Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

melling·

Japan is the 10th largest country in the world by population.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_depend...

View on HN

I think they meant geographically

What's wrong with cannibalism?

From a practical perspective, tons of parasites. From a moral perspective it becomes much harder to trust someone who no qualms about eating you.

The fact that this is being downvoted so heavily shows that the food industry is next to be disrupted.

Even that's not entirely accurate. Japan is larger than the UK. That's England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland combined.

Japan is actually closer to the size of Germany - which isn't a large country but certainly isn't small either.

From a food perspective the problem is so much of Japan isn't arable - 11.6% compared to Germany's 34.1%.

While that's true, Japan aren't unique in that respect either. For example most of the scandinavian countries have a lower percentage of arable land as well as a smaller land area size. Yet, bar Norway, they've adhered to the whaling ban.

Population-wise, the Scandinavian countries are tiny. The problem in Japan is the combination of a relatively large population and a small amount of arable land.

Sweden, Finland, and Norway have 21.7, 16.2, and 15.6 people per square kilometer, respectively. Japan has 335.6. While the Scandinavian countries do have a lower arable land % (5.9, 6.5, 2.7) than Japan (11.6), the ratio of population to arable land is much lower.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com