Comment by kickout | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kickout | Hacker News Reader

Mostly good comments in here. My take is we have at least 1-2 years of global supply of most grains. This is a completely political problem; its not like we're getting 2012 US Midwest levels of drought in back-to-back years (now THAT would be a crunch).

Food waste is a problem, yes. Animal protein is not a problem. There is plenty of land in the US only suitable for grazing. Much better than that synthetic soup of Impossible Meat.

Food system has largely run on the JIT systems for decades that crunched the chip industry. We haven't had a serious shock I'd argue and I don't think this is one either. People recognize the JIT-ness and fragility of the system though and are (slowly) trying to backstop it. Will take a combination of distributed controlled environments for high value fruits and vegetables, _proper_ land use (high value crop land for crops; high value grazing land for grazing). This, currently, is dictated by the incentive structures in place with subsidies--which can be changed in theory.

> Animal protein is not a problem. There is plenty of land in the US only suitable for grazing.

This statement is wrong. Livestock grazes early in its lifetime, but is moved to feed lots and feed corn and soy to prepare for slaughter. The US spends a quarter of its corn crop on feeding animals, whereas less than 10% is directly feed to people. Animal protein is a significant opportunity cost to US agriculture.

Nope. Go after ethanol if you want wasted corn. We like/need meat, and there is plenty of corn production or grazing land to accommodate that production.

Something like 30-50M buffalo lived and grazed in North America before they were all killed. The ecosystem can most certainly sustain 30-50M cattle grazing. They wouldn't be as _profitable_ as corn-finished cattle, but they produce meat.

The ecosystem that supported buffalo herds three centuries ago no longer exists.

We don't need meat.

And there are many price and institutional barriers to completely grass fed cattle. The primary being that slaughter is centralized to FSIS inspected facilities where most non-poultry spend their final weeks packed in eating soy and corn.

We don't need coffee, tea, spices and a thousand other things you can buy at the store. But people want them, and that's unlikely to change.

>But people want them, and that's unlikely to change.

This will change when we'll have to make compromise because our current agriculture model is not sustainable (both for climate and food production).

As an aside: I stopped drinking coffee because of the environmental impact. I now drink chicory and barley coffee that's locally grown and roasted. The taste is close enough. It also makes it easier to absorb iron and vitamins (which caffeine inhibits, which does not help if you're reducing meat consumption).

> We don't need meat.

We do if we want everyone to eat. Grazing animals are a great way to turn stuff we can't eat into stuff we can eat, and stuff we can use to grow crops that we can also eat.

You know that we share the earth with every other species right? How about we let that stuff we cant eat be food for wild animals?

What do we eat? Food grown at tremendous ecological expense and shipped halfway round the world?

Vegans are boiling the oceans. Eat what's on your doorstep.

Are you trolling or is this mood affiliation? Have you even really looked into the impact of the food miles of the ingredients you're using relatively to the rest of their carbon footprint? Spoiler: your food miles aren't going to make much of a difference relatively to the rest. Obviously, you can imagine a strawman vegan eating only your proverbial plane-flown avocado and compare that to a perfect locavore eating only grass-fed meat, and sparsely so. But how about compare the real average "locavore" and "vegan" and seeing how that goes. The BBC published a nice piece [1] (n=3) that gives a few pointers to help audit the impact of your food miles. Mileage will vary but even in the UK, with its heavy reliance on imported food, food miles weren't that big a deal compared with opting to eat less meat.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220429-the-climate-bene...

> We do if we want everyone to eat

This is not true. There is plenty of food, especially if we put all resources we currently feed livestock into feeding humans.

God dammit humans can't eat grass. How hard is that for you people to get?

I never said humans can eat grass.

The vast majority of ruminants are fed corn and soy. If they were all to eat grass we'd be able to produce much less meat than we currently do, and also use much more land

Pigs can eat garbage, feces even

We don't need programming, iphones, cars, computers, boats, houses, clothes, etc. But we like them.

The point is that, if the alternative is massive global starvation, we can give up on eating most meat so that that food can be more efficiently be eaten directly by humans instead. And you don't have to give up any of programming, iphones, cars, computers, boats, houses, clothes, etc., to do so.

We've been eating meat _far_ longer than houses, phones, tech, etc. Will be _much_ harder to give that up. Been eating meat for hundreds of millennia

I for one have been eating meat for less than 20 years. Lots of people (not only individually, but culturally) live mostly vegetarian. There is no problem with it.

True, but again, carnivore diets seem to be more popular historically speaking. Rightly or wrongly

You don't have to give up all meat, just temporarily eat less of it.

You don't get to make decisions for me on the basis of what is necessary from your perspective.

What is meat necessary for, other than proteins and iron? Taste? Tradition?

Also, what decisions are you talking about? OP said one does not need meat. Isn't that a provable fact?

My wife needs to eat red meat, otherwise she has very low iron levels.

Note: she does not like red meat, and we spent years and years trying to get her iron levels up without it. She started to have to get iron infusions, which are no fun at all.

All that stopped when she started eating red meat twice a week.

Yes, this is a very rare case, and I can imagine a future where red meat is provided as something like medicine for those few who really need it.

But some people do effectively need red meat.

Fair point! Thanks for the perspective

Meat is more useful than low energy density gasoline/ethanol mixes that have higher CO2 emissions than regular gasoline.

Cattle could easily be grass fed. You just wait an extra year before selling calfs at auction. However, selling calfs leads to more $/acre of grazing land, and more cows per acre as well. A week or two eating grain in a slaughterhouse (if sold as a full grown cow) is rounding error.

The big problem I see is that the availability of grazing land is plummeting in the US southwest, thanks to desertification and climate change.

That might be offset by marginal farmland being converted to grazing (due to climate change), but that'll reduce grain production.

Ethanol is a straw man argument. The option is a) not to produce so much corn and b) not to feed it to animals for slaughter.

We can grow other things, and we can eat less meat.

> We don't need meat.

We do if we want human beings at their optimal physical and mental capacity. It isn't much of a secret that increased consumption of meat led to human beings reaching their optimal physical and mental potential.

Now, excess meat consumption is a problem, but you aren't going to have optimal human beings without some meat.

Japan used to be a vegetarian society for more than a millenia. Their poor diet so terribly stunted the japanese people, physically and intellectually, that the japanese elites ended vegetarianism in favor of meat in the late 1800s.

Pure Meiji anti-Buddhist propaganda. Read up.

The idea was pushed by the buddhist leadership of a buddhist country - Japan. Can't claim it was anti-buddhist when buddhists were behind it. It wasn't anti-buddhist, it was anti suboptimal diet.

It's something that is true everywhere - US, Europe, Japan, etc. As people ate a healthier diet with meat, the people grew taller and smarter on average.

Meiji leadership Buddhist? You seriously need to remove your blinkers. The "Meiji Buddhist Reform" was sweeping and extremely violent and 40,000 Buddhist temples were lost to riots or repression over the period. The new syncretic state-sponsored religion of Shinto was made to replace Buddhist and cut Japan from its Chinese cultural ties and demonstrate to the West that Japan could belong to their club.

Eating mostly polished rice or wheat is not optimal from a health perspective, so quite logically people transitioned from eating miserly diets to eating enough they started becoming taller, etc. That has very little to do with the meat itself and much more with the fact that people would previously mostly eat enough carbs to get by and children would never receive the best share in nutritional terms. Solve that and you probably can explain almost all of that effect. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/rice-disease-mystery-e... gives some insight on how primitive prescriptive dietary approaches were around the Meiji period. You can see the same magical thinking around the power of rice and meat in contemporary Madagascar and it's not pretty.

> We don't need meat.

But we need freedom. And in a free country, people are free to decide what their needs are (as long as they are not breaking any laws). Some people need houses of prayer. As an atheist, I can argue that they don’t. But I don’t argue that, because it’s not up to me to decide what they need or not.

> its not like we're getting 2012 US Midwest levels of drought in back-to-back years (now THAT would be a crunch).

That's very likely in the current climate change scenario. Look at what's happening in the American South West right now. Lake Mead is currently at unprecedented low levels with no evidence that this will change course any time soon. It's possible within a decade there won't be enough water to run the Hoover dam. That's something no one would have taken as a serious risk 10 years ago.

Correct, those long tail problems aren't so long when variance is high and time scales are long (50-60 years)

Lake Mead is so low because the Colorado River Water Compact allocates more water than has historically been in the river, based on tree ring data. There have been a number of years of historically average flow in a row, and keeping the reservoirs full requires roughly a decade of above average flow.

* Edit * For clarity the compact divides up 17 million acre/ft per year and the real average historic flow is closer to 13 million acre/ft per year. The compact also double dips in it's accounting for some return flows.

It' going to be within the next year or two, not a decade.... As I currently sit less than 5 miles from Hoover Dam.

>Animal protein is not a problem. There is plenty of land in the US only suitable for grazing

Only in the sense that you can theoretically produce meat that way, but in reality most meat is produced on CAFOs that use grain.

they do this because its most efficient/profitable, not because of a technical limitation. Those economic incentivizes could be changed rapidly given the proper political capital.

I don't think we're disagreeing here. I already admitted in my previous comment that it was theoretically possible. My point was that even though it's possible for animal protein to be "not a problem", that's not the case today.

It‘s done because grasslands cannot support meat consumption of the world.

But they can supply the meat consumption of the areas with grasslands.

They do it because it dramatically increases yield.

Feeding cows grain in a CAFO setting allows them to rapidly put on weight and turnover their herds faster. Not doing so would result in dramatically lower yields per acre of grassland.

The truth is more complex than that. Most beef is mostly pastured then finished with grains. And the grains used mostly hulls and other parts of grains considered inappropriate for human consumption.

> its not like we're getting 2012 US Midwest levels of drought in back-to-back years (now THAT would be a crunch).

I got a shiver down my spine just reading that sentence. Please do not tempt fate. We just had the hottest year on record. I expect we'll break that record in the next few years again. Drought is depressingly likely.

Didn't China predict they'll have their lowest crops yields in modern history ?

I can't find the article I remember reading but here is one: https://www.reuters.com/business/china-ensure-agricultural-p... and another: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-23/climate-c...

Looks like everything is aligning for a pretty bad 2022 and 2023

Will likely happen in our lifetime. I'm positive of it. not a damn thing we can do either. If it doesn't rain, no 'genome edited drought resistance' will matter. Crops need water period (be nice if they needed _less_ water though)

"be nice if they needed _less_ water though"

Fortunately, they do. Higher atmospheric CO2 levels mean that plants can obtain the CO2 they need more easily, with the stomata in their leaves not having to open as much. Consequently, they loose less water through the stomata, and are more drought resistant.

Of course, this only helps to a certain extent. A bad enough drought will still be very bad. And a very bad drought is bound to happen sooner or later, just from natural variability. So a robust food supply system, incorporating both a degree of local self-sufficiency in inputs, and global trade (for when crops fail in one location) is essential.

The only thing worse than a drought year, is another 'Great Flood' year. When an atmospheric river turns the central valley into a lake.

Even Toyota who developed the JIT system realized that you can't JIT everything.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com