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Comment by BillyTheKing | Hacker News Reader

my biggest take-away from our current covid-crisis, and now this event (let's hope it doesn't grow into a full-fletched pandemic, I'm really done with those for now) is simply that I believe we've really reached a scaling limit in regards to our global meat production.

We'll see more and more of those zoonoses in the near future if we don't get that under control. In addition, eating meat day in and day out simply isn't healthy either. I'm afraid it's one of those habits that we as a species really need to cut down on.

I've tried eating less over the past year, and while I do miss eating meat occasionally, I really didn't find it too difficult to stop consuming.

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Alternative interpretation is that we've reached a limit on the globalization and scaling. Had countries been much more independent of each other, and open about the pandemic, an early lockdown/quarantine would have contained pandemic to a single region.

Also careful with meat guilt. Our brains have an inherent need for setting hard-to-achieve goals that require overcoming hardships. That's how humanity progressed from living in caves to what we have now. The concept is widely studied in ancient philosophy. Google up eudaimonia if you want. It used to translate to people setting hard constructive goals (like building a house in a frontier land or inventing a car to replace horse carriages). Except now that we automated most constructive things to do, this part of our brain is capturing guilt-driven self-restricting goals. Don't eat meat, don't have a nice house, don't drive out, don't have a vacation, don't have family/kids, don't pick friends you like... Except these goals are divisive by definition. You can't make everyone accept every possible "don't", so people are forced to argue about whether their set of self-stigmas is holier than their neighbor's. This is textbook medieval tribalism and it's unfortunately a very stable (and grim) state of the human society.

I'm not trying to bash anyone, I'm just saying be careful with your goals, as they may not always bring the happiness you want.

those are fair points, but I specifically tried to avoid saying 'do not eat meat', I said it's something that we should reduce or cut down. Those don'ts that you listed unfortunately conflict...

most people weren't able to have a vacation this year because of the pandemic, which in all likelihood is related to our relationship with animals. Same with meeting friends and family.

In my opinion those aren't all equal, there are certain desires that are incredibly important to us as a species as well as our democracy, and those include social interactions with other humans and arguably more important that the ability to consume meat thrice a day.

I'm not saying humans shouldn't eat meat at all, eating meat has been part of the human diet for many centuries - but eating meat day in and out, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, that's where we took a wrong turn, we're on an extreme side of the spectrum here, and that's never healthy.

Eating meat has been a large part of the human diet since the very beginning. It is what allowed us to grow our huge brains. It is what made us what we are.

I agree that the problem isn’t meat, the problem is scale. We are having too many kids, and the population is way too large for our limited resources.

I find the historical dietary evidence pretty convincing that eating meat regular or even daily is, in fact, healthy.

Ancient writers even documented that societies where meat was a major dietary component were healthier and lived longer - Herodotus’s “long lived Ethiopians”, to name one of the countless examples.

What we need to end is massive, industrialized farming, not meat consumption. It’s bad for the environment whether you’re growing vegetables or animals and it creates a fragile system subject to severe, devastating supply shocks and also externalities like this.

Minor nit, possibly predictive text: full-fledged* btw

Lab leak doesn't have to do anything with meat production.

I’m open minded to the lab leak hypothesis, but it’s still just that: a hypothesis.

We know that industrial scale meat production results in increased disease risk.

So far we've got no evidence that industrial scale meat production has caused this, and the only similar hypothesis has been zoonotic spill-over - which has it's own trouble substantiating evidence, nevermind explaining how a disease perfectly mutated for human infection seemingly sprung up in Wuhan.

Leave the conspiracy theories at the door, wouldja? They're as nauseating as intelligent design and flat Earth.

Meat agriculture is likely the cause of the "Spanish" flu. When you cram zillions of animals together with their excrement and humans, you get pandemics by creating the conditions of high-density Petri dishes for evolution and rapid spread.

I completely agree.

Our demand for meat has increased so much it is inevitable that the market is going to resort to breeding animals faster with less care to supply the demand.

By cutting down we can have a positive impact

Covid wasn't caused by meat production, it was caused by shitty hygiene. That's why the West eats so much meat and creates so few diseases. What we need is more places to take on hygienic supply chains and so reduce bush meat and wet market participation.

Fact check: we still don't know what caused covid to jump to humans.

We don't "know", but it is agreed that it's overwhelmingly likely. It is possible it came from a lab, but that's pretty far down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole...

Fact check: lab leaks are not "conspiracy theories", they are historical facts. For instance, in 2014, the US had 3 different lab leaks involving smallpox, anthrax, and bird flu, which led to a ban on gain of function research.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/3/20/18260669/deadly...

I know they happen, I just think it's incredibly unlikely. So you need some evidence otherwise we go with the most likely explanation...

Out of interest, do you know, has anyone ever leaked an engineered bio weapon? The examples are always for naturally occurring pathogens...

>I just think it's incredibly unlikely.

Why do you think its incredibly unlikely, when the facts of recent decades have shown lab leaks to be much more likely to happen than outbreaks of novel, highly adapted, highly transmissible viruses?

>So you need some evidence otherwise we go with the most likely explanation...

The initial evidence is undeniable: an extremely transmissible novel coronavirus is found outside of 1 of only 2 BSL4 labs in China; a lab where scientists were making extremely transmissible novel coronaviruses.

Unfortunately, it's impossible to investigate and gather further evidence when governments agents with guns hide evidence and prevent investigators from accessing the scene of the incident.[1]

>Out of interest, do you know, has anyone ever leaked an engineered bio weapon? The examples are always for naturally occurring pathogens...

There have been incidents where the pathogen leaked was "undisclosed". Gain of function research is kept top secret for obvious reasons.

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak

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