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Comment by elktea | Hacker News Reader

> No one needed to die for you to eat it.

Except all those animals + insects that once inhabited the fields

Cows are fed by plants that grow on the same kind of fields, except cows need to eat many pounds of food to generate one pound of cow.

And we need to eat many pounds of cow.

Or many more pounds of plants to generate a pound.

Plants to animal to you is 10% efficiency. That cow needs to eat 10 lbs of plant to get the nutrients you’d get from 1 lb.

Except you couldn't extract any nutrients at all from the plant matter the cow is eating, no matter how much of it you ate.

Not everyone is allergic to corn and wheat.

People don't eat efficiency. They want nutritious and delicious food. No one's mouth waters over kale.

We're lucky that kale isn't the only plant-based option. The vegan culinary tradition has existed for centuries. Seitan was invented as early as the 6th century in China.[0] And western vegan culinary traditions have evolved rapidly in the last 10-20 years. The reduction of plant-based diets to just eating salad is not grounded in the reality of those who are plant-based.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat_gluten_(food)

The way cows get plant matter is a lot less environmentally costly than the way humans get plant matter. Their standards are a lot lower than ours. Humans don't like to eat scrub-brush and corn husks.

More crops are grown to feed the livestock than people, so if you want to save the field animals and insects, going plant based will save even more.

Not sure this is true if you're looking at free-range though. There are many places which are not very amenable to growing crops fit for human consumption, but are more than adequate for growing the grasses (and more) that ruminant digestive systems (e.g. cows) can easily digest.

So if you're growing soy on deforested land as a base for your "cruelty free" burger, it is very possible that this has damaged the original ecology (and killed living things) more than having grazing cattle would.

> Not sure this is true if you're looking at free-range though. There are many places which are not very amenable to growing crops fit for human consumption, but are more than adequate for growing the grasses that ruminant digestive systems (e.g. cows) can easily digest.

Exactly. It's not like animal husbandry and meat-eating developed as some kind of ostentatious wasteful consumption. It's a way of converting inedible plants into edible meat.

Sure, totally, but how many of us live in places where we have access to the cows but not non-animals foods that can sustain us? Virtually none. So while its true that human beings ate meat for good reasons for a LONG time, its not really something that most folks need anymore.

Is it true that everywhere we have cows we can also grow soy or wheat or whatever? No, definitely not. Does that matter? No, definitely not.

If you live in the US 90% of the meat you eat was raised in factory farms and fed farmed grains not forage.

This argument - which I see often - ignores that land doesn’t have to be used for growing crops or grazing. Leaving some land wild allows biodiversity which has quite literally unquantifiable benefits now and far into the future. Using less land in total let’s us leave more land wild, and/or to put solar panels on it, or put it to other uses that may be beneficial.

Further, some of that land which is unsuitable for growing crops used to be - and was degraded by growing crops or grazing. Further degrading and depleting it doesn’t do us any favors.

Land doesn't have to be used for anything, unless you want to do things.

The point is that grazing is much less destructive to the original ecology than farming, so it's not clear that 1 acre of farming is better than 100 acres of grazing.

I might be misguided here, but AFAIK grazing doesn't "deplete" the land at all (and might even improve the land with manure / etc), where as farming absolutely does unless you're careful about it.

You can’t scale environmentally friendly organic grass fed beef. There is a reason why we have cruel factory farms.

Right, but I don't think anyone in this thread is arguing that Beyond Burgers don't scale better – people are merely pushing back against the idea that we should eliminate all consumption of meat and that all methods of raising such are objectively worse than such alternatives.

> More crops are grown to feed the livestock than people

This is entirely misleading. More plant biomass goes to animals than people, but very little of it is human-edible and much of it consists of byproducts of human plant consumption (e.g. corn husks).

You hear this BS all the time e.g. with soy. Yes, the "majority of soy" goes to cattle but that's because humans won't eat soybean meal. The economic impetus to grow the soy in the first place still comes from humans. If they were only feeding it to cattle it wouldn't be profitable.

This is the case for almost all food you eat, unless you survive by foraging.

True, however proponents for animal cruelty don't often* factor in the destruction of natural biodiversity, and generally only care about the 'big' animals that they can 'see'.

*Edit, removed the blanket generalisation. I know a lot of people do care about broader biodiversity, it's just not quite as commonly seen.

There is only so much natural arable farmland on earth. If everyone is vegetarian, I'm not sure it would sustain current populations, without requiring deforestation/etc. There are many places in the world where people are sustained by animals like cows and goats which are able to eat things humans can't digest on their own.

Which is why "at least nothing had to die" as an argument falls apart pretty quickly as a reason for eating Beyond Meat burgers. Pretty much everyone has different lines on which animals they find acceptable to kill, and I don't think that most people care too much if an animal that has been bred specifically to be eaten ends up getting eaten. If people want to try the sympathy route to get people to switch to a plant based diet, I think they'd have better luck bringing up the poor living conditions frequently found in factory farming.

Which is still a lot less death and suffering than factory farming livestock produces. (Aside from the fact that growing cattle to eat requires a lot more acreage under cultivation--to feed the cattle--than growing plants to eat.)

It's impossible to feed people without causing some death. But that doesn't mean we can't work to minimize it.

Not everywhere that can sustain cattle can grow crops fit for human consumption.

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