7 ms·

>A science fiction style solution is going to be the only way to feed the world. I get what you are saying, I just want to clarify: we can feed everybody now,

by Isamu 6y ago

>A science fiction style solution is going to be the only way to feed the world. I get what you are saying, I just want to clarify: we can feed everybody now, but mostly with vegetables. But yes, shared resources like ocean fish are under too much pressure right now. I feel as though it will take a major worldwide collapse of the fishing industry before there is better enforcement and treaties.

duhuh 6y ago
As a resident of a first world country I stopped eating all seafood about 15 years ago. It seems unethical to support over-fishing if I have plenty of other good food to eat.
- missedthecue 6y ago
  Plenty of seafood is farmed. The majority of shrimp for instance comes from farms.
  - usrusr 6y ago
    Ocean fish farming is more a conversion process than a production process. Most of the feed is wild catch fish.
    - all_usernames 6y ago
      Something like 3lbs of wild caught fish as feed to produce 1lb of farmed salmon.
    - riffraff 6y ago
      but does this apply blanket-like to all farmed seafood, or is it mostly about fish? E.g. I would expect shrimp, mussels, clams to not be fed processed wild catch, unlike salmon.
  - ajmadesc 6y ago
    100 Grams of shrimp has a carbon footprint of 198kg(436lb) https://phys.org/news/2012-02-tiny-shrimp-giant-carbon-footprint.html https://phys.org/news/2012-02-tiny-shrimp-giant-carbon-footp...
    - philipkglass 6y ago
      The numbers cited in there don't make sense. Something has to have been garbled from the original research report. The article says: The farms are inefficient, producing just one kilogram (2.2 pounds) of shrimp for 13.4 square kilometers (five square miles) of mangrove But Asian shrimp farms produce over a million tons of shrimp per year: http://www.shrimpnews.com/FreeReportsFolder/NewsReportsFolder/WorldShrimpFarmingProductionStats.html http://www.shrimpnews.com/FreeReportsFolder/NewsReportsFolde... If it takes 13.4 square kilometers of mangrove per kilogram of shrimp, Asian shrimp farms would occupy more than 13.4 * 1000 * 1000000 = 13,400,000,000 (13.4 billion) square kilometers of mangrove. That's about 26 times the surface area of Earth.
  - benibela 6y ago
    Most shrimp farming uses a lot of antibiotics and destroys mangroves
- ip26 6y ago
  If you're picky about the fish you eat, there are some very sustainable choices. In a happy coincidence, some of the healthiest fish are also some of the most sustainable fish.
- Stupulous 6y ago
  I've been wondering lately if cutting out a product is less ethical than buying the ethical version and supporting that market. Relatedly, people often don't eat meat because they oppose unethical treatment of animals. But I imagine farmers who treat animals well are disadvantaged by that strategy- people who care enough to buy their more expensive product opt out of the market entirely.
  - vzidex 6y ago
    > I imagine farmers who treat animals well This is a cherry picked argument, at least in the US, where "factory farms raise 99.9 percent of chickens for meat, 97 percent of laying hens, 99 percent of turkeys, 95 percent of pigs, and 78 percent of cattle" [1]. Besides, even in this ideal farm where the farmer treats the animals perfectly and lets them live long, fulfilling lives, they're still killing the animal at the end of the day. Hard to see how that is "treating [it] well". [1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/its-time-to-end-factory-f_b_1018840 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/its-time-to-end-factory-f_b_1...
    - Stupulous 6y ago
      I don't think 'cherry-picked' is the right descriptor. My point is that in order for those percentages to change, we need to seek out ethical farming and pay for it. If you believe that it is unethical to raise livestock with fulfilling lives and then kill them for meat, by all means do not eat meat. I disagree, but I accept that as a valid, reasonable position to hold. I think most people are more concerned with animal cruelty specifically, and also have a lot of difficulty switching to vegetarianism.
  - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
    I really do think people want ethical food products, but with food in particular, it's really a lot to ask of individual consumers. There's a reason we have so many regulations around food quality - it just makes all our lives easier. I've always thought less-than-ethical food products should be taxed more heavily, and the money should be used to subsidize the more ethical, healthier alternatives. Outright bans on certain product classes can be tremendously distortionary and have unintended side effects, but it's hard to imagine little pigouvian nudges being anything but beneficial to society.
blix 6y ago
Once meat is eradicated in the name of agricultural efficiency, non-grain, non-bean vegetables will probably be next on the chopping block.
- pvaldes 6y ago
  You have a point here, yup. Some vegetables are luxury food, and less efficient than cattle. Replacing nature with monocultures is a problem. If we stop eating cattle for that, there is not moral room to keep eating chocolate, for example. Or coffee
  - blix 6y ago
    Based on some rough napkin calculations, the caloric efficiency by land of broccoli is about the same as industrial meat. Optimizing diet for land efficiency probably does not produce healthy diets. You can find strong evidence for this trade-off in the changes of average human health at the advent of agriculture.
    - arrosenberg 6y ago
      Much lower water usage and impact on the land used though, even if it's bad soil and you have to use a ton of fertilizer.
      - dilettantism 6y ago
        Not to mention broccoli probably doesn't feel the conscious terror of its imminent death.
    - hombre_fatal 6y ago
      > Based on some rough napkin calculations, the caloric efficiency by land of broccoli is about the same as industrial meat. Not even close. Did you forget to consider the inputs into meat? If you want to check against someone else's math, here's a paper that claims we can increase global calorie availability by 70% by shifting crops grown for animal feed (40% of crops in USA btw) to crops grown for human consumption: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/8/3/034015/pdf https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/8/3/034...
tempsolution 6y ago
"Mostly with vegetables"... Like... What? Beans? Rice? That's another global health crisis waiting to happen. The vegetables you'd have to eat in amounts that could sustain people who don't just sit in front of their desk all day, are anything but healthy. Lentils/beans are among the most harmful things you can stuff into yourself, pretty much only outperformed by grains. I don't know why vegetarians are always so full of themselves. Why don't they just understand that without eating harmful amounts of lentils, or heavy artificial supplementation (protein powders, etc. Yeah toast to your health, there is almost nothing worse than protein powder), all you can do is "survive" with your vegetarian diet. Yeah, humans can survive on a vegetarian diet, but that's about it. What we need is artificial meat, that comes out of a lab and is virtually indistinguishable from normal meat, except that an animal didn't produce it. And we are already very close to that. What it lacks is mass production and an improved environmental footprint.

by Isamu 6y ago

duhuh 6y ago

As a resident of a first world country I stopped eating all seafood about 15 years ago. It seems unethical to support over-fishing if I have plenty of other good food to eat.

missedthecue 6y ago
Plenty of seafood is farmed. The majority of shrimp for instance comes from farms.
- usrusr 6y ago
  Ocean fish farming is more a conversion process than a production process. Most of the feed is wild catch fish.
  - all_usernames 6y ago
    Something like 3lbs of wild caught fish as feed to produce 1lb of farmed salmon.
  - riffraff 6y ago
    but does this apply blanket-like to all farmed seafood, or is it mostly about fish? E.g. I would expect shrimp, mussels, clams to not be fed processed wild catch, unlike salmon.
- ajmadesc 6y ago
  100 Grams of shrimp has a carbon footprint of 198kg(436lb) https://phys.org/news/2012-02-tiny-shrimp-giant-carbon-footprint.html https://phys.org/news/2012-02-tiny-shrimp-giant-carbon-footp...
  - philipkglass 6y ago
    The numbers cited in there don't make sense. Something has to have been garbled from the original research report. The article says: The farms are inefficient, producing just one kilogram (2.2 pounds) of shrimp for 13.4 square kilometers (five square miles) of mangrove But Asian shrimp farms produce over a million tons of shrimp per year: http://www.shrimpnews.com/FreeReportsFolder/NewsReportsFolder/WorldShrimpFarmingProductionStats.html http://www.shrimpnews.com/FreeReportsFolder/NewsReportsFolde... If it takes 13.4 square kilometers of mangrove per kilogram of shrimp, Asian shrimp farms would occupy more than 13.4 * 1000 * 1000000 = 13,400,000,000 (13.4 billion) square kilometers of mangrove. That's about 26 times the surface area of Earth.
- benibela 6y ago
  Most shrimp farming uses a lot of antibiotics and destroys mangroves
ip26 6y ago
If you're picky about the fish you eat, there are some very sustainable choices. In a happy coincidence, some of the healthiest fish are also some of the most sustainable fish.
Stupulous 6y ago
I've been wondering lately if cutting out a product is less ethical than buying the ethical version and supporting that market. Relatedly, people often don't eat meat because they oppose unethical treatment of animals. But I imagine farmers who treat animals well are disadvantaged by that strategy- people who care enough to buy their more expensive product opt out of the market entirely.
- vzidex 6y ago
  > I imagine farmers who treat animals well This is a cherry picked argument, at least in the US, where "factory farms raise 99.9 percent of chickens for meat, 97 percent of laying hens, 99 percent of turkeys, 95 percent of pigs, and 78 percent of cattle" [1]. Besides, even in this ideal farm where the farmer treats the animals perfectly and lets them live long, fulfilling lives, they're still killing the animal at the end of the day. Hard to see how that is "treating [it] well". [1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/its-time-to-end-factory-f_b_1018840 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/its-time-to-end-factory-f_b_1...
  - Stupulous 6y ago
    I don't think 'cherry-picked' is the right descriptor. My point is that in order for those percentages to change, we need to seek out ethical farming and pay for it. If you believe that it is unethical to raise livestock with fulfilling lives and then kill them for meat, by all means do not eat meat. I disagree, but I accept that as a valid, reasonable position to hold. I think most people are more concerned with animal cruelty specifically, and also have a lot of difficulty switching to vegetarianism.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
  I really do think people want ethical food products, but with food in particular, it's really a lot to ask of individual consumers. There's a reason we have so many regulations around food quality - it just makes all our lives easier. I've always thought less-than-ethical food products should be taxed more heavily, and the money should be used to subsidize the more ethical, healthier alternatives. Outright bans on certain product classes can be tremendously distortionary and have unintended side effects, but it's hard to imagine little pigouvian nudges being anything but beneficial to society.

blix 6y ago

Once meat is eradicated in the name of agricultural efficiency, non-grain, non-bean vegetables will probably be next on the chopping block.

pvaldes 6y ago
You have a point here, yup. Some vegetables are luxury food, and less efficient than cattle. Replacing nature with monocultures is a problem. If we stop eating cattle for that, there is not moral room to keep eating chocolate, for example. Or coffee
- blix 6y ago
  Based on some rough napkin calculations, the caloric efficiency by land of broccoli is about the same as industrial meat. Optimizing diet for land efficiency probably does not produce healthy diets. You can find strong evidence for this trade-off in the changes of average human health at the advent of agriculture.
  - arrosenberg 6y ago
    Much lower water usage and impact on the land used though, even if it's bad soil and you have to use a ton of fertilizer.
    - dilettantism 6y ago
      Not to mention broccoli probably doesn't feel the conscious terror of its imminent death.
  - hombre_fatal 6y ago
    > Based on some rough napkin calculations, the caloric efficiency by land of broccoli is about the same as industrial meat. Not even close. Did you forget to consider the inputs into meat? If you want to check against someone else's math, here's a paper that claims we can increase global calorie availability by 70% by shifting crops grown for animal feed (40% of crops in USA btw) to crops grown for human consumption: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/8/3/034015/pdf https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/8/3/034...

tempsolution 6y ago

"Mostly with vegetables"... Like... What? Beans? Rice? That's another global health crisis waiting to happen. The vegetables you'd have to eat in amounts that could sustain people who don't just sit in front of their desk all day, are anything but healthy. Lentils/beans are among the most harmful things you can stuff into yourself, pretty much only outperformed by grains. I don't know why vegetarians are always so full of themselves. Why don't they just understand that without eating harmful amounts of lentils, or heavy artificial supplementation (protein powders, etc. Yeah toast to your health, there is almost nothing worse than protein powder), all you can do is "survive" with your vegetarian diet. Yeah, humans can survive on a vegetarian diet, but that's about it. What we need is artificial meat, that comes out of a lab and is virtually indistinguishable from normal meat, except that an animal didn't produce it. And we are already very close to that. What it lacks is mass production and an improved environmental footprint.