Will We Ever Stop Eating Animal Meat? | Hacker News Reader

Will We Ever Stop Eating Animal Meat?

theatlantic.com

2 pointsHBlix6 comments

Yes. As the price goes up, people switch to non-meat protein. Similar to what is hopefully going to happen with fossil fuels and renewable energy.

We'll need a way to get the vitamins and minerals that we currently get from animal meat, too. And people are already skeptical of pill vitamins (which is likely what will be included with these new type of non-meat foods to make them look just as healthy).

A lot of the foods have already had these nutrients destroyed through processing (to resist more time on the shelf) or genetic modification (to increase yield, etc). It's part of what's leading us to higher and higher numbers people with chronic diseases, cancers, etc.

We'll see more of that as we give up "natural meat", too.

Modern meat, save the expensive grass fed stuff, isn't even that nutrient dense. With the exception of B12, which you can get from mushrooms/nutritional yeast/supplemented, everything else is available in sufficient quantities. I'm not even vegetarian, but meat's nutritional value is highly overrated. Agree with you on lack of micronutrients and genetic modifications making things harder to digest and begetting chronic disease though. Source: worked in meat industry tech for 4 years.

Your remarks sound fairly woo, yet not.

Most of the folks who are, say, antivaxxers firmly believe that metals, pesticides and other chemicals are a primary cause of chronic illness. The reality is that chemicals of that sort concentrate in fat stores in animals and get worse the further up the food chain you go.

It is one of the better arguments for eating vegetarian.

(This comment is a reply to two comments here, just to make it easier for me)

The woo part in the GP’s comment seems to be a hidden implication that animal meat is not processed or hasn’t had its nutrition destroyed or not been genetically modified or not been fed “pills that people are skeptical of”. There’s almost nothing “natural” about animal meat that’s sold in stores. And hence the conclusion that some disorders would increase solely because of this is false.

The technical term for your description of the concentration of certain things increasing up the food chain is “biomagnification”. [1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomagnification

I was amused that the article didn’t actually answer the title question directly. The implication seemed to follow Betteridge’s law of headlines though. [1]

The article does rightly note that people don’t care — “the moral and environmental costs of meat register as real, yet ignorable; snowflake static on the radar” — but this is not an American issue alone by any measure. I’ve seen people from other countries with a similar mindset.

I also don’t think humankind will ever stop, wholesale or on an absolute basis, doing anything that’s considered harmful in any way to anyone.

In the current scheme of things, it would probably be a combination of capitalism, consumerism, and some environmental catastrophes that would create some kind of a significant dent in animal meat consumption. That’s quite unfortunate at many levels while having a significant negative impact on those who’re usually helpless (human or nonhuman).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

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