It's crazy to see people denying that (meat) factory farming is a problem. You'd expect most of the public of this website to be rationalists in one way or another. Of course factory farming is an aggravating factor for the spread of diseases. Of course we can thrive with less meat consumption or none. How is that even a question?
>> Of course factory farming is an aggravating factor for the spread of diseases.
Of some diseases. It also prevents other diseases. Isolating animal species, specifically separating their waste, prevents cross-contamination. Google the stories of people getting parasites from lettuce grown on a "small organic farm" downhill from the pig sty. Want to eat raw lettuce and undercooked steak without getting sick? Those privileges come from factory farming techniques.
(I grew up in an area where we washed vegetables in diluted bleach. And I still prefer my meat very well done, burned, because that's how meat must be cooked in parts of the world that don't have western-style factory farming.)
"'There are more and more people wanting products like triple-washed bagged lettuce, but bagged salad is a great vector for E.coli growth,' he said. 'And farms have expanded closer and closer to animal feedlots and dairies, and these are now more prone to flooding.'"
> And I still prefer my meat very well done, burned, because that's how meat must be cooked in parts of the world that don't have western-style factory farming.
That's more likely to speak to a lack of food safety regulation in the supply chain, from farm to slaughterhouse to store to table. It's entirely possible to properly process an artisanly raised organic cow in a way that avoids spreading E. coli all over it.
>> Outbreaks of E. coli, listeria, giardia, etc. are common in factory farmed bagged lettuce.
Common, in that millions of people eat the food and a vanishingly small number get sick during the rare outbreaks. Compare pre-industrial farming, where nearly everyone got sick on a somewhat regular basis. Read British history. Everything was boiled for a reason. Today we can get away with lightly washing our food. Most everyone opens a salad and eats without question. That is new. That is because of modern farming practices.
It's because of a multi-factorial societal shift involving vaccines, sanitation, germ theory, hand washing, water treatment, safety regulations, inspections, refridgeration, etc.
Pretending it's all because of factory farming is just silly.
The key to being able to eat rare meat is not to smear cow shit all over it and store it at 65 degrees for a day in an alley market. The key to being able to eat a salad is washing and cold storage of a product that inevitably gets exposed to pathogens in farm fields unless you raise it hydroponically in a hermetically sealed warehouse.
> Isolating animal species, specifically separating their waste, prevents cross-contamination.
Not even close to true. The act of isolating (concentrating) animal species, pumping them full of antibiotics, and concentrating their waste is a significant danger to human and animal health alike. It breeds antibiotic resistant strains of disease and the waste is never isolated - it always gets into the soil, air, and groundwater of the surrounding communities increasing the risk of cross-contamination downstream. These are well-documented, peer-reviewed, large scale impacts that you somehow ignored when googling for n=1 anecdotes to confirm your bias.
> Google the stories of people getting parasites from lettuce grown on a "small organic farm" downhill from the pig sty.
It sounds like the problem is maybe farming of animals in general? Obviously a farm being small and organic doesn't automatically equate with everything being fine. Even on factory farms animal waste seeps into groundwater and can cause tons of environmental issues, which reminded me of a report from last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNutjzkXDqY
Remember, the disease spread from an animal factory farm (even in your comment). TFA is about a disease among animals. GPs comment was arguably about animal factory farms. Of course we need industrialized agriculture, but do we need animal farms?
A slightly more on topic, and more generous interpretation of GPs comment removes any contradiction.
> Of course factory farming is an aggravating factor for the spread of diseases.
Modern industrial farming has been the greatest source of limiting disease, parasites and sickness. Before modern industrial farming, human life was rife with food-born parasites, disease and sickness. So much so that it severely limited people's physical and intellectual development.
> Of course we can thrive with less meat consumption or none.
We can survive without meat. But being omnivores, we probably need meat to thrive. Though too much of a good thing can be harmful.
> How is that even a question?
As a self-proclaimed rationalist, why does that surprise you? Rational people question things.
> Of course we can thrive with less meat consumption or none. How is that even a question?
A sweeping statement, that betrays ignorance of the many people that are tremendously helped or healed from terrible illnesses by eating more meat (or even, only meat). I'm not advocating everyone eat only meat, nor do I think most people would want to, but there are also MANY people who would fall gravely ill if they did so.
Again, it's fine to voice an opinion, but this kind of categorical statement that isn't supported by empirical evidence is not. I'm very well acquainted with the subject myself, having dealt with severe autoimmune issues, and if I was forced to eat only plant matter, my health would be completely compromised. It's something I have heard from thousands of others, and if you are so interested I will provide links. There is also "scientific" data to support this, though as someone who has lived through it, I don't care for it, but it exists. Anecdotes, again, by the thousands, many with ex-vegans for whom a plant-based diet took a huge toll.
It’s not perfect, but HackerNews seems to have one of the most intelligent pool of users I’ve had the pleasure of interacting with. It’s not perfect, of course, but the discourse on a HackerNews thread is light years ahead of what you’ll find on Reddit.
With HN it depends on the topic. With Reddit it depends on the subreddit. Both have their high points and their low points. If you take the topics for which HN is very well-behaved and looked at their equivalent subreddits on Reddit, then you'll find they're likewise well-behaved.
In both cases you know exactly where the brush fires are.
> Of course factory farming is an aggravating factor for the spread of diseases. Of course we can thrive with less meat consumption or none.
Of course, life with less meat consumption has a lower quality, and life with no meat consumption is utter misery.
Cities are an aggravating factor for the spread of disease, but I’d hardly argue that they should all be dissolved: the benefits are worth the costs. Likewise with meat. Eating meat fulfills one aspect of our natures as humans; a life without meat is thus a less humane life. No thanks.
So is any travel especially public. Should we just do permanent lockdown. Only allow people in essential jobs or jobs that can't be done from home to get outside their houses?
If we really wanted to stop diseases from spreading, we could go back to lockdowns. That would clearly be effective way. And also it would be effective in combating climate change.
>Of course we can thrive with less meat consumption or none. How is that even a question?
I have personally been helped by a diet of mostly meat (and frozen raspberries) which I stayed on for a few years. It helped me to stay somewhat productive while I slowly recovered from a complicated illness state.
These years I get most of my protein from beans and almonds, but those foods do subtle cumulative damage to my gut (even if I pre-soak, pressure-cook, then refry the beans and blanch, then toast the almonds) so once a year or so I take a break from them, and since I cannot handle eggs, grains or dairy protein, and since I seem to need a lot of protein, during the breaks I eat a lot of grass-fed lamb.
If I lost access to meat, I would be less healthy.
Those words require “as proven by” and then the sentence that follows.
The claims you make are so trivial as to almost be tautological. You make no quantitive claims except “none” for meat consumption. The most extreme possible position.
Rationalists put forward measured testable arguments that can be defeated by fair reason. Rationalists don’t frame the arguments for what they oppose in purely negative terms and what they support in purely positive terms.
Factory farming has had massive benefits to the health and well-being of humans on the planet. It is undeniably cruel. No meat consumption for many would lead to mental and physical health issues for many. It would also end some of humanity’s cruelest practices.
Wonder how many people here who are reacting to what you posted negatively are also convinced about the lab leak theory of SARS-CoV-2 origins...
People get worried about serial passage "gain of function" experiments in a lab with a dozen lab animals being involved. Meanwhile in farming a virus can get passed through millions and millions of animals in nice compact bioreactors.
It’s not a question, we can. I don’t think anyone here said we couldn’t.
But it’s also not a question of if we’re going to, we won’t. Meat consumption goes up a little every year (on average) and we’ve known these things for a long time, so clearly we’re not convinced.
As to the benefits and drawbacks of factory farming, there are a lot of both. It’s overly-simplistic to call it a problem.
I mean yes, we're programmed for it, the problem is that quantity used to be hard to come by, hence it was desirable. Now that we have essentially no limits we can see how maladapted we are
This is about dairy. If there are any detectable antibiotics in the milk they have to dump it all. When the vet prescribes antibiotics that cow is isolated in a hospital for a month until the milk contains no traces of antibiotics. They only do this when needed as it costs a lot of money to care for a sick cow.
You might be thinking about beef cattle which are treated different from dairy cows. Though even then antibiotics can only be given with a vet prescription. (a change as of several years ago)
Antibiotics are enabling unhygienic conditions. Places with poor governance in animal agriculture have a vicious cycle of poor regulation permitting unhygienic conditions which permits unhygienic infrastructure and practices which causes disease which is papered over by antibiotics which allows terrible conditions to continue.
Most antibiotics fed to cattle are used to bias the population in their digestive system to optimize feed conversion, not for infection control. Milk is discarded if the cow is being treated for an infection, so it's not like they just do nothing else to keep them healthy.
Just when I contemplated the days of cows eating cow brains and getting prion diseases was behind us, I learned they are allowed to be fed "chicken litter" which is fancy term for shit and dead bodies. How about we limit our food animals to vegetarian feed? It may be less cholestrol-genic too.
At the end of the day, non-pasture food animal raising boils down to getting enough nutrients and time into them to hit your target slaughter weight, subject to feed conversion ratio for the species.
Cheaper nutrients = higher margins or lower product prices
So there's a lot of repurposing of sanitized animal byproducts. At the end of the day, as Cyberpunk 2020 quipped, "Parts is parts. Dead is dead. Dead guys is parts."
Anyone who's not comfortable with that should either go vegetarian or raise / buy into local meat.
On the facts, cows are grazers with incredibly robust digestive systems. They're too lumbering to hunt, but they're biologically prepared to extract nutrients from pretty much anything that ends up in their mouth while they're eating: grasses, insects, carcasses, rodents, etc. Ultimately, feeding them animal byproducts wouldn't be viable or cost-efficient (ugh) if that were not meaningfully the case.
As others are noting, it's the wacky industrial modernity doing its grossly myopic hyper-optimization thing that's the problem (and not just in animal husbandry or agriculture...).
I helped my dad castrate some of cattle one time, and we just tossed the ... parts ... off into the grass. Later I saw one of them come over and eat one. So I'm not so surethey would not eat meat on their own, but since they are too slow to catch any, and they couldn't tear it off the carcass, anyway. I expect that chopped up meat is in short supply in the grasslands.
One weirdo from the herd showed a preference for it one time. Whereas if you threw it among your dogs they'd likely fight over it. That's the difference.
Do the cows know they are herbivores? Why would the fact that they don’t predate on other animals in the wild make it “abhorrent” to feed them animal products in captivity?
How can we really know what cows know? What we know is they follow a herbivorous diet when possible. Their teeth and digestive system are optimized for consuming plants.
> Why would the fact that they don’t predate on other animals in the wild make it “abhorrent” to feed them animal products in captivity?
My favorite fact is that animals are allowed a certain percentage of plastics in their feed, and it’s not a tiny percentage. It’s a significant number.
Only if a significant amount of people are being directly infected by the cows and a mutation occurs in a person to allow spread to other humans. So seems like the chance is low, but not zero.
The real worry is pigs.
If it makes its way to pigs, we are in trouble. From what I understand, pigs contain a mix of avian and human receptors that make them the ideal mixing ground for crossover. Cows do not.
The question is what is the probability it doesn't transfer to pigs (if it hasn't already), compounded on a daily basis and given an exponentially increasing viral load in farm environments?
Scratch that. The question is how many days or weeks until it does make that leap.
Then the two next questions are what's the likelihood of any given pig serving as an incubator for a recombinant virus that attaches to human lung epithelial cells, and how deadly is that virus. Run that experiment every day for six months at a few farms and you might get lucky. Run it everywhere in the country and we're S.O.L.
But even if we did, it would still be factory farming (though of course with fewer outbreaks and antibiotic resistance) with other things that people would find problematic for plenty of equally valid reasons.
Also if anything, obesity would skyrocket. Meat isn’t the big cause of that, carbs are, and if you cut out meat you get more carbs. Most people gain weight when they go vegetarian.
This is a ridiculous claim. Vegans and vegetarians on average have lower BMI. Most diet intervention studies demonstrate a drop in BMI on vegetarian or vegan diets.
Sure, avoid the highly refined carbs, like white flour and sugar, but substituting dairy and meat for nuts and legumes is going to only be an improvement for your health and the health of the planet.
That’s not contradictory with what I said. I said that when people switch they gain weight.
Vegans and vegetarians are more health conscious than non-vegans and vegetarians so you can’t compare them like that. It’s like when they said that Diet Coke makes you fat because the average Diet Coke drinker is fatter than the average Coke drinker. But it’s really just because skinny people don’t worry about drinking calories.
Most people don’t switch from meat to nuts and legumes, they switch to baked goods.
There is also no scientific evidence whatsoever that switching to plant-based diets is good for your health. You should read outlive by Dr. Peter Atilla. As he points out, the only thing we know for sure is too many calories is bad. For almost anything else, it’s impossible to tease out correlation from causation.
All I'm saying is that if we're all eating so much to the point of killing ourselves surely we can eat a bit less of meat if it reduces pollution/water use/viral infections.
It's not like eating meat multiple time a day or even every day was a pre requisite for human life. I don't remember last time I ate meat and I'm fitter than 90% of people I meet in my day to day life
But they weren't obese. The person I was responded to claimed obesity is because of less meat.
> and died of a lot of diseases that we now survive easily, so by your logic, I should eat more meat
I didn't know you got your measles vaccine from a plate of pork chops. I got mine via a hypodermic needle, from a nurse who studied anatomy, biology, and germ theory for several years, and washed her hands.
They also didn't eat a lot of fries, sugared beverages, ultra-processed food, etc... which is easily available nowadays and likely to be consumed when one doesn't feel satiated (e.g. due to meat consumption).
That's not to say that there aren't alternatives to meat that also satiate and are nutritious, but most people don't consider them to be equally delicious and therefore they are not as likely to be consumed if meat isn't available.
That means the obesity isn't due to meat or a lack of meat, per se. It's the diet outside of the meat.
> fries, sugared beverages...which is likely to be consumed when one doesn't feel satiated (e.g. due to meat consumption).
You know what goes really well with a juicy hamburger or a steak? Crisp fries, and a cool, refreshing, tall glass of Coke (maybe not the Coke so much with a steak), or a frosty milkshake.
People eat junk food because it tastes good. Period. Not because they didn't get enough meat or some BS like that. Meat-eaters eat fries. Vegetarians eat fries. Everyone eats fries. They're delicious.
If you take the meat out there's a whole world of nutritious and delicious foods out there. You just have to broaden your culinary horizons. I'm not even a vegetarian or vegan, have no plans to be one, and I still recognize this.
> If you take the meat out there's a whole world of nutritious and delicious foods out there.
But most people will not find, enjoy or choose food with both of those qualities, not to mention that they are a minority over what's commonly available -- and even if they are available, they'd probably become too expensive if consumption increased significantly.
Most of the time they'd have to choose between "delicious foods" or "nutritious foods", but not both, and you know they'd choose the former.
If you take out meat, you'll simply reduce the pool of available (good) choices. You'll have a strictly worse outcome than what you had before (except for the animals, admittedly).
> If you take out meat, you'll simply reduce the pool of available (good) choices
Only if we forced everyone to give up meat at gunpoint. Most people who choose to go meat-free, and stick with it, end up finding tasty and nutritious food that works for them.
> even when they are available, they are usually too expensive to become a common staple.
People automatically assume that giving up meat means salads and tofu all day, bought in 2oz packages from Whole Foods while wearing Lululemon yoga pants. And you gotta throw in the $10 artisan kombucha while you're at it.
Beans, lentils, and green peas are far cheaper and healthier than any meat or Impossible burger. You can get them at your local Indian or Mexican grocer for less than $1/lb. Or tofu and seitan from Costco or 99 Ranch Market. A little soybean paste or mushroom broth adds a blast of umami. That's what I mean by "broadening your culinary horizons".
And no beans can never become more expensive than meat, even if more people start eating them. It's simple thermodynamics. Look at the poorest countries on Earth - I guarantee you they eat more beans and lentils than meat. That's what a "common staple" is. If they can afford it, anyone can.
I'll happily concede the expensiveness point, and also say that if we are not entertaining the idea of forcing anyone to give up meat (which is what I thought we were discussing), then we are not in disagreement.
I'll only add that when promoting vegetarianism or veganism, I find most such sources to be akin to propaganda, i.e. they always talk about the benefits but rarely talk about the disadvantages. I suspect this might be because veganism is often tied to political preferences (and certain cultures).
As an example, here's something Wikipedia mentions that you will not usually see entirely discussed in articles promoting such diets:
> [Vegan diets tend to be lower in] omega-3 fatty acid, vitamin D, calcium, zinc, and vitamin B12. As a result of the elimination of all animal products, a poorly planned vegan diet can lead to nutritional deficiencies that counteract its beneficial effects and cause serious health issues, some of which can only be prevented with fortified foods or dietary supplements
This might partly explain why it's about as common to find a vegan bodybuilder as a flying cow... it might not be impossible to find one, but it's about as unnatural. And there are probably good reasons for this, including availability and easy absorption/digestibility of all the essential amino acids, which is important for muscle growth and maintenance, which in turn is very important for health especially in middle and old age.
It could also explain why when I see a random vegan person, they tend to "look" unhealthy more often than a random non-vegan person, although I concede that I may be biased, of course -- I've also seen sources claiming vegan people live longer, although I suspect that if it's true, it may be because vegans tend to be more health-conscious and choose their diet and sources of nutrition more carefully, not necessarily because of the lack of meat itself.
But of course, as long as all such information is reported in an unbiased and accurate fashion, I see nothing wrong with it.
> You know what goes really well with a juicy hamburger or a steak? Crisp fries, and a cool, refreshing, tall glass of Coke (maybe not the Coke so much with a steak), or a frosty milkshake.
That's a disgusting fast-food derived dietary preference. Healthy meat-centric diet does not look anything like that.
That's precisely my point. There are healthy and unhealthy meat-centric diets. There are healthy and unhealthy meatless diets. The absence of meat isn't the cause of a bad diet, as GP was alleging. People have bad diets because they like the taste of unhealthy food and either don't care or don't know about the consequences.
(And I'll quibble about it being entirely fast-food derived. Steak-frites is classic French and Belgian food.)
not my field, but isn't meat pretty lossy compression food-wise? IIRC, feeding an animal to later eat instead of just eating what the animal would eat wastes like 90% (not sure of the exact figure) of the calories. So if we just ate the plants directly and easily cover our caloric needs without going through the cow-middleman.
Kind of like, instead of feeding the cows a bunch of soy and then eating the cow, just eat the soy as tofu or edamame instead.
Of course a lot of people prefer eating meat, but that's besides the point.
You do realize factory farmed animals don't graze the natural farmland right? They are mostly fed either stuff that humans could eat, or food that is grown on farmland that could be used to grow human edible food.
In my country, most of the food that goes into feeding animals is imported, and I can assure you they are not importing soccer fields.
There's reason that life on Earth exists in a food chain. In this case many of the animals humans eat consume and digest things we cannot. This particular discussion was about cattle and humans deriving nutrition from the milk they produce and the meat they yield. From that perspective, cows and steers as intermediaries provide such a distinct advantage that genetic mutation that allows some humans to digest cow milk drove the flourishing of those civilizations.
Grazing animals, properly fed (this is what we need to fix), eat mostly grass. We need that middle step. Just like we need the intermediate steps of plants extracting nutrients from the soil and turning sunlight into usable calories for us. We can't eat dirt and drink sunshine, either. Of course those aren't the only things to eat. But that's the argument I was responding to.
The "cut out the middle man" argument really doesn't work. The argument should be "here are better alternatives."
The original comment specifically mentioned soy and edamame. The reply only mentioned grass.
HN guidelines say: Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
In that case, right back at you on "strongest possible interpretation" - The focus of that first comment wasn't "soy", it was "what the animal eats". That response was both responding to the important portion while correcting them on cow diets.
Animal agriculture uses up 80% of the land and provides humanity 20% of its protein.
All those addicted people will be able to satisfy their food addiction at significantly lower costs and consumption of resources by switching to a plant based diet.
Drastically reduced spread of diseases, reduced overuse of antibiotics, environmental benefits are just bonuses.
Not to mention the fact that your grandkids won’t think you’re moral monsters for torturing and murdering sentient beings.
Meh, I’ve been hearing that for like 30 years (and much of it is empirically correct) but meat consumption has just steadily, slowly increased. I’d bet literally everything that two generations from down from me (which would be basically kids being born starting around now) most people will still be eating meat.
It doesn't need to be produced through the incredible wasteful in-between animal.
People can either eat straight up plant-based food, or alternatively go for lab grown meat. There's no need to go through all the inefficiency and suffering of factory farms.
I’ve seen videos about lab grown meat being in development. Is it actually available and available at scale?
I haven’t looked to see if studies have been done to look at the nutritional profile of lab grown vs normal meat. I’d be curious about that as well before I tried it.
So we have these animals, which eat plants and generate fuel (poop) & food (meat). Our bodies are adapted to eating them, our bodies need the same nutrients, and we’re programmed to enjoy the food. The input to this process is mostly grass and grain, both generated via solar power.
Now instead… we take grain, highly process it and make someone few people enjoy, with less nutrients, and likely some unforeseen by products. They can then sell it at a higher price.
At the end of the day, we know what works. It doesn’t make sense to try and reinvent the wheel without benefit.
Well, it’s not highly efficient, at all, except maybe chicken. The feed ratio (how much food it takes to get one unit of meat) on animals ranges pretty widely. Cows are an order of magnitude more than chicken, with pigs in the middle.
A lot of time, energy, and land goes to just keeping the animal alive and metabolizing. And you’re left with the problem of a lot of the parts of the animal are of low value.
Lab grown meat could, in theory, be much more efficient. Just quickly grow the muscles people actually want to eat.
There are also a lot of potential ethical issues with the way meat is raised at scale.
However the comment implying it’s an option currently is ridiculous. It’s nowhere near ready for scale. Might as well cite that Star Trek meal thingy (replicator?).
Maybe you should stick to plant-based food and lab grown meat before telling other people to stop eating animals and go to plant-based food and lab grown meat.
Are you saying we require this late-stage capitalism style factory farming in order to feed 8 billion people? I'm going to say that there is gamut between having a cheap T-bone on your plate every evening and global starvation.
Desire - yes. Feasibility - not sure, we need to substitute the caloric intake with something of a relatively similar density, profile, and nutrition. "Vegetarian" might do the trick (beans, rice, fresh vegetables) and I suspect there are a number of ways to improve protein and fat uptake that milk, cheese, and butter provide.
This is just for beef, of course. It is hard to overstate how reliant most developed countries are on chicken and, especially, basically every part of a pig.
General rule, when someone brings up that fact that some regulation makes things harder for "poor folks" it is almost never about poor people, but just figleafs for arguing against regulations.
In reality it is the poor who are most affected by climate change, diseases, lack of food safety... If the people really cared about poor folks they would be arguing for more regulations, higher taxes, against credit card programs and lots of other things which effectively end up transferring wealth from the poor to the rich.
When my mom was growing up she had organ meats pretty regularly, as it was cheaper and they didn’t have a lot of money.
Over in Scotland their national dish is haggis, which is a bunch of organ meats minced up, and then they add in some oats to bulk it up and make it go further.
There are solutions to use more of the animal and stretch it. I almost never hear about people eating organ meats in the US anymore. People just find factory farmed cuts at rock bottom prices.
One of the most consistent technological innovations throughout humanity's existence has been in improving how we eat, because eating is by far one of the biggest pleasures a person can have in life.
The invention of fire revolutionized eating, the invention of agriculture revolutionized access to food at a fundamental level, the invention of refrigeration and freezing vastly expanded the reach and safety of food from point of harvest to dinner table, and the past century or so has dramatically democratized the kinds of food a person can choose to eat.
This notion of sacrificing Quality of Eating(tm) is therefore a non-starter, humanity demands and strives for better eating. Any proposal to change how we produce food must accept it must co-exist with continued improvements to eating.
> eating is by far one of the biggest pleasures a person can have in life.
With 70% of the west being obese or overweight I think the pendulum swung way too far.
> This notion of sacrificing Quality of Eating(tm) is therefore a non-starter
When did factory farms meat become quality ?? I think you're mistaking quantity and low price for quality.
You'd have to be blind to not see how the quality of food decreased in the past decades, my grandparents ate much less meat but almost everything was local
Let me put it in terms of tech so the audience here can relate better:
The computers we have at home and in our pockets are inferior in quality to enterprise servers and mainframes, but everyone has computers and nobody is willing to go back to simple Casio calculators and slide rules.
The meats we have at home are inferior in quality to artisan meats, but everyone has meats and nobody is willing to go back to eating other people's refuse (I'm aware organ meats are perfectly fine food, but let's be real for a moment) and porridge every day.
Our access to food today is nothing short of utterly insane to people just a century ago, and rightfully noone is willing to let it go.
You're countering arguments I never made. If you think the only choices we have are modern industrial farming or starving on porridge you seriously lack imagination. Also you're completely ignoring the externalities and the long term consequences both on the environment and on human health, if the question was just about having meat or not having meat we wouldn't have this discussion.
> and rightfully noone is willing to let it go.
A cancer also won't let go even if it means the death of its host.
Your analogy is plain wrong because there is 0 trade off in your example, the right analogy would be to trade your $1500 iphone for five $100 backdoored chinese phones of much lower quality and pretend you're happier because you have more
>If you think the only choices we have are modern industrial farming or starving on porridge you seriously lack imagination.
It's not easy to feed so many people so many different kinds of food at a price most people can afford. When I said the past century dramatically democratized our diets, that was achieved by improving the efficiency of production and transport of food to such an extent that was only possible with modern industrial innovations.
>Also you're completely ignoring the externalities and the long term consequences both on the environment and on human health,
And likewise I would argue you guys are ignoring the benefits to and desires of humanity.
>if the question was just about having meat or not having meat we wouldn't have this discussion.
Except that usually is ultimately the question, because inevitably the discussion degenerates into "we can eat <X> instead of <Y>". I'm saying that such conversations will convince noone because it ignores the reality of humans desiring to eat something and whatever else specifically.
>Your analogy is plain wrong because there is 0 trade off in your example,
The trade off is having a limited diet, possibly enforced from the top down. As I said previously, humanity has striven to widen its diet for as long as humanity has existed. This is a trade off that simply will not receive consensus.
As a description of human behavior and how humans are local optimization machines I think you are spot on. This is where I disagree with you:
…rightfully noone is willing…
I don’t believe this is right in the moral sense or in a global optimization sense. The world’s people are getting richer and as the world’s population begins to live more and more like Americans the world becomes exponentially more polluted. This will eventually affect us all. The world is becoming a toxic shithole. The right thing to do is to make changes now. But for the reasons you stated this isn’t going to happen. As a species we are local optimization machines and we don’t seek to find the global optimum.
Isn’t it a mathematical fact that if Americans consume exponentially more resources than others then as more people gain wealth commensurate with Americans then exponentially more resources will be consumed? Or do you think Americans are especially greedy in this respect? I had not considered that possibility.
It’s interesting to hear someone use the phrase don’t listen to main stream media think that Foxnews, Newsmax, Alex Jones, etc are all cranks who can’t be trusted. Given your implied self professed ignorance you must occasionally wonder if your very limited experience exploring the world is indicative of its true state. Ignorance is bliss so continue to stop watching Foxnews, Newsmax, and other like minded sources.
EDIT: Looking at your past comments it’s clear you do consume news! What a surprise given your comment.
I consider whatever news I do see mainly as a form of entertainment (FSVO entertainment) with no credence given.
>Given your implied self professed ignorance you must occasionally wonder if your very limited experience exploring the world is indicative of its true state.
I can tell you the world is nowhere near as shitty as the powers that be would like you to believe.
Looking at Tesco online in UK: there's a soy protein 'mince' a £3.72/kg. Beef or chicken mince at £5. Quorn mycoprotein at £8.33. Beyond Meat at £13.
Out of the 5 vegan and 8 vegetarian options, only the soy protein is cheaper than meat.
I might replace one meal a week with the soy protein, but I'd be concerned about long term effects of phytoestrogen, especially on growing children? Mind you many foods have some hidden soy 'bulk' nowadays.
Why do you need a "minced meat" substitute anyway? Compare your minced meat to a can of beans which one is cheaper.
Moreover, it is well established research that most modern western diets contain too much animal products. If you think that living vegetarian causes so much problems, you need to explain how many cultures who live almost exclusively vegetarian (e.g. In some areas of India) without significant health problems.
Societal norms changing, government policies, free access to birth control, universal sex education, taxing the wealth of people who have too much, etc. It’s easy to implement once enough support is gained.
This likely wont happen in my lifetime. It will only change when the change is forced. When we’ve made too much of the planet a toxic waste dump then people will be forced to change.
There's more alt-milks than I can count. While cow's milk obviously is used to produce other things, we can drastically reduce the need for it by moving to other kinds of milk for the liquid-consumption part.
The op is likely quoting one of the recent 'hit piece' style articles talking about ultra processed foods and trying to argue nut milk is less healthy because it may not always have calcium. It's pretty absurd, and the basis for the claim is fairly well explained here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8634539/
It is ultra processed in name, not nutrition.
By the way, humans are the only species drinking the milk of another animal, or after childhood.
Nut milks in stores almost always have additives, mainly preservatives, which are questionable in terms of healthiness. Now store sold oat milks in particular are very unhealthy, if I remember right it was oatly that has 30% by calorie percentage of canola oil. Cannot get worse that this but so many vegan products do this exact same thing where they stuff whatever processed meat substitute product they sell with canola oil and other ridiculously unhealthy and gross ingredients.
Canola oil isn't the devil everyone makes it out to be. Study after study demonstrate that replacing dairy fats with canola oil has positive health outcomes.
That said, plenty of oil free alt milks out there.
I love how on HN we regularly talk about terraforming Mars, computer/brain interface, the AI "singularity", or even immortality brought by technology, but "sustainable farming" is an unsolvable problem and is so out of our imagination spectrum that we almost shouldn't discuss the possibility...
But I don't see any alternatives being discussed, like say, sky scraping towers of factory farmed cows that take up a square block and can feed hundreds of thousands. Like apparently the only solution is abstention or restriction. Where are the crazy visions of feeding tens of billions of people through some high tech magic whatevers.
What you call "abstention or restriction" in 2024 would be the dream diet of anyone before the 1930s. We're supposedly smart monkey, we should be able to eat 25% less bacon if it means avoiding all these long term issues.
You can make your own oat milk with organic oats in like 1 minute with a blender and strainer. Not sure that qualifies as ultra processed, but there’s no risk of H5N1 so I think I’ll stick with it.
https://www.ewg.org/foodscores/ might help you target specific brands. Many soy milks count as ultra processed because the additives are (calcium, vitamin b etc.). Less healthy than the unadulterated brands? I think the research is still out on that.
(and cow milk often has similar additives, so this isn't supporting the original claim)
500ml of soy milk has almost twice as many protein and tons of nutrients too. It requires like 5% as much water to produce, 0 antibiotic, and no animals
And when factoring in the negative externalities extremely expensive. When factoring in the moral aspect considering the way the cows are treated it’s an immoral product.
Are you implying cow's milk supports biodiversity? Because it absolutely doesn't. In fact, animal agriculture is the leading cause of biodiversity loss.
You should look up the meaning of the word misnomer and understand how widespread such occurrences are. When that happens you’ll likely reason better and not get sidetracked by pedantic shenanigans.
Do you believe all 8 billion people could live like Americans in a sustainable way? Do you believe we could produce enough meat and animal derived products in a morally sustainable way? Looking at film of the conditions of the animals in factory farms it’s clear the meat portion of our food supply is grossly immoral.
We saw this movie before in the 70s. “The population bomb” etc. All that Malthusian drivel assumed a static state when humanity is anything but.
You are discounting civilizations ability to adapt and invent by an absolutely incredible margin that is not supported by our own history of human events.
You think 8 billion people can live like Americans in a sustainable way? Now by sustainable, I mean that we do so in a way that does not turn the world into a pollution infested shithole. If all 8 billion people lived like Americans where would the pollution be exported too? Who would do the work that people who live like Americans won’t do but depend on people doing?
The distribution of resources in the world is grossly unfair and it is not sustainable that 8 billion people live the way Americans live.
As it stands now the world is already becoming a pollution infested shithole. Imagine what happens when 7 billion more people live like us.
The only reason agricultural yields haven't collapsed is we have printed fertilizer with fossil fuels and dug it out of the ground. Sustaining contemporary agricultural output is just going to become more and more difficult as energy becomes more costly.
For every rich and wasteful person in the world there is a poor person that lives in scarcity and „offsets“ the wasteful lifestyle. So we’re kind of at a limit when you want to make a genuine effort to continue fighting poverty.
Meat is the best food for humans — ruminants, especially, are great at processing out the various anti-nutrients plants produce to ward off being eaten & then processing it into pretty much exactly the food humans need for optimal health. Think of all the land & water that goes into crops that aren't even eaten by humans — run buffalo & cattle over that instead. That would have the secondary benefit of not monocropping (which produces all manner of negative downstream ecological effects). If you don't want healthy, thriving humans, as well as a thriving ecosystem then by all means keep pushing this plant nonsense (take a look at how much water it takes to grow one almond, & then scale that up into what it takes to make almond (or really any other plant) "milk").
Maybe. Meat consumption isn't declining as of yet.
Let's start with treating animals with respect, don't feed them (literal in some cases) trash and take hygiene way more seriously. We have a pretty good idea how disease spreads, and still there is a large fraction of farms, feed and livestock processing facilities that are absolutely disgusting by any standard.
It's not just gross, it greatly facilitates the spread and crossings of disease. We simply can no longer allow these facilities to exist: too dangerous for consumers, and food security as a whole. And the animals themselves of course.
Those are not dairy farms. Those are where cattle are fattened up just before slaughter. Very different situation. Cattle farms also take biosecurity seriously, but so far they have not worried about birds.
Diary cows are kept inside and isolated from everything else since if the cow is sick you have to treat it and dump all milk obtained for a month afterwards.
I don't think it's at all controversial that concentrated monoculture populations are more at risk of spreading infectious pathogens, and there's no evidence that these tests for H5N1 were performed on a bunch of artisanal raw milk producers.
Maybe it should be controversial. Of course there are lots of different ways to do things, but the old ways are not always better. There is a lot of researching into how to raise cows, and as romantic as the open range sounds, the reality isn't all the great for cows either. (little water at times, temperatures that are not comfortable)
Milking parlors tend to be pretty enclosed, and dairy farms being all enclosed was your original claim. Even the ones that let cows out to pasture or use external feed lots may have barns for winter, bad weather, safety at night, etc.
> If we grant an enclosed space then we can also apply air filters.
We could barely be bothered for COVID, let alone here.
Id hazard a guess that live virus contact with people on scale is what — by chance — eventually selects a cross over strain.
So virus that can be cultured into existence of out of milk presents a possible vector for that. Hence they are testing to see if they can grow the virus from milk samples.
If each person drinks milk from one cow, and there are 1 million of each, then you have 1 million chances.
A chance is higher if a cow has a few mutations in its viruses, or if a person has a slightly different receptor or immune system...
But if you put all the milk from the 1 million cows in a mixing vat and then distribute it to the same 1 million people, now there are 1 trillion chances, and the slightly better mutations will end up coming into contact with the humans with slightly more receptive cells.
This is one of many reasons I think we should limit the fanin/fanout of food production. Ie. you may only mix animal products in say batches of up to 10,000 cows, and that batch may only be split up amongst up to 10,000 humans. Then you have to clean the production equipment before the next batch.
Milk in the US is pasteurized at 63C for 30 minutes.
> The results show that at 54.5 °C, the virus [SARS-CoV-2] half-life was 10.8 ± 3.0 min and the time for a 90% decrease in infectivity was 35.4 ± 9.0 min. [1]
At 8.5 degrees hotter, I'm sure stuff happens quicker, but I doubt very much it kills them all. This study is in air - in liquid I imagine they would survive to a higher temperature.
It's far from clear that all virus particles are inactivated by pasteurization. Remember the main purpose of pasteurization is to kill most bacteria, to increase shelf life.
I have a similar theory with ground meat, or even where you're buying individual cuts. People are now consuming hundreds of thousands of animals throughout their lifetime rather than hundreds or thousands.
Plenty of studies have shown "processed food" (ie. hotdogs) leads to poorer health outcomes. Processed food, in general, comes from far more individual animals than other foods.
I'm talking about infectious vectors. Hotdogs and other processes foods are generally paturized or cured. That could still be a vector for things like prions though.
The annihilation of the virus and the absorption of all of the wreckage is what gives humans immunity without actually becoming infected.
Generally speaking, the only viruses that make it past the stomach do so in people who already have an illness or are taking medications that raise stomach pH.
Many "stomach viruses" that are transmitted orally actually infect the body at the pharynx and then make their way down to the intestines where they go wild.
> The annihilation of the virus and the absorption of all of the wreckage is what gives humans immunity without actually becoming infected.
Do you have a source for that claim? "Wreckage" would be sufficiently different from the live virus to not elicit an immune response.
The live polio vaccine infects the person with an attenuated virus. The target of the polio virus is intestinal epithelial cells.
There are hundreds of diseases that infect the lower digestive tract (both viral and bacterial) that clearly result from these infectious agents passing through the stomach unaltered.
It may be true that many viruses are destroyed by stomach acid, but you only need a few unaltered viruses to make it through.
Studies show that viruses bound to surfaces can survive stomach acid. Viruses can be bound to food or other particles which can protect them from stomach contents.
"FCV survived in synthetic gastric fluid at pH values as low as 2.5 and in some cases as low as 1.5 for at least 30 min when associated with certain materials."
Yes. The concern is more that this is a sign of high levels of spread amongst cows that might put it at risk of crossover into other animals like pigs, or into humans, where it seems to be quite nasty.
To clarify, the article says this is not confirmed, but an ongoing research question,
- "The researchers expect additional lab studies currently underway to show that those samples don’t contain live virus with the capability to cause human infections"
Unlike with covid, we know how to make flu vaccines on a large scale. Is there a reason why we couldn’t also preemptively vaccinate against H5N1 during regular seasonal vaccination campaigns?
I don't think there's anything in particular that stops us from routinely adding a H5N1 strain into the current flu vaccines. It's just a question of cost-benefit. And as the sibling post notes, getting an avian flu into human form right now is definitely more involved. I imagine if we started using mRNA influenza vaccines, that might change the relative cost.
I suspect with the apparent extinction of the B/Yamagata line, that'd free up a slot in the quadravalent vaccine.
The H5N1 tests are PCR (with an extra “reversed” step for RNA) and are, in fact, pretty reliable. The same was true for COVID. The bad covid tests were the early antibody tests which had a ridiculously high false positive rate that made them useless. But the manufacturers lied about the quality or just relied on the lack of statistical literacy to sell their product.
It showed positive because The number of cycles in the PCR test was so high that it won't make any sense anymore. It was already positive from a slight contamination.
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