Comment by scantis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by scantis | Hacker News Reader

This calculation is fatally flawed. Meat processors are extremely efficient in producing calories from unusable material in any environment. For example a reindeer eats basically moss, wild mushrooms and gras and can grow to 60 to 80 kg in a year. They can occupy unfarmable land.

Goats can be easily raised in mild desert, where there is no way to efficiently farm anything else.

There other even more efficient protein processors, like fish, who don't even require farmable land.

There are various types of wild chicken that can be held a forrests. They eat various insects and are much more tasty because of it.

Most high end pigs are exclusively fed by acorn and the like to aquire an astonishing well defined taste. You can not eat acorns directly, and even if you process them into oblivion, they can not compete with bacon.

We waste 70% of our produce, but it can be easily put into pigs as meat processors. We can also extract the fat first and put it through insects first as a protein processor. This can then be fed to meat processors and produce something delicious.

Ever heard of free range gras fed cows in the Alps? The land is basically unfarmable for anything else. These cows are super delicious.

The vegan diet requires a lot of different materials shipped from all over the world to meet a sufficient nutritional baseline. Due to climate shifts and wate consumptions, Farmland for such specialized nutritions of high value becomes more and more rare. Sure we can easily reach our calorie intake by producing a ton of highly processed starch, with a minimum of farmable land, but we would start to severely reverse Flynn's effect because of it.

The title of the article and arguments in it are "If everyone were vegan, only a quarter of current farmland would be needed" - the numbers are about what is done now if everyone stopped eating corn and grass fed cows and factory chickens and ate plants instead.

You might also argue that if everyone ate more insects, reindeer, forest grown chickens, more fish, or alpine cows it would also reduce farmland use, but that doesn't make their calculations fatally flawed.

You can only eat certain fruit bodys of plants, while animals can eat a whole lot more and the stuff you throw away.

What we feed livestock isn't exactly for human consumption and mostly non human available calories. This calculation on calories has the fatal flaw, that they assume an average calories output of farmland and intake of humans and livestock. On paper it checks out, but it has no grounding in reality.

Animals are great meat and protein processors, that can make farming much more efficient and sustainable.

The vegan diet is fun with avocados, cacao, coconut, almonds and so on, but that is intensive stuff for farming and it can not be easily ramped up.

Pigs scale much easier and can be fed with food waste.

Everything you say is probably true but you don't consider how your proposed solutions scale. They don't.

The amount of meat produced by the methods you suggest is several magnitudes too small. If you remove large-scale farming where pigs, chickens, and cows are fed grains and soy, global meat consumption would be very small. Free-range does not produce enough meat to produce even a fraction of current consumption. China imports huge amounts of soy from the US because there is not enough calories to feed their pigs.

You are proposing boutique solutions that would mean meat consumption would be just a fraction of what it is now.

Count calories per hectare and you realize that your solutions don't work on scale.

    cattle  300 million 
    pigs    1.5 billion 
    chicken  70 billion

You are absolutely right.

With sustainable methods, we would have to severely cut down meat consumption or depopulate.

I wouldn't say I propose a solution, but there is a middle ground and quality is very important.

If you think about it, photosynthesis is about 4-6% effective while high end solar cells are about 20%. LEDs give you a yield of up to 60%. So we could look at a future, where farmland is not required.

Seems strange, but growing plants below a city could be even more sustainable then on farmland.

Making everyone go vegan definitely isn't.

"Making everyone vegan" was a reference point. It seems that you took that as a strict proposal. Going mostly vegan is what you are also proposing.

Reading things too literally and not understanding the nuance in online forums seems more common every year.

I was supplying nuance and another perspective.

Sorry but eating chips, french fries and drinking energy drinks won't save the planet.

I'm not sure the math checks out. Whether you go directly solar or via LEDs, you still have photosynthesis, so you're imposing a large additional inefficiency and huge material expenditures.

Still, there are many other factors - yield of plants grown on the fields is very far from ideal photosynthesis yields due to droughts, diseases, inefficient light use. Agricultural land often lays bare for months every year, etc .. it's a complex topic.

A friends former roommate had a diet of daily rice+lentils, some strawberries and I think some veggies. Plus about 2-3 supplements. AFAIK, she hasn't changed her diet, ate like that for years and had regular checkups with bloodwork showing no nutritional deficiencies.

A nutritionally well balanced diet does not require materials shipped from all over the world, nor meat, or even milk. Historically, people had access to much, much less, and didn't even know as much about nutrition and supplements were not available. Some ate a lot of meat, in populous areas most ate much less meat, some ate no animal food, and most food was grown locally with very limited varieties available.

We are absolutely spoiled WRT with what food we can get by, and still spoiled even if a nutritiously full and complete diet is considered a requirement.

Wild animals are profoundly irrelevant to the modern world. Of all the animals on earth, ~50% are the ones we grow to eat. Around 46% are - humans. Leaving 4% 'wild' animals.

In other words, we would need > 10X as many animals in the wild as we have now, to approach the food capacity we now consume. There's just no room for that.

Except most livestock eat soy and other cereals, that are specially grown for them. Forests are still being razed to grow food for livestock. Most of the food grown on earth is used to feed livestock.

There is absolutely not a single valid justification for eating meat, you're fooling yourself.

There are tons of justifications

nutritional value availability it being delicious tradition and heritage sustainability

and so many more

Even you whole food vegan types have a final form as a hunter.

It is the logical conclusion if you care about the environment and animals, want low CO2 emissions and stay away from high intensity farming.

yeah hunting seems like a genius way of feeding 7 billion people

taste, tradition and heritage are not justifications. You can justify cannibalism using the same arguments.

We easily feed them and move a year supply of food around the world just mess with the prices. Also we throw away about 70% of human food.

Canibalism can cause severe deseases, if the protein isn't prepared correctly, but for craps it seems the way to go to find stability with any habitat.

It is my personal opinion to strive for a future with more variety in food and more opportunities.

Instead of being vegan and eat a block of starch each day.

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