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Comment by hellbannedguy | Hacker News Reader

Speaking of whales, it would be nice if all cultures would give their taste for fish a rest. Japan just started commercial whaling again. They claim only non endangered species, but their research ships has been killing any whale for years.

(https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-48821797)

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There is nothing wrong with eating fish as long as you do so in a sustainable manner. In many respects fish is a demonstrably much healthier option for you and the planet than meat, especially red meat.

Sure, I know in an ideal world we are all supposed to become tree-hugging vegans. But if the entire world switched 100% to vegetables you would soon find there are environmental and sustainable issues there. Its one thing growing a few carrots in your back garden, its another doing so on an industrial scale.

So its not so much what you eat, but the sustainability of it. The answer is not so black and white.

When you have 7x the number of humans the planet can support with natural resourse there is not "sustainable manner" in which to operation when consuming natural resources.

Do you have a source for the 7x figure? Haven’t heard something that precise before.

The source[0] below seems to contradict what you're saying about sustainability, at least with regard to land use - which seems (to me) to be the most pertinent issue in that aspect.

  "Livestock takes up nearly 80% of global agricultural land, yet produces less than 20% of the world’s supply of calories (as shown in the visualization). This means that what we eat is more important than how much we eat in determining the amount of land required to produce our food."

I know you aren't supporting traditional livestock (red meat), but the breakdown of the numbers from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization shows that plant-based food sources already account for 83% of the global calorie supply using only 23% of "Agriculture land". Based on that land use/calories ratio, we could increase to 100% by taking only ~4.7% of the total agriculture land from the livestock portion. If we assume that we definitely need all the protein listed, that would have to be increased to ~6.2%.

Obviously there would be other issues, but if we could return most of the remaining portion of the livestock land to its natural state (even scrub land can benefit from reducing livestock grazing), that seems like an enormous gain for sustainability.

Of course, this doesn't diminish your initial point about eating fish in a sustainable manner. How we could enforce the sustainable aspect is a another matter, given the number of news stories of issues with fish farms and continued over-fishing in protected areas, but that's beside the point. I just wanted to flag other potential gains from more vegetarian diets.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets

Cattle aren't being raised on fertile Iowa topsoil. Cattle are raised where the land has essentially no other purpose.

You can see this in cash rent prices for farmland. Leasing it out for crops makes around $150 an acre, but for cattle it will only bring in $35 an acre.

The statistics about how a huge proportion of agricultural land is going to raise beef is misleading for this reason. It's not one or the other.

A lot of crops are grown to feed cattle. Most livestock in the US are fed on consolidated feed lots using feed like corn and soy. Grass grazing couldn't support the amount of meat raised, so it's a chain of fossil fuel fertilizer -> feed crops -> livestock

93 percent of cattle's lifetime diet intake is food that is essentially inedible to humans, for instance agricultural byproduct/waste such as the cornstalks, husks, and depleted cobs and therefore their diet is not in direct competition with the human food supply. They don't feed cattle valuable cornmeal and soybeans. Unlike humans, cattle can efficiently digest fiber and convert previously human-inedible feeds into nutritious, human-edible foods.

http://pods.dasnr.okstate.edu/docushare/dsweb/Get/Document-1...

Whales aren't fish but mammals. Anyway, what about countries which don't have an alternative to fishing?

Maybe not for whales but fish farming subsidies seem like a good idea for vegans to shoot down.

Can we really be trusted to orchestrate gigantic farmed fishing operations at scale? After this happened a few years ago[0] I think it's safer to just give it a rest so we don't compromise more ocean life.

[0]https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/fish-farm-caused-a...

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