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Comment by wonderwonder | Hacker News Reader

With the way the human population is expanding and the rising income of 3rd world nations we are really going to look at a major increase in both genetically engineering food stock to be larger and more nutritious as well as ramping up lab grown meat. Conservation is clearly not going to work as so many nations ignore it anyway and quite often regulations lack teeth due to the fear of killing an industry. Its difficult to ask 3rd world nations to cut back while first world nations have been reaping benefits for so long.

While I wish organically growing food and conservation was the answer, its unfortunately not. Society just wont change to support it. A science fiction style solution is going to be the only way to feed the world.

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>A science fiction style solution is going to be the only way to feed the world.

I get what you are saying, I just want to clarify: we can feed everybody now, but mostly with vegetables. But yes, shared resources like ocean fish are under too much pressure right now. I feel as though it will take a major worldwide collapse of the fishing industry before there is better enforcement and treaties.

As a resident of a first world country I stopped eating all seafood about 15 years ago. It seems unethical to support over-fishing if I have plenty of other good food to eat.

Plenty of seafood is farmed. The majority of shrimp for instance comes from farms.

Ocean fish farming is more a conversion process than a production process. Most of the feed is wild catch fish.

Something like 3lbs of wild caught fish as feed to produce 1lb of farmed salmon.

but does this apply blanket-like to all farmed seafood, or is it mostly about fish?

E.g. I would expect shrimp, mussels, clams to not be fed processed wild catch, unlike salmon.

100 Grams of shrimp has a carbon footprint of 198kg(436lb)

https://phys.org/news/2012-02-tiny-shrimp-giant-carbon-footp...

The numbers cited in there don't make sense. Something has to have been garbled from the original research report. The article says:

The farms are inefficient, producing just one kilogram (2.2 pounds) of shrimp for 13.4 square kilometers (five square miles) of mangrove

But Asian shrimp farms produce over a million tons of shrimp per year:

http://www.shrimpnews.com/FreeReportsFolder/NewsReportsFolde...

If it takes 13.4 square kilometers of mangrove per kilogram of shrimp, Asian shrimp farms would occupy more than

13.4 * 1000 * 1000000 = 13,400,000,000

(13.4 billion) square kilometers of mangrove. That's about 26 times the surface area of Earth.

Most shrimp farming uses a lot of antibiotics and destroys mangroves

If you're picky about the fish you eat, there are some very sustainable choices.

In a happy coincidence, some of the healthiest fish are also some of the most sustainable fish.

I've been wondering lately if cutting out a product is less ethical than buying the ethical version and supporting that market. Relatedly, people often don't eat meat because they oppose unethical treatment of animals. But I imagine farmers who treat animals well are disadvantaged by that strategy- people who care enough to buy their more expensive product opt out of the market entirely.

> I imagine farmers who treat animals well

This is a cherry picked argument, at least in the US, where "factory farms raise 99.9 percent of chickens for meat, 97 percent of laying hens, 99 percent of turkeys, 95 percent of pigs, and 78 percent of cattle" [1].

Besides, even in this ideal farm where the farmer treats the animals perfectly and lets them live long, fulfilling lives, they're still killing the animal at the end of the day. Hard to see how that is "treating [it] well".

[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/its-time-to-end-factory-f_b_1...

I don't think 'cherry-picked' is the right descriptor. My point is that in order for those percentages to change, we need to seek out ethical farming and pay for it.

If you believe that it is unethical to raise livestock with fulfilling lives and then kill them for meat, by all means do not eat meat. I disagree, but I accept that as a valid, reasonable position to hold. I think most people are more concerned with animal cruelty specifically, and also have a lot of difficulty switching to vegetarianism.

I really do think people want ethical food products, but with food in particular, it's really a lot to ask of individual consumers. There's a reason we have so many regulations around food quality - it just makes all our lives easier.

I've always thought less-than-ethical food products should be taxed more heavily, and the money should be used to subsidize the more ethical, healthier alternatives. Outright bans on certain product classes can be tremendously distortionary and have unintended side effects, but it's hard to imagine little pigouvian nudges being anything but beneficial to society.

I would be very much in support of a regulation that requires every single product to display the carbon footprint required to produce it and, where applicable, the carbon footprint of using the thing per year.

Doesn't necessarily solve our problem here, but it might help the larger situation and with potentially bipartisan support (economic right positions rely on the consumer being able to make educated choices).

I absolutely agree with a carbon tax and a land tax to push the prices in the right direction. From what I recall, American meat is subsidized by the government, making it cheaper than anywhere else. I expect removing those subsidies would also have the support of anyone not bribed by the meat industry.

All too often, controversial opinions dominate the conversation because they get people talking. I think there's a lot we can do to improve things by working together across political lines.

Once meat is eradicated in the name of agricultural efficiency, non-grain, non-bean vegetables will probably be next on the chopping block.

You have a point here, yup. Some vegetables are luxury food, and less efficient than cattle. Replacing nature with monocultures is a problem. If we stop eating cattle for that, there is not moral room to keep eating chocolate, for example. Or coffee

Based on some rough napkin calculations, the caloric efficiency by land of broccoli is about the same as industrial meat.

Optimizing diet for land efficiency probably does not produce healthy diets. You can find strong evidence for this trade-off in the changes of average human health at the advent of agriculture.

Much lower water usage and impact on the land used though, even if it's bad soil and you have to use a ton of fertilizer.

Not to mention broccoli probably doesn't feel the conscious terror of its imminent death.

> Based on some rough napkin calculations, the caloric efficiency by land of broccoli is about the same as industrial meat.

Not even close. Did you forget to consider the inputs into meat?

If you want to check against someone else's math, here's a paper that claims we can increase global calorie availability by 70% by shifting crops grown for animal feed (40% of crops in USA btw) to crops grown for human consumption: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/8/3/034...

I did include the inputs, with the assumption of high efficiency feed for industrial meat production, i.e. a feed conversion rate of about 6.

This paper is about shifting animal corn to human corn, not about shifting animal corn to broccoli. Corn produces about 6 times as many calories per hectare as broccoli.

Not this again, why is it always broccoli that gets brought up in this argument? Nobody is eating kgs broccoli per day to get their calories. Compare industrial meat with beans or rice.

The point is that, as a source of calories, many vegetables are about as inefficient by land as industrial meat. Optimizing calories per unit land is an implicit or explicit goal of many of the comments throughout this thread. I think this is a poor optimization target and there are much better arguments against meat consumption that aren't also applicable to broccoli.

I chose broccoli because it is my favorite vegetable and I eat quite a lot of it.

Fair point! it was a bit of knee jerk reaction on my part as a previous thread I'd read on HN about climate an animal agriculture had the exact same broccoli point.

>Some vegetables are luxury food, and less efficient than cattle

[Citation needed]

I'll assume you're arguing in good faith, but this argument is a common straw man made by people who are against plant-based diets. In fact, the only case where you have a point is that the worst case for chocolate produces more emissions than the best case for beef [1]. Odds are that if you're eating beef in North America it comes from a factory farm [2], while people who advocate for plant-based diets are often for more sustainable farming practices too, and will try to buy chocolate/coffee/avocados/whatever in sustainable ways.

Finally, the most important point is that it's not an either/or proposition - you can be _both_ for eating less meat, and producing plant products in more sustainable ways.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46459714

[2] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/its-time-to-end-factory-f_b_1...

There are vast areas that are very, very poor for growing anything other than some grasses. These lands will not support growing plant based foods for people. However! They do produce plant based food for cattle. You end up with 0.5-2 acres of this land to feed a cow.

The vast majority of beef is not grazed on lands incapable of naturally supporting more intensive forms of agriculture.

>The vast majority of beef is not grazed on lands incapable of naturally supporting more intensive forms of agriculture.

The vast majority of beef is grazed on lands incapable of supporting at a sustainable price point more value dense forms of agriculture. If those ranchers could sell you boutique sustainable tomatoes they would do so in a heartbeat (or as fast as they can given the fact that it's basically a career switch).

You get crops like soybeans and corn where the land will support that and less value dense crops (like beef and timber) in places it won't. You can grow other products on cattle grazing land but you won't be price competitive with the farmers on better land. The fact that this land is used for beef instead of some other crop is a reflection of how efficiently we use the better land. As vegetable product fillers make their way into lower and lower end beef products (as price, technology and consumer preference allows) the land used to farm beef will likely shrink from the least viable areas (the areas least suited for beef) with demand and/or be pushed out of the most viable areas (the areas most easily suited to other crops) by more value dense plant crops. Obviously there's some serious switching friction otherwise you'd see this play out with every little change in commodities prices.

Sure, everybody reducing their meat consumption to their share of what is produced on marginal land would be the optimum, even better than everybody going 100% meatless. How much of the typical meat consumption of a current-day nonvegetarian would that be? 5% perhaps?

And it wouldn't be the same 5% that we see with "almost vegans" today who argue "less but better" to only eat premium cuts while proudly announcing that they avoid all grinder meat. If you want to eat the steak, don't scoff at the sausage.

Back to grazing marginal lands, yeah, I'd also hate to see the animal species that have accompanied us throughout human history go extinct. But we're very far from that.

> [Citation needed]

pvaldes, 2020

Some facts are so well stablished in human knowledge that there is not need to cite it. For example: "Some crops are more productive than other. Point".

We, humans know it since 10.000 years ago. Anybody can see it with their eyes. Not need to repeat what Aristotle would say about it.

Primary and secondary production, is a big fat chapter in any Ecology handbook. Any Plant physiology handbook will explain the differences between CAM and C4 plants

If nobody is trying to produce a natural sized cow sculpture made of vanille beans, there must be a reason.

> Some facts are so well stablished in human knowledge that there is not need to cite it.

So, your statement is true because you say that it's common knowledge that it's true?

> Primary and secondary production, is a big fat chapter in any Ecology handbook

OK, then kindly provide one of these ecology handbooks that proves your point

> If nobody is trying to produce a natural sized cow sculpture made of vanille beans, there must be a reason

What do you even mean by this?

> So your statement is true because you say that it's common knowledge that it's true?

Not, my statement is true BECAUSE is has been proven extensively and is common knowledge that it's true. There is a difference. There are extensive databases, plots and tables about how many food you can expect to produce from each organism by unit of time and area. Is the basis of a main branch of ecology: Trophic chains and energy.

To say than growing Soy is more efficient than to breed Polar bears is a repeated lie, trying to make simple things that aren't simple. Not. It depends on the ecosystem, context, temperature range, soil, and climate. And is the same with breeding cattle.

If I eat seafood I rob from ocean species, illegal labor, the hungry poor, and the future. Sometimes, farmland represents the same problem, sometimes not. Seafood is an unsolved problem globally. It has no form of ethical consumption.

Most seafood is produced and sold by the hungry poor. You're not doing them any favors by boycotting their goods.

Not in the short run but in the long run everybody would win. If you lower demand I assume people would find another way of living that would be more sustainable.

I don’t believe humans should operate as pure, replicators– doing any action for the chance to continue to exist. Fishing is global and global fishing runs on slave labor. I am doing them a favor. It’s called ethics for a reason. You are presented with 100 things you can eat. Seafood and cocaine are probably the most unethical. Why not skip them?

What impact have your decisions had on unsustainable farming practices? I'll wait

I have lessened the demand by myself and five people I was able to convince. It’s a question of ethics. What ethical stands have you taken? How are they helping?

I’m not sure why you’re being downvoted, but yes, as a society if we find that we are over-using resources, we should cut out those foods. We seem to value a human population numbered in the billions. Some foods won’t work for that population.

I don’t really see us worrying about food scarcity any time soon. We still burn the bulk of our corn as gas until that changes I see no issue with calorie shortages

As someone with dietary restrictions that prevent me from eating corn (among many other things), I do not find this argument very comforting.

This is a thread about worrying about seafood scarcity already. Not-anytime-soon has arrived on a food-by-food basis. In the case of seafood, it’s an entire food group!

Tbf, seafood is a special category, as most of it can not be farmed (not efficiently, at least), so capturing it from the wild is the easiest, and often only, solution.

It is as special as a canary in a coal mine I suppose

You know, it seems silly to me that the choice we seem to make is rather than controlling our population, we choose having worse lives for us and all future generations. Lack of self-control will truly be the end of humanity.

I think population control is expected to happen automatically in the next 50 years. It doesn't feel like a profitable area to direct activism.

Generally as a nation builds wealth its birthrate slows. We cannot allow a state to control it though as the issue becomes how do you control population size, who gets to have kids and who gets to decide. This is pretty much the be all and end all of government power. Do we force sterilize people? Force abortions? If we fine them then the rich have as many kids as they want. Government mandated population control cannot be the answer.

> While I wish organically growing food and conservation was the answer, its unfortunately not.

I recently had a lengthy discussion with some friends about their support of a solidary organic farm, where you pay a flat fee per month and get a box of whatever they have in that week. It's really hard for most people to understand that things like these are not sustainable and that it's purely a luxury product. Terms like "organic", "no GMO", "local" sound sustainable as you imagine going back to "the good old days", but it's just impossible to feed the world. Even after I quoted some facts about the needed land usage for organic, it was not really possible to convince them, that it's not sustainable.

If anybody has some good articles / studies about sustainable farming for the future, I would love to read them.

I think there are confused definitions for "sustainable."

There's "sustains the land," which is food that can be grown this way indefinitely, which is what most people mean when they say "sustainable agriculture." To be more specific, "meeting society's present food and textile needs, without compromising the ability for current or future generations to meet their needs."

You're saying sustainable as in "can sustain the future diets of 10 billion people."

They don't map 1:1.

TBH I think you're right. "Sustainable agriculture" isn't scalable to 2050 populations.

Cuba has already shown the World the way forward with their Green Revolution.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/the-good-l...

It absolutely does. Do not bet against agriculture innovation. We have a comfortable head start and plenty in the pipe. The problem isn't exactly a secret. Multiple decade research projects focus on this and only this problem. We'll be okay (and sustainable too boot).

You are right, I was focused on the sustainability to feed all the people with that method. From the comments here it seems I was a bit too pessimistic and that there are some working examples, pretty exciting! Probably have to get back to my friends, after I looked through the material.

There aren't any articles I can point you to, but I live in Portland, Ore., and between here and Vancouver and Camas, WA, there are a number of collectives that are doing exactly this. They don't publicize, it is word of mouth. They primarily focus on raising chickens and pigs, and butchering them for the members. All members participate somehow. Some members host the animals, others who cannot, contribute for feed and vet bills or participate in the slaughter days since it is a lot of work a few times a year.

They are successful but are not capable of replacing 100% of the grocery needs. And vegetables only appear in the summer and can be subject to infestations or random die offs... although there is significant canning that takes place throughout the summer for the winter months. Growing a diverse amount vegetables to support 25-50 people is surprisingly more complex than raising livestock (unless you just want to eat lots of zucchini and squash ;-).

However, there are many well documented small co-ops in Portland that I can refer you to if you want to ask them questions. These are very small farms, and in many cases people buy their shares of well in advance, and some have even become store-fronts rather than pickups.

Here are examples of places within a 15 minute drive of where I live:

When I used to eat meat I would buy half a cow with some friends friends. You could go visit the cow throughout the year:

https://www.foodbevg.com/US/Scappoose/393417489771/All-Natur...

This place exploded in popularity in the past 7 years. It used to be two guys and you would order chickens months in advance and pick them up a day after the slaughter, now I can just walk into their store and they have a growing staff:

https://www.marionacres.com/order

Similarly:

https://www.kookoolanfarms.com/

This dairy was a kickstarter, and I get milk, cream, and eggs from them year round, its fantastic.

http://schochfamilyfarm.com/

Lastly, Sauvie Island just outside portland has an enormous farm community where half of the year one can purchase all manner of fruits vegetables through multiple farmers market stands.

Again though: it is only for part of the year, year round veggies are damn hard without large industrial apparatus. Unless you like pickled things.

It can be done, but it takes a village. Seriously.

Oh, I forgot to mention one other weird thing: this isn't just liberals. There is a frightening large contingency of white supremacists who are into this, and a few showed up at Portland farmers market until they were outed. Regardless of how you feel about having racist nationalists selling next to hippies, self-sufficiency is quite a thing up here.

This non-american finds it amusing that the only two categories of people in Portland are liberals and white supremacists.

Hah! No, it's not. I was playing on stereotypes. There is a stereotype that local farmers-markets are for "liberal hippie" people (see: the television sitcom "Portlandia").

Based on my travels to other countries, local farmers markets are simply called "markets" and there is nothing unusual about them. In the USA, small local markets and co-ops are a fringe thing because we are fed almost entirely by industrial farming through vast supply chains that terminate at enormous multi-purpose grocery stores.

I may have a few facts wrong, but this consolidation started after WWII, and local food co-ops were considered liberal operations because it was "liberal hippies" who were opposed to the industrialization of food.

Seeing extremely far right subsets embracing what has generally been considered far left behavior is just amusing.

Hope this clarifies!

This comment made me realize the original Portlandia episode with Colin the Chicken is a decade old already.

Surprising to me that year-round veggies is so hard even with modern methods/greenhouses.

> Surprising to me that year-round veggies is so hard even with modern methods/greenhouses.

You are correct: it is not so hard with modern methods, but none of the small communities I know of (15-50 people) have invested in a greenhouse of sufficient size. And even the local farms here don't have greenhouses, not that I am aware of. That seems odd to me, perhaps I am missing something because that seems unlikely now that I think about it...

Having seen the transformation of Medford/Ashland to MJ and hemp greenhouses I'd think at least some people would be as fanatical about their vegetables/fruits.

The organic movement doesn't have to end with the whole world eating certified organic food to be successful. It can still serve as a standard bearer, leading a charge on a different way to do things- and industrial agriculture can take up some of its best ideas.

> Society just wont change to support it.

Maybe this is just me, but I would happily change my diet to be around 50% Soylent or other meal replacement if the cost was cheaper. Currently I eat around 2400 calories a day, with Soylent that costs me $20 a day. I can get Chipotle for ~$15 per day, and between the two Chipotle clearly wins on taste.

From what I can tell meal replacements are often far more environmentally friendly, there might be an environmental win here if the price drops.

It also will wreck metabolic havoc since it's processed and often uses PUFAs, non bioavaiable versions of nutrients and and other such things.

You think we have an obesity crisis now? Wait until it's near mandatory to only eat things like cheap-edition soylent.

The price for Soylent you quoted is for pre-prepared bottles.

You can get the add-water-only version for much cheaper. In fact, you can get a day's worth of calories for about $10 even with better quality formulation competing products such as Huel 3.0 or Plenny Active. You literally scoop the powder into the provided bottle with the provided scoop they give you, fill it with water, shake it up for 30 seconds, and it's ready to drink.

A bit more of a fair comparison just in case anyone reading this is curious on the development of this space.

I hadn't heard of Plenny Active before, looks like you're right about the price. I'll have to give that a try, thanks for the suggestion!

$10 for a daily subscription to Ensure 2.0? You can eat eggs, slow cooker cuts of meat, seasonal fruit vegetables, rice, beans, flour, salt, yeast.. etc for $10 a day easy. As long as one is not too allergic to washing a few dishes, that is.

Soylent is too expensive. It's a very attractive solution for me but the price point is higher than real food. Soylent needs to be like $1 a meal, with super duper high protein, if it wants to compete with home cooking.

I can make a fine French dining quality 4-6 egg omelette, with a reheated beans and vegetables on the side, for like $2 a plate. A big plate, too.

Yeah, this. A couple years back I shifted my diet around to be more sustainable. I still eat meat, but stick to chicken and pork, and more occasionally rather than every meal. I use sous vide to batch cook and freeze stuff like chicken plus a curry base. Then per meal I can just thaw a portion and spend less than 10 minutes combining it with some fresh produce and final seasoning in a skillet. I costed out one of the thai curries I do this way out of curiosity the other day. Even using some more pricey seasonings like thai basil, kaffir lime leaves, lemon grass, and decent produce it still comes out below $2 per serving. Id say at this point I'm about 3/4ths of the way to the quality I get at local restaurants.

A basic rice, beans, and green veg meal comes out to less than $0.50, and that's including some pork sausage to flavor the beans. I do gumbo occasionally and it's at about the same price.

If you have the time/space/ability to cook, you can eat quite well shockingly cheap, even in places with relatively high cost of living.

For me the key was to just ban myself from takeout, period, for about a year. It worked. My cooking is good enough now I prefer it to takeout, whereas when I was in my 20s I was a pretty typical tech bro that ate out every single meal.

Key insight for me was learning how to use my freezer. So much stuff freezes well which most people wouldn't consider freezing. For example, I run my own small baked goods business and do a ton of baking. 95% of anything you could buy in a bakery can be frozen and no one can tell the difference. In fact, bakeries already freeze most of what they are selling to people and no one can tell the difference.

I don't expect normal people to make their own puff pastry or cronuts by hand but I really do think everyone should try to bake their own bread at least once a year. Most people don't want to make their own kneaded bread because you have like 15-30 mins active labour plus about four hours waiting time (mixing, kneading, bulk fermentation, proofing, baking, cooling). But you can make three loaves at once, and freeze them. The time and labour involved in making three loaves is very close to making one. But most people would turn their nose up at freezing bread, as though it completely destroys the crumb and ruins it. But most people's instincts are wrong, once again. Bread freezes extremely well.

I was thinking that we really need to teach children how to be poor. Poor people need to cook and be smart about buying and storing their own food, but most people do not know how to do this. We spend so much time teaching children how to find a job in the most shallow way (how to write a resume, etc) but kids need help with knowing what to do when the economy is bad or they just can't find a good job, even if they are trying to. This sort of thing is political suicide because of national pride and this unshakable notion in the mainstream that people are poor because they are lazy or on drugs, their fault basically.

Anyways, I agree with you on all counts. It is shocking when I realized that eating well is actually pretty cheap. If only I learned that at a younger age.

Yeah, I agree about the freezer. One of the things I love about using sous vide for batch cooking is the bags go from the cook to the freezer without being opened. The liquid in the bag acts as a sort of jacket that prevents freezer burn. Based on the science I know there's a texture change, but I'd be surprised if you could spot it in a blind test.

But the other big thing for me is convenience. It takes maybe 10-15 minutes for me to prep say 5 lbs of meat this way, depending how elaborate my marinade/base is. Then you just put it in the sous and ignore it for a couple hours. I can use the sous to thaw a frozen portion very fast with no worries about food safety or overshooting and overcooking. Past that making a plate is just getting the rice cooker going and then again maybe 10 minutes of active time to bring it all together with some fresh produce.

The convenience of all this is what really clinched it for me. At this point it'd take more active time for me to go get takeout.

I've tried bread a couple times, but so far all I've learned is I'm not a great baker. I intend to make another stab at it though.

Bread Baker's Apprentice is a great book which will teach you everything. Peter Reinhart, the author, in general is a great resource for bread making.

You kind of have to embrace the random factor in bread making and develop a feel for it. A cake recipe is a far more mechanical process, just follow the instructions and it will work. Bread is more chaotic for sure (like, maybe it's a very humid day and your flour is heavier with water than usual) but it's not like pulling a slot machine.

My first few loaves were mediocre, some were bad, but after about 5-10 it came together. And now, like I wrote earlier, I make money baking. Anyone can do it, just treat it like a weird little hobby with no pressure at first.

Thanks for the rec, I'll check it out.

I have the Ken Forkish book. I'm not his biggest fan based on personal interactions, though I'm honest enough to admit he makes amazing bread. But I pretty clearly need to start with something a little more low key.

What about people who enjoy eating? Cheese, meat, vegetables, wine, etc? Let's not forget eating is a pleasurable activity, not only a source of energy and protein.

I enjoy eating too, I don't think I would ever switch to meal replacements completely. But I would consider switching my default from my own terrible cooking to a meal replacement and eat out for my other meals.

Learn to cook, read some good cookbooks - for example anything by Madhur Jaffery - it really isn't difficult.

The thought of educated people eating crap like Soylent and paying for it, when they could be eating really good food, which completely uneducated people all over the world manage to cook easily, is quite upsetting to me.

I agree we have people here making 200+k a year eating chipotle burritos and soylent as meals. These people are truly missing out.

People find drugs and alcohol pleasurable as well, but we find good reasons to regulate them because they have externalities for society that we need to control.

I don't get the people who jump straight to dystopian goo foods. There's no shortage of culinary traditions that relied on less meat and are actually food. Have they never seen a black bean taco?

$20 a day is shocking.

Eat rice, beans, potato, tomato, cereals. That will be an order of magnitude cheaper while tastier.

I'd be happy to eat Soylent if I wasn't allergic to it. Unfortunately my mom fed me soymilk as a baby and triggered a life-long reaction to soy protein. Too bad... I love tofu, but it does not love me.

One-size fits all meal approaches need to keep in mind that individuals have different needs and restrictions.

Huel is also cheaper

Due to COVID, I put most of my food at home in a spreadsheet to track inventory so I could figure out how much I had to buy on each shopping trip to last for a week or two.

At the moment I have 54938 calories of food on hand (not counting tomatoes, lettuce, and onions that I do not track because I only use them as sandwich toppings or for small salads where they contribute negligible calories).

This cost $171.44. That works out to $7.49 for 2400 calories.

Most of this is heat and serve stuff. E.g., there are some mini deep dish pizzas, some frozen breakfast sandwiches (think Sausage McMuffin clones), Hormel "Compleats" entrees, instant rice cups, add water and nuke mashed potatoes, canned soup, and such. Another big group is things for sandwiches: bread, sliced meats, condiments. An assortment of things that don't require any cooking or prep, such as protein bars and potato chips. Finally, ham steaks, liquid egg substitute, and frozen mixed vegetables.

It turns out I'm spending somewhere between 1/2 to 1/3 of what I spent on food pre-COVID. The interesting thing is that it is not a hassle. I always knew I could eat a lot cheaper if I cooked at home, but that also took a lot more time. But for most of what I'm keeping now, cooking is really just putting it in the microwave or in a frying pan for a while. That doesn't really take much time at all.

When COVID is done I will go back to getting take out--but only now and then for variety. I don't think it will ever go back to being my main food source.

I will probably gradually add more things made at home from lower level ingredients, which should bring the cost down some more, and can probably be done without adding much more time.

Thats just a crazy habit to have :)

I feel already bad when i order food twice a month.

It even never occurred to me to do takeout all the time. I have already feel guilty when i see all the packaging for take out and regret it at the moment.

>It turns out I'm spending somewhere between 1/2 to 1/3 of what I spent on food pre-COVID. The interesting thing is that it is not a hassle. I always knew I could eat a lot cheaper if I cooked at home, but that also took a lot more time. But for most of what I'm keeping now, cooking is really just putting it in the microwave or in a frying pan for a while. That doesn't really take much time at all.

I always cook more than I need and always have leftovers. This is a great way to cut down on the amount of time spent in the kitchen (I care more about the time lost than the money saved). You don't have to immediately eat the leftovers, you can freeze most of it and rotate what you made a week or two ago to keep some variety.

Why can't you get vegan Chipotle?

Yup. We're already pretty much at capacity in terms of using arable farming land[1]. We need more efficient farming, which means GMOs and advanced farming methods; we don't need less efficient farming like organic and anti-GMO.

[1] https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/how-much-arabl...

Any good studies estimating the carrying capacity of Earth with current ag tech?

can't remember where but I think theoretical upper bound was about 11-12B, but realistically I think 9.5-10B based off nothing in particular.

It's worth noting that every time there's been estimations on carrying capacity applied to humans, it's eventually turned out to be wrong.

The reality is that we are not very efficient at agriculture in all of the places where agriculture is practiced. Most carrying capacity models make the assumption that we are at or near peak agricultural output, but this simply isn't true, so the models' predictive powers fall apart.

For an example from another industry, where people have been similarly predicting capacity-related doom since the 80s, look at oil. In the 80s, people thought we were going to run out of oil, because "proven accessible reserves" were dwindling. Between the innovations of low-cost fracking and more effective "proving" tools, this problem evaporated.

The moral of the story is that, where demand is high, capitalistic pressures means that, given enough time, we will always finds a way to open up more supply.

All this to say, be very critical of the assumptions made by whatever models you find, or doomsday claims you may come across. If agriculturalists are not concerned about this, the burden of evidence for us to be concerned should be rather high.

Exactly if Americans spent more resources on food there would be more innovative approaches in this sector. Currently food is too cheap and there is barely any opportunity for innovation.

What? Agriculture is hyper-efficient in the biggest areas of the world (US Midwest, Brazil, Eastern Europe).

Sorry, I'd rephrase my original statement a little bit for clarity. I didn't mean at all to say that "nowhere is efficient", which in retrospect is one valid way of interpreting my original statement.

It's not that agriculture isn't hyper-efficient in certain locales. It's that it could be more efficient, if its operators cared to invest in making it so. Until demand rises relative to supply (from supply shortages), there isn't a price pressure to innovate on efficiency. This doesn't stop the "big farms" from innovating, because "big farm crops" are a race-to-the-bottom commodity business. That's why we get more corn, soy beans, whatever every year.

This is all without mentioning the places where agriculture is rather undeveloped, compared to the places you mention (many locales in Africa, central Asia, even the United States and Canada).

We could try harder not to lose or waste food that we produce: FAO estimates that each year, approximately one-third of all food produced for human consumption inthe world is lost or wasted.[1] (Note that this is not just about people throwing away food they bought, though it's a big part of it.)

And at first glance it seems obvious that eating less meat, globally, is going to increase available calories/area; the fact that some areas are viable for livestock but not vegetables notwithstanding. About half of the area used for agriculture is used for livestock, if I read [2] correctly.

[1] http://www.fao.org/3/i3347e/i3347e.pdf

[2] http://www.fao.org/3/ar591e/ar591e.pdf

Though we could feed many more people with current farming capacity if we ate all the corn we grow ourself instead of feeding it to cows that we eat. Meat production is incredibly inefficient.

If we eventually manage to produce most of our meat demand from lab-grown meat this will likely free up enormous amounts of agriculture capacity.

In what world is lab-grown meat production more efficient than cattle farming?

Given enough resources to refine the process and a few years, I don't see how in the long run it cant become more efficient than farming.

I don't buy it. You're comparing the energy inputs required to support large-scale tissue engineering operations with those needed for grazing cattle on pasture. It's not even close.

If it was just pastures I would agree. But 30-40% of all corn produced in the US (the largest corn producer in the world) is used to feed lifestock [1]. That's a lot of perfectly good farmland that could directly produce food for human consumption.

Even if the lab process takes more energy, as long as producing the growth medium takes up less farmland that is a win towards the goal of having enough farmland to feed the world.

1: http://www.worldofcorn.com/#corn-usage-by-segment

Hard to say now if it will actually be MORE efficient or environmentally friendly, but initial indications once price parity is achieved would lean to YES. In terms of timeline, reports show at least 5 years before it can hit the grocery stores and that doesn't take into account the regulation. Here is a good resource that shows the process, companies making it, etc. https://cellbasedtech.com/lab-grown-meat

Organic and sustainable methods are more efficient, even without GMOs [1]. It is a myth that GMOs or high-tech is the answer to food production/land scarcity concerns, as simply managing a farm properly can lead to yield increases multiple times over conventional, unsustainable methods (annual tillage, broad spectrum pesticides, etc). This is in part because GMOs that are in wide use are little more than ways to deal with pests or herbicides, which high efficiency sustainable farms deal with much more cost-effectively anyway.

[1] https://www.greenbiz.com/article/how-mini-farms-can-yield-fo...

No they aren’t. Organic for the most part is a myth. What they do is either spray with a pesticide that can be classified as organic (often nicotine derived) or create an island of organic surrounded by a conventional buffer. Often both.

>> Organic for the most part is a myth. What they do is either spray with a pesticide that can be classified as organic

That's demonstrably untrue. Many organic methods use no pesticides at all because they use things like row covers or greenhouses which replaces them, or crop-timing to avoid source pests. Look at any farm inspired by Eliot Coleman methods, which can produce crops cost-competitively with conventional agriculture.

Some boutique farms for farmers markets can do that, the organic shit you get at Safeway is just organic pesticides

> Organic for the most part is a myth

This is not really true, I think the problem is every country has a different definition and standards, sometimes multiple.

>> We need more efficient farming, which means GMOs and advanced farming method

Considering the fact that so much of the farmlands are devoted to producing animal feed -- how about we as a species start eating less meats ? Make meats more expensive all around the world by imposing ... dare I say it .. caps on Carbon emission.

Issue is that we are not going to. Just like we are not going to solve global warming by individuals making better carbon choices or even nations as other nations will just do whatever they want. We are only going to win these battles by creating cheaper better alternatives.

India and China are not going just stop using coal in the middle of their economic expansion. People are just not going to stop eating meat, especially as many 3rd world nations are just reaching the point they can afford it.

Only way we can come out ahead on this is scientifically devised cheaper and better alternatives.

The issue is that we cannot rely on it to actually be there, and to come in time. I agree that we cannot efficiently regulate our behaviour, but I believe that will be our end eventually, science and engineering marvels not withstanding.

Yeah but what about YOU? Are YOU going to choose to not eat meat? Or are YOU going to wait to see what everyone ELSE does first? Its a game theory problem.

It is indeed the tragedy of the comments. That's why we need regulations, sanctions etc. This needs to be the number one issue for all international negotiations.

I say that as someone who cut down on 95-99% of meat consumption to reduce my carbon footprint and because I feel terrible for the animals

>> India and China are not going just stop using coal in the middle of their economic expansion

Why not ? Both these countries need foreign investments and free trade with the industrialize world. Could the OECD countries not coerce them into capping carbon emissions ? As long as Carbon emission caps are fair -- that means accounting for the fact that the bulk of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere came from the OECD countries.

However, Carbon taxes is a four letter word in North America. Sometime back , I saw a pickup modified to emit black soot -- here in Ontario Canada of all the places.

Correct. Farming/ag is fine. Its already scaled and efficient. Now we need to make it sustainable

https://thinkingagriculture.io/what-silicon-valley-doesnt-un...

Global warming will free up an enormous amount of arable land (most land is in the northern hemisphere anyway)

Is this not exactly what you would expect in a free market? All arable farming land will produce whatever crop brings in the best return; no arable land will be left fallow long term.

But just because we are using all of it doesn't mean we need all of it or else starve. Vast quantities of crops are used to produce biofuel, or feed for livestock, or raw materials for other non-food products.

> A science fiction style solution is going to be the only way to feed the world.

What about plant-based diets? That doesn't seem too SF to me

It doesn't seem that most people are willing to give up meat/certain animal products.

While not giving up entirely, I feel like many people, if presented with facts, would be willing to greatly reduce their consumption.

oh the naïveté of youth...

The easiest way to reduce meat/fish consumption is to make the cost reflect all the externalities.

So, I agree with this in theory, but how does this work in practice? To stick with the topic of seafood, it's just out there in the ocean; as long as it exists in fish-able quantities, people will fish and fish until there's none left. Pricing in externalities would be huge for the US, but it would need to happen on a global scale to make a difference.

Then also make the airlines price seats to pay for externalities. I bet people won't be flying as much if the seat cost $5000 instead of $500 to pay for damage to environment. Don't single out ag. Tech and transportation are just as bad. At least with agriculture, it produces food.

> if presented with facts, would be willing to...

Now that is SF

No, it is not. People just choose not to see the facts. People do not want to know where their food comes from as they suspect it would be not good to know as changing habits is hard and they have lots of other stuff going on to take care of.

But once they have seen movies like "we feed the world" they do care at least a bit.

No, the answer you'll get has an 85% chance of being, to the word, "Oh, I don't think I could ever give up bacon." I know that answer might seem a little far-fetched, but it will happen time and time again.

Facts don't really change anything when they're easy to ignore.

Maybe if they had to pay for the externalities.

Tech and transportation better be paying too then. How much pollution you think those Chinese factories pump out to make your $1000 iPhone?

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

They don’t work. You will have gastro intestinal issues on plant only diets. All those vegan you tubers are cheating for a reason.

Start with vegetarianism (with B12 supplements only). No cheat needed, plus you'll be in your best form.

I'm a year into a daily vegan diet and haven't noticed this. When will my GI tract collapse?

Now, there are people sensitive to a certain kind of insoluble fibre, and if you are you might have some trouble on a vegan diet, but these people are in a minority. Apart from people wanting to avoid FODMAPs (the fibre group in question), the only problem I have heard of from friends becoming vegan is the transitory flatulence from eating beans.

Anecdotally the worst gastrointestinal problems I have ever had was on whatever version of the standard American diet I was served when visiting the states as a 20-something year old. I couldn't shit for 10 days...

> the human population is expanding and the rising income of 3rd world nations

Fortunately, these two tend to cancel out. As a country gets wealthier, its birthrate tends to decline. Some of the most developed countries have shrinking populations.

Yes, but consumption isn't going down. Even if we stabilise at 11 billion people by 2100, which is much too late and arguably already at overshoot mode, consumption will continue rising and increase resource usage, although the population remains about the same.

Those 11 billion people won't use the minimum amount of resources needed to sustain themselves (which is a very low quality of life), but use double or even triple than that.

This is one reason I'm such a fan of fake meat companies like Impossible Foods.

I've tried to go on vegetarian diets before, but I just can't do it. I always feel weak and just generally "not right". I don't eat a ton of meat, but I find it really difficult to abstain 100%.

An Impossible Burger, however, completely satisfies my cravings for meat. It's not just that it tastes like meat, but I feel sated after eating an Impossible or Beyond Burger in a way I just don't feel eating a normal veggie burger.

The human population isn’t expanding much at all.

In 1950 there were 2.5 billion humans, today there are 7.7 billion, but by the end of the century there will only be ~11 billion.

And at that point, most humans alive will be working age or older (approximately ~3.5 working age adults for every U15).

A lack of human population growth will be one of the defining economic issues this century, with a chance at unfortunately solving the issue of rising incomes at the same time.

That might be true, but the caloric consumption of the population is changing. People are transitioning from staple based diets (rice, wheat, etc.) to more complex diets (non native fruits/vegetables, meat). As poor countries gain wealth they want the food to match.

Oh absolutely, I didn’t mean to imply falling growth will neatly solve all the issues they listed so much as continue my one sided feud with our distorted ideas of future population levels.

Should have left out the income quip at the end in hindsight!

Supply has never been the problem with feeding the world.

More supply solves nothing.

The answer is fewer people. I can't see any reason to encourage a rising population, even while I see one has to be careful about encouraging a decreasing population. Nonetheless, engineering for population growth--even if it works--doesn't lead to the best possible world.

We should cease all food aid, and replace it with education, contraception, and abortion for women for starters.

Why science fiction and not plain old fish farming?

And/or an international agreement to reduce fishing, and outlaw the import of fish caught outside the bounds of that agreement.

Similar international agreements have worked relatively well to cut down on things like chemical weapons and anti-personnel mines.

I see little bit of difference between man killing weapons and food

Currently fish farming is often just fish recycling. Conversion of lower quality feed fish into higher quality market fish.

The most depressing part is the feed fish are often healthier for you than the farmed fish.

We go through this whole process and the result is half as much fish as we started with, and it's worse for you.

The fish feed of today contains far less animal protein than it used to - a lot of the protein now comes from soy.

Salmon farming, for example, can be incredibly efficient - Norwegian salmon farms typically get 1 kg of fish for every 1.15-1.2kg of feed. That's an amazing conversion factor.

That said, there are serious welfare concerns with fish farming. Even in Norway, which has some of the highest standards in the world, sea lice are a huge problem, and the mechanical and chemical treatments used are horrible. Another issue is the welfare of "cleaner fish", which are places in cages to eat lice from salmon - AFAIK there are still no regulations around their welfare, and mortality rates are shocking[0]

https://sciencenorway.no/animal-welfare-fish-farming-salmon-...

Maybe this information is out of date, but these are the issues I was referencing:

Anchovies, sardines and other palm-sized, schooling fish are caught in the ocean and processed into fishmeal and oil to feed to other fishes and crustaceans that are raised in aquatic farms around the world.

https://www.washington.edu/news/2018/06/14/key-ocean-fish-ca...

Every year, millions of tons of wild fish, like sardines and anchovies, are caught and processed into fishmeal and fish oil, which is used to make feed for farm-raised species.

https://www.seafoodwatch.org/ocean-issues/aquaculture/wild-f...

It's true that a lot of wild catch still goes towards fishmeal; my point was simply that things are improving a lot there, at least for salmon (I presume it's the case for other species too, but I don't know that).

Fish farming isn't easy and doesn't scale well. No idea how well artificial meat is going to scale, but we already know the challenges and costs of farm raised fishes. IIRC, the biggest issue was disease and waste concentration.

Or just work towards sustainable population, aka dis-incentivize multiple children, greatly lower immigration, etc etc

But everything the governments do right now incentivizes overpopulation.

Time to start killing industries

While there is a small cushion to "kill" in terms of wealth and conspicuous consumption, before long you're talking about killing people. These industries don't just extract wealth for the 1%. They're also feeding billions of people.

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