Comment by Slevin11 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Slevin11 | Hacker News Reader

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This is a very silly take. If you consume any animal foods raised in the US, you are consuming canola / rapeseed meal, soybeans (90% of soy grown in the us is used to create animal feed), and sunflower seed / meal already. You are consuming it in a condensed secondary form (one tropic level up). It seems exceptionally backwards to be worried about eating any of these foods when the animals you eat are essentially just condensed versions of these ingredients where any downside effects would have accumulated heavily.

Also canola oil is now considered on par or healthier than olive oil. Soybeans are one of the worlds few complete plant protein sources with a high quality protein and widely consumed all over the world to both animals and humans to much beneficial effect. Sunflower oil is the least healthy thing here, but still considered quite healthy without excessive heating.

> You are consuming it in a condensed secondary form (one tropic level up).

I always find this is looked over and a double standard. You can raise an animal on a diet of anything along with medication, drugs, and supplements, and advocates will label the beef/chicken/pork product as "meat" and "natural" as if it was a single pure ingredient. But then if a non-meat alternative like a burger is mentioned, every individual ingredient used gets scrutinized, even if that ingredient is often fed to farm animals like soy or grain.

This, in my opinion, is the most important point in the thread and the clearest expression of it. For purposes of this argument, meat is conceived of essentially as a single ingredient, and the raising of the animal in artificial conditions, on hormones, fed on processed food with its associated environmental footprints are kind of sidestepped, while alternatives have to answer for every step in the chain of production.

That mapping seems correct to me, as a lot of the objections here are free-floating one-offs that presume these background assumptions more so than they are apples to apples comparisons intent on clearly comparing them in totality.

Many “beef burgers” have filler included like soy and wheat.

Fallacious argument. Buy grass fed and grass finished.

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