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I don't want lab grown meat, the concept is disgusting. As it is our food is too processed and industrial.
Maybe we can focus on mixed farming instead https://www.earth.com/news/mixed-farming-could-increase-food...
I’m surprised at the skepticism here on HN. Was everyone this skeptical / glib when the (insert technology) was useless when it was invented? Anyone seen the efficiency of a solar panel in 1970? Factory farming is a real problem to solve.
The skepticism comes from a keen awareness that technology is not a solution in itself. You've made a common logical fallacy; it is true that factory farming and solar panels can solve specific problems. But measuring the progress of the proposed solution doesn't measure its effectiveness at solving the fundamental problem at scale. Nor does it prove that the technology is appropriate or necessarily better than alter…
You've misread their comment:
> Factory farming is a real problem to solve.
Or we could switch to eating plants now. We already get 82% calories and 63% proteins from plants. https://ourworldindata.org/land-use If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets We could stay on our 1% of habitable earth, lower our agricultural footprint from 48% of land to 15%, use quarter of pesticides,…
The solutions of "everyone just needs to do " are a dime a dozen. We could solve war if everyone just stopped fighting. It's better to fix incentives such as making meat more expensive through taxes or fewer subsidies on meat or feed grains (corn). Or making vegetables cheaper. I could see a serious PR campaign to support farmers/small business (conservative hook) and eat local planet variety combined with fulfilling…
As evident from your (absurd) comparison you're responding to the parent from the perspective of another completely different problem. Consuming less meat and more plant-based foods, including going fully vegetarian, is absolutely within grasp for a substantial amount of people in the west.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This isn’t an either/or proposition. Long term goals (“everyone just needs to do ”) can (must) coexist alongside shorter term incentives and PR campaigns. To your point, hyper fixation on the long term goal makes it seem unachievable. But conversely, short term incentives must necessarily be informed by long term goals if there’s hope of establishing a useful incentive structure. Success will require focus on both en…
> To your point, hyper fixation on the long term goal makes it seem unachievable. It's not even a feasible long term goal, though. There are plenty of places where steady progress will lead to achievements in the long term that seem unbelievable now - science may yet reverse climate change, achieve nuclear fusion at scale, cure cancer (and aging), etc. This isn't one of those things, though. There's no path from wher…
It sounds like you’re imposing a specifically slow set of increments here.
We know that these goals can’t be met overnight, so the only option is some kind of incremental progress.
But the size of those increments certainly isn’t set, and will be increased (voluntarily or not) as our situation becomes more dire.
> Long-term goals are great, but long-term goals that can't plausibly be achieved are bad.
I think it’s problematic to conclude that what we’re discussing can’t be plausibly achieved. Insanely difficult, sure, but at some point these decisions will be made for us, and abandoning hope is one option that seems guaranteed to lead to failure.
Going further and calling these kinds of goals “bad” seems actively harmful.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The solutions of "everyone just needs to do " are a dime a dozen. We could solve war if everyone just stopped fighting. It's better to fix incentives such as making meat more expensive through taxes or fewer subsidies on meat or feed grains (corn). Or making vegetables cheaper. I could see a serious PR campaign to support farmers/small business (conservative hook) and eat local planet variety combined with fulfilling…
Salads carry a huge profit margin at restaurants. Everyone loves to eat healthy or at least believe that they're doing so. A salad is a great healthy choice (until you slather it with dressing, which is nutritionally awful stuff.) But a house salad is composed of the cheapest ingredients ever: you've got tomatoes, iceberg lettuce, shredded carrots, cucumbers, a little shredded cheese and croutons. But you can charge…
Also, https://www.myplate.gov is very reasonable. The problem with food guidelines aren't that they're wrong. It's that nobody adheres to them the same way they don't adhere to a guideline like "get daily exercise".
Or we could switch to eating plants now. We already get 82% calories and 63% proteins from plants. https://ourworldindata.org/land-use If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets We could stay on our 1% of habitable earth, lower our agricultural footprint from 48% of land to 15%, use quarter of pesticides,…
I noticed that many people who propose this are not aware of a plethora of health issues that people have that make eating plant-based foods extremely difficult. For many people eating plants only is extremely difficult - e.g. for me personally, with a plethora of food allergies (soy, almonds, various kinds of nuts, apples, peaches and other fruits) and intestine issues causing irritation when consuming multiple othe…
If that's the case, wouldn't a world where you get lab grown meat and everyone else eats plants make more sense? Since it's a medical issue you get special treatment, it seems to make more sense than supporting an entire industry just for you!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why does everything have to be all-or-nothing? Start by stop subsidizing meat.
Every climate solution I've seen that started with the word "just" has been woefully inadequate, and modestly raising the price of meat is no exception. People would still eat plenty of it.
I want to eat meat from chickens and cows that had good, happy lives, eating the healthiest most natural form of their diet possible. I don't want lab grown meat, the concept is disgusting. As it is our food is too processed and industrial. Maybe we can focus on mixed farming instead https://www.earth.com/news/mixed-farming-could-increase-food...
Be careful what you want, you just might get it.
Or we could switch to eating plants now. We already get 82% calories and 63% proteins from plants. https://ourworldindata.org/land-use If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets We could stay on our 1% of habitable earth, lower our agricultural footprint from 48% of land to 15%, use quarter of pesticides,…
What's the ultimate purpose? To subsist using the minimal amount of resources? Have you considered that people may want to eat animals? Every human activity consumes resources. We cannot make the reduction of consumption as a goal in itself. At the end of the road, what that line of thinking leads to is just existing for the mere fact of existing while occupying the minimal space and feeding ourselves enough to meet…
With scrub land, that is about the only agricultural use for it. Putting cows on arid scrub land turns useless land into useful land. It's so easy to falsely reason about agriculture when one is so far removed from it.
>What's the ultimate purpose? To subsist using the minimal amount of resources?
That is the ultimate purpose to reduce the standard of living of the poor and middle class.