforcement of drink driving laws, because it's not a common enough offence to warrant random testing and the police expect to get tip-offs from the public. It's seen as a foolish and selfish thing to do, a marker of personal weakness, a sign that you're some kind of alcoholic.

That might be the case in the UK, but it's definitely not in the US. People didn't get serious about avoiding drinking and driving until the punishments got serious.

It still wouldn't be considered honorable here to turn in a friend for drunk driving (unless it was obscenely over the limit). It would be mainly considered a failure of friendship that you didn't confront them and instead called it in.

Even in rural Ireland there was a relatively recent backlash because they could keep driving home drunk down the side of the road with the hazard lights on.

Also, with a 12-month ban in the UK, they must not have been enforcing it much because it wouldn't take long to have most of the drunk drivers banned. So my suspicion is that enforcement increased as well. People rarely fall for propaganda alone when there is nothing that makes it concrete.

Is this a shared resource problem though?

The problem, as I see it, is one of a questionable food supply or at least a contamination issue, in which case, each person should decide what matters to them, and is how this particular problem is solved in the micro, which in aggregate, does lessen the macro aspect. I'm thinking of cases like cigarettes and alcohol.

However, where this falls apart is that consumers don't always have that info, and even if we slap warnings on things, it doesn't usually help unless there is a very clear line of causality and effect.

For instance, the prop 65 warnings[0], which are essentially useless.

Either way, I do think that individual choice is the first line of defense for issues like this.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_65_(1...

The salmon that you eat is not harmful to you (probably less so with antibiotics). The multiresistent bacteria are harmful to everyone. Antibiotics are the shared resource, and the incentives are misaligned precisely because more antibiotics in livestock = cheaper and healthier (in a veterinarian sense) meat, but more resistant bacterial strains that can find a way into the populace.

>Is this a shared resource problem though?

The shared resources is the limited amount we can use an antibiotic before it becomes useless.

That's an interesting angle I hadn't considered. Thank you :)

  It feels like solving traffic mortality by pasting a "drive carefully"-sticker inside the windshield

Wouldn't a better analogy here be to "solve traffic mortality" by considerably reducing your exposure to dangerous situations (as in, driving less)?

There's a demand for meat, hence an industry working to supply (and profit-off-of) it. Encouraging people to eat less meat is making a difference.

I dispute that encouraging people to eat less meat will make enough of a difference in this case to, well, make a difference. It's not wrong, it's just too much self-congratulatory blame-shifting with a moral message as the end itself.

These kinds of problems need results, not feel-good activist sentiment woo. People are dying.

Are you suggesting that the change is too slow/not drastic enough? Or perhaps that a change isn't taking place at-all in the first place, that it's all just hot air?

Indeed, we have to be confident that the mechanism of intervention will have the desired effect, and in time before we run out of antibiotic alternatives.

I say that anything less than that is worse than useless, because we're spending wasted effort (mindshare, attention) when time is, to the best of our knowledge, running out.

Now i don't know that personal activism and moral campaigning will be insufficient in this case, it just smells that way to me. It also has a certain fragrance of moral superiority and virtue signalling about it, which i guess triggers me, or something.

Except for the fact that meat consumption is a major resoirce drain on the planet as a whole. Just think about the amount of land, energy, water, medicine and time it takes to produce one kilogram of meat and contrast this with alternative protein sources such as vegatables and you will find that just by reducing ones meat consumption you can cut a big part of your impact on the planet.

I don’t have the first-hand source right now but according to Doing good better [1] a book by William McAskill on the topic of Effective Altruism, there is a strong correlation between individual choices and economic outcomes. For example, if you refrain from buying an egg you would normally buy, egg production is reduced by 0.7 eggs or something close to that number.

The logic of this being that you as an individual might have a small probability of affecting change but if you do that impact is rather big. So the first person not buying an egg doesn’t change the situation but the 50th person does lead to one pallet less being bought (and so on). If you attribute the effect across individuals you arrive at a reasonably high impact each individual choice has. The same argument goes for voting!

[1]: https://www.effectivealtruism.org/doing-good-better/

Since this article talk about fish farms there is very obvious solution and that is eat wild caught fish, preferable from places where there is either a overpopulation or where there are invasive species. Plenty of such meat in the world where eating it would have a net-positive on the environment.

Know one lake where the price of the overpopulated fish species in it is so low that just transporting it to a cat food factory would be a loosing deal.

  eat wild caught fish

But how does the consumer know the true origin of a product?

"Wild-caught" claims are only as reliable as the least honest entity in the supply chain.

Perhaps because they caught it themselves? If I had the time and land I’d go fishing and hunting. But since I don’t I just restrict myself to a vegetarian diet.

You may know by eating fish that are not possible to farm, like cod.

Edit: Apparently, cod may be farmed (1), though I think the idea still stands.

1: https://thefishsite.com/articles/cultured-aquatic-species-at...

Anything written on the product is liable to supply chain fraud. How do a customer know that the virgin olive oil is not mixed with lard? No food is safe from product fraud.

Has fish a higher risk compared to other products? To my knowledge the food product with highest fraud rate is oil. After that things like honey, and further down we have beef. I have never heard of report in regard to fish, but feel free to point me to such reports.

That's what a government is supposed to be doing: laws, regulations, and the ability to enforce them.

Yeah, and if you look at newspaper articles about wild fish actually being farmed, the government seems to be doing a terrible job about that in particular.

I live in Seattle, and couldn't agree more! I think it's reprehensible that there hasn't been more done by our current Congress, the Executive branch, and the Washington state legislature to prevent such disastrous accidents as the recent release of Atlantic salmon around Puget Sound.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/puget-sou...

I'm glad to see that parts of the government, specifically one of our US Senators, Maria Cantwell, and some folks in Washington state's legislature, like Kevin Ranker from Orcas Island, are doing the right thing on this issue. Cantwell, being in the minority party in the Senate, can't do much more than angrily issue press releases, and Ranker, being in the majority party in the Washington state Senate, is doing as much as he can—i.e. introduce legislation.

https://www.facebook.com/senatorcantwell/posts/1994659154144...

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/puget-sou...

But there can be multiple governments involved.

So? The responsibility is on the government where the product is being sold. If they can't verify the origins, they can disallow that sell. I don't see the issue here other than it makes it complicated... which it would be anyway.

This is why I only by olive oil from Australia or New Zealand. It's local to me, and organised crime has less of a hand in it as far as I'm aware.

eat wild caught fish

That can have it's own (different) set of problems if the fish comes from pollute waters.

"What's the safest way to go skiing? Don't ski!"

Skiing isn't the only sport.

Meat isn't the only food.

In economics, this situation is called "substitute goods".

You missed his point. Of course skiing isn't the only sport, but if you love skiing, why snowboard?

Of course meat isn't the only food, but it's delicious and a great source of protein. Sure antibiotics are bad for the system as a whole, but why not go after that instead of boycotting altogether?

No, I got his point.

Of the people who ski, some would be happy to substitute another winter sport if skiing became less desirable (more expensive or less fashionable). Some would substitute non-winter sports (e.g. go to the California coast instead of Tahoe.)

That's the 'substitute goods' that I mentioned.

If you really love skiing, you're still a part of that economic theory, you're just the inelastic part. You might still substitute something else if skiing became 10x more expensive.

To embrace the skiing analogy, I’m Swiss and I love skiing. I’m about to go on a ski trip next week. If I believed that going on occasional ski trips does anywhere near the harm that meat consumption does I would indeed give up skiing.

For similar reasons, I’m not interested in going lion hunting for my holidays. It’s harmful. There are other alternatives. So use the alternatives!

Thanks, that's exactly what I was getting at! And in your skiing example, it's not the price of skiing that causes you to choose another sport, it's your opinion of skiing. Both price and opinion matter to humans.

Extending the analogy: I live in northern Bavaria. I've switched most of my skiing away from weekend drives to Austria to daytrips on the train to places in southern Bavaria. I love skiing in the high Alps, but for what I'm doing, the "foothills" still provide a lot of fun, and it's reduced the marginal cost of a ski day from over 150 EUR to 70 EUR. I still plan to take one long weekend, driving to a less-accessible part of Austria, as well as some train-transported weekends, but the cheap daytrips have compelled me to change what I think is necessary for a day on the slopes.

Deutsche Bahn helped kick this off by offering some really great combo deals that enticed me to try a different style of ski travel, so how could that be done with food?

This will make meat cheaper and people who currently don't eat as much meat because of price will start eating more.

You cannot solve a collective action problem by individual action; the incentives for others to cheat means that you are trying to push water uphill.

A personal anecdote: I've tried cutting my meat consumption many times in the past, but I ultimately fail to keep up a low-meat diet for the following reasons:

- Vegetarian food is really not that tasty in my opinion. (edit: the kind I can reasonably prepare myself)

- It's very difficult to eat enough vegetarian food for me to meet my Calorie requirements (I target 3500/day).

- Eating a balanced diet of vegetarian food that tastes half-decent requires a substantial amount of preparation, especially if you have carb/protein targets. Non-vegetarian pop-it-in-the-microwave food is plentiful. There just aren't enough hours in the day.

I stumbled along with this for years, trying and failing over and over. One of my best friends became a vegetarian and I watched as he basically dialed down his diet to peanut butter and lentils.

Last year, I unintentionally became mostly-vegetarian entirely by accident: I started drinking Soylent. It's high-Calorie, it's consistent, there are five different flavors (three with caffeine!), each flavor tastes decent enough, and it's not a pain in the ass. Other than the odd takeaway order (two or three times a month, or if I run out of Soylent) effectively zero meat enters my apartment.

My coworkers have rolled their eyes dramatically, but it's pretty good. The bottles get recycled, they come unrefrigerated direct from the manufacturer, and the drinks are (seemingly) made from half-decent stuff. If my office put them in the lunch line, I'd probably stop eating meat at work, too.

(And they're pretty cheap!)

wtf 3500 calories a day. are you a professional athlete? I'm a grown man and that many calories would have me take two pounds a week (assuming stability at 2500 cal and 3500 cals extra per pound)

3500 really isn't very much when you're trying to put on weight. Soylent in the morning and three after work (400/each) is ~half that, plus protein shake after the gym (350) and full breakfast/lunch at the office (~600/each) come out to roughly 3500. Plus I'll snack on stuff, maybe have some grapes or string cheese or whatever treats people bring in.

I'm not super strict about it, so it ends up between 3000 and 3750 most days. The Soylent makes it a lot easier because you're not constantly eating. Even something as simple as using half and half instead of skim milk in your coffee adds up.

Edit: but yes, I work out quite a bit.

Why are you trying to eat less meat?

P.S. Good luck on a vegetarian diet with a 3500+ caloric intake. You'll be eating all day.

Vegetarians eat calorie-heavy foods like fats, carbs, and protein, just like everyone else.

Didn't think that was up for debate.

Uh, then why would a vegetarian be eating all day to get 3500+ calories?

Because it is true. You will be consuming a lot more food to maintain that level. I never said it is not possible. I don't mean pasta, bread and pizza either. If you took a healthy reasonable amount of clean meat and fish. Compared to a straight vegetarian diet. You will be eating a lot more food. If you do not agree with a meat diet or not that is a fact.

Arguably easier to eat a large number of calories on a vegetarian diet, than on its polar opposite, ketogenic diet.

It's kind of hard work eating 3500 calories of just meat, eggs and cheese. Whereas that amount of bread, pasta, sweets, and other nominally vegetarian foodstuffs can be easily wolfed down.

Ketogenic diets are high fat. Having plenty of coconut oil, olive oil and butter with everything goes a long way to keeping up the calories and are quite easy to eat.

Sure if you eat pizza, pasta and bread all day.

I've mostly been accomplishing it with the soylent. Trying to eat less meat to be more environmentally conscious, but also because I think meat production is, in general, a bad thing™. Moral issues aside, it seems like such a wasteful and problematic way to produce food.

"P.S. Good luck on a vegetarian diet with a 3500+ caloric intake. You'll be eating all day."

Nuts and nut butters make this very easy. Just 1/4 cup of almond butter, for instance, is over 350 calories.

I'm not a vegetarian but I have cut out a lot of meat and maintained a relatively high (3000+) daily caloric intake without any difficulty.

Almonds, walnuts and sunflower seeds.

These people are all vegan:

https://www.peta.org/living/other/vegan-bodybuilders/

You can definitely get 3500 calories per day on a meat-free diet, although it may take a bit more effort.

Wonder if those steroids are vegan.

I sometimes wonder with problems like these that the underlying solution is controlling the global population.

How can you just wonder and not come to the obvious conclusion yet ? (By the way from my own observations, this opinion is strongly frowned upon here)

How about buy and eat locally sourced beef (and other meats) from farms that you know use the least amount of antibiotics. Have the shortest travel to your market and thus your plate. Stop eating fast-food and buying the equivalent microwave quick meal dinners. These two are the biggest offenders of factory farms.

Stop eating fish from another continent is another good choice. I live in the North East and do not consume salmon because it is not a fish that lives naturally and wild. Besides some small concentrated areas. I refuse to eat farm raised salmon. So I eat whats local flounder, mackerel, bluefish, muscles and clams. Which is also seasonal. (Sorry we're so spoiled eating Pineapples in Feb during a blizzard.)

> Do you feel helpless to stop the problem of antibiotics use in the meat industry? You’re not!

Eating less meat isn't necessary to accomplish that at all. US consumers, as one example, are managing to force a large change upon US meat companies through pressure about health consequences, thanks to a long campaign of education by numerous groups and government agencies. Just five years ago you couldn't find antibiotic free chicken at most Walmart grocery stores, now every one of them carries such, with the major producers like Tyson all gradually switching over.

Actually my mother (age mid 70s) who grew up on a farm has said to me many times over the years her family only ate meat on Sunday. They were not vegetarians or some weird cult it was the way people were it was a normal way to eat.

Traditionally or historically (?) fish isn't seen as meat. And not just for religious reasons. My guess is people saw them as so different from land animals they were not classed as meat in the minds of our ancestors.

"You don’t need meat in 3 meals a day"

You don't need 3 meals a day.

If you are at all open-minded about eating less meat, you should also (if only for your own health, fitness and longevity) open your mind to eating fewer meals.

Eating less[1] is one of only two things I have ever done[2] that made a noticeable impact in my health, fitness and athletic output.[3]

[1] Total calories are actually about the same since I have an exercise regimen that requires a floor on calories, but feeding window is reduced (sometimes dramatically) putting me into a fasted state more than half of my life.

[2] The other was shifting almost 30% of my caloric intake to almonds, walnuts, almond butter and sunflower seeds.

[3] I am a competitive BJJ player.

I never eat farmed fish because I don't trust fish farms and it seems that there are not enough regulations to make farmed fish healthy.

I don't buy industrial beef neither and only eat high quality beef that is certified to have had a good diet and no hormones or antibiotics.

I don't eat cheap Brazilian chickens neither.

That means that I eat quite less fish and meat than other people, but every time I eat, I enjoy a good product. Also, that makes me not responsible of all the externalities generated by the meat and fish industry.

Do you feel helpless looking at the burning house?

You’re not! Here’s a simple easy trick you can use to reduce how fast it's burning: Spit into it sometimes!

---

Structural problems cannot solved with individual behavior.

Structural problems can be solved when 1. individuals bond together and affect policy or 2. when a new technology emerges.

Yeah but I don't feel like suffering from every aspect of my life just to make an impact. My suffering will become a full time job. Focusing on not eating x/y/z, not wearing x/y/z, not doing x/y/z, not going to x, y, or z, for x/y/z reasons. And so on and so forth.

I work a day job, I don't have time to give a shit about most things, least of all adjusting my entire diet for activist ideology, let alone reading enough about these micro topics to get actionable data from. I have trouble just sticking to a solid routine every single day. If I possessed the power to just change my shit up for arbitrary disconnected reasons like lowering global antibiotics research, then I'd already have the mental fortitude to be a billionaire.

Would personally rather donate to a foundation that is able to accomplish the same goal on a larger scale. Our efforts should be focused on the rich putting their efforts into these things.

I never vote with my wallet. If I vote with my wallet and it costs me 2 hours to go across the city to get an item that's 14-16% of my day lost to acquire just one item in my life because I had the luxury of 'making a statement'.

Or paying more taxes to fund epa, fda and unilateral trade agreements to adress challenges so numerous that no mortal man can be expected to grok half of it in two lifetimes.

In order to do that though, you have to vote vith your er... vote.

Right now my wallet is doing the voting for me; can't afford meat in every meal, let alone one meal a day haha.

> Consumers are key to change

Consumers are given responsibility for too many things. When I buy something I have to check how it impacts the environment, animal welfare, fair trade, worker impact, company social responsibility, price, antibiotic usage, palm oil usage, health impacts, allergens, various toxins, suspected list of toxic substances, company reputation, etc.

When will it end? IMO this doesn't scale... This needs regulation, I'm fairly sure the EU is doing it's part, where is the US?

The EU is doing its part. The UK media ridiculed and undermined it constantly for "red tape". Now we're leaving; things will only get worse.

How about they stop demanding paperwork before any production is made, and instead go after actual trespassers by doing blind tests?

Because, you know, as a consumer I fail to see how paperwork protects me from anything. Being expert at paperwork doesn't mean you're an expert of being a fair tradesman.

Paperwork collectors mentality is precisely what we should beat off of bureaucracy.

Would you apply the same concept to drugs? Would you allow pharmaceutical companies to sell anything and catch them if they sell something that kills people? While it's not the same situation, the difference between food and drugs is not that great.

I'm not sure about drugs, but the process they have right now also inspires zero confidence in me:

* It costs billions effectively confining market for a few huge conglomerates.

* It passes throuh drugs that turn out to not have any observable effect or which are worse than ones already on market.

* It did allow pushing opioids for the epidemic.

It's not pretty. It might be better than nothing in this extreme case, but that's a pretty low bar.

Interesting idea...

Catching things with blind tests as a way to increase compliance while reducing the burden of documentation.

If it could be done efficiently, that would certainly be better.. I suspect that tests might be expensive to scale, and not offer sufficient precision... Antibiotics might disappear over time, for example.

IMO we should always strive to improve regulation and make it more efficient.

If you're not doing tests know nothing about antibiotics in meat, who grew this meat and where, and whether it's meat at all.

No amount of paperwork provides even a tiny bit of compliance. Just look at VW.

>When will it end?

When you want it to end. You're putting those burdens on yourself.

No, the people who say that this is up to the consumers, rather than being a regulatory issue.

Those people are doing big-corporations a favor, by trying to shift the burden to me, who we all know can't possibly do this.

Except we don't operate in some sort of unrestricted free market. There are agencies like the FDA that enforce food and pharma standards - so you can trust that nothing at a grocery store will poison you. There are laws, regulations and trade deals that govern how commerce is conducted. What you're doing is injecting personal, arbitrary and capricious standards on top of the already existing massive regulatory framework and then complaining it is too hard. No kidding! Don't do that then or at least don't be a martyr about it.

You're right it is completely not scalable, and not only that, but incompatible with present-day market economics. One of the most important things we give up for the abstraction of market transactions with interchangeable goods is information outside the transaction.

I cut down on eating meat to 3 times a week but Burgers won't like that. An alternative is organic free range meat but damn that's too expensive.

Nice, move... But you also have to choose the right shampoo :)

And some shampoos might have organic ingredients, while the contents is manufactured in an environmental damaging fashion... Others might be environmentally responsible, but not organic. Some might be both, but nighter of those is a guarantee that it's good for you. Organic snake poison, might be organic, but it's still very unhealthy :)

Point being that consumer choice is not a good way to solve these problems.

That said, eating less meat is generally a good approach. But replacing it with organic free range meat is not a perfect solution without a study. Could we feed the entire planet this way? Is it as efficient in terms of fodder needed? Is free range better than caged in terms of animal welfare (usually, yes, but there could be caveats).

The article does not mention that Chile received a lot of investment from Norwegian fish farm industry. After strict regulation and enforcement in Norway started to affect profits the industry looked for other countries where local laws are not that strict or can be ignored.

"The thoughtless person playing with penicillin treatment is morally responsible for the death of the man who succumbs to infection with the penicillin-resistant organism."

- Sir Alexander Fleming

Humans are squandering antibiotics for the most inane uses, rapidly growing superbugs and resistance along the way. This will become a major public health crisis if nothing is done about it sooner than later.

> rapidly growing superbugs

We can outsmart them. We have biochemistry and flocks of 30 year old PhD students. They have a random number generator.

But they have huge, I mean really, really huge numbers. And their generation time is measured in hours.

Not "a" random number generator, but rather trillions of random number generators running in parallel.

The sad thing is that this understates the parallelism of the evolutionary process by ... many orders of magnitude. A single human gut has on the order of 100 trillion bacteria. Also, the gp poster seems to be unaware of plasmids and conjugation process, too. (unless it was sarcasm that went over my head, which it very well may have been)

I would gladly take 1000 vacuum tubes over 100 trillion random number generators.

Same thing

And a natural machine learning algorithm.

Unfortunately many from the 30 year old flocks are finding the best ways to optimize ad revenue because that pays many times more than biochemistry.

Those who resist the temptation and stay focused on disease eradication will be wealthy beyond their wildest dreams

Tell that to Edward Jenner or Jonas Salk. Unless you're referring to spiritual wealth, nobody has ever got rich by eradicating a disease.

For the "they" side you elided natural selection, lateral gene transfer, and generation times measured in hours.

So why aren't we then?

The market is failing on this.

In an age of increasing nationalistic sentiments and military escalation, it's become a common trope that there's almost no one left to remember the tragedies of WWII. Coincidentally there's certainly nobody alive who remembers the previous pandemic, Spanish Flu.

(I say "previous" - there's an ongoing pandemic of HIV/aids, albeit a more gradual affair, but that's happening to Other People (TM))

The Spanish Flu epidemic was 1918-1920. There are quite a few who will remember that still.

Of the centenarians who were alive, very few were old enough then to remember anything.

In 2016, Chile had a massive algal bloom that killed an unprecedented amount of fish.

The salmon industry was held accountable for it, but the issue was just deflected and blamed on El Nino.

Salmon seemed abundant and cheap, relatively, at Chile's coastal restaurants and I guess now I know why.

Perhaps I'll pick something else on the menu the next time I visit. I wasn't a great fan of deep-fried seafood empanadas or ceviche but paila marina was tasty!

Ok. so, as a Chilean, what can I do, other than stop eating salmon altogether?

Fish farms are concentration camps for fish, same goes for the rest of the meat industry. The reason they need all the antibiotics is because the animals are so sick they just wouldn't survive without. Many still don't, it's just more effective to let 20% or so die if it allows stuffing more animals in the same space. Did anyone really think we would get away with treating animals like that and not have to face the consequences? Just say no, really. It's a disgusting, harmful habit; much more so than tobacco and alcohol. And down-voting me for telling you what you already knew isn't going to save you.

I don’t think you need to invoke concentration camps here, true as it may be in some cases.

They use antibiotics to make them grow faster. That’s half the reason.

My understanding is that this practice is now banned in both the US and EU.

Sounds like a bedtime story in my ears. We're eating more and more meat, and demanding that it gets cheaper and cheaper while the stock market index needs to go higher and higher. It won't stop until the majority is willing to look beyond the bullshit we're being fed and start using their brains.

We (french) are not https://www.planetoscope.com/elevage-viande/1587-consommatio..., pretty much the opposite actually

What's the difference then? Piling up living beings in awful conditions to kill them in the most cost-effective way is pretty much the definition of a concentration camp. And making them grow faster than they're supposed to at the expense of everything isn't very nice either.

They're not people. Concentration camps are for people. At least we don't eat them alive, like their other natural predators.

At least they have a chance to fight for their survival, which makes all the difference. If it's horrible when done to humans, it's horrible when done to animals. And as long as we keep doing it to animals, we shouldn't expect to escape the same fate ourselves; Karma 101.

Fair enough, if you fear karmic retribution that makes sense. I don't, so for me the shoe remains on the same foot. Other people are more valuable to me than animals, and also more dangerous. The stakes are higher and therefore the moral considerations are more prudent (or karmic, if that's your bag).

Karma has nothing to do with revenge, karma is just another word for consequences. Every action leads to reactions; if they didn't the universe would have descended into chaos in no time at all. And thats how we learn, by acting and studying reactions until we get it. One of those lessons is recognizing the value of all living beings.

A big difference is that humans in concentration camps generally don’t get antibiotics, not for disease or for accelerated growth, and their bodies are generally not used as food.

Also, animals kept not in high concentrations have often been given antibiotics since the 50s. It’s not all about supporting concentration.

I understand that animals suffer in mass farming conditions—which is why I don’t buy mass produced meat or eggs or milk—but concentration camps are for people. You cans say animals are just like people, and I may even agree with you mostly, but to me and most people they’re not entirely like people. I understand if they are to you.

The metaphor is backward actually. The Nazis transitioned to gassing and extermination camps because the leadership saw first hand the psychological problems of having ordinary people commit mass murder, not because it was cheap. It was probably far more expensive. Think of all the war time train and supply usage.

> During a visit to Minsk in August 1941, Himmler witnessed an Einsatzgruppen mass execution first-hand and concluded that shooting Jews was too stressful for his men. By November he made arrangements for any SS men suffering ill health from having participated in executions to be provided with rest and mental health care. He also decided a transition should be made to gassing the victims, especially the women and children, and ordered the recruitment of expendable native auxiliaries who could assist with the murders. Gas vans, which had been used previously to kill mental patients, began to see service by all four main Einsatzgruppen from 1942. However, the gas vans were not popular with the Einsatzkommandos, because removing the dead bodies from the van and burying them was a horrible ordeal. Prisoners or auxiliaries were often assigned to do this task so as to spare the SS men the trauma.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einsatzgruppen#Transition_to_g...

They grow faster because they are less sick. Antibiotics are not like growth hormones.

That is probably true (that they don't act like growth hormones) but last I visited the subject, scientist don't know exactly why, but antibiotics actually do increase growth in some livestock.

No, antibiotics make animals like chickens and pigs (and humans) actually grow much faster and bigger.

I would encourage you to read Antibiotic Growth-Promoters in Food Animals ( http://www.fao.org/docrep/ARTICLE/AGRIPPA/555_EN.HTM ) (the fao domain is the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) or the introduction of Antimicrobial Growth Promoters Used in Animal Feed: Effects of Less Well Known Antibiotics on Gram-Positive Bacteria ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC153145/ )

The Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotic_use_in_livestock also covers it:

> Certain antibiotics, when given in low, sub-therapeutic doses, are known to improve feed conversion efficiency (more output, such as muscle or milk, for a given amount of feed) and/or may promote greater growth, most likely by affecting gut flora.[15] However, any antibiotics deemed medically important to humans by the CDC are illegal to use as growth promoters in the U.S. Only drugs that have no association with human medicine – and therefore no risk to humans – are allowed to be used for this purpose.[5][16] It is also important to note that some drugs listed below are ionophores, which are not antibiotics and do not pose any potential risk to human health.

They are indeed not growth hormones, but they do change the gut bacteria balance and make it easier to extract calories from the feed stock. This has nothing to do with actually being sick or not.

The reason they need all the antibiotics is because the animals are so sick they just wouldn't survive without

I'm not sure this is entirely true.

Have you bothered to look into it? It's not like the information is impossible to find, even if they don't exactly advertise the icky parts of their business. 'Eating Animals' by Jonathan Safran Foer is a good place to start.

I am curious if you have. I would encourage you to read http://www.fao.org/docrep/ARTICLE/AGRIPPA/555_EN.HTM

> According to the National Office of Animal Health (NOAH, 2001), antibiotic growth promoters are used to "help growing animals digest their food more efficiently, get maximum benefit from it and allow them to develop into strong and healthy individuals". Although the mechanism underpinning their action is unclear, it is believed that the antibiotics suppress sensitive populations of bacteria in the intestines. It has been estimated that as much as 6 per cent of the net energy in the pig diet could be lost due to microbial fermentation in the intestine (Jensen, 1998). If the microbial population could be better controlled, it is possible that the lost energy could be diverted to growth.

Do you have any material from a peer reviewed source that refutes this?

It's worse than that - the meat industry uses antibiotics on perfectly healthy animals as a growth enhancer. This is pure profit motive, nothing to do with veterinary care.

Imagine the day you was born, somebody already planned your death. Because this is how it is for pig, cow, chicken on this planet.

Everyone and everything dies in the end. It's fairly common among religions to presume that fate is inexorable and already written, with free-will being only an illusion working towards the predestined plan of god(s).

The crucial difference of course is that most of us aren't forced to live day to day in horrifically cruel conditions and then killed about one tenth of the way into our natural lifespan, purely for the pleasure of others.

Well, I think I'd take a sledgehammer or pneumatic bolt to the brain over being hamstrung, disemboweled, and eaten alive by wolves...

Nature is no less cruel.

Nature doesn't force animals to stand in their own shit for their entire life in cages that don't allow them to even turn around.

https://theintercept.com/2017/10/05/factory-farms-fbi-missin...

Watch this and get back to me about cruelty.

https://vimeo.com/209647801

Cruel conditions aside (which could be argued as morally bad thing), this:

> then killed about one tenth of the way into our natural lifespan, purely for the pleasure of others

does not seem to be rational. Humans and animals don't eat only for the pleasure, then need to eat something in order to live. Your stomach and other organs do not really care about your conscientious choices about what to eat, whether you had to kill for that or not. The natural lifespan is also partially influenced by 'demand' for the species by the predators, so the fact that some animal populations in wildlife have ten times the lifespan can be explained by the fact that those animals do not have humans in their natural habitat. Those which do end up in farms and their natural lifespan is lower.

Anyway, I believe eating meat is so profound on moral debates only because humans are apex predators and no one preys on us. If there were such things then maybe our moral choices about animals could be more compassionate (in order to possibly influence moral choices of the human-eating predators).

It's easy to live a long healthy life without ever eating meat, so, with a few exceptional cases, yeah it's completely a question of what you prefer to eat.

A cow will live about 20 years on average. A dairy cow will live about 4. I'm having a hard time coming up with a definition of "natural" that fits the latter. And for most of human history it was a small fraction of animals in the wild that would up on a human's dinner table (American Buffalo, for example).

It doesn't seem likely that humans are ever going to have to worry about predators again but meat production is a huge contributor to climate change so we are going to pay for our meat habit one way or the other.

Your argument relies on the assumption that one would feel as much empathy towards animals as they do towards humans, or at least a comparable amount.

What is the antibiotic? How long does this compound last when deployed? If something is highly reactive (causing the death of bacteria) is it not a reasonable starting assumption that it would not last long once deployed? If it is long active, where is the evidence of this compound causing antibiotic resistance?

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