Comment by a-french-anon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by a-french-anon | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

"Cruelty" is a rhetoric word because its meaning is caught between the classical "deliberate causing of pain" and the new "neglect, indifference towards another's pain" and of course, that discrepancy is fully exploited. What livestock beasts suffer is purely for practical reasons.

>I am genuinely unsure where this disconnect comes from

1. Empathy is a base emotional response triggered by nearby animals, not a rational/moral one.

2. Empathy is also an evolutionary tool that "happened" in (some) humans to help survive situations that require some sort of cooperation, like harsh winters. Anthropomorphization is an associated bug, not a feature.

2b. Being disconnected from nature and reality is the #1 cause for such disorder; you don't see any kind of vegetarianism in rural people.

3. People with a brain realize that eating meat is important.

4. People with a bigger brain also realize that that eating other animals is the prerogative of power: humans have simply won the animal kingdom's oldest game and are enjoying its spoils. Things wouldn't (and shouldn't) be different if positions were reversed.

Since you are french according to your handle, I will direct you to this video, which I liked very much : https://youtu.be/VlWvnhSiuck?si=dvgQQS1Y4oa3A1yO .

In essence, I don't disagree with points 1 and 2. But the conclusions that you draw from these could be used to justify things which, hopefully, you would find morally objectionable. It is not because empathy is not a rational response that we should not try to use rationality to shape our decisions. There are pretty of other feelings/behaviours that we choose to consider bad and worthy of punishment, regardless of the fact they are useful evolutionary tool.

Unfortunately this comment is much too short to make the full argument, but the video I linked does a great job. I was wholly convinced by it, and though I'm not vegetarian, I do try to source my meat from places with more humane conditions.

> 2b. Being disconnected from nature and reality is the #1 cause for such disorder; you don't see any kind of vegetarianism in rural people.

This is just untrue, hundreds of millions of rural South Asians are vegetarian.

> 3. People with a brain realize that eating meat is important.

Everyone has a brain. Both vegetarian and omnivore groups have their share of geniuses and fools. Meat was important as a calorie source but it has many drawbacks in modern society totally unrelated to animal ethics; cancer risk, inefficient land use, methane production, etc.

> 4. People with a bigger brain also realize that that eating other animals is the prerogative of power: humans have simply won the animal kingdom's oldest game and are enjoying its spoils. Things wouldn't (and shouldn't) be different if positions were reversed.

This sounds like manifest destiny rhetoric and deserves just as much consideration.

> Meat was important as a calorie source but it has many drawbacks in modern society totally unrelated to animal ethics; cancer risk, inefficient land use, methane production, etc.

I think the most important drawbacks which actually threaten modern society are deforestation and zoonoses. Both can be largely avoided by raising only insects for meat, which reduces water and land use by 80%, and CO2 emissions even more if feed is mostly food waste. It is however a hard sell and has to be hidden in products in order to be accepted by consumers.

So, it is marketing and perception problem and not because insects are objectively terrible as food for people?

In my understanding it is mostly a cultural thing that makes people reject insects. I am unaware of any objective measure by which are insects are terrible foods.

And how many of your meals have included insect food?

Why ask this question?

If I heard somewhere that insects are good people food, I certainly wouldn't go repeating that assertion in public without having tried eating insects at least once.

It is unethical profess a belief in public, especially an unusual belief, but neglect to test that belief when a test would be inexpensive and straightforward.

It is also unethical to propose a radical change to society with only very tenuous basis in reality: people should be able to demonstrate knowledge (and not just knowledge about what beliefs will prove popular or fashionable) before they engage in public policy discussions. If the person I'm discussing with hasn't tried eating insects at least once (preferably a lot more often) he is doing us all a disservice in even engaging in a public discussion of the topic unless perhaps he has deep professional-level knowledge of the nutritional value of insects and the effect of nutrients and anti-nutrients on human health (and "insects are high in protein" alone doesn't begin to be enough knowledge).

Trolling is widely believed to be anti-social. It is approximately just as anti-social to try to whip up a public discussion of some radical social or economic change or some radical change in our daily lives with as little grounding in reality as this discussion of insects as food.

I think it would be nice to have socialized healthcare in my country. I have never been covered by socialized healthcare. Am I trolling by expressing that opinion because I have a PPO plan through my employer?

There are no ways[1] to obtain info relevant to public policy discussions about a nationwide healthcare system anywhere near as easy as, "the net is full of misinformation, so I should at least try eating insects to make sure I even can without getting sick".

[1] Or more precisely I havent been able to think of any ways.

> It is also unethical to propose a radical change to society with only very tenuous basis in reality: people should be able to demonstrate knowledge (and not just knowledge about what beliefs will prove popular or fashionable) before they engage in public policy discussions. If the person I'm discussing with hasn't tried eating insects at least once (preferably a lot more often) he is doing us all a disservice in even engaging in a public discussion of the topic unless perhaps he has deep professional-level knowledge of the nutritional value of insects and the effect of nutrients and anti-nutrients on human health (and "insects are high in protein" alone doesn't begin to be enough knowledge).

That is a strange position. The most that I could contribute is anecdotal evidence anyway. The nutrient composition and the safety of insect-derived food has been rigorously studied, for example in: https://doi.org/10.2903/j.efsa.2023.8009

I linked the EU FAQ on insects in my other reply.

Here in the EU, insect powder is now an approved food additive.

https://food.ec.europa.eu/food-safety/novel-food/authorisati...

As I don't closely read labels of everything I eat, probably I consumed it inadvertently already. Otherwise, I don't eat meat.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com