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Comment by joelrunyon | Hacker News Reader

> Eat less meat.

I never understand how "Stop eating factory farmed meat" means you have to "eat less meat" - why not just eat better sourced high quality meat?

It seems especially strange in a place like HN where you'd think that supporting the alternative grass-fed, non-factory farmers would be the entrepreneurial thing (and encourage more farmers to do it).

Meat is not the problem. The quality of the meat is. There are ways to solve that problem outside of eating less meat.

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why not just eat better sourced high quality meat?

Because it's more expensive. Most people can't afford to eat large amounts of high quality meat.

Luckily people don't need large amounts of meat.

Not sure why you were downvoted; its true, you don't need large quantities of meat in a healthy diet.

Right, I agree. I was merely responding to the parent's assertion that people just go ahead and eat as much meat as they do now but make it higher quality.

> I never understand how "Stop eating factory farmed meat" means you have to "eat less meat" - why not just eat better sourced high quality meat?

I do, but it means I can afford to eat far less meat. Like, twice a week. Which is fine, and also I enjoy it more[0].

Organic chicken is stupid expensive here (compared to pork or beef) and so is bacon (compared to factory bacon, which I agree is in fact stupid cheap). So I get mainly sausage and other cheaper cuts like pork belly.

But if you have the money to spend, go for it, vote with your dollars or something? :)

[0] unlike organic vegetables, the flavour difference of organic meat vs factory meat is (to me) extremely noticeable.

I think in this case, it's the quality of meat that's the issue. But there's another very important issue with meat: it's one of the most inefficient forms of sustenance. Animal agriculture is the single largest source of greenhouse gases - larger than the entire transport industry, including planes. It takes 11 times more fossil fuels to create 1 calorie from animal sources than from plant sources.

I'm sorry for linking to a PETA page (especially since it's a very buzzfeed-y one), but [this page][1] has links to a lot of good sources.

[1]: http://www.peta.org/features/meat-climate-change/

In practice, when it comes to antibiotics you are correct. But lets be honest, quality meat isn't always an option, especially going out to a restaurant, so the solution in reality is to eat less meat. There's also things like land usage, water conservation, carbon footprint, health, etc... there are a lot of reasons why you should eat less meat if you live in a first world country.

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