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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

This is the only thing where I fully support the policy of the Green parties worldwide.

Overusing antibiotics and other medicine, just to be able to grow up more animals in the same space, is plain greed and animal cruelty.

The state should set a fixed minimum for meat prices (under which no product may be sold) and at the same time impose minimum levels of animal rights (roaming space, food variety, no declawing/tail cutting etc.). I know many will shoot me for advocating state regulation, but the free market most obviously has FAILED here.

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But why buy meat at all? In terms of efficiency and "feeding the world" the cow lags behind quite seriously compared to that other GMO soya

High quality meat is irreplaceable in the optimal human diet.

[citation needed]

EDIT: I'm a vegetarian. I'm well aware there are nutrients that are harder to get on purely plant-based diets, but it's far from impossible. I'm getting my Omega 3s (all DHA and EPA, not merely ALA) from algae, and my B-12 from plant sources, too.

What am I missing by not killing sentient things for sustenance?

We have canines for a reason: our evolutionary and digestive history includes meat.

I'm sensitive to the moral issues involved, and understand the arguments against eating pigs and cows; however, I think it's reasonably ethical, and biologically optimal, to at least eat fish and eggs. And no matter what, farm animals should be raised humanely (pasture farms, not factory farms).

Evolution dictates that we live long enough to reproduce and fight off anything that wants to kill our young. There is no reason to assume that it might somehow be a guide to what an "optimal human diet" (silly expression) might be.

That our evolutionary history includes eating meat is by no means an argument that the nutritional benefits of meat are irreplaceable.

And cave homes are irreplaceable in optimal human architecture?

Beef is a particularly inefficient protein source.

You get more than just protein from beef. Grass-fed beef, and ruminants in general, contain a wealth of human nutrition.

It's not the product, is the producer. The perverse incentives in our meat and farming industries drive production of a vasty inferior product at an unsustainable price.

What is the mass-market meat product that is more expensive to produce than beef?

Farmed carnivorous fish (e.g. tuna)? I've started getting farmed bluefin at the Japanese fishmarket in Berkeley (confusingly called Tokyo Fish Market); it's essentially as good as wild bluefin, and I'll eat it, but is even more inefficient and expensive to produce than beef.

The point is the taste and the fact that you can't nutritionally fully replace meat.

I'm talking about the production of beef, not its metabolic efficiency. There are meat products that are much more efficient than beef.

Agreed, yet it will be difficult, if not outright impossible, to restructure US (and maybe Mexican) agriculture to raise e.g. pigs or chicken instead of cattle; also, each of these animal races carry their own individual risks - bird flu and "cannibalistic picking" (dunno the English term) in birds, and pig flu for pigs.

The last food-animal-related health problems I heard of were multiple different bird and pig flu varieties, the last major problem with cattle was BSE/Jakob-Creutzfeld disaster years ago. So I think the cost of perfectly fine, but "preventively killed" animals should be weighed in, too.

You can't fully replace meat nutritionally? Any source for this assertion?

At least not in child nutrition, unfortunately the only usable reference which is not vegan propaganda I could find are in German (http://www.focus.de/gesundheit/ernaehrung/gesundessen/tid-21... and http://www.dge.de/modules.php?name=News&file=article&...).

TL;DR: It is extremely difficult to sustain the needs of a child with a pure vegetarian/vegan diet.

> TL;DR: It is extremely difficult to sustain the needs of a child with a pure vegetarian/vegan diet.

Tripe. I think people forget that even with the naive diet pyramids a lot of us grew up with, eggs (rightly) were counted as meats. It's been well understood for a long time how to function without eating meat, as in, the flesh of animals, if you have eggs available as part of your diet.

Pure veganism requires some actual thought, yes.

> TL;DR: It is extremely difficult to sustain the needs of a child with a pure vegetarian/vegan diet.

So really, meat is wholly replaceable in the human diet, though doing so in children may be difficult.

Anecdata, but I know a woman who's never, in her entire life, not been a vegetarian, and she's probably the healthiest person I've ever met. It's easier than you think.

Agreed 100%. I hope this whole super-bug thing has a silver lining, in that it results in better treatment for animals bred for slaughter.

Ironic that the broad regulations you're advocating wouldn't address the issue at hand, that you mentioned in the previous paragraph.

How about to make it illegal to give antibiotics to animals that are not sick, or making new antibiotics illegal for animal use for a number of years?

.. and also require the same standards of any imported meat.

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