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Comment by hs | Hacker News Reader

sadly, drinking soda, eating potato chips and candy = vegetarian too ... anyway that's not what i'm doing; neither do i eat eggs, milk, even fish. i should say go vegan!

i'm too selfish to care about what the rest of the world eat ... if you regard my post as a solution, fine, that's my solution to avoid *.flu -- for my selfish self

well, enough of myself

can you come up with better solution? something creative is even better, much better than critical things you said about how unhelpful/unfeasible one's solution is.

sorry if my comment hurts your ego

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It has nothing to do with ego; I am a vegetarian. The "solution" is probably what we're doing, that is, being able to produce vaccines quickly.

The calorie density of vegetarian food being what it is, it's probable that if all of humanity went vegetarian, it would solve the over-population problem pretty quickly too because we'd run out of food.

Think about how much food a cow eats in the 2-3 years before it gets turned into burgers.

You have this completely wrong. It takes about 10 times the plant calories to produce meat calories. If the world stopped eating meat we would would be able to feed many more people.

The bigger issue with veganism (and to a lesser extent vegetarianism) is that it requires cleverness to avoid malnutrition. Like it or not, the human colon is too short for a generic vegan diet; we evolved to eat meat.

There are people who already have issues getting enough iron and protein. This problem would only be exacerbated by a pure vegetarian diet.

Furthermore, we do not have an issue producing food for people. We have an issue convincing people to produce food for people. That is, most of the people who starve do so because they cannot afford food, rather than because food is too expensive. This is not a problem of too little food production, because farmers can barely support themselves in places.

This is not to say that reducing meat consumption is not a bad thing, just that it would probably not solve all the worlds problems (or even the food-related ones).

> The bigger issue with veganism (and to a lesser extent vegetarianism) is that it requires cleverness to avoid malnutrition.

On balance I think it takes less cleverness to be a healthy vegetarian than it does than a healthy meat eater. I'm not a vegan so I can't comment in detail but if the misconceptions about vegetarianism are anything to go by I'd say the difficulties are pretty much all BS. And of course if society was vegan it would be trivial to find all the foods you needed regularly cause they'd be everywhere.

> Like it or not, the human colon is too short for a generic vegan diet; we evolved to eat meat.

The opposite argument actually works better. Could humans live on a 'generic' carnivore diet? It is just as easy to argue that we evolved to eat plants.

But if course that isn't how evolution works. We didn't 'evolve' to do anything but to further our genes. We didn't evolve to drive cars or use computers but here we are. Maybe we evolved to die early so there would be more food for our grandchildren. Evolution can be a rough guide but now we have science which favours a plant diet.

> There are people who already have issues getting enough iron and protein. This problem would only be exacerbated by a pure vegetarian diet.

People who are on the edge of starvation will benefit from any extra source of calories or nutrition. In the long term though the most efficient way to provide this would be via plants or perhaps even artificial means in some cases.

> Furthermore, we do not have an issue producing food for people.

Fair point. However the cheaper it is to produce food the more likely it will find it's way to the poorest of people.

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