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Comment by tomweingarten | Hacker News Reader

Most of this comes from a single type of ship waste:

"Half of the great Pacific garbage patch is made up of fishing nets, by weight, according to a report published last year in Scientific Reports."

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So the ocean is being overfished and is being polluted by fishing. The clear answer is to ban fishing. Though, as someone who dislikes all seafood, this is easy for me to say.

"Approximately 1 billion people people are dependent on fish as the principal source of animal protein"

http://www.suds-en-ligne.ird.fr/ecosys/ang_ecosys/intro1.htm

Is there something in particular necessary about animal protein, that it gets a distinct category from just protein in general?

It also stands to reason that if that many people really are dependent on fish, it will be devastating to them when overfishing and pollution destroy fish stocks. All the more reason to reduce fishing and build alternatives now.

Well yes, but actually no. Not all proteins are equal, they have different quantities of different kinds of amino acids. Humans need 9 distinct amino acids for a healthy diet, and animal proteins are by far the easiest source of "complete proteins" from a single source. It's absolutely possible to get plant-based complete proteins (e.g. soy or quinoa), but often that involves deliberately mixing different protein sources to get a complete balance.

Turns out that eating the exact same thing every day is bad for you. That goes for meat as much as it goes for not-meat.

What do you mean “gets a distinct category”? Nutritionally it’s certainly possible to survive without eating fish, but a very large number of people do eat fish to survive.

Statisticians will collect and analyze data at many levels of granularity. Obviously it’s nice to know the types of food billions of people eat more generally than “fat”, “protein”, and “carbs”.

It stands to reason that fishing should be done sustainably, just like anything should be done sustainably, lest it become unsustainable. In other words, this says essentially nothing, right?

Only in the context of what the substitute is, how readily available it is, how comparable in cost, how comparable in nutrition, how much is it preferred or disliked compared to the status quo, and what negative externalities might exist in scaling up the alternative, only in that context can a useful discussion be had.

> Is there something in particular necessary about animal protein, that it gets a distinct category from just protein in general

Pretty worrying that people don't know that the only real sources of essential acids critical to humans are from seafood, eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA)

They aren't optional and the body sucks at synthesising them.

Humans can get EPA from algae, same as where fish get it, among other sources. Just look up "algae based omega 3 supplement". The body synthesizes DHA from all sorts of seeds and oils, else we'd be screwed.

Weirdly smug, alarmist post.

There are people who never eat seafood. Reading your post, you'd have to assume such people would be dead.

Historically none of the above is true. iodized salt, and the OM3 where almost universally received from sea based foods.

You are talking about sources that have only affected people in the last small period of time. There are a couple of million years of development that got you to the point of fortified cereals and pills.

> There are people who never eat seafood.

Woosh

There are entire countries and cultures that survive without meat for centuries. I’d love to know how you decided sourcing those proteins from fish is “not optional”.

In your zeal you have both misquoted me to redirect the comment to be what you were hoping i had said so you could treat it combatively.

Do those folks know that peas, tofu, nuts, etc. have protein too?

These are people in some of the poorest countries like Bangladesh. Are pea proteins cost effective and available in sufficient enough quantities to feed all these people? Other people brought up that it isn't just about the protein but other essentials things like amino acids.

Amino acids are the building blocks of protein. All of my aforementioned foods have the complete spectrum of amino acids.

I don't know the details but look at what Slippery_John said in his comment:

> Well yes, but actually no. Not all proteins are equal, they have different quantities of different kinds of amino acids. Humans need 9 distinct amino acids for a healthy diet, and animal proteins are by far the easiest source of "complete proteins" from a single source. It's absolutely possible to get plant-based complete proteins (e.g. soy or quinoa), but often that involves deliberately mixing different protein sources to get a complete balance.

Like prohibition in the US, a ban that is unpopular and impossible to enforce can be counterproductive. Consider the difficulties in enforcing a ban on something that 1) Millions of people depend on for their livelihood; 2) Happens in the middle of the ocean.

Yeah, in the middle of the ocean the only governmental/law enforcing body that really exists is the ship's captain. Beyond that, people can do whatever the hell they want because there's no one else for miles.

Also, no, the world is not going to stop fishing because a few people on HN think it's a good idea. Trying to enforce your own sense of morality on others is pointless.

There are types of fishing we really should think about banning because of the harm the cause to the ocean ecosystem. And that's before you take into account the fishing net waste.

The ocean is interconnected commons though so nobody really has a whole domain over it.

Banning non-biodegradable nets and lines would be far more sensible and even that would have compliance issues.

Seafood haters unite! You're the only other person I've ever found who doesn't like seafood, I feel like we should form a club or something.

There are dozens of us

Smells like death to me.

Fresh fish has barely any smell. You won't smell fish in a reasonable quality sushi train place for example. It's only if you don't preserve it well for hours that it starts to stink.

I've lived near the sea most of my life and have always been exposed to very fresh fish.

To me (perhaps not you) it smells like death.

- ed

As an aside - I remember reading some thing a few years ago about 'supertasters' and there was a checklist that i went through that implied I had a particularly acute sense of smell. Probably bullshit, but perhaps it's something to do with that.

I really wish I could enjoy fish - as a meat it looks wonderful, but I simply cannot stand the stuff.

That has the peripheral benefit of allowing me to be smugly pious when it comes to the subject of over-fishing and depleted stocks, etc..

Personally, I don't mind fish, they smell and taste like nothing to me. I hate crustaceans/etc because they look disgusting, basically cockroaches of the sea. I can't understand how people look at them and still eat them (obligatory XKCD here https://www.xkcd.com/1268/).

I was eating dinner at a Thai restaurant with an ideological vegetarian friend of mine, when I noticed that he ordered prawns.

So I teased him with "For heaven's sake, John! You're a vegetarian! Why are you eating Prawns??? Prawns are insects!!!" fully expecting to have an enjoyable argument about whether or not prawns qualified as insects for the purpose of vegetarianism, a hill I was willing to die on, for which I had a bunch of subjective emotional aesthetic talking points locked and loaded.

But he headed me off at the pass by accepting my premise and shutting me up: "Of course I eat insects. Insects are the enemy! We MUST eat them!!!"

Shrimping is so bad for the environment and other marine life. The amount of bycatch involved is disturbing. He made a pretty lousy argument.

Damnit. He has a point.

Most raw meat smells disgusting.

Raw horse is tasty.

Ban fishing? That's like saying we should ban email because of spam. Or ban the internet because of malware.

It'd be great if fishers needed to be checked for how many nets they have on board and then checked when they arrive and then be fined for the difference.

Or only allow certified nets, and make them cost so much that you'll never want to dump them in sea.

Also valid, but in this case you'll still need to check their ships before they leave. Though I guess the cost of the nets could help pay for these checks.

I imagine in both cases the ships would just have a boat meet them out at sea with additional nets so they either don't need to pay the fine for nets lost or don't need to buy expensive certified nets.

> I imagine in both cases the ships would just have a boat meet them out at sea with additional nets so they either don't need to pay the fine for nets lost or don't need to buy expensive certified nets.

I don't think they would go through that much trouble just for not bringing a net back home. In any case, you could also put an ID or name on a net, just like a license-plate.

Also, having nets without certification would be a crime, so that boat waiting at sea would be in problems if caught.

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