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Comment by blindriver | Hacker News Reader

A brave new world where the poor people eat artificial meat and crickets while the rich get to eat cows and chickens.

Meat consumption has been a sign of affluence throughout human history. It's only fairly recently that beef has become broadly accessible to lower income consumers.

This is a myopic and western centered view, true of a subset of western civilization, largely due to authoritarian rule (e.g. you can't hunt the King's game, even if you're starving).

Meat consumption is how a vast amount of indigenous cultures survived.

It’s not western centered. As countries like China and India have grown more affluent, their consumption of pork and beef have also risen. While hunting (and especially social hunting of large game) was important in pre-agricultural societies, it didn’t nearly approach the amount of meat in modern human diets.

I’d recommend the book “Should we eat meat?” by Vaclav Smil for a very thorough dive into this topic.

the rich already eat the best cuts/breeds and corn-feds, the concept is "life is better if you have more money", which is obvious in a system where better things cost more relatively.

> A brave new world where the poor people eat artificial meat and crickets

Or, you know, vegetables.

Vegetables are prohibitively expensive for many people. Most people can't just afford the latest veggie dish from The Cosmopolitan that would cost EUR 20,- per person. Even potatoes are super expensive.

Unless you mean turnip style hunger winters, as occurred during WW1 and WW2.

Legumes are inexpensive, healthy, filling and have a low CO2 footprint. "Beef or crickets" is a false dichotomy.

Meat should always be more expensive than vegetables due to inefficiencies. But due to subsidies it isn't.

That sounds a bit implausible if you're in the EU. Here in the Netherlands the large supermarkets sell potatoes, carrots and onions for around €2/kg, while chicken is usually around €10 to €15/kg and beef more like €15 to €40/kg depending on the cut.

You can't really make a direct comparison of a kg of meat vs a kg of legumes.

Maybe you just need 100g of meat to get what you'd get with 1kg of legumes.

At least that's what people usually say, but if they do the maths, it's still generally cheaper to have a plant-full diet than a meat centred one (kg vs kg aside).

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