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by rickycook 3352 days ago
most of us in hacker news aren't most of the world.

also, "natural" is a kind of ridiculous term. plenty of food additives are natural, but that doesn't make them good. also plenty that are unnatural aren't all bad.

medicines are highly "unnatural", but they save lives. why is food any different?

given how quickly we're heading toward a world in which we don't have the land area to be able to feed our population (and by "heading toward" i mean we already don't and it's getting worse), grass fed anything is totally unsustainable. lab grown meat, or lab vegetables might be our best option, and i'd go with that over a tortured chicken any day

2 comments

Open-ocean fish farming will have a dramatic impact on food production, once we get some technical challenges out of the way (storms mostly).

The biggest problem is that its inefficient to feed meat animals grain. Instead we should be farming lots of insects for human and animal food!

Lab grown meat is a nice idea, but I don't see how it can scale.

> medicines are highly "unnatural", but they save lives. why is food any different?

Many medicines also cause more harm than they provide help. Just look at the history of drugs that have had to be taken off the market due to crippling or deadly side effects just to treat some mild cold symptoms or something equally minor.

"Natural" is not at all a ridiculous term. It can be made ridiculous when things like "natural flavoring" aren't any different from "artificial flavoring," but I will take natural (or at least human incrementally improved over generations and generations) over artificial (top down diet science-ing) any day.

> Many medicines also cause more harm than they provide help

How many is 'many'? 50%? 25%? Or simply 'more than zero'?

> but I will take natural (or at least human incrementally improved over generations and generations) over artificial (top down diet science-ing) any day.

I assume that you would prefer an 'unnatural' vaccination to the 'natural' disease it prevents. If so, which categories of 'natural' do you prefer?