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Comment by colordrops | Hacker News Reader

We still maintain animal agriculture due to it being considered baseline as everyone was born into it. But seen from a clean slate, as if it wasn't yet adopted, it is a strictly negative practice in almost every measure - health outcomes, water usage, environmental impact, suffering of animals, subsidy burden, and disease risk. It should absolutely be banned.

I know that knee-jerk reactions will cause a lot of people to respond negatively to my comment, but, just like climate change, all the data and science unequivocally support my statements.

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I get irritated that every post here recently about a wild bird virus (H5N1) entering mammal populations, has to feature a holy diatribe about the evils of factory farming.

To be clear, this is a wild avian virus that jumped the species barrier to numerous mammals in the wild now, including marine mammals, with no relationship ever to farming practices.

Yes, factory farming is gross and dangerous and a disease vector. Currently, though, it is likely the only vector through which this virus is being monitored for a potential further jump to humans.

The vegan argument that keeps cropping up here is not much more than a "tisk tisk, you deserve horrors because... (X)". In each of these posts you could replace farming practices with overpopulation, spread of humans into wildlife populations, global warming, overuse of antivirals/antibiotics, ventilation systems, air travel, large religious gatherings, or people not wearing masks all day every day.

My point is just that responding to a post about a virus jumping species by writing a public service announcement implying that people have brought this upon themselves because of your pet cause "X" is basically the HN equivalent of the guy with the sandwich board saying REPENT THE END IS NEAR.

> To be clear, this is a wild avian virus that jumped the species barrier to numerous mammals in the wild now, including marine mammals, with no relationship ever to farming practices.

The rest aside, wasn't the "bird" part of bird flu referring to poultry, mainly? Which presumably would be related to farming practices.

Bird flu makes itself most prominently known in chicken farms, yes, but they are brought there by wild birds.

You could have the cleanest, ethicalest, modernest chicken farm known to man, but there's only so much you can do until a wild disease sees a high population density and says "I'mma infect that".

Your comment is ranting and bordering on ad hominem. It would be no different if you substituted "factory farming" with "climate change". The science and data support my statements. Do you have anything to say in response to that rather than just tone policing?

You list factory farming and climate change, and say they're bad. I agree. You say data and science support your statements. You don't list the data or science. But moreover, you don't even mention the virus which is the topic of this thread or attempt to tie it through any data to the things you list in your post. In fact, the spread is H5N1 to mammals is largely unrelated to any human activity. So it's hard to know to which data or science you're referring, and I suppose people are supposed to come to their own conclusions. But as I said, I find that these types of posts detract from and derail useful conversations on this topic.

https://www.foodunfolded.com/article/animal-agriculture-is-i...

Again, this article doesn't mention H5N1, avian flu, etc. As with your initial comment, it's untethered from any useful discussion about this topic. It can serve as total absolute verification of your statements about farming practices, but it still does nothing for a conversation about the mutations necessary for h5n1 to go airborne between humans. So back to my original point, I think these kinds of comments serve to derail technical and useful conversations by injecting broad political/social statements that serve little purpose except to demo the bonafides of whoever posts them first.

You are being disingenuous with your own tone, you started up comment by calling their post a diatribe against factory farming.

what would you call it?

Eh. The problem pandemic-wise is the number of humans in slobbering distance of the animals: pets like cats are less of a problem (toxoplasmosis) because they're in less proximity with each-other. But all the unsanitary conditions add up to a gigantically increased chance of developing new pathogens when compared to most natural settings.

Yes factory farms are basically a training ground for viruses to learn how to spread.

They look practically custom designed for this task.

The purpose of a system is what it does.

It is impossible to get someone to understand something when their fast food, bacon, and grilled steaks depend upon their not understanding it. Meat ag is unwise for many reasons below but there is widespread resistance as per above. It requires leadership and alternative products to overcome.

- Pandemic evolution, a few examples: BSE, COVID (indirectly), MERS, Q fever, Nipah, H1N1, H1N2, H2N2, H3N1, H3N2, H5N1, H7N7

- Climate change

- Antibiotic resistance (given to cows because they can't digest corn properly)

- Lower overall caloric production and net higher food prices

- Freshwater and oceanic dead zones

- Air pollution

- Soil pollution

- Somewhere down the list is animal cruelty, but it's historically been an unpersuasive argument

Edit: Erroneously listed "H1N1" twice

Edit2: Maybe not force, but taxation to make an FDA prime steak cost $1000 instead of $100.

Not sure where you buy your steaks, but you are overpaying.

By this logic, human travel should also be banned. It's bad for disease risk, the environment, etc.

It's not that people believe meat has no downsides, it's that we believe the positives outweigh the negatives.

We enjoy meat.

Not banned, replaced. We're still going to eat food after we give up meat, and we're still going to travel after we give up primarily fossil fuel driven travel.

We're not giving up meat.

And even after lab grown meat becomes the norm there will still be cows raised for food to satisfy high end markets.

Sounds like you agree with me that we're giving up meat. We gave up horse travel and there are still horses and occasional horse travel to satisfy high end markets.

I'm counting lab grown meat as meat here. I'll still be eating chicken, beef, etc, it just won't have come from a living animal.

My point is that the world is not going to switch to plant or insect protein.

Thank you, kind overlord, for replacing the bad things with good things! Please monitor our behavior and communications to ensure all lives are compliant!!!

> By this logic, human travel should also be banned. It's bad for disease risk, the environment, etc.

Shhh you’re giving the hall monitors ideas.

Surely there is some middle ground between "we should ban this behavior entirely the second this comment is read" and "we should never acknowledge or discuss or take responsibility for the inevitable harm that this behavior causes"

Perhaps the middle ground could be the health certificates or vaccine passports? More mRNA concoctions with a side dish of myocarditis or pericarditis? What do you prefer?

Meat is more necessary to livelihood than schmoozy business trips to Singapore or a shallow influencer's five-star trip to Tahiti.

Until you can come up with a way for people to eat grass themselves I think that animal agriculture will continue.

We already do eat grass. Corn, barley, wheat, oats, etc…

We eat the seeds, not the blade. I would assume by "eating grass" op meant eating the grass blades. Maybe in the future vegans will genetically engineer themselves to chew their cud. That actually sounds like a cool scifi backstory.

Cow (field) corn is nasty shit, but CAFOs still feed it to cows and use antibiotics to keep them from dying from it. Google Image Search "muddy feedlot".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_animal_feeding_op...

That has nothing to do with what I said.

It's also used to make corn chips, corn-meal, and the sweetener in everything Americans consume.

Yeap. And HFCS and ethanol for mandated use in gasoline.

We don't eat or are able to digest the majority of even those crops. Cows can eat alfalfa which is nearly free to grow and provides free fertilizer for the soil for future rotated crops. Not growing alfalfa would mean relying more on fossil fuel derived fertilizer and increase carbon emmissions from farming.

Banning would be less impactful than popularizing some widely more preferable alternative.

Banning is impossible in democracies because doing so would be wildly unpopular and sure to leave the door wide open to opposition parties promising to repeal the ban.

You are correct that we need a more preferable alternative. Our best shot is probably lab-grown meat, which unfortunately is now banned in FL because some conservatives have chosen to make it a culture war issue. However, perhaps it will gain traction elsewhere. Really we need massive government support - a moon shot for lab-grown meat - to accelerate its development.

> Banning is impossible in democracies

> lab-grown meat, which unfortunately is now banned in FL

Unless Florida is no longer a democracy, I don't see how these two statement square. It's clearly possible to ban things with enough political will, no matter how smart or stupid the ban is.

It's straightforward to square the statements. The first one is about expected political will. The second one is about something that happened with sufficient political will.

Because meat is popular and lab-grown meat is not. I’m not saying banning anything is impossible. I’m saying banning meat is impossible. Banning lab-grown meat is easy. It doesn’t take much political will to ban an unpopular, unknown or early-stage technology.

Are there brands of lab grown meat now available?

I know just what you’re saying, agree, and think you accidentally overlooked one other proven alternative: centuries of lentils and grains complete essential amino wisdom used in parts of India and likely elsewhere.

Anecdotally,

I don't believe the US government is capable of making tough decisions like that, or anything that inconveniences anyone really. The next crisis is going to be every person for themselves, either directly or indirectly.

The US government is designed NOT to be able to do that. And thankfully so.

While disappointing, I agree based on what's currently possible.

The problem of hyperindividualism is getting only more pronounced in the US, and it's possible there will be a hard shift right to deregulation, strip-mining of social welfare, destruction of community commonwealth, austerity, and tax cuts for the rich.

It isn’t disappointing at all. The US government was intentionally designed to prevent fast, large decisions especially if they affect individual rights. Otherwise would-be tyrants and control freaks would try to control other people on everything.

If anything we need a return to more celebration and protection of the individual.

Sound like the US fear their own government more than foreign ones.

Easy to exploit.

BTW if you fear control by tyrants maybe the US version of capitalism is a bad idea.

It doesn’t matter because meat is delicious, densely nutritious and frankly not up for discussion amongst the general population. Even if it isn’t meat, a mostly vegetarian country like India is heavily reliant on the milk that comes from cows for their protein requirement.

> a mostly vegetarian country like India

One to two fifths of Indians are vegetarian [1]. The majority eat meat.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_by_country

31% are vegetarian. An additional 9% consume only eggs. 30% of those who consume meat do so very infrequently.

> 30% of those who consume meat do so very infrequently

You misread the quote. Less than 30% consume meat regularly; 30% consume it infrequently.

--> 43% of those who consume any meat, consume it infrequently.

Yup. Three fifths of Indians eat meat, and four fifths to a half of those that do do so regularly.

> densely nutritious

Aside from the fact that red meat is not particularly nutritious in terms of calories or nutrient variety and has well established health hazards for us, the density of nutrition doesn't matter. The resources needed to produce a certain amount of calories / 'nutrition' involved do.

Beef has just about the worst possible resources-to-calories/'nutrition' value of any mass-produced food. The amount of water, land, and feed that goes toward growing cattle until they're old enough to go to the slaughterhouse is enormous compared to grains, legumes, nuts, chicken, fish, etc. Legumes often are a more complete source of "protein", which is actually several variations of protein.

And then there's cattle being the number one source of methane in the world, and methane is a major greenhouse gas.

>a mostly vegetarian country like India is heavily reliant on the milk that comes from cows for their protein requirement.

Legumes like chickpeas and lentils are far more likely than the more resource and labor intensive processes involved in dairy/cheese.

If you think otherwise you apparently don't do much grocery shopping.

> Aside from the fact that red meat is not particularly nutritious in terms of calories or nutrient variety

Animal proteins are generally more complete, containing all essential amino acids, which is more difficult to find with plant protein.

> and has well established health hazards for us,

Mostly correlative studies, I wouldn't call them well established.

> The amount of water, land, and feed that goes toward growing cattle until they're old enough to go to the slaughterhouse is enormous

These stats are fairly deceitful. Cattle are raised on low quality "marginal land" that would otherwise not be able grow proper crops. Cows with their four stomachs can digest rough grasses that grow there, making the otherwise useless land useful. Generally when you hear the "amount of water" required to raise a cow, this is simply rainwater. These headlines that get thrown around imply a massive amount of resources being diverted away from growing crops to raise cattle instead, but that is completely false.

You can have 0.2 lbs of red meat or 3 lbs of lentils for the same amount of protein. It’s not easy to consume that amount of lentils per day.

Not sure where your numbers are from. Cooked chicken and pork are ~30% protein, beef ~25%, lentils ~10%[0]. So no, you'd have to eat 0.5lbs of lentils for the same protein as 0.2lbs beef. (Lentils are 25-29% protein by weight, but during cooking they absorb water)

[0]: https://chefscornerstore.com/blog/high-protein-vegetables/

Complete protein vs just protein. Animal protein contains all amino acids, and that is hard to find with non-animal protein.

Plant protein also contains all essential amino acids. Even broccoli.

500 calories (150g) of TVP (soy chunks) has 100%+ of each EAA while 500 calories (200g) of steak is sub-100% in three EAAs. The soy chunks also have 25g more protein than the steak. I use it in all recipes that call for ground beef as it's similar is texture.

The 500 calories of soy chunks also has 59% of the day nutrition while the steak only has 47% (source: Cronometer).

Seems to me that if you're going to bring up a concept like incomplete protein (which I think is a nonsensical concept), you'd have to bite the bullet on steak being incomplete and plant protein being superior.

I dismiss the concept because we aren't limited to 500 calories per day. But if we were, I'd rather be stuck with TVP.

Your claim that meat has 15 times the protein of lentils doesn't match what's in my data source (FoodCentral). I'm seeing a 2:1 ratio depending on your choice of meat and pulse. What's your source?

Then compare it to a more protein dense food like extra firm tofu, TVP, or seitan?

Though I also contest the claim that animal foods are more nutrient dense compared to plants while singling out one nutrient.

What about nutrients like vitamin C, fiber, and vitamin E? What about averaging their %RDA across all nutrients per calorie or gram like the "All Targets" column on Cronometer?

Plant-based foods would rank above animal products in such a comparison.

Many things in the past were "not up for discussion" until they were. Society can change.

> densely nutritious

No, plant products are far more dense in proportion to water, fertilizer, land, and energy used to produce them. 10x the plants are required to get 1x the meat.

But then you have plants like alfalfa which require no fertilizer, no pesticides, create extra fertilizer in the soil, and can easily be grown in excess on the massive amounts of farmland that require zero irrigation.

Yes, but you have to eat more plants and the amino acid spectrum is not always complete. An equivalent amount of red meat has 40% more protein than chickpeas, 400% more than green peas and 300% more than lentils.

And the equivalent calories of red meat has 50% the protein of seitan.

At equivalent mass, red meat has 30% the protein of seitan.

If you're going to pick one nutrient of comparison (which doesn't even make sense since we need more than protein), why wouldn't you compare foods that are dense in that nutrient? Would you accept someone comparing tofu to pig skin to conclude that plants massively dominate animal flesh in protein?

Chickpeas were the most nutrient dense plant protein I could think of. I hadn't heard of seitan before this comment and looking into the amino acids it provides shows that it’s not nutritionally complete.

Can you give me the definition of nutritionally complete that applies to seitan but not red meat considering that seitan, at the same amount of calories, is more amino acid dense than a steak according to Cronometer?

Let's pretend you can only eat 500 calories per day (which is usually part of the weird implication in these claims). Seitan gives you 100%+ of all EAAs except one (70%). A steak gives you 100%+ of the EAAs except for three (85%, 80%, 77%). Seitan also contains double the total protein of the steak.

Wouldn't you have the bite the bullet on steak being nutritionally deficient if seitan is?

If that's not good enough for you, we could look at another protein dense plant-based food: TVP aka soy chunks. 500 calories of soy chunks have 100%+ of the EAAs, 25g more protein than steak, in 50g less food than steak.

Protein isolate powder has more protein than red meat, so you should be eating that, not meat, by this measure.

* The density of protein is not important at all. What is important is that you get the sufficient daily amount of protein, which is easily achievable by eating plant-based foods only.

* It is a myth that the "amino acid spectrum" is not always complete. Plants contain all essential amino acids, and as long as you aren't on a strict white-rice diet, you'll get everything you need from a modest variety of foods.

Please stop spreading misinformation.

Then leave it to the market to decide. If people need to be coerced into it or forced, they don’t want what you are selling.

I'm fine with that. All protection laws and subsidies for meat and dairy should disappear. They are huge in the US.

There are protections and subsidies for all produce as far as I’m aware. This is to ensure stability and consistency of production volume and to prevent any one-off bad seasons from ruining the farmers. I’m okay with more production of fresh produce so that people can get as many calories as they want from vegetables and fruits and eggs.

People aren't ready for it, but we should be eating bugs.

Boca-bug-burgers would be an infinitely renewable 'meat' and farmable on massive scales, without destroying forests or watersheds. Without subjecting users to antibiotics.

Bug-burgers for the win.

It's quite easy to get all the nutrition you need from plants. No bug eating necessary.

Feed the bugs to chickens or ducks, and I am in!

Do you think bugs come without bacteria, viruses and parasites? :D

The problem isn't cattle, it's big agriculture.

As soon as everyone eats bugs, then industrial big farms will start up, and all the worrisome problems discussed will appear with bugs too.

"Microplastics found in protein bugs"

Along with crops grown and fed to bugs, after all, they need to eat to grow.

There will also be crowding, bugs feeding a country aren't going to be wild harvested, how would you even do that, and we'd need massive quantities.

So disease would be a thing.

And we'd need massive amounts of water too, and we'd have massive amounts of leavings, just as with cattle.

Any "but we can just" scenarios, like using their leavings as fertilizer, can also be done with cattle.

Some bugs are likely smarter that the cattle I've been around, and they feel pain, so what of the bug activists? What of the queen, and the hive mind?

Are we going to claim we know that they aren't feeling pain from crowding, or their situation?

What happens when we harvest in the same area over and over, a massive building just for this? Bugs excrete chemical warnings to communicate, and poison during stress, will these all build up month after month of harvest?

There are endless questions to be resolved, but all I hear is "well we can just...." eat bugs, with no other validation or justification about scale, safety, etc.

The funny thing is, we already do eat bugs, we just don't call it as such.

Lobster, crab, shrimp, crawfish, mussels, clams. If you go to very small bugs- the yeast that ferments beer, cheese, kimchi, pickles, saurkraut, yoghurt. We also eat honey made by bugs. In some places spiders are eaten as are scorpions.

Also of course, every time you eat bread, pasta, rice or any grain product you're also eating small amounts of bugs that were ground up in the process.

It's an arbitrary cultural thing. Is it weird to eat the flesh of a mammal? Weird to eat a fungus growing off a decaying log? Weird to eat seaweed? Weird to drink milk from a lactating mother cow? Weird to eat a cricket?

Yuck. I don't know if you're serious, but it's not an either-or Hobson's choice.

There are plenty of alternatives.

I keep looking at ordering cricket flour but it's so expensive. Bug-based stuff needs to come considerably in price for folks to get on board IMO.

FWIW, more than 25% of humans eat bugs regularly around the world.

Bugs don't come without the problems of bacteria, viruses or parasites.

No, we should eat what we want and instead focus on more sustainable practices for what we have now

Yet it is not supported.

Instead, some current methods of animal husbandry exhibit some of the concerns you raise.

For example, animals that free range live lives far, far better than any wild counterparts. They get health care (vaccines), protection from predators, and more.

The disney-eqsue view that wild animals live in a paradise is false, few deer die of old age.

Water and environmental impacts are falsehoods as a solid rule, there are loads of sustainable cattle ranches in, for example, Quebec. Free ranged in summer, slaughter down for winter, hay grown by crop rotation and without fertilizer for over wintering.

You're confusing one type of farming with all methods, big agriculture with litte, and more.

For example, everyone used to have a few pigs and chickens. The pigs ate left over refuse as part of their diet, all those potato peelings, carrot ends and leaves, and food about to go bad. Give it to the pig, and you can eat it later upon slaughter.

So environmentally friendly.

Chickens eating worms, bugs, the pests of man. Chickens mean our small gardens are not eaten bare by pests.

If you truly wanted change, advocate change to better methods.

You will never get us to give up meat, a hard requirement for a healthy life for European genes.

I suspect that changing to better methods would result in humanity eating a lot less meat.

Most of my ancestry is European, but I eat relatively little meat -- not every day, and small portions when I do. My spouse is vegetarian. What health risks are we taking?

Commonly anemia for her. Very likely nothing that will kill either of you.

There might be some confusion of the term 'protection from predators' going on here.

I’ll admit I haven’t run the numbers, but I seriously doubt we can feed 8 billion people on sustainable cattle ranches.

Had me until the last sentence, it's not a requirement (especially at current quantities) it's a preference.

>all the data and science unequivocally support my statements.

oh, that rings a bell. I heard that in a different context over and over again for about 2.5 years. I heard grim promises that I will suffer and die, everyone I know will suffer and die too, the economy will collapse and the world will end - unless I trust the soyence and accept it as my lord and savior, of course.

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