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Comment by waffletower | Hacker News Reader

I love meat yet stopped eating all mammalian and fowl protein more than 30 years ago. I compromised with fish, but have gone long stretches without. Yet somehow protein is still very primary in my diet. As many people speak of this difficulty to evolve and change their diet, I have come to theorize that people have a deep seated cultural need for sacrifice -- something must die for their meal to be legitimate. The OP/OA explores the history of this idea. With all of the well developed plant protein options, some imitative of meats and others unique and viable, and the obvious looming problem of scaling livestock production with population growth and climate change, there must be something deep seated holding our evolution back.

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Interesting framing, I've seen a similar 'If it's a meal, then where's the meat?' attitude from my own family, I've had some thoughts on where it came from, but I think part of it was escaping poverty in my grandparent's generation, and seeing 'success' as being able to afford meat in the first place.

Meat was then a part of every meal, because doing otherwise would be socially... embarrassing? Not necessarily in a conscious way, but in a way it would be like giving you kids gruel. (Not that I have a problem with savoury oatmeal now :P)

Then my parents grew up in that environment, and it was just part of the landscape of life. Meals have a meat ingredient. Or meat is the meal.

There's a similar resistance to breakfasts that aren't egg-based. (honorable mention oatmeal again for breaking through) Or a similar resistance to eggs as the protein source for dinners, notice it just doesn't happen in north american cooking very much. Happens in other cuisines all the time though.

I don't think it needs to be some deep seated gene-based flaw (at risk of putting words in your mouth) it only needs to be 'normal', and there's massive resistance to changing what's 'normal' when diverging from 'normal' isn't immediately more emotionally or physically comfortable than staying. Sometimes even then, if it makes you an outlier in the social landscape.

I think the prevalence of the "soyboy" epithet is also evidence though. And hunting is a deep seated cultural value -- it is a rite of passage for many in American culture and is an important component of American masculine identity.

Definitely not ruling it out, it's not 0% for sure. Though as a Canadian I don't think we got it as bad here, so I wouldn't say I really have any idea how big a factor it is. Especially in the USA.

> As many people speak of this difficulty to evolve and change their diet, I have come to theorize that people have a deep seated cultural need for sacrifice -- something must die for their meal to be legitimate.

Of course something must die, but it's not because of culture. Even the most devout vegan would surely concede that the plants they eat must die in order to render sustenance from them. The reality we live in, even if we don't like it, is the simple fact that something must die for us to continue living.

Life feeds on life feeds on life

Some might even chant, "This is necessary," over and over.

Since we can't do photosynthesis or break down some rather toxic molecules like our more primitive siblings, we must eat organic matter that once was alive. No need to delve too much in some militant vegan fantasies and rationalizations.

Plant vs animal makes little difference from rational point of view, both feel pain and we have no clue telling which one more, not that it matters in this topic. Health wise plants are better, but ideal is as always some middle ground.

Biohack our guts and we can go on whole lives without harming much, jainists would probably be interested.

> both feel pain and we have no clue telling which one more

I never understood that dumb argument. After so much evolution lead us to being an empathic species, of course we have clue of others pain.

Tear off some leaves of a tree in a public space

Tear off some pets legs in a public space

Observe people around you reaction. They’ll have a clue.

The argument as I understand it is that empathy and the “clues“ are imprinted based on social norms. Little children will happily rip out plants but will start to cry if they see or hear somebody else crying. One theory is that it is all about self-preservation: An environment where one animal cries without being taken care of is considered dangerous and inherently unsafe for self. Not so with plant life.

Why? I mean we only need the molecules from the ingested food, so why can those chemicals only come from things that were living?

Is there any entirely artificial food that doesn't require a previously living thing?

>so why can those chemicals only come from things that were living?

Because food is a way to consume order. In Schrödinger's terms, the food chain is "life feeding on negative entropy". As you go up the food chain more and more complex organisms need to consume more low entropy things to maintain their more and more sophisticated internal structure. There's more energy in the matter of a rock than you'll ever need, but you can't gnaw on the thing to sustain yourself.

That said "life" doesn't necessarily mean "sentient animal". You can certainly expend energy to create artificial food sources but they'll always be lifelike, that is ordered for the reason Schrödinger lays out.

> Even the most devout vegan would surely concede that the plants they eat must die in order to render sustenance from them.

Let me (far from a vegan) try to disagree: you can sustainably harvest the fruit or the bark of a plant without killing it, and you can certainly argue that those parts aren't alive in themselves. You could stretch the argument to include the sap and the leaves. Does a mother have to die to suckle her baby?

A really enlightened follower of this argument might limit himself not only to renewable parts of the plant, but also of animals: it's OK to eat eggs, dairy products, honey, blood pudding, but not meat, potatoes or carrots.

Of course, we don't farm those products in a way consistent with not killing the non-productive animals, with the possible exception of honey. But in principle one could.

> dairy products

There is no dairy without lots of dead male cows. “Lacto” vegetarians for ethical reasons are frequently unaware or ignorant of this.

If we had no emotional attachment to specific recipes, shapes, colors, textures of food, we'd plausibly move away from "of course something must die" quite fast. We have the tech to produce a nutrient dense food from "thin air", from waste, from any number of things that do not require destroying sentient or non-sentient life. Notable in the press was https://solarfoods.com but that's just one example of many.

Still, there is a clear and significant distinction between killing sentient life (most animals) and non-sentient life (plants or mushrooms), and there are very few people here who could not feasibly switch to the latter.

It's extremely difficult to eat low-carb without eating animal protein.

Many of us don't eat low-carb because of some internet fad - we do it because we can see the data from our CGM.

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