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Comment by JMTQp8lwXL | Hacker News Reader

From an environmental perspective, it's easier to directly consume fruits, vegetables and nuts yourself, rather than have an animal do the same, then eat the animal. That doesn't address the human appetite for animal proteins, but there is beyond meat.

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Perhaps one step further is to bypass even the plants and produce protein directly from CO2!

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/08/nasas-idea-for-making...

Wow, that sounds nuts and awesome at the same time. :) Thanks for the link!

> It's a high-protein, flour-like ingredient that contains 50 percent protein content, 5–10 percent fat, and 20–25 percent carbs.

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

> Protein poisoning was first noted as a consequence of eating rabbit meat exclusively, hence the term, "rabbit starvation". Rabbit meat is very lean; commercial rabbit meat has 50–100 g dissectable fat per 2 kg (live weight). Based on a carcass yield of 60%, rabbit meat is around 8.3% fat

Ew. You're not supposed to just eat this. It's a protein replacement. Still eat your fruits and veggies and everything else.

You can not grow enough fruits, vegetables and nuts to feed the human population without severe deforestation. Also, agriculture uses up pretty much most of the obtainable drinkable water.

A large fraction of "agriculture" goes to feeding livestock, inefficiently. Some land is used for animal feed that is not usable for crops people would eat, but the conversion ratio for a lot of it would be better if we grew food for ourselves directly.

Feed is an efficient way of transferring water from wet places to dry places.

Can you sustainably feed all of humanity by feeding cattle from all the world's grasses? I don't understand your position. What's the better alternative to a more plant-focused diet?

1. No. 2. Insects.

Also 3. Less people.

Why not rabbit? It's a much leaner meat, takes less space, and they breed much faster.

I'm also sceptical that the recently proposed diets of fruits, vegetables and nuts actually work out. AFAICT it's an outstanding problem in nutrition science concerning how many of the calories in nuts that humans are able to digest. And yet it seems like the proposed diets just assume "all calories are equal". I've seen reports from journalists who have tried following those diets saying they were constantly hungry.

> I've seen reports from journalists who have tried following those diets saying they were constantly hungry.

This is the inherent problem of journalism - they need sensational results, otherwise the majority of folks wouldn't be bothered to read their journalism.

My 2 cents on this topic: I'm 10+ years vegan and everything is good, it's just no clickbait-worthy story...

Oh, I'm not saying you can't live as a vegan. But the criticism of these diets is they prescribe X grams of this, Y grams of that, and use those numbers to compute a global environmental impact. If the X and Y are both underestimates compared to what an adult needs, then so is the impact.

We tend to count calories in foods via combustion of their components then adding the average caloric content of each gram of fat (9kcal/g), protein (4), alcohol (7), and non-fiber carbohydrate (4) in the average serving size of that food. Keep in mind that US food calories on labels are equivalent to a kilocalorie.

Last I checked, combustion was not one of the stages of digestion in the human digestive tract. I'm not a nutrition researcher, but it's always seemed intuitive to me that different compounds behave differently in a complex, gradual chemical system even if they behave similarly in a simple, rapid high-energy reaction. This is already acknowledged in the fact that dietary fiber is known to be mostly excreted and so isn't counted along with other carbohydrates.

This story is much about a small change by proportion changing several aspects of how digestion works in a mammalian digestive tract, including how efficiently the energy is taken up from other parts of the diet. Now in vitro is not in vivo and cattle aren't humans. But I think we're still far from settled on all calories being the same, and more evidence is building for the opposite conclusion. There are even multiple cases of fecal transplants leading to weight gain or weight loss, with the recipient's digestion suddenly resembling that of the donor causing body weight changes.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-do-food-manuf...

https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT03789461

The UN report [1] says that if the world population switches to a fully plant-based diet by 2050, accounting for the expected growth in population, we would actually use less land and less water as we do now. So we could in terms of land and water use. Or do you mean some other reason why this would be impossible?

[1] https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2019/08/4.-SPM_Appro...

Hopefully beyond meat and similar companies are able to continue to drive forward their research. I had a Beyond Burger for the first time recently and it was unsettling. The flavor was beef-like but the texture was wrong.

I will happily eat either a beef burger or a veggie burger but the Beyond Burger is in the uncanny valley right now.

Agree, I would rather a nicely flavoured vege pattie than a fake meat one.

Try impossible burger I hear it’s way better

No, it’s not. Most of the places where nuts are grown in industrial scale are water challenged.

Animal agriculture is unsustainable at the scale we operate in today in the United States. Meat doesn’t equal feedlot, and pastured ruminant agriculture helps sustain the land.

> pastured ruminant agriculture helps sustain the land.

That totally depends on which land we're talking about. In a lot of places, forest was cut down to create the pasture, and so grazing to "sustain the land" is perhaps misguided.

That still leaves fruits and vegetables, which proportionally compose much more of a diet than nuts.

Yes, but I imagine the OP included nuts in the list because of their protein and fat - you don't find much of either in fruit and veg, with a few exceptions (avocado, soy beans).

That's an interesting way to put it into words. In paper sounds like a really unefficient pipeline (vegetables -> animals -> humans).

Thanks for that, made me reflect on how stupid it sounds but how common it is.

It's not really stupid, the idea is cows eat plant matter that humans can't eat. Cellulose mainly from grass and other plants.

They aren't eating the same plants that you eat.

> They aren't eating the same plants that you eat.

Humans don't eat corn and soy? Because that's what is fed to industrially raised beef cattle.

That works up to a certain point, since the production is limited by the area of naturally occurring grasslands. When all the grassland is used, forests are cleared. Today, grazing is responsible for 80% of all deforestation in the Amazon [1].

[1] https://wwf.panda.org/knowledge_hub/where_we_work/amazon/ama...

Cows are much better at extracting nutrients from, say, grass than humans are.

In places where nuts, vegetables, fruits aren't available, meat may be a more environmentally friendly choice.

But almost nobody is eating pasture-raised meat, though the industrial meat complex loves that you think that or are pointing it out as if that's how beef is made.

The US farming methods (grainfed, feed lots, etc) are very different from what we do in New Zealand.

In New Zealand every farmer I've ever met (and I've met many) let their cattle feed on fresh pasture almost entirely. We are blessed with lots of land per person, and lots of rainfall, perfect for growing grass. In the dry part of summer or the cold part of winter when fresh pasture isn't growing fast enough, they supplement with hay and silage (both produced from fresh pasture that is typically harvested at the beginning of summer).

But I know that outside of my own experience, other things are occasionally fed such as waste products from food processing, brewing, etc. And I know that when you sell animals you can legally tick "grass fed" as long as the animal has had access to pasture, regardless of what percentage of their diet actually came from that pasture. So it is possible that some cattle from NZ have eaten mainly non-grass foods, but in practice I've never actually seen that happen.

As for seaweed, we have a lot of coastline so we could utilize this strategy more effectively than the US could.

I asked a small town butcher in Scotland if his beef was grass-fed and got seriously laughed at. Then he sold me some damn good steaks.

Because it was, or because it wasn't?

I mean, I'd guess it was, but equally it could be "why do you care, it tastes good", so ...?

It’s was A) “that’s what cows eat”

If you travel through Austria you will find herds of cattle on every pasture cutting the grass instead of machines. From what I've heard cattle farming in the US is different.

Yeah, but farming in general is different in Austria, just look at the rates of e.g. cage eggs in the US, where 95% are caged. Plus even in Austria you have to watch out, a lot of the cheaper meat is from large German farms with similar conditions.

> Cows are much better at extracting nutrients from, say, grass than humans are.

That's because we human cannot digest grass due to the lack of the proper mictobiote, but most cows in the modern world aren't fed with grass anymore but instead with soy, corn or other kind of high-nutrients food (for which we human are totally equiped to eat).

That just means the inefficiency is in the feed used and the farming practices, not in the animal.

Not really: having an animal in between makes you waste a lot of energy (because the animal only spend a fraction of this energy to build muscles, and the rest is just burned away to sustain its metabolism).

You can take the problem the other way around: the limiting factor is land, and if you have 1 square kilometers of (somewhat fertile) land, you will feed many more humans if you grow potatoes, wheat or rice on the land than if you feed a cow on this land (whether you fees the cow directly with grass or grow corn or soy on it to feed your cows).

It's easier to consume those things... until winter arrives. Unless you support the massively carbon intensive process of shipping ~80% of each hemisphere's food supply to the other during winter, this isn't viable. Even if that is acceptable, it isn't sustainable.

Perfect is the enemy of good. Should we try to eat local? Absolutely. Eating seasonally is one simple way to do reduce the carbon footprint of your diet [0]. But getting momentum for the right direction -- which is decreased animal protein consumption, is absolutely the right step. It takes much more energy to raise livestock than it is to feed directly from the land.

Also, shipping doesn't have to be so carbon intensive. Renewable energy has a lot way to go with plenty of options: wind, solar, hydro, geo, nuclear.

[0]: https://www.seasonalfoodguide.org/why-eat-seasonally

That's only because people insist on eating the same food all year. There are plenty of vegetables that grow and harvest in the colder months. If we ate summer vegetables in the summer and winter vegetables in the winter we wouldn't need to ship food around so much.

Kale is a traditional food at Christmas in Sweden. I was surprised when I learned that it can survive in the winter, and that you harvest it by brushing away the snow. Snow even provides an insulating layer that protects the kale.

Shipping food that doesn’t need to be refrigerated or airlifted really has a minuscule carbon footprint.

Chopping down and burning rainforest carbon sinks to plant food crops, now that’s where the real problem is.

To add to what the sibiling commenters had said. I was born in the village in part of the world where there are strong 4 seasons. So winters are full (less lately) of snow and bellow 0 celsius. People here store large veraety of vegetables over the winter. Potatoes, pumpkins, onions, garlics and others are stored as is as I remember. Other which could not be stored for long raw are fermented and kept in glass jars, it is called ‘turšija’ here :) Then there are grains and legumes and beans and dried stuff and you can easily thrive on localy sourced food even during winter.

But doesn't the animal save you time. The animal essentially consumes these things for you so you don't have to.

Humans cannot get or synthesize all of the amino acids from a plant diet.. we need animals or chemistry.

That's not true for most people. You just need to eat a mix of vegetables that provide the "essential" amino acids. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_amino_acid E.g. Mexican corn and beans, Japanese rice and soybeans, or Cajun red beans and rice. You might need a Vitamin B12 supplement to help stitch all those together but the amino acids you need are 100% available from plants.

Quinoa, a plant, produces all essential proteins to humans. It is known as a "complete protein" food source [0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_protein

Algae provide all the essential proteins [1].

[1] https://www.antenna.ch/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/AspectNut_...

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