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Comment by bragr | Hacker News Reader

In some sense, this is no different than that a huge portion of agriculture goes to feed farm animals. It does not make sense from a purely economic nutrition delivery perspective but since people have a preference for meat, especially lobster, people are willing to bear the cost.

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The "purely economic" perspective is why it does make sense to them.

Raise the prices of the baitfish, or outlaw using them. Do you have another method?

I think realistically we're not going to make any real progress either way until there's a big cultural shift away from regular meat eating.

I don't think that's required. Look, they have quotas on cod fishing, and AFAICT those are effective. Whale hunting is mostly outlawed.

There's a TON of progress that could be made without any changes in meat eating. Animal husbandry only accounts for a few % of emissions in the U.S. for example.

They said purely "economic nutrition delivery", not merely purely economic. I assume they're talking about $/cal

Eating meat and other products from higher up the food chain makes perfect nutritional sense. Much more than optimizing for calories per buck which leads to a diet full of HFCS horrors.

Nutrition isn't the same as calories; you can have a more efficient diet in terms of recommended daily values of macro and micro nutrients without having to rely on "products" higher up the food chain.

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