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Comment by carapace | Hacker News Reader

I don't think this will lead to starvation. Meat will get more expensive this summer, but we shouldn't be eating as much meat as we do anyway. (To say nothing of the cruelty of our methods.)

If this worries you plant a Victory Garden now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_garden

And buy some chickens.

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If meat gets more expensive, people buy more vegetables instead. If people buy more vegetables, vegetables get more expensive. Plenty of people in America already go hungry. In a crisis with increased unemployement and decreased food production, more people will go hungry. It's not a famine (in the US), but it's a serious problem. How many studies have suggested that just giving kids breakfast would be the number one thing to improve school performance?

The good news is many vegetables go from seed to harvest in ninety days or so.

Not only that, a pound of meat takes like a hundred pounds of veggies to feed the animal (I pulled that number out of my ass for rhetorical effect, whatever the real number it's large. One or two orders of magnitude.)

It's not even close to two orders of magnitude, and usually significantly less than one order of magnitude. For chicken and fish the feed conversion ratio (FCR) can be less than 2. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_conversion_ratio#Conversi... (FCR can be 1 or even <1, though the difference there presumably comes from water weight--input feed is dehydrated while outputs are measured by weight, which includes some amount of water. Whether FCR includes only dressed meat depends on the data source, but for chickens and fish it's mostly irrelevant because everything ends up being processed into food, and by weight the carcasses are mostly protein. If we're pessimistic about published FCR numbers I think we can ignore the water weight difference.)

Also, farmed animals aren't very picky about the look of their food. In some aspects industrial meat production permits us to make more efficient use of agricultural land in terms of providing calories and especially proteins for human consumption.

What's hidden in the FCR number is the energy required to process the feed stock to get those high FCRs. But a human consuming "whole foods" also needs more of that input for the same amount of useable calories. Flours and similarly processed foodstuffs require more energy than that required for the inputs to livestock. So in terms of energy use we're basically just looking at the fixed overhead of the animal conversion as captured by FCR, possibly offset by some efficiencies that would be absent in direct-to-human consumption.

TL;DR--modern industrial agriculture is crazy efficient. Beef isn't as horribly bad as we think (notwithstanding the methane problem), but consuming pork and, especially, chicken and farmed fish shouldn't be very guilt inducing, ceteris paribus.

Wow! Thank you very much.

I did a little more digging regarding water content. By weight dressed chicken is ~60-65% water, so not insubstantial. Dry feed is ~10% water. But even if we double FCR to offset the water weight we're still under 1 order of magnitude, at least for chicken and fish.[1] I think the point still stands. If we consider all the context, such as nutritional needs (can't simply replace all animal protein and fat with processed corn), maximization of diverse agricultural resources, industrial efficiency, relative inefficiencies of whole vegetables and fruits, etc, then some moderate amount of meat consumption is readily defensible.

[1] Using other metrics there's a lot of literature that defends beef production, but that doesn't make for good napkin math, and I'm somewhat skeptical of it, anyhow--much of it seems to be published by the beef industry, and if you pick your metric you can make anything look good. Nonetheless, beef production is pretty darned efficient as far as it goes.

Recent news reports were of farmers throwing away produce because demand dropped from all the restaurants closing down. I think we’ll be ok.

I hadn't heard about that. Googling it suggests most of this is due to supply chain problems preventing farmers who normally sell to restaurants being unable to sell to grocery stores; and labor not being available to pick food

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=farmers+throwing+away+produ...

If people buy more vegetables then we all win

Not the people who were already struggling to afford vegetables

> we shouldn't be eating as much meat as we do anyway.

This is not universally agreed, and sounds a bit like a modernized version of "let them eat cake."

> This is not universally agreed

Well, what is? I mean flat-earthers don't agree the world is round, should we take their objections seriously?

> sounds a bit like a modernized version of "let them eat cake."

Except how am I Marie Antoinette?

I'm just trying to look on the bright side.

It sucks that those birds are going to live and die and go to waste. It sucks that the people working there are out of work. It sucks that the company is losing money. All of that sucks.

The best you can say is, well, it's a good excuse to try to eat healthier.

FWIW, my sister roasted two chickens just the other day and they were delicious. So don't think I'm not feeling the pain here. (Is little joke. Trying to end on upbeat note here. Work with me.)

The nutrition scientists all agree we could do fine with much less meat, and is some ways better.

On the other hand, the nutcases, back up by the meat industry, say present meat consumption rates are just fine.

As a vegetarian I agree, it's easy to be healthy on a majority plant based diet (for most people). The first couple weeks are the hardest as you get over the addiction to meat, but it's really not that big of a deal.

They're right about supply chains falling apart though. If everyone were to switch over to mainly plant based a lot of crop land would likely need to be moved from grain to feed animals to plants to feed humans. Who knows what that would take.

Just using the same grain to feed humans instead would be rather easier. It's not like humans are incapable of eating corn, barley, oats, or soybeans.

I think the real problem here isn't that we can't get by without meat packing plants. It's that it's been 2 or so generations since the last time a really large of North Americans have had to adjust their diets in response to a major situation like this, and so we don't know what to expect, and the most psychologically available stories to look to are ones of actual famines.

No. Ruminants eat food that humans can’t. Furthermore, grazing grassland uses marginal land unusable for industrial scale farming. And, locally operated meat processing works just fine.

Virtually all of our problems with the meat supply are self-created and can be fixed — lets just return to the horror show we had 30 or so years ago... wait - it was just fine 30 years ago, and someone who ate the same meat he sold you was responsible for raising and preparing your food.

Source: family owned and run feedlot, and worked at a local abattoir thru university.

Ruminants CAN eat food that humans can't, but they're not - they're fattened up on grain that could be fed to humans. Feeding that grain to humans would be more efficient.

It varies by locale. Most of the rural places I lived did not use human consumable cereals, as that would be far too expensive.

I'll bow to your experience; we can't just ship the same crops to people.

Still, growing crops to feed to cows to feed to people is an inefficient path to getting calories to people. Grow people crops, skip the cows.

The cereals in the supply chain today aren't going to be convertible into food for humans before the meat in the supply chain runs out. The meat supply chain is much shorter because it's much more expensive to keep meat fresh. Even if you don't care about the people who work in the meat industry and you think it's evil, surely shutting it down so abruptly (with the entailed food shortage risks) should be a last resort?

Crops raised as ruminant food have different mechanical, nutritional, and yield characteristics than crops raised for humans, they are optimized for things other than being easy and palatable for humans to consume.

Consider edible beets and sugar beets. Sugar beets are technically edible but many people would find the experience of eating them to be unpleasant, since they were not bred to be edible by humans.

I eat meat but I am not a big fan. What makes a difference is that it is reasonably easy to season meat and thanks to the Maillard reaction it tastes good.

I love vegetables, but seasoning them so that the taste is not bland requires more work and skill.

For sure, it's always a tell of a good chef if they can cook vegetarian or not. If a restaurant doesn't have a good selection of vegetarian options I'll generally assume the kitchen isn't all that skilled in most cases (back when there were restaurants...).

Seasoning vegetarian dishes isn't all that difficult once you dedicate yourself to learning. You'll often need to look to non-European/American recipes though. I was lucky that I grew up in a household with a North African parent where I learned a lot about seasoning just by osmosis (even if they aren't veg, there were lots of vegetarian dishes). My partner is South Asian and there's obviously a long, rich history of vegetarian cuisine there. It's worth learning!

> If this worries you plant a Victory Garden now

Don't forget to tell your neighbors to stop using pesticides on their lawns. Per acre, Americans use 10x the amount on lawns as agriculture.

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