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Comment by jononomo | Hacker News Reader

I eat mainly beef and I don't understand why everyone in the world doesn't eat mainly beef -- it just fixes everything. I'm thinking about doing an only-beef 2023.

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Nothing wrong with other protein sources - I prefer chicken as it's cheaper and much leaner for shredding and lean gains for example. Every bodybuilder I know is eating primarily chicken breasts & eggs. Why doesn't everyone in the world eat mainly chicken? ;-)

Because chicken is less nutritious than beef — look it up.

Well for starters that is an economic impossibility.

I buy my beef by the cow and I get the whole thing for less than $4/pound, whether it be ribeye steaks or ground beef or roasts. That price is for the cow bought at auction, slaughtered, butchered, packaged, and frozen. Note that I don't spend money on any other food, since I only eat beef. You save massive amounts of time, since you only go shopping for food once or twice a year, you never deal with vegetables or chopping, pealing, etc, and your food never goes bad. Sometimes I'll go to Wegman's and buy fifty ribeye steaks and then just eat ribeye steaks for a while -- that can run me about $700 since I've been able to find them for $13/pound and they're about 1.1 pounds each. But the crazy thing is the health benefits you experience -- three dozen minor issues are cured.

That's great, and I believe you've experienced positive benefits in many ways. I myself eat a large amount of meat.

But it's a privilege for individuals in high income countries. The economic impossibilities are tied to the resource side: water, energy, land-use.

Again, I'm far from anti-meat but I am a food systems researcher and the world cannot extract enough resources to feed ourselves mostly beef - or meat for that matter. Nor could we do it at cost.

Perhaps there is a scenario where a majority of the population is directly involved in agriculture and we spend >50% of our income on beef. But then you have a massive reduction in total GDP because more human capital is pulled away from other sectors.

> ...the world cannot extract enough resources to feed ourselves mostly beef - or meat for that matter. Nor could we do it at cost.

I wouldn't be so sure: markets find ways to satisfy demand. People made similar statements about photovoltaic panels, but here we are, with solar competitive with coal. I'd prefer to let markets organically allocate scarce inputs to their highest and best use over asserting that this technology or that behavior is unsustainable. If you're right, markets and prices will take care of modulating the demand and there's no need to tell individuals that their habits and preferences are a "privilege".

Do you realize current food prices are already propped up with government subsidies? And we aren't even pricing in the negative externalities associated with our current agri-food system. You're boiling down one of, if not the most, complex industry on earth to simple supply and demand. Econ101 doesn't hold up in this territory.

Well, it is expensive.

I went from spending $1600 a month on food to just over $600 by switching the majority of my diet to beef. Turns out I can only eat about 1.5 lbs of food a day when I'm eating primarily beef. When I'm eating an omnivorous diet I eat around 4 - 5 lbs of food per day and eat out several times a week.

When people say expensive, they aren't necessarily talking about just your wallet. Our agri-food system does not fully price in the negative externalities and govt subsidies which artificially brings the consumer cost down.

Move over OnlyFans OnlyBeef the next big thing coming 2023

youve got it all wrong now. Ever since I read an article about farmhands and astute svelt businessmen who stand at 18th century lecterns conducting traditional old fashioned business I learned our modern diet is causing everything from climate change to the inevitable heat death of the universe itself. Cornkids and Soyboys beware, for what I propose is a radical change in everything youve ever known about putting a thing into your mouth.

For the past 1500 years ive made it a point to eat nothing but the rancid dew-pocked suet in unattended suburban bird feeders for breakfast. My lunch is a simple trip back to those very same bird feeders, and --you guessed it buddy-- dinner is a quick helping of that sweet greasy nectar of the caged brick full of seeds and lawn detritus. Most people say they cannot believe their eyes when they see what i look like, or how I managed to stay so physically fit, or where all their suet keeps going to.

I hope to start a blog soon where i will expound upon the brilliance of giving up old fashioned coffee as well in favour of a modern advancement in nutrition i call, contact cement and model epoxy.

In fact I spent several weeks during 2021 rendering tallow from beef suet and now I use tallow to fry eggs in and to slow-cook roasts in. I've also been thinking of making pemican with it. I have several gallons of tallow in my fridge (along with several ribeye steaks that I'll be eating later).

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