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Comment by bbarn | Hacker News Reader

What you've just described is less an argument for vegetarianism and more an argument for population control. If the fish come to you, and you're incapable of overfishing them, your whole fantasy stops.

That said, you're right in that vegetarianism is just not sustainable in this size a population - but not just for elitist vegan snobs. If we all ate mostly vegetables, and got our proteins from other sources, we'd be facing a scarcity of land to grow crops as well as sources of fertilizer. The math just doesn't work at scale, and that's why purely vegetarian nations are generally that way: because they are poor, not enlightened. They also aren't usually particularly healthy. Ironically the healthiest cultures (if you'll permit the generalization) are those eating mostly fish-based diets like the Pacific and Mediterranean.

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Vegetarianism doesn't scale? Right now most Americans eat meat that mostly eats food like corn and soybeans. How would it take more land if people got their protein from tofu instead?

Also the meat we eat eats food. That's how it grows. There's an obvious caloric inefficiency there, if we're struggling.

Personally I think vat-grown meat is gonna be the ideal win/win: low environmental footprint, perfect high quality kobe beef for all :)

Why wait? Excellent plant-based foods are available now, and the improvements in quality, taste and cost are accelerating.

Beef for people who don't eat beef?

There is a common myth in vegetarianism that cow fields can be just interchanged by soy or wheat fields. But they aren't equivalent. Lets see.

Lets take a cultured plant of wheat from family Poaceae: There is a crop of seeds once in the year and then the plant die. The cow eats the grain and maybe they eat the straw also. Finished.

Now lets take a similar plant in a pasture or a meadow. But the cows aren't put there for the "once in the year" grain of this plants. Is the Poaceae superpower to grow leaves again and again after being grazed what counts.

Therefore we need to take in mind that we can extract more food from the same plant in a pasture, and this happens all around the year.

And not all fields are flat. Some are located in mountains and have inclinations of 60-70 degrees or so. You can't use machines there to sow or harvest. Would be economically unfeasible. Using this areas as grazing fields for goats or sheeps are a better option.

And there are the arid areas, where you have all the sun and space to culture, but none of the needed water; and where a lot of plants are poisonous or have horrid spines. If you remove the donkeys, goats and sheep, you can't have still tofu in return. Does not work like that.

We need to refine our master plan of "1 Kg of meat equals to 10 of wheat". For some places "1 Kg of meat equals to 0 Kg of wheat".

Of course if "we'll do it for the animals", a meadow inhabited by 450 species is much better than a concrete parking; and the later holds still more species than a monoculture of soybean. All soybeans means "no more butterflies, micromammals, flowers, and birds"

Given the sheer inefficiency of animal agriculture, this argument doesn't hold up to even passing scrutiny.

For every 100 calories of grain fed to cattle in industrial (meat) factory farms, the result's equivalent to ~30 calories.

Those "inefficient" fields you cite wouldn't need to be cultivated at all if we didn't pour two thirds of the food fields produce into fuelling the livestock industry. Not everywhere outright requires cultivation.

Most of the meat on your plate will come from a factory farm, for the sake of maximising efficiency of food production. The idyllic picture of animals roaming freely across pastures doesn't really map to the reality of modern affordable meat production[1].

As to your point concerning the meadows/monocultures comparison- a global food production system less wasteful than that which exists presently, in which we wouldn't be pouring mountains of perfectly edible food into fuelling meat production, would substantially reduce the area of land required for continual cultivation. Modern diets in the western world area astoundingly inefficient- even reducing the amount of meat consumed would help matters considerably[2].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_vqIGTKuQE

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets

> Most of the meat on your plate will come from a factory farm

Maybe in some countries, but this assumption is most probably false in my case.

> For every 100 calories of grain fed to cattle in industrial (meat) factory farms, the result's equivalent to ~30 calories.

Plus manure, leather and other subproducts that you can't obtain from grain. We need to take the whole equation, not only the good parts.

Where I work we used to have a lot of life in the river, now there are just place names and left over bits of infrastructure from those former times when there were fish. Unless you do your own bit of local (or global) history seeking then you cannot imagine times to have been different. Hence I shared what I know about how rivers used to be.

That was mere observation, as is my commentary on how people just move on from whatever they have just made extinct to some other fish without batting an eyelid.

Some crazy scientist chap once wrote that 'Nothing will benefit health or increase chances of survival on earth as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.' He also wrote 'e=mc2'.

Anyway, as for these 'poor vegetarian nations', you mean India!!! India wasn't poor and did not have famines until the British arrived with their guns. Before then India made and exported many things, fabrics being a speciality. The likes of the East India Company closed that down. A lot of enlightened thinking has came out of India. And it still does.

Now if you are going to live in Scandinavia then you are going to have a tough time of it being vegetarian. Those long winter months don't help you grow your oranges.

As for nitrogen fixing and general soil fertility, what you need are turnips. This was worked out a long time ago in England. What you don't need is more and more fertiliser from oil/natural gas thrown on the land to grow crops to feed animals that get churned up into beefburgers, with the residue washing into the oceans to create uncontrollable blooms of algae, suffocating the fish below.

Despite the significant numbers of humans on the planet there is plenty of arable land, albeit mostly owned by the 1%. We no longer need cows to pull the ploughs, the Dutch invented the harness for the horses bred by the British to do that. But we no longer need any beasts of burden, we can make tractors and power them with things like sunlight if we wanted to, cutting big oil out of the agri-business.

There is no need to be defeatist and to 'compromise'. Or to insist on eating fish just because some Japanese bloke lived to 112 possibly because he ate fish every day.

> Some crazy scientist chap once wrote that 'Nothing will benefit health or increase chances of survival on earth as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.' He also wrote 'e=mc2'.

Skill in physics does not necessarily equate to skill in macro-biology. 'Genius' is relative to one's profession.

> As for nitrogen fixing and general soil fertility, what you need are turnips. This was worked out a long time ago in England. What you don't need is more and more fertiliser from oil/natural gas thrown on the land to grow crops to feed animals that get churned up into beefburgers, with the residue washing into the oceans to create uncontrollable blooms of algae, suffocating the fish below.

Turnips are gross. Most people don't like eating them. You will never win that battle.

Eating fish is not a compromise, it's a logical place you end up if trying to feed a populous without forcing them to eat refined foods.

Perhaps you could take a look at the this traditional Okinawan diet, which is 95% plant-based (only a tiny amount of fish).

The longest lifespans on the planet (well until the western diet came along and promptly reversed that within mere decades).

If you want to talk logically, the most eco friendly approach is a vegan diet simply due to the inefficiency of calorie conversion through an intermediate species as opposed to getting directly from the source.

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