81–90 of 360 posts
There are people who for various ideological reasons hate beef. If the market demands more chicken over beef, producers are perfectly capable of making a switch. Cows are able to make delicious beef from grass and thistles; that they are often fed other things is not a proof that eating cows is bad.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802...
Not trying to be overly flippant... who cares? The paper opens with "to feed a growing population" without asking is that what we need? want? where we are actually heading to? Is feeding the world a real problem? I've yet to see compelling evidence that it really is except as a secondary effect of logistics, energy supply, and war. edit: I understand the environmental impacts. I think we should solve our energy probl…
> "needing 33 cal of feed per 1 cal" The calories cows eat are ... useless to humans. We cannot digest cullulose (grass) and most of the rest of the things we feed to cows. Anyone throwing this number around has an agenda, and is not objective
Other crops that humans can digest can be produced on land currently used for grass.
Other animal species that eat grass require fewer feed cal per calorie produced.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"The market" doesn't work as long as costs to the environment can be externalized. If the cost of climate change and lost living space would be added to the cost of beef it might be fair. But it isn't. Methane released by cows, cutting down rain forests for feed, and all the transporting costs us all dearly. But it doesn't cost the manufacturers anything directly so beef can be cheap.
And meat is heavily subsidized by the government. It's insanity and corruption.
https://usafacts.org/articles/federal-farm-subsidies-what-da...
Tofu and ethanol may be more price-distorted by the US government than is beef, but I dunno how to quickly support that idea with hard data beyond what I cited above.
> If excess beef consumption were reduced to healthy quantities, as defined by the EAT-Lancet healthy reference diet, and substituted with chicken in forty-eight higher-income countries, the lost calories avoided would be enough to meet the caloric needs of 850 million people. It's really impressive how efficient chickens are compared to beef. Obviously thinks like legumes are way more efficient, but we've really bre…
Soy is pretty good, but corn is insane.
Not trying to be overly flippant... who cares? The paper opens with "to feed a growing population" without asking is that what we need? want? where we are actually heading to? Is feeding the world a real problem? I've yet to see compelling evidence that it really is except as a secondary effect of logistics, energy supply, and war. edit: I understand the environmental impacts. I think we should solve our energy probl…
You don’t think the two are related at all? When you say “solve” energy problems, do you mean from supply-side solutions or demand-side solutions?
Cows eat grass. Humans use more calories digesting grass than they gain from eating grass, so cows are infinitely more efficient than humans at gaining calories from grass. And there are places in the world where growing human food would destroy the land. Semi-deserts like Texas and Montana. Grazing cattle there is a good idea. Bison would be even better because the native prairie there is adapted to bison, but cattl…
> To feed a growing population, it is essential that the global agri-food system be managed to efficiently convert crop production into calories for human consumption. It's really not. Efficiency is the enemy of redundancy. Countries want food security, so they must therefore produce excess calories.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cropland-per-person-over-...