Comment by apatters | Hacker News Reader

Comment by apatters | Hacker News Reader

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I actually couldn't care less about all the moralizing, virtue signaling PETA type crap. I spit on hipsters and their endless moral outrage. I'm an unapologetic meat eater. I love my cuts of beef carved off of methane farting cows and you can pry them out of my cold, dead hands.

I also love peas! And beans! And lentils, and chickpeas... They're all delicious. Hummus is divine. I have no objections to consuming a diet of mostly plants, because plants taste great too.

So these weird processed plants don't make a lot of sense to me either. If a veggie burger is good I'll order it, but why not just make great food that features the plant as the centerpiece and tastes amazing? There's no shortage of options. (And when you start thinking this way, and avoid joining cults of all persuasions, you realize pretty quickly that these dishes often get even better when flavored with a very modest amount of animal. When I make refried beans I render the lard myself and it doesn't take much to make a difference, but there is simply no substitute.)

Is it convenience? Maybe, but it's pretty damn easy to throw stuff into a crock pot before you go to work and have a mouth watering stew/soup/chili/ratatouille/whatever ready to eat when you get home at night.

More likely it's just people thinking what the corporations tell them to think. There's no money to be made in serving food the way we've always eaten it. Business needs products it can patent and trademark and market at a premium. The next Zuckerberg needs to build his fortune so he can start his foundation and virtue signal harder than you!

> I spit on hipsters and their endless moral outrage. I'm an unapologetic meat eater. I love my cuts of beef carved off of methane farting cows and you can pry them out of my cold, dead hands.

This doesn’t strike me as a particularly reasonable argument. There are plenty of enjoyable things that are bad for you, those around you, or in this case, the whole planet (cigarettes, slavery, rolling coal, etc.) What would it take for you to care about “methane farting cows”?

Aside: Cows actually don’t fart much. Most of the methane they produce comes out the other end as a burp.

All it takes is a compelling case that eating a plant-heavy diet is in my best interests, which is easy: plants taste great and they're healthy.

My contention is with the vocal minority of extremists who evangelize plant-only diets as the only right way to live, even though they aren't necessarily better. These people resort to less effective, morality based arguments to sway others (let's face it, most people care more about eating tasty food than saving the environment), indicating that their real concern isn't moving the needle on meat consumption, it's asserting their moral superiority in order to gain status among their peers.

A pragmatist would use effective tools to reduce the average person's meat consumption by 75% and that would solve a lot of problems. They'd cook healthy vegetable heavy dinners for their friends, or maybe promote pork/chicken instead of beef since those generate fewer emissions. A fanatic proclaims that the only solution is eliminating all meat consumption, and the fate of the earth is on the line.

Plants do not taste great, and they are not healthy.

Most plants require significant genetic editing (in form of 10k+ years of selective breeding), processing (milling, soaking, cooking) and adding secondary plant products just for taste (spices) to be palatable. Not to mention need for aditional fat and emulgators.

Most of plants, even after 10k years of selective breeding, are toxic for us in some way. Even simple green leafy vegetables are full of oxalic acid.

On top of that, modern agriculture approach of artificial fertilizing, and high nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium levels in dirt that is starved of other nutrients through constant yearly use, results in changes in plants where they contain higher % of simple carbs, while not having normal levels of other micronutrients.

No hunter-gatherer group in the last 2 million years of evolution has exceeded 50% of caloric intake being plant-based, and only some small groups near ecuator have managed to get close to 50%.

During the most recent part of our evolution, part that has made us human, we have evolved to eat predominantly meat diet. Agriculture sidestepped that, and coopted evolutional remnants of a time 50-60 million years ago, when our ancestors were 5kg proto-monkey frugivores.

High-carb plant-based diets are undoing of evolution. Human brains, and general human stature, have been getting smaller during the last 20k years, accelerating in the last 10k.

> These people resort to less effective, morality based arguments to sway others (let's face it, most people care more about eating tasty food than saving the environment), indicating that their real concern isn't moving the needle on meat consumption, it's asserting their moral superiority in order to gain status among their peers

Again, why is that? There are countless other moral issues (some of which I mentioned in the gp post) that most of us cringe when thinking they were contentious debates in the past. What makes eating beef different?

The implication that people behave morally to gain status among their peers is, frankly, childish. As if the only reason people aren't setting children or fire, murdering one another, stealing cars, etc. is to "gain status". No—I encourage you to realize that some of us actually believe in doing what we think is the right thing. I assure you, veganism garners far more criticism and bizarre hatred than it does admiration.

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