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Comment by maximente | Hacker News Reader

why stop at "wild" animals? might as well go whole hog (pun intended) and go plant based to the extent possible.

I really hope that is the future. Plant based meat or just proper free range farms and hunting I guess. Industrial meat production is too cruel and just another pandemic waiting to happen.

100% agreed here, I am very hopeful that lab-grown meat will become the norm (when it gets affordable), and that as older generations die off and more environmentally and health conscious younger people make decisions, the average consumer eats little to no animal products. Lab grown meat will absolutely be a huge help to this transition.

We simply do not have a choice - we're either going to have massive climate change and mass displacement, animal-borne viruses wiping out chunks of the population, fishless oceans by 2050, etc. We can't feed the population with animals anymore.

I wonder why I don't hear this argument more from vegans. Eating animals spreads disease. Chronic wasting disease, avian flu, SARS, Influenza, mad cow, probably even the common cold.

Vegans do make that argument sometimes, and it's often countered by the fact that other diseases and bacteria can spread on veggies, like salmonella and E. Coli on lettuce. And proper handling and cooking will kill viruses/bacteria, so it theoretically shouldn't be a real problem...

Note that I'm not arguing one way or the other, that's just how I've seen it play out a few times.

I don't have a horse in this race either, but bacterial diseases are far more manageable than viral diseases from a public health perspective. The fact that you can get the former doesn't balance the latter, if pandemic risk is a policy consideration you want to have.

Except for the part where bacteria can evolve permanent resistances to antibacterial agents, and survive for weeks or months on surfaces, while viruses have a limited ability to adapt to antivirals and have a short and finite span of viability in the wild.

Antibiotic resistance has an energetic cost and generally gets selected against in the absence of agents. Bacteria are also much easier (and cheaper) to test for. Even if there was a hyperbug, you can afford to check everyone inside a half mile of the infected for relatively low cost.

They won’t be if we keep pumping antibiotics into our food supply in the meantime

I know more people who've had hospitalisation levels of illness from lettuce than meat, raw or otherwise. My wife was recently made very ill from some salad leaves.

The vast majority of all food poisoning comes from greens. Not meat.

Plenty of folks die from Salmonella and E. Coli outbreaks

Sorry, but this is absolutely absurd to claim. Are you actually suggesting that keeping animals in cramped, filthy conditions, surrounded by dead baby animals covered in feces (ex. pigs in farrowing crates), is less likely to facilitate disease growth than growing romaine lettuce?

Edit: I re-read your comment and saw you were referring to food POISONING - but I'll still maintain my point here. Fact of the matter is, food poisoning is not contagious and is fairly rare, and there are machines in place for product recalls, etc. What we have at the moment is a global pandemic started by the close quarters of animals. Which one would you rather deal with?

And the reason it's more common to get salmonella or e-coli from plants is because they are eaten raw (lettuce or broccoli or carrots, etc); this doesn't mean meat isn't contaminated with it. It just gets "cooked off" because you heat meat (or pasteurize dairy).

> Sorry, but this is absolutely absurd to claim

Why is it absurd?

> is less likely to facilitate disease growth than growing romaine lettuce?

As I clearly stated I was discussing, as with the parent comment, the community of diseases that infect consumers is massively more prevalent in eating salads than meat. That's not an opinion.

You clearly want to have a different discussion

Aren't those cases often due to washing greens with water contaminated by livestock waste?

No.

While not definitive, it does appear there could be a connection. Certainly enough of a possibility for the industry to change some of their operational practices. https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2018/08/cattle-feedlot-could-...

A very good point!

You will. Vegans do bring this up now, but they're outshouted by people talking about the more important problem at the moment - stopping the current pandemic.

I'd argue it's just as important right now to take the coronavirus as a massive warning and stop doing what we are currently doing. It's only a matter of time before this happens again - Bill Gates predicted this would happen back in 2015 in a Ted talk.

> Bill Gates predicted

Man predicts spread of virus in animal species. What vision.

Your phrasing suggests that it's very obvious, yet you are blaming salads as the real public crisis in an earlier comment. Fact is, breeding animals and raising them for food is going to keep resulting in pandemics. Like the one that we are currently going through.

Don't raise livestock or breed/catch wild animals, and the contact between humans and animals drastically lowers. Then pandemics don't happen. If that market in Wuhan didn't exist, we wouldn't be having this conversation today.

Great. Comment stalking. That's the sign of a well balanced mind. Certainly not the behaviour of a detached zealot obsessed with shoehorning their personal dietary preferences into every conversation.

> Your phrasing suggests that it's very obvious, yet you are blaming salads as the real public crisis in an earlier comment.

You are clearly in such haste to find fault that you don't actually read the things you are arguing with. You jumped in on a discussion, made yourself look like a loony deranged type and here you are doing it again in a non sequitur fashion

Take your daddy issue driven zealotry elsewhere and stop harassing people

Alright, I'll stop eating bats and pangolins. Done.

They do but it's a mostly hopeless cause. If lab grown meat ends up being viable on an industrial scale at a competitive cost, our consumption of animals will likely be something that can be openly discussed without being instantly pushed aside.

I've argued this on HN plenty of times and I get drowned out by people telling me that they like bacon too much and that "well e-coli can spread on lettuce too so we might as well keep breeding hundreds of billions of animals per year and keeping them in filthy conditions in close proximity."

For a very scientific community, you absolutely hit a brick wall as soon as you tell a typically unhealthy group of people that eating meat is a massive public health hazard.

Because you want people to actually do it

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