This incredibly stupid take is actually pretty common on HN whenever vegetarianism comes up. I don't know whether they're simply mocking the serious thought many people have put into the ethics of eating animals or what, but it's manifestly false and patently ridiculous to claim that eating plants kills more animals than eating animals.
Some people have a hard time engaging with ideas that might cast them in a negative, ethical light. I’ve had people abruptly stop me from explaining ethical vegetarianism, even though they initiated the conversation haha
On a side note, I never followed the project very closely but I was really hopeful for soylent. What happened? Is the technology just not there? Do we not know enough about human physiology? What is missing to take the soylent idea — which I understood as automate most (boring) meals — and make it a reality?
I saw a quora answer which says we simply don’t know enough about the science behind food but to me it implies that maybe some day our knowledge will get there?
People laugh but the idea of “bachelor chow” from futurama makes sense to me.
I don’t know enough about the topic of ethical vegetarianism to criticize it. I eat meat. In fact, I had fish for dinner last night. I just don’t think about the ethics of it.
Now I may sound hypocritical when I say this because I’m against policy action through taxation (make taxes as simple as possible by eliminating all income tax credits and deductions). However, I know I’ll continue to eat meat (including milk, eggs, chicken, pork) unless it is either too impractical or too expensive.
I want to believe that if push comes to shove I’ll be able to adjust my eating habits and that my current eating habits are not a part of my identity.
I don’t really have a point to make here except that something like soylent would go a long way toward making me vegetarian at least for the meals I eat alone.
I really liked it as an occasional meal replacement, for much of the reasons above. But then they switched from rice to soy or pea protein. I have a peanut allergy. While I can eat soy/peas by themselves, the hydrolyzed proteins give me hives. Otherwise I'd still be eating it.
The taste/quality/mouthfeel definitely went up since v1.
The soylent thing always struck me as a bizarre Silicon Valley fad with very limited appeal. I haven’t done a study but I would be very confident that most people simply enjoy eating food.
I’m actually in the middle of a bad GI flare-up, and soylent is a god send. I forget to eat, solid foods are hard to digest, I oversleep and miss meal times, etc. A bottled soylent helps me get back on track quickly.
Some people don’t think there is any ethical problem with eating meat and rather than get into an argument with a vegetarian prefer to end the conversation. I am not one of these people.
Take that number and at minimum ADD the cows to it. It's not like they feed of thin air while they live.
In addition to that, every step up the food chain requires 10x the amount of energy so for every kg of beef produced you need equivalent of 10kg plants just to raise the cows. It's not like the cows feed freely in the grass and carefully avoid stomping on insects all the time, this is often also harvested with machines killing rodents exactly the same way, just multiplied by 10x.
Meat eater myself here, occasionally and in moderation, but at least i'm not making up nonsense about rodents to feel better for myself.
Edit: To add some data into the discussion, see https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/i2vx78/the... for example. It shows more than 10x land usage for cattle and even more for water and energy, sources and their bias discussed in the comments over there. There is also some interesting links stating that purely grass fed beef can only provide half the cattle on same unit of land.
