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Comment by jjtheblunt | Hacker News Reader

I read things like this and wonder what will move the tipping point to plant-derived sources of essential amino acids (thus protein) adequately to stop farming animals.

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Poorly managed plant diseases are just as prevalent and often even harder to control and eradicate.

Animal agriculture won't stop.

This disease process eliminates bad management and corrupt inefficient government.

Any industrial scale animal agriculture has as an input industrial scale plant production. For example, most of the plant matter produced for consumption in the US goes not to humans, but to animal agriculture instead.

Any issues in plant agricultural production will be felt many times over in prices for meat (either via subsidy or at the counter) than in prices for plants.

How is this ending corrupt inefficient government?

Plant diseases are caused by animal agriculture operations for the more part. E.Coli and salmonella are two big ones that were on salad greens recently. Guess what - they didn't originate from the plants. They are 100% animal (or human) based.

Manure, contaminated water, runoff - all contributing factors to "plant diseases", all issues from raising animals for food.

E. coli and salmonella aren't plant diseases. They make humans sick, not plants. Plant diseases are stuff like pseudocercospora, which are on track for eradicating the most common bananas grown today, despite attempts at quarantining affected regions to stop the disease from spreading.

Wikipedia has a nice list of lists of plant diseases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_plant_diseases

>E. coli and salmonella aren't plant diseases

You must have misread what I wrote because I never claimed that they were. I put quotes around "plant diseases" because the two major outbreaks that everybody thinks about weren't plant diseases, they were animal-related.

thank you

Are plant diseases less communicable to humans (and animals in general) ?

I don't know if this is a good faith question or not. But of course the concern isn't people getting diseases from plants.

Crop yields go down and in some cases the resulting grain becomes poisonous to people or animals which can in some cases cause disease (fungal most often).

good point, as i didn't word it correctly at all: how tricky is it to control diseases _among_ plant cultivars?

You're correct. Pigs are very similar to humans anatomically, and biochemically mammals share a LOT of genetics, so its much easier for mutations to lead to species hopping pathogens. This is one reason why Eurasian cultures dominated historically speaking: they'd lived with livestock for much longer and evolution crafted those human populations to have numerous immunities that isolated, non livestock holding communities didnt have.

Put in another way or with another interpretation: the arms race between disease and immune system in the animal-human-disease relationship led to very powerful diseases which the humans carried in their populations but were not largely affected by.

When the Europeans started crossing oceans to contact very different civilizations they brought the diseases which themselves committed genocide because the new populations hadn't had the same difficulty or interactions with animals and diseases.

China has rich tradition of vegetarian cuisine due to Buddhism but pork is still a significant cuisine staple. China is already nominally food secure i.e. it can feed everyone on domestic production but absolute food security is a huge focus for central planners and from what I've gleaned, the goal is still to provide enough domestic animal production vs pivot to plant proteins. Although Chinese fake meat research is also trending. At the end of the day it's cultural, I think long term it would be easy to encourage more vegetarian diets in China because vegetarian Buddhist diets is associated with health and Chinese demographics is skewing older for the foreseeable future. Combined with lack of comprehensive health safety net and people will eventually skew towards less animal protein.

> China has rich tradition of vegetarian cuisine due to Buddhism

This is less and less true. Chinese meat consumption increased nearly 3-fold in the 1990-2013 period (from 25kg/y/cap to 62kg/y/cap). Meanwhile, meat consumption in the EU during the same period has started reducing from 85kg/y/cap to 81kg/y/cap. The trends have been continuing since 2013.

Of course, the USA is off the charts, at 115kg/y/cap, but the meat obsession there is totally unsustainable, unhealthy and insane IMO.

Source: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/meat-consumption-vs-gdp-p...

I believe this is mainly because of the growth of income. In the early 90s which I was born, most Chinese think of meat as an expensive ingredient, whereas in the early 2000s, most people can actually buy meat for dinner without a second thought.

I agree. This actually demonstrates that low meat consumption in China is maybe in part a cultural factor, but first and foremost an economical problem.

> China has rich tradition of vegetarian cuisine

Doesn't seem to me like that at all.

Chinese under 40 are bigger protein eaters today than even Germans and Americans

Tradition as in there is a lot of already developed Chinese vegetarian dishes to draw from if there is to be a vegetarian resurgence. They're not popular in contemporary Chinese consumption culture but there's no need to reinvent meat.

Plants can also become ill.

...from contact with contaminated water, which is contaminated with things like animal shit, from farms.

Plants don't just get horrendous diseases - nearly all of these outbreaks can be traced back to animal agriculture in close proximity.

This is really, really incorrect. Many, if not most, of the major crop plant diseases have nothing to do with animal agriculture. Wheat rust, potato blight, fire blight in fruit trees, citrus greening, verticillium wilt, various other fungal and bacterial pathogens — none of which have anything to do with factory animal farming.

When is the last time there was a major outbreak of potato blight that made thousands of people sick?

The diseases I'm referring to here are the ones that are making humans sick on a large scale, like E. coli for example. I'd think it was obvious given the context. But then again this is hackernews so being pedantic about everything is par for the course.

I agree with your point that E. coli outbreaks are closely coupled to animal agriculture, and I apologize if I appeared pedantic. That was not my intent.

The thing is, E. coli isn’t a plant disease. It’s a human pathogen that gets on plants and then makes humans ill. But the plant was never infected by the germ — in the same way that if you share a fork with someone who has a cold, you could get infected. But you wouldn’t say that the common cold was “a kitchen utensil disease”.

In addition, E. coli is a very minor player in terms of human deaths compared to actual plant diseases. Plant diseases to be very, very concerned about are the ones that attack major crops and reduce or eliminate yield. Then people starve. Starvation kills many more people than E. coli. This is why wheat rust is such a big deal.

Plants can be infected with viruses, bacteria, fungus, and of course pests. It doesn't all come from contaminated water either.

Read the top comment here. Animal agriculture is extremely destructive to the environment, and unsanitary conditions in factory farms are par for the course.

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