Hacker News Reader

Comment by admax88q | Hacker News Reader

If meat collapses it will put strain on other parts of the food pipeline which might not be able to pick up the slack.

There's a lot of calories in meat.

As if there's a scarcity of food in the US so that missing out on calories from meat could not very easily be substituted. Incidentally that would also result in a diet commonly regarded as healthier.

The calories in meat aren't relevant, it takes more calories in animal food to produce meat than the calories in the meat.

The meat industry is a strain on the food pipeline, losing it would free up other parts of the pipeline and feed more people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_p...

I eat meat, but the parent is correct, it's a luxury.

*edit: confused by all the downvotes. Am I incorrect, or being somehow offensive?

You're taking about long-term effects, which are true. But that meat waiting to be distributed is already there. If the deliveries disappear for a few days/weeks, you don't suddenly get extra plants to distribute in that timeframe.

True. Yeah I thought the whole sub-thread here was talking about long-term effects, not a short-term one-time gap of unused supply. The top comment was talking about the general necessity of meat to our economy, right?

Well general and specific, and short- and long-term, are orthogonal. Oil is also generally necessary in the US economy in the short-term, if (conceivably) not in the long-term. On the other hand electricity is not necessary in the short-term specifically to aluminum foundries, but in the long-term it is (or the crucibles solidify).

Sure agreed. I'm perhaps not understanding what part of the above that this distinction clarifies. Sudden loss of oil would bring the entire economy to a halt and certainly result in mass loss of life. Sudden loss of human edible meat would no doubt be a major blow and an enormous waste, but would not generally result in a lot of people dying or stop the economy. It would certainly bankrupt and cripple the operations of meat farmers, but loss of oil would bankrupt and cripple all farmers, and all transportation and distribution of food.

Beef is grown using cellulose which contains calories that are unavailable to humans.

Unless you've discovered a very neat chemistry trick that would also make fuel much cheaper.

I wasn't suggesting that people eat hay. We could use the same land to grow edible plants and vegetables instead, right?

I imagine some grazing land could be converted, but I do think most of it is used for grazing because that's about all it's good for. My family used to graze a small herd on land that could /almost/ be used to grow grain (with lots of chemical help), but definitely not vegetables.

That is a very good point. I poked the internet about it and got this interesting information back which backs up your thought: https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2012/march/data-feature....

Maybe worth mentioning that poultry feed is grains and "mostly" edible in theory (though maybe not in today's practice), and poultry is the largest segment of meat in the US?

Also relevant are that per-capita meat consumption in the US has gone up dramatically in the last 50 years, and so has the average caloric intake. Looking at history, it seems like we have room to downsize some, right?

> poultry feed is grains and "mostly" edible in theory

Yeah, some of them definitely. We fed our chickens a fair bit of wheat, which of course makes good bread. Plenty of field corn too, which... I guess if you like corn chips as much as I do... okay! Poultry and eggs might be better for you than loading up on grains though.

> per-capita meat consumption in the US has gone up dramatically in the last 50 years, and so has the average caloric intake

Perhaps as little as double those fifty years ago it would have been unthinkable that even the poorest among us could be troubled by obesity. We live in an age of riches and I guess we're still figuring out how that works. What a problem to have, though!

> it seems like we have room to downsize some, right?

This is perhaps the most amusingly uncontroversial thing I've read on the Internet lately. Thank you

In a year, yes, with some work and re-tooling it would be possible. But not to cover for a short-term disruption in meat supply.

If only that were still completely true.

https://wwf.panda.org/discover/our_focus/food_practice/susta...

You could completely strike meat from everyone's diet and still feed everyone.

Just because you can do something and still feed/house everyone doesn't mean it's optimal.

Plants are mostly cellulose, not sugar.

Sugar will not be optimal either. Nutrition isn't that simple.

The most effective step you can take to reduce your carbot footprint is to stop eating beef. http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/food-carbon-footprint-diet

To satisfy our consumption of beef using grass-fed grazing, we'd need surface area of like 2.5x of earth just dedicated to that. Most beef is not grazing, it's kept in intensive farms and being fed factory produced feed, made with lower quality crops, i.e. corn and some processing by-products.

But most meat is not beet, it's chicken and pigs, and they can't digest cellulose - they eat same stuff we do.

So for 95% of meet, the OP is correct, it's is a luxury and a strain on our food system, with a giant carbon footprint.

I don't think America is particularly starved of calories.

Are there a lot of calories in meat? I always looked at meat by itself as pretty lean.

By volume I think there are quite a few types of food that are richer in calories, and a lot of times meats are rich due to how they are prepared (fried, or drenched in butter, etc.)

Yes, There are a lot of calories is meat, even without additions. See bellow for calories in 100g of common foods. The only things that are more calorie dense than meat are primarily composed of sugar or fat.

271 Beef

265 bread

247 Roast chicken, skin on

130 black beans

110 rice

57 Apples

35 Broccoli

Depends on how lean the meat and how dense the fat but generally only processed foods (like bread) are more calorie dense than meat. Protein and sugar (carbs) provide 4 kcal per gram while fat provides 9 kcal per gram and our gastrointestinal tracts are better adapted to carnivorous than herbivorous diets (compared to, say, cows or rabbits). We're simply unable to digest a lot of the mass in fruits and vegetables like the insoluble fiber and animal husbandry's purpose is to convert that material to edible food - it'd be pretty pointless if it wasn't more calorie dense.

Americans eat too many calories already. Let us eat some vegetables for a few weeks, it won't kill us.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com