Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by nend 975 days ago
>But it’s simply not correct to claim that we’re stuck in the tradeoff our ancestors made when they settled down to farm.

I mean we are because if we go back to hunting/gathering billions of people would die.

The point is that that at the time, farming produced worse nutrition, but despite that we couldn't go back once we started. There's a whole lot of other variables today that obviously prevent us from going back to hunting/gathering.

1 comments

> if we go back to hunting/gathering billions of people would die

And those who survive wouldn’t be much healthier. This isn’t a tradeoff. It’s a net gain. The original tradeoff was a worse but more-stable food supply. Today we can reliably produce nutritious food. No tradeoff.