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Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

Even just getting people to go mostly chicken over beef has a big impact. This also creates a way to ease into a more plant based diet.

Personally I've found the 90% aspect easier. I don't have to worry if my vegetarian meals have something like chicken stock in them. It is about eating healthier and a lower carbon diet than being 100% perfect. Just needs to be good enough.

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Depends on the reason behind being vegan / vegetarian. If it's to reduce animal suffering, eating chicken is almost certainly causing a greater amount of animal suffering than if you eat cows.

https://reducing-suffering.org/how-much-direct-suffering-is-...

I find the approach of the cited web page very strange. Basically, it says, the longer the animal lives, the more it suffers. Throws in some arbitrary multipliers, divides by mass, and voilà.

I would not call healthy animal life as suffering. Details matter. We all have seen peaceful cows and healthy fish. What counts, IMO, is fear, stress, pain, and the way animals are dying. That's not accounted in the article.

One may argue that the number of lives taken counts too. And then eating beef or whale meat will kill fewer animals than eating chicken or insects (of we don't count what whales eat). But in my opinion eating insects would cause less suffering.

Overall I think that eating smaller animals more frequently is more natural and oppotunistic. And eating cheaper meat will reduce overall carbon and water footprint.

From the welfare perspective, if the cows are just out in a large pasture, they will likely have net-positive experiences across their lives. But there are animals that have overwhelmingly negative experience throughout their lives (pigs confined to a cage where they can't turn around). As for chickens, >99% of which grow up in cramped conditions, with no access to the outside, with selective breeding causing them to grow so fast they often can't move, it is better to never have been (their lives are a net negative experience).

It's unfortunate, with respect to emissions, cows are worse than chickens, but with respect to suffering on sentient creatures, chickens are worse than cows.

Great news! There's a solution: eating fewer of both.

What about pescatarian (sp?)? I like the idea of ditching dependence on land based animals. Is sane tilapia farming sustainable? I have a fairly strong intolerance for beans and pulses and getting enough protein to deadlift from other sources is hard. The best my blood work has ever been was me eating about 1.3lbs of grassfed beef a day plus greens and 4 sweet potatoes. Thats great, but not sustainable for our whole population.

I'm an omnivoire, but can't you get a lot of vegan protein from chickpeas and soy? Soy does have the obvious huge downside of containing a much higher amount of estrogen and causes havoc in some people, but Chickpeas aren't hard to make delicious. Ditto for lentils as well

> Chickpeas aren't hard to make delicious. Ditto for lentils as well

Yes. Check out my other comment about beans in this thread. All the dishes I mentioned there are pretty tasty. And so are lentils, if by that you meant masoor or masoor dal, or even if you meant tuar dal). And all those are high in protein as you say.

I love Indian curries, but one serving obbeans or pulses will haunt me for a couple days. I don't know if it is sibo related, but I do have that. Cauliflower, blackberries, and mushrooms destroy me too.

Tough luck. Maybe some people are more prone to such issues.

>sibo

A typo? An acronym?

Small intestine bacterial overgrowth. Often due to overuse of antibiotics in childhood. I'm not complaining, probably would have died without them.

Had not heard of SIBO. Good to know. Wonder if yogurt and other fermented foods that increase good gut bacteria can help.

> Soy does have the obvious huge downside of containing a much higher amount of estrogen and causes havoc in some people

Do you have a study that confirms this? As far as I know this is a myth. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytoestrogen#Effects_on_human...

Another downside of soybeans is that its production causes deforestation and other environmental changes in areas like Amazon. See e.g. https://www.worldwildlife.org/stories/the-story-of-soy

That said, soybeans are mostly used to feed livestock, so if you just eat meat instead of soy, that's likely not any better for environment.

They said they don’t tolerate beans and pulses well. Chickpeas, soy, and lentils all fall into that category.

Commercial fishing at modern scale is not sustainable. Fish farming, especially for valuable species, still has a huge carbon footprint, requires a non trivial amount of agricultural land, and often uses wild-caught fish to feed the farm. So we're back to square one.

Not saying that the issues can't be solved, but pisciculture is not a free lunch from the sustainability point of view.

My favorites are baitfish like herring and sardines does that change the sustainability? If not, should I just go back to beef, or is it at least better?

Tilapa are herbivores, and some setups grow all the fishes food in the tank. Whether that is scalable is another matter.

> Fish farming, especially for valuable species, still has a huge carbon footprint, requires a non trivial amount of agricultural land, and often uses wild-caught fish to feed the farm. So we're back to square one.

Isn't most of that only true for carnivorous or omnivorous fish? I knew there were problems with finding small fish to feed the bigger fish, but I was under the impression that herbivores and filter feeders could be raised sustainably. I.e. farming tuna would be extremely difficult and costly to the environment, but you can farm things like tilapia and catfish fairly sustainably.

They aren't fish that a lot of people are excited to eat, unfortunately.

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