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Comment by bitops | Hacker News Reader

Hopefully folks reading this article won't take it to mean that humans still need to continue consuming large amounts of meat. Maybe it was necessary to eat meat and hunt to evolve large brains, but the negative economic & ecological impacts of eating meat are pretty well-documented by now.

I am thinking here of the "meat industrial complex" that powers a lot of large commercial meat production, not the friendly sustainable organic farm where I am sure we all shop.

Our brains are big enough now after generations of evolution. Time to put those big brains to use so we can figure out how to continue the existence of the human species. I really doubt it'll be by continuing to eat lots of cows.

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This conflates at least four issues:

  1. Is is healthy to eat meat?  
  2. Is it right to eat meat?  
  3. Is it healthy to eat sustainable organic meat?  
  4. Is it right to eat sustainable organic meat?

Accepting that the 'meat industrial complex' is bad doesn't automatically imply vegetarianism/veganism.

In particular, I'm thinking of Joel Salatan's brand of sustainable agriculture and permaculture.

I think every single one of those questions is missing yet another 'question' - that is, how much meat?

From a naive min-max approaching to building your diet, it generally pops up that -some- meat is super useful. Simply by doing that you ease all sorts of constraints on your diet, and allows you to optimize your veggies/grains for other stuff, instead of desperately trying to get all your iron and B12 in. Even from an overall energy budget point of view, -some- meat is super useful. There are large amounts of marginal land that is not really useful for large scale cultivation, but perfectly usable as feedland for free ranging animals.

How much, how is it produced and what kind?

farm raised alantic salmon have a feed to gain ratio of about 1.2, which is amazing (cattle are about 5x worse)

Also, there are some serious doubts about whether veganic farming could support current global population levels (manure is a great fertilizer!)

Of course things get more complicated in terms of efficiency when you start thinking about dairy and fertilizer and hide production.. the thinking around permaculture ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture ) takes this "whole system" approach to agriculture and would be necessary if you wanted to e.g. create a self-sustaining colony on mars.

A crucial question. I don't really know of any calculation that's looked at total food energy production based on sustainable production plants vs. animals.

I think we can safely assume the optimal balance is neither all plant nor all animal, but I am in no position to hazard a guess as to what the optimal balance is.

We're so far off from sustainable production of either plants or animals that the question isn't on most people's radar.

The original article also conflates vegan and raw diets. I am a vegan who enjoys cooking and often eats highly processed foods; in my present environment (San Francisco), I'm faced with the health challenge of getting far too many calories every day, not too few. In fact, creative food entrepreneurs keep making this challenge worse and worse for me!

I would readily accept that almost everything about my life is drastically different from the environment in which my ancestors evolved. Those differences seem to have both positive and negative ethical and health consequences.

Resolving this is challenging. I've been on a ketogenic diet for the last several months, and while intellectually I recognise that eating mostly plants is more sustainable and has a lower carbon footprint, I have also never felt healthier than while eating larger amounts of fat and meat. My blood sugar is normalised, I generally have more energy and endurance and have effortlessly lost weight in the process.

I also find it hard to resolve the ethical dilemma of eating meat when my body responds so favourably to consuming animal fats. I think the least one can do is to make an effort to try to source locally produced free-range products, but sadly this is difficult for many as it's expensive or simply not available.

Being on a keto diet doesn't mean you must eat a lot of meat. A keto diet is perfectly compatible with vegetarian\vegan diets.

Some more variables: grass-fed or not, amount of fat, how rarely it is cooked, what organs are consumed.

People who I met traveling in the south of India were shocked to find out that I eat meat every day or even multiple times a day. Even those who eat meat in India do so springy. I too took to that way of life and now am pretty much a vegetarian who cheats with seafood every so often. Feels good.

Aquaponics ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquaponics ) exploits the nice relationship between fish excrement and plant growth (using some friendly bacteria to turn the amonia into nitrates) in a sustainable way that yeilds tasty lean meat.

I've always wondered if the food industry needs a serious SV-style disruption, meat-industrial complex is what led to overweight/obese and people with unbalanced hormones (fyi, industrially-farmed poultry are injected with Estrogen for them to fatten)

With various negative aspects such as that, combined with negative ecological effects there exists a huge market ripe for disruption.

> Our brains are big enough now after generations of evolution.

Err... bigger isn't always better, but I won't say no to a bigger noggin.

> Time to put those big brains to use so we can figure out how to continue the existence of the human species.

I wasn't aware we were heading toward extinction? There are billions of us, you know?

> I really doubt it'll be by continuing to eat lots of cows.

I like chickens, turkeys, goats, sheep, and all the other domesticated animals too. There's fish as well. Oh, and there's pigs too. I don't think we've ever relied on a single animal for sustenance?

As a matter of fact, cows were pretty late on the "domestication" game (around 3-4k years after pigs and sheep)[1].

Also, a lot of studies indicate that the kind of meat the humans ate when their brains grew was much more on the frog/bird/misc small animals side than on domesticated cattle.

[1] The edible story of food / Guns, germs & steel

> Err... bigger isn't always better, but I won't say no to a bigger noggin.

There is evidence that our heads would have kept growing if it wasn't for the fact that it makes it pretty likely that women will die in childbirth. So instead evolution got around this by having us born earlier, which is why we're basically born as fetuses compared to most animals. But there's a limit to that too of course.

> But there's a limit to that too of course.

In my state of NJ, roughly 50% of babies are "born" by c-section. So that limit seems to be a little fuzzy at the moment.

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