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Comment by samatman | Hacker News Reader

If one discovers that a brand of tshirt is being manufactured using slave labor, a reasonable response is to buy another brand of tshirt. Clearly more is needed to solve the problem, but the slave labor doesn't "rub off" on the other tshirt, it's obviously silly to say "don't wear tshirts, some of them are made by slaves".

It's no different with beef. Most beef in the USA comes from the USA, and you might raise various objections about the treatment of cattle, pollution from runoff, and so on, but it isn't contributing to rainforest deforestation, so that isn't a good reason to not eat it.

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Crops grown for animal feed is still a major cause of deforestation and USA beef can still be culpable for contributing. Realistically, I think most US cattle is fed from domestic feed, but I know Brazil exports a lot of animal feed to Asia and Europe.

To expand on your metaphor, not only are the t-shirts made with slave labor, but the cotton grown is harvested and milled by slave labor and without supply chain transparency it’s impossible to know if the new brand is also using the slave-labor cotton.

On the other hand most beef I eat in the UK is grass fed which is a whole lot better and does not consume much imported feed.

I’ll agree, but it’s important to remember and consider grass-fed cattle cannot scale to any level resembling societies current beef consumption.

AFAIK most beef in the UK is grass fed, not 100% so, but close.

grass fed or grass finished? Because if they graze for a bit, but then still have to fed a ton of feed crops to fatten them up fast enough, it's a distinction without a difference.

In the end, all versions of beef production remotely possible are either insanely inefficient in yield or in resource usage or objectively cruel (aka factory farms). A vegan diet is absolutely going to be the better choice on every reasonable metric for the vast majority of people and life situations (aka Inuits don't count).

Grass fed, usually grain finished.

> A vegan diet is absolutely going to be the better choice on every reasonable metric for the vast majority of people and life situations (aka Inuits don't count).

Is that true of a vegan diet high in fake meat? Highly wasteful because it extracts and uses a small amount from the input material and often the waste is old as animal feed. On top of that extra transport and energy inputs required, etc.

ON the other hand cattle can be part of a natural carbon sink environment. In Scotland (and other places) they are releasing cattle into the wild as part of rewilding!

>Highly wasteful because it extracts and uses a small amount from the input material and often the waste is old as animal feed. On top of that extra transport and energy inputs required, etc.

All of these apply to cattle as well and fake meat will still use less resources than real beef.

>On the other hand cattle can be part of a natural carbon sink environment

Not technically incorrect, but this is absolutely greenwashing

> Realistically, I think most US cattle is fed from domestic feed

I believe you could make this "all" without loss of accuracy, at least to three significant figures. Might have to relax "domestic" to cover Canada and Mexico, neither of which is deforesting to produce fodder.

The US is a major exporter of the crops fed to cattle, and livestock in general. The lack of supply chain transparency your counter-analogy relies on is nowhere in evidence in US agriculture.

Considering that alfalfa production is drying up the Colorado(?) river, wastefully and destructively producing feed crops at home instead of importing them is not the win you think it is.

> it isn't contributing to rainforest deforestation, so that isn't a good reason to not eat it.

Yes it is, only indirectly, as it's driving climate change. It's also destroying local ecosystems which you might have an interest in? Beef is just insanely inefficient as a food source. It's like finding out all t-shirts are manufactured using a process that throws 10lbs of manufactured cloth into a landfill for every shirt made.

Nothing is driving climate change more than AI, microchip's and Wars.

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