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Comment by jswinghammer | Hacker News Reader

The basic problem is that one intervention is seeking to fix another. Crop subsidies are the reason why these antibiotics are so widely used. Farmers are encouraged to feed animals food they aren't meant to eat which makes them so sick they need antibiotics to stay alive long enough to be slaughtered.

Just end those crop subsidies and let things take care of themselves. A few agribusinesses will be pissed but the rest of us will be much better off.

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Strangely, here in the UK, corn fed meat (i.e. with antibiotics) is a premium product over grass fed one. So, the problem is a bit deeper than that.

There are other problems that are solved by antibiotics: overcrowding and mass production. Nothing to do either with crop subsidies.

And similarly that's not an easy problem to solve. Very few organizations defend quality meat. Small, local farmer are easy target for various animal rights group. Big groups on the other hand are generally ignored.

They can only overcrowed because of corn feeding. Grass fed cows can't really be mass produced and factory farmed.

The animals aren't generally sick. They are fed antibiotics at a very low dose because one of the side-effects is faster weight gain.

There are three uses of antibiotics in veterinary settings:

1. Treating actually sick animals 2. Low-dose treatments to promote growth 3. Prophylactic treatment to prevent initial infection

Both 2 and 3 are widespread, and a problem.

They keep the animals in unhealthy, unnatural conditions where they will get sick more often. The antibiotics are there to combat that and the side effects of eating corn (in the case of cows) make them very unhealthy and prone to getting sick as well. The whole thing is a mess.

> Just end those crop subsidies and let things take care of themselves. A few agribusinesses will be pissed but the rest of us will be much better off.

I don't disagree with your conclusion about what needs to be done, but you can't "just end those crop subsidies" with a flip of a switch.

We're talking about millions of people and tens of thousands of jobs directly affected, and huge secondary effects to the entire food industry (and everyone who eats food) in the United States as the price of corn and corn-related products goes up.

This would drive the cost per calorie on the bottom end of the market up not insignificantly.

It would have to be a gradual reduction in subsidy over a period of time, ending at zero after a number of years.

Otherwise, you just fuck millions of normal people over— everyone from the people who work at these agribusinesses to the ultra-poor barely scraping by on the cheapest 1500kcal/day they can find to buy.

I realize all that but pulling the cord is the only sane thing to do. The food that gets produced is basically poison anyway so excluding it isn't the end of the world. I would be fine with increasing food stamps before continuing these market distorting crop subsidies.

> The food that gets produced is basically poison anyway

That's nice hyperbole but there are literally millions subsisting on those artificially cheap, subsidized corn syrup calories.

Not having sufficient carbohydrate intake without resorting to stealing is certainly worse for them, can't you agree?

No I don't agree. If the food you eat is making you sick, fat, and tired then it isn't doing much good for you. There's more than enough food without cheap corn. The problem is distribution and perverted incentives-not lack of affordable food. Also what's produced isn't actually all that cheap. It's cheap for the producers of processed foods but the taxpayer pays the real cost, the farmers make almost no real money from their work (unless they're a very large farm who can operate at a massive scale), and the taxpayer picks up the extra cost of the sickness these awful foods create. It sounds pretty expensive to me.

It already costs money, it's just that the money is coming from the taxpayer rather than the people that actually use expensive corn products.

Or ban feeding an animal something that is not part of its "natural" diet. Then we have the fun of debating if cows naturally eat corn and soy. Chickens will be particularly fun because they historically ate the scraps from the humans (what we now call "compost" :P), they were the old form of food recycling.

I'm pretty sure human beings are not "supernatural" beings, therefore everything that we do including feeding cows stuff that makes them sick is "natural".

Now if humans are "supernatural" than cows are also "supernatural" because they've been created by humans. Cows are a product of centuries of human genetic engineering.

You're attempting to be funny by giving the word "natural" too much thought. I stuck quotes around the term for people like you.

Natural being defined as something their bodies are "designed" (have fun with that one) to digest.

Grain finishing was done before the discovery of antibiotics.

Does grain finishing get grass-fed-tasting compounds out of the meat?

Probably. I can only cop to having read about it some. One of the big goals is to increase the fat content of the meat.

I'm sure it tastes better and in small doses is probably fine. If the cow is eating enough corn to get sick then you have obviously made a huge mistake.

What will humans eat?

Better off in what way? Meat will get a lot more expensive, and it's already gone up a lot in the past couple of years.

Curiously enough I'd expect meat to get cheaper because its' production would have to get a lot more thoughtful to be profitable. Right now what we have is expensive in direct and indirect costs. The meat is of poor quality and will make people sick so all these government programs pay for these costs on this side of the equation too. Basically the consumer pays for the meat, subsidies, AND healthcare to cover the cost of the subsidies making the meat of poor quality that made them sick.

Good! The people that use corn (even if indirectly) should have to pay for it rather than taxpayers.

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