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Comment by exploding_water | Hacker News Reader

The third solution doesn’t make much sense since livestock consumption is mostly made up of inedible foods that we can’t eat like husks, stems, leaves, etc. of plants. Livestock is effective for up-cycling foods we can’t digest and turning it into foods that we can such as meat and dairy.

Also there is a lot of food waste in the US. Good food that is suitable for livestock…

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Soooooooo "Roughage Products" which is fiber, that humans also need to eat BTW, is usually something like 25% of pelleted food. The main ingredient in pelleted food is usually digestible by humans and between 6% to 15% protein, it's like 25% to 30% depending on the pelleted food. Pound by pound going by the estimates that "eat cow advocates" use you need 12 pounds of food per pound of beef produced, if half of that is grass and half is balanced (which is about what you get for very fancy "grass fed" meat, because it's rated on % of life in grass at like 75%, but the cow eats way more when it's big), you are using around 1.5 pounds of grain per pound of beef. 12 pounds is the lowest estimate, it can go up to 20 or 22 pounds. Yeah corn and soy are less nutritious, but the reason those get planted industrially is that cows eat it. Other stuff like chickpea, rice, beans, hemp, could be grown instead of subsidized crop for cows and just feed cows grass and forage, which is better for the cows too.

In San Francisco right now there's no "entire life on farm" meat on the market. If I want to eat your "ideal cow" that eats _mostly_ inedible foods I have to buy land and raise it myself or get it alive from a farm. It's not a product one buys for human consumption. Cows in the US eat mostly human edible foods.

> In San Francisco right now there's no "entire life on farm" meat on the market. If I want to eat your "ideal cow" that eats _mostly_ inedible foods I have to buy land and raise it myself or get it alive from a farm. It's not a product one buys for human consumption. Cows in the US eat mostly human edible foods.

Search for "100% grass fed beef". There are many ranches that sell it around the country, even in California. Some deliver, some sell in farmer's markets, and a few products are even available in markets like Sprouts.[1]

The fact that it's not available in most supermarkets could be fixed.

1: https://www.sprouts.com/healthy-living/sprouts-butcher-shop-...

Can it be fixed and meet all the demand for beef today? And without making people poor in the process?

Perhaps the solution is a mix of both: eat less meat and only eat sustainably raise meat.

Grass-fed cows use more land and water than grain-fed cows. So no.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/08/13/746576239/is...

Are you going to take your bucket out to the Great Plains and capture some of that water?

I can play that game too. Are you going to solve hunger by conjuring more great plains and have the cows graze there?

Because that's the point I'm making. Grass fed beef cannot scale up beyond current production to solve hunger.

On other hand they can be grown where there is enough land and enough water... Just because parts of the world has lack of water doesn't mean there is lack everywhere. In many parts there is even enough rain.

https://www.markegardfamily.com/ does

Holy shit I need a subscription for the cuts that are worth it? This is peak Bay Area.

"main ingredient in pelleted food is usually digestible by humans"

You would truly need to be starving from famine or an "Instagram Go-Green Promoter" to eat this.

>You would truly need to be starving

That's what the debate is about.

I don't think we had a famine in the last half century that was caused purely by production. The beauty of a working free market is that starving people are willing to pay quite a lot for cheap food, and so it's virtually impossible to starve just by being poor. The problem was always that the food couldn't get to them. I'd bet on a half-half mix of regulatory issues and fighting.

But yeah, production issues can increase price, which will create a whole lot of issues downstream - for example even if people won't literally starve, some of them won't be able to both eat and make rent. Which will predictably piss them off, and this is how you get Arab Spring as a consequence of corn ethanol.

> starving people are willing to pay quite a lot for cheap food, and so it's virtually impossible to starve just by being poor.

I think you're missing out some key facts about poor people.

Like the fact they are poor. .50 dollar a day won't feed your family.

I don't think it's about eating the pellets, but about using the ingredients to make food for people instead of pellets.

Other factors aside, are you claiming that 100% grass fed beef is equivalent to grain finished cattle? I don't have any information to the contrary, and some do take liberties with terminology, but I'd be very interested to learn how this labeling is applied.

how do vegans rationalize owning pet animals?

I am a mere vegetarian but I justify it by aiming for generally better, not perfect.

(Also I adopted my cat about a decade before I became a vegetarian, it doesn't seem morally superior to destroy her because I had a change of heart.)

I see. I eat meat and I know about the issues (health wise and environmentally). I’m trending towards less, largely for health reasons.

My ideal world (in my head) is that human beings don’t interfere with animals at all (to eat, as pets, to showcase). We should interfere in only cases where it’s critical (like a natural disaster treating animals).

Is there a word for this viewpoint?

If there is a word for it I don't know it, sorry.

I live with and care for a dog. We are coevolved species. Your frame of ‘owning’a pet is not shared by all.

When scientists take all the complex factors into account and do the sums it turns out that in general plant-based foods are still far more sustainable than livestock, e.g. https://theconversation.com/climate-explained-how-the-climat...

I haven't seen one of these that takes major factors into account. Tires and pet food contain animals. Animal by-products are used everywhere. Switching away would require replacements. Replacements would become more efficient with economy of scale, but initial switching costs will be high. Some replacements, like food for our obligate-carnivore cats, might not be possible.

Simplest example: Beyond meat is 2-4x the price of meat.

It seems pretty clear that switching away from protein sources like lamb and cows in favor of pork and chicken is carbon-positive.

There's likely an optimal level of meat consumption. Unfortunately most of our information comes from either an industry and farmers dependent on our continued meat consumption, or dishonest vegan evangelists.

Which do you suppose is the bigger problem in food information: dishonest vegans—0.5% of the US population, btw—evangelizing or the lion’s share of the meat-eating public doesn’t like to hear and acknowledge that their favorite dishes are harmful to the planet? I suspect the latter is a more widespread issue…

> Which do you suppose is the bigger problem in food information: dishonest vegans—0.5% of the US population

Being a small share of the population doesn't mean they're invisible or silent. Here on the UK my leftist self that far too often reads the Guardian, one of the biggest newspaper in the nation, there's many times a week an article advocating the vegan diet. One of the two resident recipe writers only prints vegan recipes. I'm pretty sure it's newspaper policy never to print any diet related news that's not vegan-favourable, I guess it's their way of "changing the world". It's conquered a large part of the popular opinion, even though as you suggest the percentage of actual vegans might be very small.

As a meat eater that is non indifferent to the ecological issues we're facing, and believes the vegan diet NOT to be the answer, I would appreciate a more educated and reasoned approach to a hairy question than the constant evangelizing and ignorant repetition of meat bad, vegan good.

Solar and wind energy used to be multiple times more expensive than other more polluting methods. And yet they’re now much cheaper and going down every year.

We developed a vaccine against Covid in less than two years, which we previously thought to be impossible to do.

If we really tried, the problems you mentioned would have a sizable chance of being solved.

I haven't seen a study deeply analyzing non-food uses either. I suspect though that while there will indeed be replacement costs they will be less than the costs of continuing the current system.

Michellin apparently already makes "vegan" tyres. Even for cat food, there are already vegan supplements and the science will improve. Beyond Meat being only 2x the price of killed meat is I think quite impressive when you consider how long each industry has had to optimise.

Yes switching from cows to chickens is better with regards to carbon but the problem is it's much worse with regards to animal welfare since many more animals need to be killed per kilo of meat..

There could be an optimal level of meat consumption if you just consider the environment, but it's far below what we're doing now, and given the urgent climate action that's recommended by expert scientists, it seems wise to reduce this consumption as much as possible. We're _far_ more likely to reduce too slowly than too quickly..

> There's likely an optimal level of meat consumption.

Just going to go out on a limb and say the optimal level is probably less than the typical North American or European diet... Societies that are more resource constrained eat a lot less meat.

> Societies that are more resource constrained eat a lot less meat.

They also lag the life expectancy curve by about 10 years. There are a lot of factors at play obviously, but the universal trend is richer countries have better medical care, education, and more complete diets.

There is so much livestock that while most livestock consumption is inedible foods, the rest is large reason for food shortage. The amount of land they consume takes land from grains.

>grain accounts for 13% of cattle dry feed. In 2021 China imported 28m tonnes of corn to feed its pigs,

The amount of livestock is ridiculous. 63% of mammal biomass is lifestock, 35% humans. Wild mammals are insignificant.

The bulk of cattle feed is roughage but the majority of the calories is usually palatable, at least in the winter.

Pigs and chickenz eat almost completely palatable food.

Please share a reference, I am not sure I understand what you mean.

The big majority of agriculture land is spend on producing fodder not husks, stems and so on. I mean an animal need calories too, yes a ruminant can digest cellulose, but the majority is soy, corn and wheat.

I look forward to hear more. Thanks.

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