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Comment by alex_young | Hacker News Reader

A huge chunk of our net impact on global warming and deforestation is a direct result of our food system, namely animal agriculture.

There is disagreement about just how inefficient turning an acre of corn into slabs of cow, but it should be clear that it is some fraction of the efficiency of just eating that corn as food itself.

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I'm always amazed how good the fruit and vegetables look, but how little flavour they have when bought from super market here, compared to Europe, or actually most parts of the world where vegetables are grown locally and organically.

Very sour unripe oranges, bananas, grapes, flavourless green peppers, tasteless tomatoes. Pretty much the norm in Supermarkets.

I believe those vegetable and fruits are GMO i.e. constructed genetically to look good. Moreover quality of soil and its nutrients is not like it was before, making vegetable and fruits less nutritious [1]. In the end, until grown vegetable and fruits are grown in home, we don't have much choice.

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-an...

California is not nearly as bad as the rest of the country. the southeast US has some decent produce, but not much, and not nearly as much as its soil should offer. I am continually flabbergasted that Americans accept this - or rather, they don't.

I think so much of meat consumption and fast food consumption can be explained by how bad our fruits and vegetables are.

It’s really only recently coming into focus. Because if you look sector by sector it’s not clear (in terms of emissions). But when you look close it’s clear that a sector like chemical production is heavily weighted towards producing fertilizer. And the majority of that is being used to grow animal feed. Or the transportation sector, a lot of which is shipping food all over the world. And land-use change, deforestation, etc, to create grazing land or grow conventional mono crops — again, mostly for animal feed.

Basically, in our current system, plant foods are an edge product of an animal agriculture system. To be more sustainable, we probably want the opposite — meat as an edge product of a plant-focused agriculture.

The picture in my head is a more decentralized system — regional farms, urban farms, etc. And probably a carbon tax which would make meat a little pricier. It doesn’t have to disappear, but the externalities should be baked into the cost.

Strongly agree with this. Utilisation of water to irrigate animal feed, deforestation of land to support growing that feed, methane expulsions from cows themselves.. it’s crazy to think about the environmental impact of beef, when eating chicken or fish would be far better for the environment (not to mention healthier).

What about in the case where animals can extract more nutrients from plant food than we can? Cows in particular have specially built stomachs that can extract nutrients from plants than we can. I don't think this would be enough to make eating meat more efficient, but it may be necessary to eat some meat to get nutrients you wouldn't otherwise get from plants.

> but it may be necessary to eat some meat to get nutrients you wouldn't otherwise get from plants.

It is not necessary to eat meat.

Necessary is not the right word. More efficient might be better. It's entirely possible to get protein from plants and omega-3 from vitamins, but from a human health point of view, is it more efficient?

Letting grazing animals eat grass that's just growing on its own is incredibly energy-efficient, but that's not what we do. We manually grow food for them then ship it to the animals.

Who's "we", Kemosabe?

Humans, basically — the majority of agriculture.

Well, no.

Nobody grew food to feed to farm animals one hundred years ago, and I'd bet the vast majority of farm animals today are still not fed agricultural products.

Your complaint is against American factory farming, which is a whole separate issue of economic incentives and wealth distribution.

That’s an interesting point, given modern animal farming practices. 97% of cows are going to come from a feedlot, where they’ll be fed grain (corn). The special part of their stomach that allows them to extract more nutrients from certain plant foods compared to humans, the rumen, is “made” for grass. When switching over to grain, acid builds up in the rumen which can lead to acidosis, so we then have to pump the cows full of antacids to keep them placated while we continue to fatten them up for slaughter.

That's interesting. I certainly do not claim to be an expert in raising cattle. Perhaps there are smarter ways we can raise cattle. Is that why the grass-fed label is so important?

It kind of depends on your priorities, whether taste, animal-welfare, cost, etc. I think grass-fed tastes better, but I do find it has less marbling. Check out The Omnivore’s Dilemma.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Omnivore's_Dilemma

It’s true that some animals can digest plants that we can’t digest. But there is plenty of evidence that humans can live perfectly well on a plant based diet if they eat the right plants . It’s not necessary to eat meat for getting nutrients.

> But there is plenty of evidence that humans can live perfectly well on a plant based diet if they eat the right plants .

Vitamin B-12

From https://www.mayoclinic.org/drugs-supplements-vitamin-b12/art...

“However, if you follow a vegetarian or vegan diet, you might be prone to deficiency because plant foods don't contain vitamin B-12. ”

If you are deficient there you can take supplements.

Animals can't extract that much more. And we certainly can't get 100% of that back out during consumption, ignoring all the inefficiencies of the process.

1 pound of food in might produce 0.01 pound of cow (probably much less).

Cows primarily eat grass and other ruminants that humans can't digest until the cows reach the finishing stage. At that point, expensive beef is finished on grass and cheap beef is finished on corn (to fatten it).

So 1 pound of corn might only product 0.01 pound of cow, but that's because 99% of the cow was built up by its non-food diet.

And paper.

We kill trees so Trader Joe's can send me a catalog of products I will throw away without reading. And 90% of people will likely do exactly the same.

Or so companies like Lob.com can convert API calls into dead trees, instead of looking into ways to do the opposite.

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