Hacker News Reader

Comment by malvosenior | Hacker News Reader

> I think that in the future societies will look back at our consumption of meat, especially factory farming methods, and wonder why it took us so long to change our attitudes on this issue.

How would future societies propose we feed ourselves if we don't eat meat?

View on HN

Is that a serious question? As one small example, the 500 million or so vegetarians in India seem to do just fine.

I thought there were a few required proteins that were very hard to supply in the body without an animal source

I thought the same. I get the sense people gloss over this in their promotion of vegetarianism/veganism

All amino acids originate from non-animals (plants, microbes). Where do you think other animals get their essential amino acids? They eat plants or eat an animal that ate plants. All plant proteins have all of the essential amino acids. The only truly “incomplete” protein is gelatin, which is missing the amino acid tryptophan, so the only protein source you couldn’t live on is Jello.

Basically all of your comment is false. Humans can synthesize many amino acids. That is the defining difference between non-essential vs. essential amino acids.

And there are lots of plant sources that are missing or insufficient in essential amino acids. Beans, for example, are lacking in methionine, which is why corn and beans are eaten together in some traditional diets.

Sorry, all essential* amino acids come from plants or microbes. Beans, e.g. pinto, do have methionine, but corn has even less, so I don't see your point.

Besides, you probably don't want a lot of methionine in your diet (it's linked to feeding cancer) [1..7].

Further, you're recycling the tired myth that "protein comibing" is necessary. Our body maintains pools of free amino acids by dumping protein into the digestive tract, which are broken down and reassembled, i.e. it does the protein combining for us, it's not necessary to explicitly do it through meals if you're otherwise eating a varied diet that sufficient in calories.

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22171665 [2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18789600 [3] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15955547 [4] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18252204 [5] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22342103 [6] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11603655 [7] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14585259

No, that myth was debunked decades ago. You can get all essential amino acids from a normal variety of plant foods, and the body combines them naturally. Or in case of some all essential amino acids are in the same plant.

Tell that to the doctors that have to save malnourished vegan children.

Soylent is vegan and nutritionally complete, so there are definitely cheap-to-produce ways to make it work.

Yes it's a serious question. Many people love meat and it's a staple part of their diet (as has been the case with humans for all of humanity). As for India, you may want to update your numbers:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelpellmanrowland/2017/12/1...

None of your statements strengthen your argument. Many people also love it when other people are forced to work for them for free and it was the basis of the economic systems of many societies for centuries. Yet somehow we've managed to survive and thrive without large scale slavery.

As to your comment on India, no one is arguing that meat doesn't taste good or that most people don't like to eat it. But whether the number is 300 million or 500 million, clearly meat isn't necessary for a balanced diet, and no one seriously disputes this.

Comparing eating meat with slavery is exactly why people won't stop eating meat. It's impossible to take such an argument seriously.

> no one is arguing that meat doesn't taste good or that most people don't like to eat it.

That's pretty much the final word on the subject. People will never stop eating meat. It's part of being human (yes some humans don't do it, but we are omnivores).

> It's impossible to take such an argument seriously.

Why? It seems you are exactly proving my point: you've compartmentalized one as "ok cause we like it and do it now" and the other as "evil because it's bad and we don't do it anymore", but provide no argument as to why they are logically so incomparable. And your "final word on the subject" is apparently "meat tastes good and people like it." Forgive me if I'm not pursuaded by your "logic".

> Why?

Because it's a non-sequitur. Slavery and diet have absolutely nothing to do with each other. You could pick any good or bad example of something and strap it to your argument, but it doesn't make it convincing.

> And your "final word on the subject" is apparently "meat tastes good and people like it." Forgive me if I'm not pursuaded by your "logic".

Yep, that's why people will continue to eat meat; it tastes great. Do you honestly think people will ever stop? I know I never would and I'm sure I'm not alone.

> slavery and diet have absolutely nothing to do with each other.

No one is talking about diet. The part where you eat the animal isn't relevant morally. The part where the animal's freedom is restricted and is treated as an object purely for the pleasure of humans is.

What you're experiencing is cognitive dissonance. You're not a bad person for being raised in a culture that encourages you to not think about these things. You should try to look into where your food comes from even though our cultural biases that will make us try to avoid doing so or justify the atrocities when we do see them.

It's seems obvious that if you are raised to not eat meat then you will be very unlikely to introduce it into your diet later on, especially if it is socially frowned upon. People who have been vegetarians for a long time often are unable to stomach meat. Also, it's clear that some kinds of meat are already not eaten: do you think the reason people don't eat dog in the US is because it doesn't taste good?

So, while it's certainly likely that people alive today will always eat meat, generational turn-over could result in a world without meat eaters.

(I eat meat but do not eat mammals.)

Please stop. We don't need another generic flamewar about this.

Surely if killing animals is wrong, so is exploiting them for eggs and milk? So the only moral option (currently available, in the absence of lab-grown meat) is veganism, which is deadly (it's missing some B vitamin I think).

> Surely if killing animals is wrong, so is exploiting them for eggs and milk?

Prefacing an argument with "surely" doesn't make it a stronger argument. I don't see why it follows at all that raising animals for eggs or milk could not be done humanely.

What happens to males in eggs and milk? Is that (to take one example) humane?

Well, the argument agains killing animals seems to be "you wouldn't kill humans" (I don't consider "animals suffer" a valid argument, because there are viable killing methods that don't cause suffering), so then you can use the same argument "you wouldn't enslave humans" with any kind of farm-raising. Like, the only possibly moral alternative would be foraging - picking unfertilized eggs of wild birds - but I don't think that would scale...

> Well, the argument agains killing animals seems to be "you wouldn't kill humans"

That's not my argument, so I'll try to explain my personal reasoning. To me, the main real reason we have for not killing or hurting other creatures is that we believe they have some level of emotional life, and are capable of things like happiness, love (at least in some form), sadness, fear, and suffering beyond just physical pain. We love our dogs, cats, etc. because we believe at some level they are capable of loving us back (perhaps a stretch for cats I know).

Thus, for me personally I draw the line at mammals because I believe they possess all of these qualities. I will eat poultry, fish and shellfish because I don't believe they have the same capacity of "emotional sentience" as humans, though I'm fully open to the idea that my ideas about poultry are wrong.

Thus, while I "wouldn't enslave humans" I also believe it's possible to keep hens and cows for eggs and dairy in a manner where the animal does not suffer, and I don't see this as any kind of "enslavement".

You aren't even sure which vitamin it is, but you're sure that veganism is deadly? It's B12, which is from bacteria in the soil and water, but because of water purification and washing vegetables, we don't get it so much naturally. So vegans take a B12 supplement. But even animals raised as food are also given B12 supplements, and it's often recommended for non-vegans to take a B12 supplement as well. You know what else is deadly? Atherosclerosis from eating animals.

Yes exploiting animals for eggs and milk (and all the death that accompanies it) isn't moral when it's for pleasure and not for staying alive. No a plant based diet is not deadly, in fact vegans tend to live longer healthier lives. The longest lived population studied was essentially (over 95%) vegan.

You can eat plants perfectly fine which in addition is much easier on the environment. At a minimum meat consumption could be reduced a lot.

some plants would kill the planet as well. let's take almonds for example, they need a huge amount of water. and still more and more products will include them.

if everybody eats plants we would also need a huge amount of water/field sizes to feed everybody. guess the best thing is a healthy mix of everything.

> if everybody eats plants we would also need a huge amount of water/field sizes to feed everybody.

Keeping non-human animals for the purpose of eating their flesh requires even huger amounts of water/field sizes; so much in fact that half of the world's crops are fed to non-human animals[0].

[0]: https://www.treehugger.com/green-food/half-of-world-crop-is-...

Those numbers are way off, even if industrial animal husbandry is highly inefficient. You may want to read Meat: a benign extravagance by Simon Fairlie: https://www.amazon.com/Meat-Benign-Extravagance-Simon-Fairli...

Here's some numbers from a peer-reviewed analysis from 2018[0]:

> The new analysis shows that while meat and dairy provide just 18% of calories and 37% of protein, it uses the vast majority – 83% – of farmland and produces 60% of agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions.

I know I was responding to a specific comment about land usage, but I probably wouldn't read that book as I also believe that we should prevent unnecessary pain and suffering, e.g. even if we hypothetically found out that the smoke from the ovens in concentration camps didn't contribute significantly to air pollution, they still wouldn't be a good idea, so of course I object to a book that describes ongoing mass killings as "benign".

But if you have the specific numbers from the book handy, I'd still like to give them a look.

[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding...

Animals need even more water and space, both for themselves and for the huge amount of plant crops we grow to feed them. Which one do you think is more effecient to eat?

How much grass can a human eat? There are huge swathes of land where nothing but grass grows. Animal can graze it and people can eat animals.

This argument that certain areas _only_ support grass / ruminants gets brought up a lot but isn't accurate. Grasslands are some of the richest areas for growing plant-based crops in the USA.

https://i.imgur.com/qBxCYma.png

Reply on news.ycombinator.com