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Living in close proximity is one thing, but growing them at the speed and scale which we do with factory farming must massively increase the rate of development of viruses. It’s almost as if we designed a special program just to develop a virus that would wipe us all out.

But hey, cheap food!

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Not even cheap food, just cheap meat. We could still have plenty of cheap, salty, fatty food without the livestock.

Yeah. It's very cheap to grow large amounts of canola seed, soybeans, potatoes, corn, and wheat to make all manner of high-salt, high-fat, high-carb junk food.

It’s even cheaper to just eat the potatoes, corn, wheat, soy directly like humans have at least for 1000s of years. It would also be healthier and less damaging to the planet as well as local environments, and save tens if not hundreds of billions of animals lives.

The processing is simply unnecessary and the output isn’t food but essentially drugs that people get addicted to. That’s completely different from the actual food that we grow.

> just eat the potatoes, corn, wheat, soy directly like humans have at least for 1000s of years.

Humans (and our ancestors) have been eating meat for around 2.5–3 million years, and possibly even earlier if you include earlier hominin species.

Yeah bro, meat is the only non-junk food available.

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