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Comment by hirundo | Hacker News Reader

Of the five Guiding Principles on page 52 only about 1.5 of them are primarily concerned with the nutrition content of the food. The rest are mostly focused on their environmental impact.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. And clearly that's aligned with the mission of the WWF. But I think you'd get a much different list if it was just about maximizing the health of the eater. E.g. meat.

When I choose food at the grocery store I'm focused on which are better for me, not Earth. If I were convinced that there is a genuine discrepancy between those goals, I'd likely still choose me. Am I the bad guy?

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Aside from fad diets like Atkins, you don't see health professionals recommending meat as the core of a healthy diet. My doctor tells me to eat a plant-based diet at every visit now. If there's a discrepancy here, it's not that you should be eating lots of meat.

Is anybody the "bad guy?" Is anybody not?

The Earth will fix itself, eventually, no matter what we do to it. It's seen worse. I mean it apparently went from a ball of lava pelted with meteorite-nukes to the only verdant garden we have ever known, and it has already been through at least a few cataclysms.

Even if the planet disappears overnight, the universe at large will still go on as if we never existed.

You choose the scale you want to care about, and some levels require some sacrifice on other levels.

>The Earth will fix itself...

I suppose this depends on your definition of "fix," but this sounds suspiciously like the Gaia hypothesis:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis

Which is closer to wishful thinking than science. Sure, Earth will go on, because Earth doesn't care. But humans are facing a climate catastrophe if they do not course-correct their impact on the planet, and that is what we mean by "good for the Earth" -- that is, good for the maintaining the planet as a place where we want to live.

That's analogous to the commonly held, stupid opinion that you may as well smoke because you have to die of something.

Well sure - if nothing matters, it also doesn't matter we consume a lot of animal products and ruin our tiny planet as we used to know it.

If anything does matter, we should reduce our consumption and production of animal based products.

To quote the late George Carlin: "The planet is fine! The people are fucked!"

Same with "Organic Food" its a label to describe the way the food was grown as low impact on the environment. Some organic foods can have fewer chemicals, or better flavor, but that is a side effect.

I don't think we can assume meat based diet is better than plant based diet anymore.

And without this assumption the "own good vs. common good" argument doesn't hold. Because in reality, "own good" and "common good" align at a lower consumption of meat. (Ignoring taste, obviously. Meat is delicious!)

No, you are not the bad guy but it's good to be concerned. I focus on companies when I shop. If there are two similar choices of big 2.5 gallons of water, I don't choose arrowhead. I think that's what they are trying to get at.

I really don’t want to come off as some sort of condescending euro-snob, but is the state of tap water in the US so bad so that you have to purchase plastic bottles of water?

US consumption of bottled water in 2017 was 42 gallons per capita (160 liters) [1].

That's behind Italy (188 liters per capita) and Germany (175 liters per capita). The EU average is 117 liters per capita [2].

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/183377/per-capita-consum...

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/455422/bottled-water-con...

That's fascinating, thank you! Excellent site as well, looking forward to dig throuhg it.

In some parts of the US, notably coastal California, the taste, smell, and color(!) of the natural water supply can be quite poor. It has more to do with geology than tap water safety and remediating the natural chemistry is cost prohibitive in extreme cases. For example, in the western volcanic regions of the US, pristine water sometimes has an unpleasant sulfur taste -- perfectly safe to use but no one wants to drink that because it tastes awful due to natural water chemistry.

Many parts of the US have excellent tasting tap water, and in those places everyone drinks it. California is one exception, and many parts of it have infamously discolored and poor tasting/smelling water. When I lived in California I drank bottled water, most everywhere else I drank tap water. California water is safe, it just tastes terrible and is sometimes discolored because of where it comes from.

I agree with everything. But the treatment of water in California and its safety is subjective. The amounts of salts in the tap water is very unhealthy in certain regions. Even though this water is deemed safe by local governments, I still wouldn’t drink it.

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