[nebula]

I can understand what he meant: Heavy use of antibiotics in diary and poultry industry is a significant factor contributing to drug resistant bacteria. In other words, these industries are actively providing the selection pressure you referring here.

[zdkl]

Well the selection environment is a requirement to not getting sick from eating the products. You can't just have a nice chat with the microbe unions and ask them to behave and stay off the meat...

[livestockboy]

> is a requirement to not getting sick from eating the products

one gives antibiotics to one's thousands of chickens to spur growth (body growth - gaining mass), not to protect the consumer from disease.

giving antibiotics to poultry extremely increases mass gains. post-slaughter processes add chemicals that keep meat from rotting, eradicating some of those living harmful bacteria that just so happen to turn flesh into unwanted dark piece of s+=t.

[zdkl]

I entirely agree on your opinion of the antibiotic situation regarding large scale farming. The problem is that we could not substitute another method to produce enough food to me(e|a)t demand. If we want to keep eating we must have safe food, and to keep food safe in frankly hostile environments we need to treat it. Until we can do without what passes for modern industrialised food growing and processing, we'll need treatments and colorants so we can pretend this is 'regular' food.

[snowwrestler]

Antibiotics are not given to livestock to reduce loss. They are given to increase mass.

Farming without prophylactic antibiotics--where antibiotics are only used to treat sick animals, as they are in humans--could meet the demand for food easily.

[mercutio2]

There is no need to meet the current demand for meat. If meat was our only food source, then perhaps this syllogism you've drawn would be true.

But in reality, meat is an inefficient form of producing food, with complements humans can easily shift to. So the way you get less antibiotic use in livestock in a capitalist decision market is by reducing the demand for livestock. Taxes do a great job at reducing demand.

[zdkl]

Maybe my pun about meet/meat confused you but the problem definitely isn't limited to meat production. You should see the quantites of pesticides/fertilisers/treatment agents used in the extensive culture of plants. The question holds, if you don't intend to back current production levels that are only possible through over intensive exploitation to the detriment of the product and it's growing medium, what alternatives are there to meet current demand for food in general?

[livestockboy]

Use of pesticides in plant agriculture is mostly driven by huge demand of meat/dairy industry for feed. GMOs also aren't exactly necessary if you don't have 90 billion mouths to feed every day.

There are some vegetables that are easily grown in unsuitable areas with GM, and some people do use pesticides and GMOs to "defeat" the market but if international logistics weren't so hard it would be easier to just import the stuff.

Similar industry, completely plant driven, is cotton agriculture for clothes - to ensure proper demand you need GMO or pesticides.

When it comes to beans, lentils, soybean for humans (although most of it is for fish farms, poultry and livestock), wheat, corn, rice, all sorts of fruits, pesticides come in hand, but there's more than enough if space was taken from dairy/meat and given to those.

91% of Amazon is cut for animal agriculture. http://www-wds.worldbank.org/servlet/WDSContentServer/WDSP/I...

It's just 7 billion people, while you have to raise 50 billion chickens, 1 billion cows, -- about 150 billion animals yearly just to get them from baby form to somewhat of an adult form. That requires a lot of food, way more than 7 billion avg. 150 pound humans.

https://xkcd.com/1338/

edit: realistically, this problem is unsolvable, just like US and China and others won't really struggle lowering their CO2 footprint, so will not Brazil, USA, India, Australia, Denmark and others when it comes to reduction of their meat/dairy output. If we were some nice unified Humanity maybe things would be different.

[hx87]

We could meet food demand with quite a bit less production if we ate lower on the food chain, improved transportation infrastructure and reduced waste. People don't go hungry because farmers don't produce enough food, not today; people go hungry because some people don't get enough allocation of resources and/or transportation infrastructure is crappy.