What would make people eat less beef? Since taxes seem a hard sell, would subsidizing chicken + non-meat protein help? As a vegetarian I'm trying to get my head around what would help change the behaviour of the meat eating HN members.
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Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?
221–230 of 287 posts
Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
These claims are not easily substantiated - that curious 45 year old report notwithstanding. The short wikipedia article on Elemental diets, summarizes a handfull from more recent years: > Many patients are unable to tolerate the taste, even if the diet is flavoured, and choose to receive it through intragastric administration.[2] Possible nausea and diarrhea can result from the high sugar content which can also comp…
The question wasn't whether a synthetic diet has side effects compared to a natural one, the question was whether we could accidentally "wipe out the human population".
I was replying to your own claims, but I dont think it actually is ridiculous to worry if novel food products could "wipe out the human population". Its just an unnecessarily extreme phrase for catastrophe, but it is possible. Disease can wipe out a population and novel material exposures can cause novel diseases like Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
Food safety should not be presumed on theoretical basis, only a long history of consumption can reliably evidence it.
Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is what it has to eventually be. We all have a garden in our garage. We save tons on transportation costs throughout the chain. It has to be near zero work. People used to all have gardens in their backyard but stopped when they could afford the cheap produce at the store.
This is a horribly inefficient way to grow food. The reason why food is grown by large industrial farming companies is because they can grow it ~100 times cheaper than you could. If everyone had to grow their own food, then everyone would starve to death. The idea of locally grown food in everyone's backyard is a fairy tale that just sounds nice, but would actually be horrible.
Isn't it partially true though ? at first true maybe but given some time they start a margin chase ending up in picking plants that will look good 1 month later on shelves even though they're not the best nutrition wise.
Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?
#224What would make people eat less beef? Since taxes seem a hard sell, would subsidizing chicken + non-meat protein help? As a vegetarian I'm trying to get my head around what would help change the behaviour of the meat eating HN members.
>“We could imagine a significant shift from beef to chicken, and that by itself goes a long way.” (Poultry production has about one-eighth the climate impact of beef production.) I think the possible benefits of this approach might be exaggerated. The uniquely "large" environmental impact of beef cattle results from methane emissions, but methane is not the big challenge; land use is. While methane is a potent greenh…
A significant portion of the the agricultural land is used to feed animals though - this page has a good diagram on how land is used - https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets.
Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?
#225The Netherlands! It's a small country that grows a lot of food! Final answer. Now let's read the article and sees what it says. Edit: ah it's more about cattle.
Not really. The Netherlands has a high dollar value of "agricultural exports" which includes flowers at 10% of that value and equipment and machinery at another 10%. Of the 80% that is actually food, a lot of it is high value low calorie food. And the methods used to produce that food are horribly destructive, not sustainable, and will cost future generations untold hardship to deal with: https://www.dutchnews.nl/features/2018/03/dutch-agriculture-...
Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
What specifically are you looking for? That synthetic foods exist? Google provides many results on the subject. You probably have already eaten some synthetic ingredients. For a real world example sugar was first synthesized in 1953 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sucrose#Chemical_synthesis Carbohydrate synthesis is also a well studied field. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbohydrate_synthesis Many vitamin additives t…
You didn't referenced anything approaching wholesome food. Of course there are a few simple compounds which are edible, but most artificial additives are extracted and processed from grown inputs, and this is susceptible to unexpected health problems as happened with exposure to trans fats for decades - now banned. > we can certainly create a synthetic smoothie with the necessities of life That is a low bar - being c…
“Wholesome” is not a scientific term.
The food landscape is filled with pseudoscience, and whether a compound is synthesized or extracted is more of an economic decision not a scientific one.
Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
You didn't referenced anything approaching wholesome food. Of course there are a few simple compounds which are edible, but most artificial additives are extracted and processed from grown inputs, and this is susceptible to unexpected health problems as happened with exposure to trans fats for decades - now banned. > we can certainly create a synthetic smoothie with the necessities of life That is a low bar - being c…
“Wholesome” is not a scientific term. The food landscape is filled with pseudoscience, and whether a compound is synthesized or extracted is more of an economic decision not a scientific one.
It is a plain language term, pseudoscience most often alludes to science by misrepresenting scientific terms. In this context "wholesome" plainly refers to foods which provide broad but not necessarily complete nutrition, so they can be eaten perfectly safely in bulk like potatoes and rice (note the objective of this thread).
Small amounts of almost anything can be synthesized at great expense, but you should have provided an example of a wholesome food which would not be completely uneconomical to synthesize (and purify) in bulk, to support a claim that there exists such a potential economic possibility. Even how much for example, it costs to synthesize food grade sugars would be a start on showing your advice on this subject is grounded in reality.
Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is what it has to eventually be. We all have a garden in our garage. We save tons on transportation costs throughout the chain. It has to be near zero work. People used to all have gardens in their backyard but stopped when they could afford the cheap produce at the store.
This is a horribly inefficient way to grow food. The reason why food is grown by large industrial farming companies is because they can grow it ~100 times cheaper than you could. If everyone had to grow their own food, then everyone would starve to death. The idea of locally grown food in everyone's backyard is a fairy tale that just sounds nice, but would actually be horrible.
>The reason why food is grown by large industrial farming companies is because they can grow it ~100 times cheaper than you could.
No, it is because people don't want to grow food. My tomatoes cost me 2 minutes of time. I don't know how much you want to value my time at, but lets say I am pretty awesome and deserve $100/hour. That's $3.33 cents for all the tomatoes I can eat. Where are the industrial farming companies producing tomatoes for 3.3 cents per 100 pounds?
>If everyone had to grow their own food, then everyone would starve to death.
If that were true, we wouldn't exist. People did grow their own food for thousands of years. If everyone had to grow their own food, we'd be fine. All mechanization did was free up people from agricultural labor to do other jobs, humans predate tractors.
>The idea of locally grown food in everyone's backyard is a fairy tale that just sounds nice, but would actually be horrible.
It is a reality for lots of people, and we're pretty happy about it.
Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is what it has to eventually be. We all have a garden in our garage. We save tons on transportation costs throughout the chain. It has to be near zero work. People used to all have gardens in their backyard but stopped when they could afford the cheap produce at the store.
The missing context is that people did that out of necessity. Hundred years ago 56% of Americans were rather poor. Most non-city people had outhouses in the 1940s. America’s rise to wealth has been long and hard fought. Wealth didn’t just land into our laps. The average American family had an annual income of ~$3000 (in today’s dollars), So, yeah, poor.
The average US family had an annual income of $956 in 1940. That is $17,268.43 in todays dollars, far more than $3k. And that was almost entirely earned by a single individual rather than both adults in the household working like now. Also, someone earning that little paid no income tax. The average house price in 1940 was $2938, which is $53k in today's money. Now the average family income is $70k, but that's mostly two people's income, they only get to keep $60k because of income tax, and houses are $200k. So we earn about twice as much, but houses cost about 4 times as much. It isn't nearly as clear cut a win for modern life as you make it out to be.
Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?
#230From a recent Bloomberg article[1] The last two graphs show that 41% of the land in the contiguous 48 states is used for feeding livestock. More than 33% of the 48 states is just pasture, most of which I believe is used by cattle. What would it take to shift protein consumption from beef (3% efficient) to products like poultry (21%) and eggs (31%)? [2] I think we have to take a hard look at taxes, fees, and subsidies…
Land used for grazing livestock is often no good for growing crops. > For example, US NRCS statistics indicate that about 59 percent of US non-federal pasture and unforested rangeland is unsuitable for cultivation, yet such land has value for grazing of livestock. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arable_land#Non-arable_land
Oh yeah, I"m not suggesting that the pasture could be converted to cropland. I think we just aren't pricing in a bunch of externalities for beef production that would otherwise raise the price and shift consumption to poultry.
The fees to access that land are very low ($1.70/cow/month)[1]. Maybe those lands would have more ecological value if they weren't being grazed, so add a charge for the environmental burden. A tax on bovine methane emissions is also necessary.