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Comment by jiofih | Hacker News Reader

I didn’t claim otherwise. What I do think, is that

1) these views are heavily colored by industrialization in the USA / low animal welfare / high-intensity farming, which is not matched anywhere else

2) we can lower demands on land and water by moderating our consumption of meat (the US average is something like 1 burger pp/day?) while still growing most of our food in natural ways

Turning to more industrialization seems like a cop-out instead of real (hard) solutions: change of consumption habits, organic farming, strong environmental laws and so on.

I don’t particularly look forward to having most of my food being some form of goo coming out of a massive factory, completely inscrutable, which is where this is leading.

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The United States could feed its own population with significantly reduced industrial inputs, particularly if Americans were content to eat only as much meat per capita as e.g. Japanese people [1]. But the United States has over twice as much arable land per capita as the world average:

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.ARBL.HA.PC

The US is currently one of the world's top exporters of corn, wheat, and soy beans. If the US exported less food then other countries would intensify production further. I don't think that any dietary changes could prevent mass starvation if the world abruptly stopped using artificial nitrogen fertilizers altogether.

Microbial protein production is one of the ways that the world could gradually cut back on artificial nitrogen fertilizers, though. Some chemoautotrophs are capable of assimilating atmospheric nitrogen.

"Autotrophic nitrogen assimilation and carbon capture for microbial protein production by a novel enrichment of hydrogen-oxidizing bacteria"

https://www.powertoprotein.eu/wp-content/uploads/pagination_...

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

In that list the USA is the top consumer of meat per capita, along with other highly developed countries. You just proved my point.

> If the US exported less food then other countries would intensify production further

> abruptly stopped

> mass starvation

Heh. That’s one of the most creative cop-outs I’ve seen recently.

Vegetarians have been trying to get people to eat less meat for decades but worldwide, per capita meat consumption has grown steadily since 1961.[1] The percentage of Americans identifying as vegetarian or vegan has held steady for twenty years.[2] Maybe it's time to look for other solutions.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/meat-production

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/food/wp/2018/08/03/you-m...

Some people eating more meat doesn't change what the problem is or how it can be addressed.

Also, I think you claim that vegetarianism/veganism hasn't grown is pretty dubious.

My source for the second claim was the Washington Post. Can you provide a contrary one? It does say that people have moderated their consumption a bit, but it's not visible in the global trend.

The rise in meat consumption over the past sixty years mostly comes from poor countries getting richer. It's been inexorable. Meatless Mondays in rich countries aren't going to make a dent in it.

Lab-grown meat cheaper than farmed would be another matter. We didn't stop whaling with public relations campaigns. It stopped when kerosene made it mostly obsolete. Thirty years after kerosene came on the market, 95% of whaling had stopped.

> but it's not visible in the global trend. The rise in meat consumption over the past sixty years mostly comes from poor countries getting richer

Gonna need a source for that too, the numbers available say otherwise.

Um...the source is my first link above. Rich countries eat the most meat, but their consumption has been steady over the past 50 years. Meanwhile:

> Growth in per capita meat consumption has been most marked in countries who have underwent a strong economic transition – per capita consumption in China has grown approximately 15-fold since 1961; rates in Brazil have nearly quadrupled. The major exception to this pattern has been India

If you disagree, what is your source?

Trying to get Americans to sacrifice their lifestyles for anything is like trying to squeeze blood out of a diamond.

“ Turning to more industrialization seems like a cop-out instead of real (hard) solutions: change of consumption habits, organic farming, strong environmental laws and so on.”

This. I used to carry the view that going to a full industrial processes would eliminate the inefficiencies. It just ignores the core problem, we are no longer in coexistence.

moving away from sprawl, and back to high tax revenue older school forums of urbanization(which we are seeing as new age urban spaces), agroforestry, more cyclical product “end of life” supply chains

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