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Comment by nemo44x | Hacker News Reader

I guess we can agree to disagree. Livestock is something only the wealthy could eat daily and today we have discovered methods that allow anyone to enjoy this. This is great progress.

You’re free to choose your lifestyle of course and I’m grateful to live in a place and time where that’s possible. But I don’t subscribe to your beliefs. I have access to the same information you do. I possibly have a more critical appraisal of it and I don’t believe the hype.

People have acted like you since the dawn of time. They might be right one day but they’ve been wrong every time so far. Line the guys who claim the market is crashing every month.

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A cow was worth about 10 months of skilled labor in ancient Rome [0].

If you keep the fat trim that's maybe ~600-700 pounds of usable meat.

That's about 0.01666 of a month's salary for a pound of meat. So if you were willing to spend 10% of your salary on meat, you could have a quarter pounder everyday. Not cheap, but if you really liked meat and you had a semi-skilled job you could afford to eat it everyday.

[0] https://www.money.org/uploads/pdfs/press-releases/ANAPR.10.1...

Thats an interesting way of looking at it, but seems kind of misleading to use a cow. Pigs can live anywhere and eat pretty much anything and are a much more common meat. Beef has always been a luxury meat in most places.

Beef was cheaper than pork, porknubbins.

https://imperiumromanum.pl/en/roman-economy/roman-goods-pric...

Wow not what I would have expected, though a lot of my intuition about Rome is probably wrong. I respect your effort in looking up ancient pork prices. I may have to change to Beefnubbins.

Cows can eat what people can't. This may have been the source of the semitic proscription on pork: that they compete with people for the same calories.

Of course now we feed cows mostly corn.

If everyone gave up eating meat from animals fed farm output, the looming climate catastrophe would just fade away.

> we have discovered methods that allow anyone to enjoy this. This is great progress.

Just because we can produce (and consume) vast amounts of meant doesn't mean we must. Restraint is a virtue.

You sound like a Catholic. Just because we can have sex doesn’t mean we should, etc.

What is the point of restraint? To what end? I should suffer to make your ideal of how the works ought to be a reality?

I’m not into your religion.

> What is the point of restraint? To what end?

You know, stopping climate change. The thing that's gonna keep your grandchildren from eating meat at all if people don't stop consuming so much of it.

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