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Comment by scrivna | Hacker News Reader

Mushrooms aren’t “real food”?

Yes it’s processed with some additions, but so is a meat sausage.

Talking more broadly, not about OP. It seems a lot of people have this cognitive dissonance (I don’t know what to call it exactly) about what food is, maybe from their upbringing or religious beliefs or just society.

I’ve spoken to people that are like “I don’t like any vegetarian food”… and I’m like… so you don’t eat fries? (Oh uh I guess 90% of what I eat is already vegetarian… mmhmm)

Then if you dare get on to the topic of animal protein people are EXTREMELY conflicted in their views… if you eat a cow why not eat a horse? why not eat a dog, why not eat a monkey… oh hang on this is getting a bit close to eating humans… hang on are animals real feeling thinking creatures that while tasty also have some other properties maybe I haven’t considered before?

Hmm

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At the end of the day no matter what you eat, life consumes life. Even for photosynthetic organisms, often times they perform behaviors that preclude other life forms from having abundance after the first are established (e.g. black walnut trees poison the ground around them). If you eat nothing but plants there's no reason to act all high and mighty, your life still depends on the sacrifice of other life. All farmland destroys local environments. You are removing biodiversity and introducing a mono culture by definition. Then there's also this idea of the human bias towards consciousness. We are conscious individuals and we are biased towards other forms of conscious life; only Jain monks or other highly spiritual people seem to care about not stepping on insects anywhere they walk.

All you can ask at the end of the day is that all life is treated with humane respect. It doesn't really matter then whether your protein comes from a chicken or a bean if both are grown in such a way to limit harm to these life forms and to the wider environment. Short of living in the woods and homesteading, its hard to avoid widespread environmental damage to produce the things you need for modern life.

Yeah completely agree, we all do harm and benefits to the world/society.

I’m not making a moral judgement at all. I wanted to comment on the process of how people think (or don’t think) about the reasons they do or don’t eat things (like mushroom derived products or monkeys) saying mushroom based products are not “food” but eg cookies are food sounds silly to me. They’re both just ingredients mashed together.

Then they don’t want to continue this conversation because they don’t want to internalise what they’re feeling and REALLY actually think about their choices because if I think I might have to change, and then comes the very human feeling of “I don’t want to change” or “that’s not who I am” as if it’s bad to grow and change as a person.

I have to say I don't want to continue the conversation because your reply is incomprehensible. This isn't about touchy feely internal reflection.

All heavily marketed "trends" are predetermined to forward an ultimate agenda from the permanent elite class. Bill Gates doesn't want you eating beef and pork. He wants you eating his fake "meat" so they can shut down the livestock industry to save Mother Gaia from global warming.

The AMA recommends against red meat because it's high in saturated fats. It's never been proven that saturated fats are the cause of atherosclerosis.

Is this a conspiracy? Yes. But it's not a theory, the evidence is all around.

> I’ve spoken to people that are like “I don’t like any vegetarian food”… and I’m like… so you don’t eat fries? (Oh uh I guess 90% of what I eat is already vegetarian… mmhmm)

You can't (or shouldn't) live of fries. A complete vegetarian / vegan diet is not that enjoyable to eat, albeit all the processed vegetarian food make things way easier.

I started brainwashing my parents at 16 with vegetarianism because I trusted the scienc struggled for 15 years to gain any muscle because vegetable based proteins are less bioavailable and eating a lot of proteins is hard. Got kidney stones because of the vegetarian protein shakes.

After 15 years of eating a 95% low fat, high carb vegetarian diet (at least striving for it!) I started having serious health issues. Constant diarrhoea, stomach ulcers, anal bleeding. Took some meds to fix the symptoms and kind of live.

2 years of suffering and wanting to kill myself. The doctors were telling me I had high cholesterol (from what?) and needed to be put on statins and that I had to avoid eating the little meat I had. And anyway, it was probably stress related.

After 2 years, I decided to do exactly the opposite of what the doctors told me and dropped first all the processed carbs (bread, pasta, pizza - pretty hard considering I love baking bread and pizza), then after not seeing much improvements I dropped vegetables and fruit and started eating just eggs, meat and dairy.

All the symptoms disappeared in a week and I started losing weight. I eat very little calories (which is one of the best things for longevity), no hunger, my protein needs are met and I can still lift similar amount of weight.

So, right now I'm on a carnivore diet, mainly for health reasons.

From a moral point of view, I absolutely don't care, I would eat people if it were healthy (there are some deadly diseases you can get with cannibalism) and if other people wouldn't kill me (or eat me?) for it.

Anecdata where the data set is N=1.

Similarly, from my circle I have a complete reverse example.

Multitude of health problems that went away after going to raw vegan diet. IMHO a very extreme diet, but if it's the only (discovered) thing that helps, then why not.

> why not eat a dog, why not eat a monkey…

Eating carnivores is not a good idea because they have higher concentrations of poison etc.

> if you eat a cow why not eat a horse?

Sure, that's a valid point. Where can I buy it?

> Eating carnivores is not a good idea because they have higher concentrations of poison etc.

Presumably you would control their diet to avoid food chain toxin accumulation if you were to farm them. Tuna is carnivorous but that doesn't stop us from farming it much less catching it in the wild.

I would wager dog meat/slaughter is almost exclusively banned in the places it's banned due to cultural "ick" factors and nothing more.

horse meat IS eaten in many parts of the world but AFAIK is banned in the USA

Yeah I know. I was just being facetious.

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