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Comment by mainstreem | Hacker News Reader

Increasing the cost of food is anti-poor. Increasing the cost of luxury fabric, not so much. Until poverty and hunger are eliminated worldwide, it's going to be hard to make me care more about how animals are farmed in order that the most possible people can afford enough to eat.

It's easy to not care about people not getting mink coats. Much harder to care about people having food taken out of their mouths by people who think they have a right to dictate that sort of thing. If you think eating pork should be forbidden, I've got a part of the world to introduce you to.

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It is funny that you mention human need for food. Hog is actually an inefficient food production method because they need to be fed more corn/soy etc than the food they produce.

If your goal was to make food more accessible to the poor then one way to go would be to stop this inefficient food production method and just consume the corn/soy protein directly. That would be healthier also. Consuming corn/soy directly would drive down the price of food because we would need less of it.

Consuming excessive amounts of corn is associated with other issues, up to and including cannibalism, mind.

https://phys.org/news/2017-01-corn-french-hamsters-deranged-...

Do not discount the value add of multiple digestive and organ systems worth of energy work, even if the numbers otherwise look attractive. The entire planet is interrelated.

From the article:

"A diet of corn is turning wild hamsters in northeastern France into deranged cannibals that devour their offspring, alarmed researchers have reported."

Are you saying I might be a wild hamster from northeastern France? And I should not just be eating corn?

I am saying that mammalian research models have predictive power, and that shifting to a fully corn based diet without any of the livestock based foods we'd raise on corn could have unintended side effects. Not everything happens as a first order outcome.

Every creature in the logistical food chain is performing different nutrient accumulations for the next one in the chain. If you think about bioaccumulation as a mechanism, that research should have you realizimg that "You are what you eat" has a terrifyingly poignant meaning, in the sense that if we end up seeing a smaller creature fed on a single having potential in the wild population management problems, the same thing could happen to us. By the time we realized what was going on, the damage to the ecosystem could realistically already be done.

I mean, scoff if you like. Me? I'm trying to figure out how to companion farm. Better for the ecosystem as a whole, and I like the plethora of wildlife that end up benefitting as result too.

On another note, I don't remember making this posting twice? Did I pocket post somehow? Hrrm.

Of all the problems with eating a lot of corn, you chose cannibalism as your example?

Consuming excessive amounts of corn is associated with other issues, up to and including cannibalism, mind.

https://phys.org/news/2017-01-corn-french-hamsters-deranged-...

Do not discount the value add of multiple digestive and organ systems worth of energy work, even if the numbers otherwise seem unintuitive the entire planet is interrelated in ways we have not even scratched the surface of.

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