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Comment by steve_adams_86 | Hacker News Reader

If you know much about agriculture, this question has an almost certain answer. The contrast of energy and resource expense between plants and animals is staggering, even if you’re comparing a less demanding animal like chicken. You can refrigerate, process, and ship many plants by sea, truck, and plane and they won’t catch up to animal foods.

We’re also not seeing a clear economic picture in Canada and the USA because subsidies/tax breaks/etc can significantly transform the final costs of something like milk or beef in a grocery store.

My kids like the fake meats, but I’m pretty content with whole grains and legumes covering most of my protein requirements. Once you get over meat, you almost never think about it and the substitutes seem unnecessarily unhealthy (they’re kind of like savoury junk food with a ton of salt and saturated fat).

I think it’s also important to acknowledge how filthy, torturous, destructive, and unethical the vast majority of animal agriculture activities are.

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The alternative we do is:

* Order vegetarian when eating out. Non-western cuisines do incredible food that doesn't have any meat in it.

* Only buy meat + eggs from a local farm that effectively does things "small batch". Their farm is open for visitors and you can see pigs and chickens that actually look happy. The pigs even run over to you when they smell you and you can see their cute little tails wigglin'.

* Try to eat less in general.

I don't know if I'll ever personally break from eating meat. But I do think that paying prices that are actually related to the cost of raising the animals, and doing so from a place that actually lets them live a pleasant life before slaughter feels better.

> Order vegetarian when eating out

I've been pretty successful with the opposite, only getting meat when I eat out / special occasion and not stocking it in the house.

The other upside to this(at least here in UK) is that it's easy to find a restaurant that serves local meat and produce, but it's extremely hard to find local meat in stores - even "butchers"(I put that in quotes, since I firmly believe that 90% of British "butchers" are basically cosplaying as such and are nothing more than stores that sell factory-prepared meat in a store meant to look like a traditional butcher store) are not that keen to tell you where the meat is actually from - when pushed you might find out that your local "butcher" is actually selling meat raised and slaughtered in Denmark or Poland.

One advantage to US "exurban? not-quite-rural? not sure what to call it but 30-50 miles from a big city" living is you can actually find smallish farms that do everything on-site and buy from them.

If you're willing to use freezers you can even stock up for quite a long time (some places will even let you pick the cow and process it for you and give you all the meat).

There is a vegan activist from the UK named Ed Winters who has some damning content about abattoirs and animal agriculture in general in the country. He’s very eloquent and diligent about sourcing good data, and it seems as though your suspicions about butchers selling questionable meat is astute.

Where I live it’s not better. The average piece of meat comes from a slice of hell in some feedlot or crowded enclosure, labelling laws make it look okay, and people carry on and eat it. Butchers selling nicer meat have variable suppliers and, when I was eating meat, I’d notice over time that supplier quality was gradually decreasing and never increasing. Like they started with these great ideals and eventually had to give in and be able to reliably get a product and a decent margin off of it. Meat is a major casualty of the race to the bottom.

> Their farm is open for visitors and you can see pigs and chickens that actually look happy. The pigs even run over to you when they smell you and you can see their cute little tails wigglin'.

That reminded me of a childhood memory. We didn't have a farm, but we had few animals (sheeps, chickens, rabbits). One year my father decided to buy a piglet from a spring fair. Me and my brothers were thrilled, it was playfull and curious (not like sheep, who were rather booring), kinda like a dog. My father also really liked to take care of it. I remember that he even applied some soothing cream on it after a rather bad sunburn. But in the end it was still bought and raised for meat. My father had always been a guy that slaughtered animals for other people in the neighborhoud, pigs also. But this one really got under his skin. He did still slaughter it, but sweared to never raise and kill a pig himself. It reportedly was kinda like killing a puppy.

Yes, my family raised pigs and it became unbearable. They were smarter than any dog I had met at the time. They were kind and curious animals. They loved to play and had favourite foods.

After a few years we had a bad slaughter day in which one pig survived a bullet to the head and started making some of the most horrifying movements and screams I’ve ever heard.

We were all aware that we’d killed a sentient creature that we cared for. Not much unlike killing our dogs. We talked about it several times over days and weeks, here and there over months, then not much from then on. We never got pigs again.

Somehow it took me another 15 years to stop eating animals. It blows my mind that I was able to keep it up after that day – it was so gory and brutal, and simultaneously entirely unnecessary. We ate those pigs because we liked it, not because we needed it.

Buying local and small batch generates more carbon dioxide and is less sustainable. https://worksinprogress.substack.com/p/notes-on-progress-an-...

Ethical/morally it is probably way better. Less so than plant-based.

I'm curious about this but the article doesn't really go into any depth summarizing things.

For example:

> Grass-fed beef seems like the environmentally-friendly option. Hormone-free chickens do too. Yet intensive livestock farming in feedlots often has a lower environmental cost, despite a higher price when it comes to animal welfare.

I'm not an expert in this space, but I do know that terms like "organic", "grass fed", "free range", and others can have wildly different meanings depending on the farm and how they're regulated. For example, "free range" doesn't necessarily mean that chickens are able to walk around a farm; it just means that there is "access" to an outdoor space. The links I clicked on in that article didn't seem to really account for any of this and set up a comparison. The one about feed seems to compare the environmental impact of mass feeding with "organic" feed compared to industrial feed. But that's not applicable to my situation.

>* Only buy meat + eggs from a local farm that effectively does things "small batch". Their farm is open for visitors and you can see pigs and chickens that actually look happy. The pigs even run over to you when they smell you and you can see their cute little tails wigglin'.

I understand this as an ethical argument, but are you assuming any "small batch" operation is more sustainable?

I can't imagine it not being sustainable, no. Farms that grow all kinds of crops and raise many different kinds animals are sophisticated systems, and humans have learned over centuries how to best utilize them in ways that don't pollute rivers or emit incredible amounts of methane. The reason why they don't work in much of the modern world is because they don't optimize their output for maximum pounds of beef that gets ultimately sold to McDonald's, for example.

I was doing something like this last year when it hit me how bizarre it was that I wanted to see happy animals at farms when the intent was to kill them for the sole purpose of eating them. Like, what do I care if they’re happy if I’m content to take that all away from them? Why is it logical to prefer they’re happy up until the moment they’re killed – do I think their experience matters? If so, why would I kill them? If not, why does it matter if they’re happy?

If I care about their experience it seems really bizarre to kill them unless I absolutely need to. So far I’ve found no evidence that I do need to, and I’ve actually come to enjoy not eating them. I’ve become far better at cooking and it’s way easier to afford high quality ingredients.

I genuinely believe it’s great that you prefer to source food from places that at least make an effort to provide better experiences to the animals. That alone is a huge step forward for animals as well as people. I hope more and more people make the same effort.

I'm not sure I understand the logic. Everybody die, is it a reason to not seek happiness during the time we're aliveN

Everybody does die, but the animals we farm die on a schedule predetermined from the moment they're bred to be killed. That's not equivalent to the way humans tend to die, in accordance with our intent to have agency and opportunity and so on before fate befalls us. So, humans do die and that's inevitable, but we generally live without a knife on our throats many years before we'd naturally die. Animals on the other hand are farmed to their prime and killed, or used for milk or eggs until their production slows. Then they are killed, again, without any agency or opportunity to live in accordance with their own nature. They live by our desires, die by our desires, and generally suffer immensely along the way. That doesn't sit well with me.

As for our happiness, why does eating meat bring anyone happiness? If it's simple, fleeting pleasure at the cost of a sentient creature's life, it doesn't seem worth it. Pleasure is nice too, but there are better things and better ways to find pleasure than through consumption. Really, the world is filled with countless ways to enjoy myself that don't require the suffering or killing of sentient creatures.

Eating all kinds of foods brings me happiness. They also nourish me better than meat, so meat isn't even necessary. Meat is one small group of foods, and everything else is this massive world of other foods to enjoy. They almost all come at a smaller cost than meat does, financially, environmentally, and psychologically speaking.

That's the gist of it. I get a lot of pleasure from caring for animals. I take time out on my morning walk to pet cats, watch the birds, so on. I dive in the ocean to see what the marine life is doing, record footage to share with people. These things bring me far more joy than a pork chop or a steak. So why choose the steak? If I'm to do that, I have to pretend that it doesn't carry the environmental and external costs of suffering and death. I have to tell myself that I wouldn't rather care for that cow. That's not true of any animal. I'd rather it had a chance to live and thrive, just like I want to.

Some people believe animals don't have the capacity to suffer and that they're lower beings than humans. I see no evidence to support that, other than the very weak "we can't possibly know" or "they aren't as intelligent". These are irrelevant to me. They are more like us than they are different in the vast majority of ways. Hell, we can live with pig lungs in our bodies. An octopus can solve puzzles, as can a raven. Cows mourn when their calfs are taken away. Dogs develop rich relationship with their families, human or otherwise.

You can say no, none of this is evidence that animals are like humans, or that they're sentient. But again, I don't see much evidence suggesting they aren't.

So, the logic is that animals suffering and dying to get on my plate doesn't make me happy. It brings me a lot of sadness. I enjoy other foods just as much, so that then is the logical path forward for me.

I don't criticize others for eating animals. I did for a long time. I raised animals, I hunted them, I fished for them, all of that. It took me almost 40 years to arrive here. If you eat meat and you don't care if animals live or die, suffer or otherwise, that's your call and I'm not for a moment condemning anyone's choices or beliefs.

It is so frustrating how much well-entrenched subsidies and tax breaks have distorted our (consumer's) notion of what is "regular" vs "expensive".

Same thing can be said about VC funded tech companies too. Does anyone really know the cost of an Uber? What about the true cost of that Door Dash delivery?

Frustrating, no. Half the people in the US couldn't afford food if the costs weren't low. Paying subsidies is a way to keep labor costs low while keeping people fed.

That itself is frustrating too though, right? Why do we need subsidies to be able to afford life’s most basic staples?

Most people have long since forgotten about all the ways the American food system has been engineered over the years. In a way that's a success because things like famine are unthinkable to the average American. It's something that happens in "some other country."

It's part of the disconnect that industrialization and urbanization has brought. People don't really understand agriculture or agriculture policy anymore.

Things like adding iodine to salt; iron, thiamin, and niacin to bread; extra vitamin D to milk. Federal stockpiles of various types of food from grain to cheese. All done to improve the general health and wellbeing, and as a measure of insurance in the event of war or disaster.

The only thing most people on the internet seem to know about today is the old politician's cry of "We're paying farmers not to grow food!" Yeah, well, there's a reason for that. When the farmers go out of business, you have no food.

It's not ideal. It's not perfect. But it's worked, and has kept America fat and happy for almost a century. Try to understand more than what's right in front of you.

A good parallel is the rising costa of electricity in the UK - should small businesses fail and citizens go cold because of geopolitical issues & wars outside their control causing price spikes? Or should the government help smooth things out. The latter seems ideal while the longer term problems are worked out.

> Half the people in the US couldn't afford food if the costs weren't low. Paying subsidies is a way to keep labor costs low while keeping people fed.

Or to assure a minimum well being for the population. A good economy is just a means for the goal of providing well being the citizens.

Even if keeping people fed increased labor cost over letting them starve, we should still keep people fed.

Ok, but maybe we should be shifting subsidies away from animal-based food and towards plant-based food (for humans).

"Frustrating" is by itself vague, so I agree with your point. I meant: frustrating for having an informed conversation about how a changing world and a changing climate suggest a changing diet. Past subsidies to animal agriculture make it easier for people to now dismiss new plant-based foods as fringe and not for them, because of their cost.

There are so many ways that having a plant-based good system is far superior to what we have. I don’t really understand why we’re so intent on devoting so much wealth to eating animals.

Plants high in protein are easier to preserve, cheaper to grow, cheaper to transport, can be stored with less energy, the list goes on.

It seems like we do this entirely because most of us think it tastes good. There’s no reason we couldn’t sustain ourselves on a fraction of the meat, dairy, and eggs that we have now.

I do wonder what I’m missing. There must be more to it.

Agreed! I always thinking of driving, specifically roads and fuel in the US. They absorb huge amounts of money, we rarely see the true cost.

Indeed you are correct about the

> contrast of energy and resource expense between plants and animals is staggering, even if you’re comparing a less demanding animal like chicken.

I would like to see this study[0][1] repeated for various types of beans and legumes:

> Pork, chicken, eggs, and dairy were all pretty similar, but beef was a different story. Compared to the average of the other four, beef required 28 times the area of land per calorie, 11 times the water for irrigation, six times the nitrogen fertilizer, and it resulted in five times the greenhouse gas emissions For reference, they calculated similar impacts for potatoes, wheat, and rice. Compared to the average of those, beef’s footprint ballooned to 160 times the land, eight times the water, 19 times the nitrogen fertilizer, and 11 times the greenhouse gas emissions. Per gram of protein, the story is largely the same except that potatoes, wheat, and rice have less of an advantage due to their lower protein content.

The math listed in the article doesn't completely check out, e.g. they imply that [pork, chicken, eggs, dairy] require 160x (beef:plants) / 28x (beef:chicken) = 5.3x times (chicken:plants) as much land as [potatoes, wheat, rice], which makes sense, but also imply that [pork, chicken, eggs, dairy] 8x (beef:plants) / 11x (beef:chicken) = 0.72x times (chicken:plants) as much water as [potatoes, wheat, rice]. It's not thermodynamically possible for chickens to use less water per calorie than their feedstock. I never opened the actual study[1] though, I'm assuming they have reasonable results inside the study.

I also think that analysis vs. protein is more relevant than vs. calories -- which is why I think they should be compared against high-protein plants like beans and legumes.

0: https://arstechnica.com/science/2014/07/among-meats-beef-has...

1: https://sci-hub.ru/10.1073/pnas.1402183111

> We’re also not seeing a clear economic picture in Canada and the USA because subsidies/tax breaks/etc can significantly transform the final costs of something like milk or beef in a grocery store.

Thanks, this was the question I came to ask about the why is my fake meat more expensive than ground beef at the grocery store.

A big part of the price is just that fake meat is currently a duopoloy of luxury brands. When Tyson has a full rollout of their fake meat products you'll see the prices go down.

> the substitutes seem unnecessarily unhealthy

As a meat eater, this has been my philosophy. If you’re gonna go vegetarian, just go for it. Vegeterian food is delicious and there’s so much choice! Entire cultures of amazing natively vegetarian foods with no need for weird meat substitutes.

Personally, legumes don’t have the right macros. Neither do fake meats. Cottage cheese and greek yogurt make better meat substitutes imo.

Usually you need to combine multiple different beans and legumes with rice to get the right macros

Eh, sometimes I want a burger and fries. Cottage cheese/yogurt burger doesn't sound so great to me.

FWIW the vegetarian “whole food” version of a burger and fries is probably a falafel sandwich and fries.

Yeah so eat a burger and fries when it feels right :)

No need to go full vegetarian. No need to eat cows every day. Balance

But if the substitutes are good enough (some of them are now, imo), that seems like the best of both worlds.

> As a meat eater, this has been my philosophy. If you’re gonna go vegetarian, just go for it.

I never understood this meme. What exactly is the philosophy? A philosophy of how others should partake in a lifestyle that you don’t?

It's odd enough to tell others what to prefer, but it's not clear what the impact of "As a meat eater" is supposed to have.

"As a straight man, my philosophy is if you're gonna be gay, just be gay this certain way." —It's nonsensical to me.

A philosophy of how others should partake in a lifestyle that you don’t?

Sounds like how the vegan people at work would comment on other people's lunches.

Well, I understand an unsolicited ethical prescription more than an unsolicited one of taste.

In other words, if you're telling people which foods to prefer, and you don't even have an ethical angle on it, what exactly are you doing?

It means that when I have a vegetarian meal, I don’t look for fake meat. I just have a dish that was designed to be vegetarian.

The “as a meat eater” part signifies that I’m not vegetarian which seems like an important distinction in this context.

Do you mean they have the wrong macros for you personally or you personally believe the macros are bad in general?

Macros are an interesting thing. I’m far more interested in micros though, and various plants have them more than any animal foods. The balance of macros I get is reliably sufficient to stay healthy, I almost never need to think about it.

I suppose if you’re a body builder it might be appealing to eat animal products, but you can still swing it with plants.

It's important to acknowledge that, and also that the question of sustainability arises only because of population growth. Growing demand encroaches on land (for a variety of reasons) at either a higher or lower rate, but still encroaches. A stagnant global growth rate would render the problem moot, which is going to happen in 100 or so years. In the meantime we're dealing with environmental problems that require immediate rectifying, and varying consumer habits would be wholly insufficient to do that, though still welcome. Waste in particular could be disrupted with better policy, and frankly, so could agriculture. Meat is subsidized. It's practically a matter of policy to encourage consumption as it stands. To say nothing of regulation, the potential for less land-intensive feed, etc.

> My kids like the fake meats, but I’m pretty content with whole grains and legumes covering most of my protein requirements. Once you get over meat, you almost never think about it and the substitutes seem unnecessarily unhealthy (they’re kind of like savoury junk food with a ton of salt and saturated fat).

Personally I often have vegetarian dishes in eateries or when ordering take-out, when available - it is probably just me, but none of those really feel "worse" than meat, nor do I find myself feeling like I'm missing out on it. Even when having fast food, a pea/bean based burger patty feels good enough to me and is a similarly enjoyable experience to a meat based one.

That said, I still sometimes have meat (and other animal products) as well, given that I'm not educated enough or don't feel competent enough to nail down what exactly my dietary requirements might be, though talking with a GP and getting blood work done every now and then can be at least a bit helpful in that regard. Still, there is a certain comfort in having fried eggs or something like that once a week, although some suggest that many of the oils used in cooking might also be worse than olive oil.

For the majority of people, the quote by Michael Pollan is probably decent advice:

  Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Of course, some people's strong enjoyment of meat aside, it's hard to even know exactly what you're eating on a daily basis, given the many additives used for a variety of reasons in food products nowadays. And recognizing that sometimes going to sleep a bit hungry is okay might also take work, as would training yourself to recognize the difference between hunger, thirst and stress/boredom as well.

(note: adjacently to this topic, carnivorous pets also still enjoy a diet with lots of meat in it, currently no good "compromise" there, their dietary requirements have to be taken into account as well and messing about with those feels unwise)

> I think it’s also important to acknowledge how filthy, torturous, destructive, and unethical the vast majority of animal agriculture activities are.

I've heard that Dominion from 2018 can be rather eye opening, though viewer discretion is advised: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_(2018_film)

Personally, I've also gone hunting with my father and have helped dispose of the guts, carry game back home, skin the carcass, cut/snap the bones and so on. I'm not saying that everyone needs to do that, but partaking in the process of preparing meat (even in a farm setting) is a humbling experience. Maybe not enough to "scare" one away from eating meat, but definitely enough to make one reconsider how much meat they consume.

> whole grains and legumes covering most of my protein requirements.

What are your protein/calorie goals, and how are you meeting them with grains and legumes? I have to take pea protein and on top of that eat a lot of eggs because otherwise I can't imagine getting enough protein just from beans and oats. If you avoid oxalates, it becomes even more difficult.

I wouldn't say the `vast majority` are `filthy, torturous, destructive, and unethical`. While that is undoubtedly out there, is sizeable, and should be addressed; it's far from the vast majority. You have to remember that these are still people raising these animals and that most people aren't monsters. They feel compassion and often aren't given a fair shake. Even the calloused, hard-ass, old-timers get teary eyed in certain situations. Hell, a lot of them don't like going to the zoo for ethical reasons.

Source; grew up in a hog-raising family in big-ag country.

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