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 problems first.
Yes, but it is not a production capacity problem. The constraints on food are mostly in the logistics chain, often having to do with corruption or distribution targets (food goes where the money is), or regulation (did you know that cherry growers in the Upper Midwest are required --_by Federal law_-- to destroy unsold crops?).
A huge amount of food goes to waste simply because of regulation or subsidies, at least within the United States.
Tart cherries are supply-controlled because they are processed into other goods, like pie filling, and can be stored for long duration (multiple seasons). The supply-control regulation is designed to prevent a surplus crop from depressing the market to the point where it's no longer viable to grow tart cherries - reducing future supply, ie. the regulation is designed to provide a consistent, stable supply.
Surplus tart cherry crops are rarely destroyed. In the event of a surplus, they are often exported, diverted to secondary markets, donated, or carried-over into next-season's stock.
Yup. The regulations on food in the US is exactly to make sure the shelves stay stocked no matter what. Without such regulations, you'd experience random items being unavailable and price shocks.
One thing people often don't figure or realize is food takes time to grow. It requires long term thinking to make sure supplies are sufficient. Left to their own devices, farmers will often chase after last season's cash crop. That is bad. It's far better for farmers to stick to more predictable growing and for more dedicated incentives to be issued.
I grew up on a farm and lived around farmers. This is my lived experience.
I saw first hand farmers tear up a barley fields to plant wheat when the price got high enough.
Farming is a game of speculation. Planting last year's cash crop can be a successful strategy just like buying APPL today will likely yield good returns. Yet, it's a very hard market to predict with a lot of luck involved. Maybe only a few chase the cash crop and you win big. Maybe everyone does and you lose. Maybe there's a natural or political disaster that pumps up your crop.
There was nothing insulting, condensing, or dismissive about my comment. Highly speculative markets, like food, have booms and busts that can swing wildly. That's bad for something like food. The free market does not work with crops.
I'd argue that this should be refined to something like "farmers that speculate heavily struggle in an under-regulated free market".
Financial stability in highly volatile markets depends on appropriate planning, saving, and distribution. I say this from the investment perspective, but I would venture to guess that it also applies to hard goods like food-stuffs.
The nature of farming is speculation. It's inescapable. In a completely free market there's no way to guarantee success. Even with the best planning and saving you can't know what the rest of the market is doing and because of the long tail, you are locked in to harvesting and selling your crop no matter what.
You can speculate and be the farmer that always plants and grows wheat. You'll see booms and busts based on that. You can also switch up what you are growing based on your best guess about demand. Both strategies can be successful.
Funnily, one way to make farming less risky is a futures contract. And, if you know anything about futures commodity trading you know they are some of the most risky forms of trading.
It's true though, these regulations exists because speculation and profit-chasing in agriculture is what lead to the dust bowl and worsened the great depression. We really, really don't want a repeat of that.
The amazing thing about people failing to learn from history is that everybody thinks they're too smart to (a) learn history or (b) follow rules enacted to prevent the disasters of yesteryear.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it a lot lately. We've already asked you a whole bunch of times not to do this. Eventually we ban accounts that won't stop.
Sure, but I think you should strive to run your community in a way where you’re policing the “I don’t endorse X, but I don’t understand why more people don’t do X” that this comment espouses https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47773488
You’re busy policing this while people are out there saying “Destroy their things and firebomb their houses”. So is it just that I made a mistake in my phrasing? Should I just frame the same comments in the style “I would never endorse X, but I don’t understand why others don’t do X”?
I can do that easily without LLM assistance if you like. But if you want your community to be exclusively endorsers of violence against enemies of a chosen tribe, then you should ban me so you can keep your little tribe of Ted Kaczynski fanboys.
I think your fun cherry fact is pretty inaccurate. If you're referring to USDA Marketing Order #930, it's basically about setting sales limits in bumper crop years to avoid a situation where so many cherries hit the market that farmers lose money simply by harvesting them. They're free to donate the cherries etc. but again, they would be essentially wasting their own money by putting in the time and effort to harvest them beyond the amount they're allowed to sell.
This is for good reason though. You want to overproduce significantly in ordinary times so that if there is a big negative shock you will still be able to produce enough to feed everyone merely by not destroying the excess anymore.
But in a pure market that would mean that during overproduction times, prices should be low. Which they artificially aren't through industry price fixing.
The result that free markets are Prato optimal, though, requires conditions like low barriers to entry, perfect information, and low cost transactions… none of which seem very well met in the case of agriculture.
That's a nice bit of trivia but it doesn't really affect the comment you're replying to. It's still food, full of flavor and calories, and able to be used by a home cook (by making a pie).
If you researched this regulation even a little, you'd see the crops are rarely destroyed. They are far more often exported, diverted to secondary markets, donated, or carried-over into next-season's stock.
It's interesting to me how people are quick to comment about things they know nothing about...
> It's still food, full of flavor and calories
Tart cherries have about 1-2 calories per cherry, and do not taste good without a lot of sugar. That's why they are used in commercial processing, not generally sold as a fruit in grocery stores.
Coming back later, I realized earlier I looked up the calories but I didn't compare them to anything else. So while tart cherries "only" have 50 calories per 100g, sweet cherries are up around 60, not very different. An apple also has about 50-60 per 100g. So does an orange.
Fruit isn't super dense in calories to begin with because it has so much water, but it's still a meaningful amount, and tart cherries are pretty standard among fruit.
So you understood the crop we're discussing is rarely destroyed - and more often donated, diverted to secondary markets (ie. sold in grocery stores), or exported - yet still felt compelled to say a home cook could use them?
What was even the point of your snarky comment then?
> So you understood the crop we're discussing is rarely destroyed - and more often donated, diverted to secondary markets (ie. sold in grocery stores), or exported - yet still felt compelled to say a home cook could use them?
In the context of someone talking about home cooks using them, and you acting like "People do not eat tart cherries directly." is a counterargument, yes I felt compelled to correct that.
The incorrect thing you were implying had nothing to do with how often they're actually destroyed. So why would that stop me?
It's the leading cause of deforestation which is a major factor in climate change. It also is a major contributor to climate change for other reasons. Since you mentioned energy, it's also much less energy efficient.
I recommend you visiting the Brazilian region of Pantanal, if possible travel through Mato Grosso do Sul -> Mato Grosso -> southern Pará where it transitions into the Amazon.
You will see vast areas of cattle ranching, soybeans plantation used for cattle feed, and other crops that can be used as cattle feed. All that area used to be the Pantanal and Amazon, now transformed to grow beef.
If we would reduce the calories wasted on beef, this area could still have a lot more native vegetation. Of course, it's purely wishful thinking because this ship has sailed, beef consumption will take a long time to stop growing, these farms will fight for their lives to keep producing, and we've lost a huge area of incredible nature to eat some steaks and burgers.
Solve our energy problems first? How would decreasing cattle stop work on improving our energy system? I think a lot points to that we need to do both (and yesterday). It’s not like agriculture is a small part of our greenhouse gas emissions (25-35% globally).
Exactly. The current world population is 8.3 billion and is expected to peak at 10.3 billion in 2080 and then begin declining. Now, there are a number of other reasons we might have food shortages, but population per se I don't think is a significant factor.
>I understand the environmental impacts. I think we should solve our energy problems first.
is there a rational argument in here or is this just a cheap psychological reflex to keep eating beef? Because it's not clear to me how solving our energy problems and the consumption of beef even intersect so that we couldn't do both at the same time.
You might as well have said "man I really should stop drinking and smoking, but we gotta solve the energy problems first"
Agreed. The market should decide if beef consumption is viable. Ultimately energy is the basis all food production. Cheap and plentiful energy solves the food production and distribution problem, then its just matter of preferences.
We have 8 billion people. We have enough people to solve both the energy problem and the food efficiency problem.
That said, it's very, very funny that you responded to an article about energy inefficiency (calorie -> calorie) and said we should solve our energy problems. Beef is an energy problem! We're putting 30x the energy into the product against the energy we get out! Thats wasted energy!
> edit: I understand the environmental impacts. I think we should solve our energy problems first.
There's no "first." There's not a queue of problems that the people of the world work on one by one. It's not a matter of limited labor/money either, we're talking about policies to change allocation. If anything is limited here it's political will, but that doesn't really work like money or physical limitations, it's more abstract and nonlinear. It's quite possible that a platform containing more changes earns more will than one with fewer, so budgeting is the wrong impulse.
meat uses up enormous quantities of water. potatoes for instance use about 75 gallons to produce 2000 calories compared to say 1500 to 2500 gallons for 2000 calories of beef.
When they complain about these lost calories is anyone asking them if they have a better way to turn grass into food we can eat? Eating beef lets us eat grass we couldn't otherwise, indirectly. It also has a whole bunch of minerals and nutrients that are particularly beneficial.
We don't need a steak every day, but two servings of beef a week can be a truly great infusion of protein and nutrients in someone's diet.
This is being downvoted, but is raising a serious point.
- Nearly 90% of Americans eat red meat [1].
- Environmental activity against meat has led a lot of people (26% of Americans) to believe that there is a push to ban red meat. This issue does not poll well [1].
- Despite the above, Americans are eating less red meat than we used to [2].
- The vast majority of people who choose to reduce their meat intake do so for cost or health reasons, not environmental [3].
Putting all that together... studies like this do not help the environmental cause. Sure, they find something that's vaguely interesting, and can possibly be a bullet point on an environmentalist slide. However, a far better research study would be one focusing on human health impacts of red meat, or demonstrating economic benefits to red meat alternatives.
tl;ld - This study is not useful, and is probably damaging to it's own cause.
> I've yet to see compelling evidence that it really is except as a secondary effect of logistics, energy supply, and war.
I don't know how to respond to this. It's like saying you don't think breathing underwater is difficult, except for the secondary effects of water. War is a problem. Energy supply is a problem. Logistics is a problem. All these problems lead to starvation. People starving is a real problem.
Another reason people starve is economics and market forces. The market decides it wants to use up more water and grain to feed cows. That grain and water is now not available for purchase as human food. That means it is more scarce on the human-feeding market. Scarcity drives up prices. So livestock feed makes grain more expensive, making it harder to purchase, for people to eat.
(I'm using "starve" as a euphemism for "malnutrition that not only severely impacts bodily health, reduces quality of life, and increases mortality, but also decreases economic productivity")
Now, if the point you're trying to make is "we could solve world hunger", then absolutely the answer is yes, humans produce more than enough grain to feed everyone in the world, and we have the money to transport it everywhere, even assist with cooking fuel. But because of all the categories you think don't apply, and markets, and economics, we are not fixing it. We are choosing to let people starve.
The question is, whats the bigger environmental impact, more people using smart phones, computers, cars, planes, buying the newest fashion to show their style,... or feeding them with beef?
Feeding the world is mostly a political-economic problem. Political-economic decisions make it hard to feed everybody, when we technically have more than enough to feed everybody. But one of the decisions that make it hard to feed everybody is the decision to eat lots of beef in rich countries. Land that's used to grow food for cattle could (in many but not all cases) also be used to grow food for poor people, but there's no money in that.
That's not the only one; there's lots of other ways in which food is wasted or used inefficiently. Although the situation has improved tremendously over the past half century, there are still a lot of people suffering from malnutrition.
> 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 bred chickens to be meat machines in a way we haven't with cows.
> 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.
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 cattle are a close substitute.
But we eat a lot more cattle than Texas & Montana can support.
I think we need more ruminant animals raised on grass as a means of regenerative farming... I think beef largely gets a bad rap for a lot of reasons that largely don't hold to grass fed cattle farming.
One of the weakest and least persuasive arguments, like animal cruelty, against animal ag. Data will also never convince anyone that they're doing something dangerous or selfish especially when their salary or lifestyle can be justified and rationalized through denial and cognitive dissonance.
The stronger arguments are:
- Local air, water, and soil pollution.
- Climate change 16±2% contribution.
- Antibiotic resistant bacteria evolution because the antibiotics over used in livestock are typically used in humans through the mostly different veterinary supply chain but they're the same fundamental molecules.
- Pandemic virus evolution due to both wildlife and (human, for now) workers getting very, very close to animals and animal waste crowded together creating a Petri dish. It's already happened several times throughout history.
Exchanging e.g. grains for beef is not 'lost' anything, even if theoretically the former gives more calories. Nutritionally beef is just more valuable. Calories isn't the only thing we need apparently.
As a sidenote for this audience - this is multiple magnitudes higher global warming impact than AI. If anything this and daily commutes optimization are the key ways software engineers can directly impact carbon, way more than AI as a tool.
Hmm, I wonder if beef is more expensive than chicken to reflect the inefficiency in its production? Oh it is. So it must then be that people just prefer the flavor and taste of it as compared to cheaper meats then.
The really good thing about this is that if we somehow do manage to "ruin earth" and lose a significant portion of agricultural production, we will just have less tasty food rather than starving to death.
Food waste is another kind of "slack" in the food supply chain that would help. Imagine how the world would look if food supply was as optimized as e.g. microchips and then we got any kind of disruption... except now you starve rather than not being able to upgrade your car.
Fat and carbs are energy, properly treated as calories.
Protein is not (in a non-starving person) used for energy, and it should be measured in grams not calories. The input calories weren't lost, they were converted to protein for use building body structure instead of energetic use.
If the authors wanted to make an honest argument here, they would show the relative conversion of feed calories to animal protein across different livestock.
Beef gets a lot of bad rep in environment terms because developed countries grain fed it in intensive settings. But not all cattle in the world is raised like that.
Since about 2019 I have been anemic. My iron levels were just a hair above being low enough to require an immediate infusion, and my doctor kept pushing me to eat more iron. She would often ask if I was a vegetarian or vegan, presumably she was assuming I was bad at it. I would always tell her the same thing. "I don't eat much beef but I do eat it"
Last summer I was diagnosed with celiac. Suddenly it all makes sense. I'm low on iron because my gut cannot absorb it.
So I start eating gluten free, and I start eating way more red meat than I used to, because building your iron levels takes a lot more iron intake than maintaining it. Now, about 8-9 months later I'm finally starting to feel better and my blood tests are showing my iron slowly creeping out of the danger zone
My nutritionist tells me that recovering this quickly would have probably been just about impossible for a vegetarian or vegan, without having an iron infusion done.
Anyways. Beef is kind of an important thing in our diets, that's all. Now that I'm back to a more normal level I'll go back to eating less of it, but I am now very conscious how important red meat is in a rounded diet
Edit: I guess my point is that calories are only part of the picture when it comes to food and there are a lot of other concerns as well, which are arguably more important to being healthy. You get calories from basically anything food you eat (assuming it's not some kind of engineered zero calorie diet food) but other minerals and vitamins are harder to source.
isn't the obvious answer not to eat less beef but rather not produce beef super fast with grain feed. if the beef we ate came from grass lands + hay in the the winter it would cost more, but would dramatically reduce the crop consumption...
false comparison, as most calories cattle consume are from things people dont eat, even if there are simmilar variets of plants that both people and animals eat, they are not interchangable.
Animals also eat huge quantities of human food, that has been rejected through some technical consideration, just size, as many crops produce many fruits or vegetables that are iether too large or small to be processed, or are misshapen or damaged, cow dont care nom nom nom, gone by the ton, and the trucks are still comming.
The true unforgivable waste is by people over eating, wasting, throwing away, and destroying good foog for countless beurocratic reasons.
Another factor that these studies seem to miss from the beef question is the fact there is more pasture land than viable agriculture land. Beef are often grazing on marginal land that would not be fit for much else. Clearcutting the amazon to meet beef demand is one thing but that isn't the case for I'd guess most places they have been farming beef for the past 100 years.
it seems disingenuous to problematize beef. it turns grass into human energy and also requires civilizational practices that create and preserve human dignity and animal welfare. mainly, the so called problem serves to centralize the problematizer themselves. their arguments from a position of centrally planning and managing food economies are intellectual tarpits. however, that our food supply and rural ways of life have the attention of the perpetually concerned is worthy of note. when they start with their opinions, mind your wallets and assets. in short, avoid.
Aha. All the grass humans could eat instead of the cows. Not all land is great for growing crops at. Other land is just good for growing grass for cattle to graze on.
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
323 comments
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 problems first.
> Is feeding the world a real problem?
Yes, but it is not a production capacity problem. The constraints on food are mostly in the logistics chain, often having to do with corruption or distribution targets (food goes where the money is), or regulation (did you know that cherry growers in the Upper Midwest are required --_by Federal law_-- to destroy unsold crops?).
A huge amount of food goes to waste simply because of regulation or subsidies, at least within the United States.
Surplus tart cherry crops are rarely destroyed. In the event of a surplus, they are often exported, diverted to secondary markets, donated, or carried-over into next-season's stock.
One thing people often don't figure or realize is food takes time to grow. It requires long term thinking to make sure supplies are sufficient. Left to their own devices, farmers will often chase after last season's cash crop. That is bad. It's far better for farmers to stick to more predictable growing and for more dedicated incentives to be issued.
I saw first hand farmers tear up a barley fields to plant wheat when the price got high enough.
Farming is a game of speculation. Planting last year's cash crop can be a successful strategy just like buying APPL today will likely yield good returns. Yet, it's a very hard market to predict with a lot of luck involved. Maybe only a few chase the cash crop and you win big. Maybe everyone does and you lose. Maybe there's a natural or political disaster that pumps up your crop.
There was nothing insulting, condensing, or dismissive about my comment. Highly speculative markets, like food, have booms and busts that can swing wildly. That's bad for something like food. The free market does not work with crops.
> The free market does not work with crops.
I'd argue that this should be refined to something like "farmers that speculate heavily struggle in an under-regulated free market".
Financial stability in highly volatile markets depends on appropriate planning, saving, and distribution. I say this from the investment perspective, but I would venture to guess that it also applies to hard goods like food-stuffs.
The nature of farming is speculation. It's inescapable. In a completely free market there's no way to guarantee success. Even with the best planning and saving you can't know what the rest of the market is doing and because of the long tail, you are locked in to harvesting and selling your crop no matter what.
You can speculate and be the farmer that always plants and grows wheat. You'll see booms and busts based on that. You can also switch up what you are growing based on your best guess about demand. Both strategies can be successful.
Funnily, one way to make farming less risky is a futures contract. And, if you know anything about futures commodity trading you know they are some of the most risky forms of trading.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You’re busy policing this while people are out there saying “Destroy their things and firebomb their houses”. So is it just that I made a mistake in my phrasing? Should I just frame the same comments in the style “I would never endorse X, but I don’t understand why others don’t do X”?
I can do that easily without LLM assistance if you like. But if you want your community to be exclusively endorsers of violence against enemies of a chosen tribe, then you should ban me so you can keep your little tribe of Ted Kaczynski fanboys.
The result that free markets are Prato optimal, though, requires conditions like low barriers to entry, perfect information, and low cost transactions… none of which seem very well met in the case of agriculture.
Sweet cherries have no such regulation, and are the ones you consume directly as a fruit - without any additional processing.
It's interesting to me how people are quick to comment about things they know nothing about...
> It's still food, full of flavor and calories
Tart cherries have about 1-2 calories per cherry, and do not taste good without a lot of sugar. That's why they are used in commercial processing, not generally sold as a fruit in grocery stores.
Fruit isn't super dense in calories to begin with because it has so much water, but it's still a meaningful amount, and tart cherries are pretty standard among fruit.
Maybe just quit being needlessly pedantic? Every point you've attempted to raise in this thread has been entirely pointless and equally ridiculous.
> Which is to say consuming tart cherries is not a significant source of calories and not something "people in need" are in need of at all.
This applies to almost all fruit though. But saying people in need don't need any fruit would be a terrible stance. What gives?
> If you researched this regulation even a little
Yeah yeah yeah I saw that in your other comment.
That's a completely different argument.
The argument you made in this comment is still a bad one.
It's interesting to me how people are quick to move the goalposts...
What was even the point of your snarky comment then?
> So you understood the crop we're discussing is rarely destroyed - and more often donated, diverted to secondary markets (ie. sold in grocery stores), or exported - yet still felt compelled to say a home cook could use them?
In the context of someone talking about home cooks using them, and you acting like "People do not eat tart cherries directly." is a counterargument, yes I felt compelled to correct that.
The incorrect thing you were implying had nothing to do with how often they're actually destroyed. So why would that stop me?
Isn't this something to care about?
You will see vast areas of cattle ranching, soybeans plantation used for cattle feed, and other crops that can be used as cattle feed. All that area used to be the Pantanal and Amazon, now transformed to grow beef.
If we would reduce the calories wasted on beef, this area could still have a lot more native vegetation. Of course, it's purely wishful thinking because this ship has sailed, beef consumption will take a long time to stop growing, these farms will fight for their lives to keep producing, and we've lost a huge area of incredible nature to eat some steaks and burgers.
>I understand the environmental impacts. I think we should solve our energy problems first.
is there a rational argument in here or is this just a cheap psychological reflex to keep eating beef? Because it's not clear to me how solving our energy problems and the consumption of beef even intersect so that we couldn't do both at the same time.
You might as well have said "man I really should stop drinking and smoking, but we gotta solve the energy problems first"
That said, it's very, very funny that you responded to an article about energy inefficiency (calorie -> calorie) and said we should solve our energy problems. Beef is an energy problem! We're putting 30x the energy into the product against the energy we get out! Thats wasted energy!
> edit: I understand the environmental impacts. I think we should solve our energy problems first.
There's no "first." There's not a queue of problems that the people of the world work on one by one. It's not a matter of limited labor/money either, we're talking about policies to change allocation. If anything is limited here it's political will, but that doesn't really work like money or physical limitations, it's more abstract and nonlinear. It's quite possible that a platform containing more changes earns more will than one with fewer, so budgeting is the wrong impulse.
We don't need a steak every day, but two servings of beef a week can be a truly great infusion of protein and nutrients in someone's diet.
These are found calories, not lost.
- Nearly 90% of Americans eat red meat [1].
- Environmental activity against meat has led a lot of people (26% of Americans) to believe that there is a push to ban red meat. This issue does not poll well [1].
- Despite the above, Americans are eating less red meat than we used to [2].
- The vast majority of people who choose to reduce their meat intake do so for cost or health reasons, not environmental [3].
Putting all that together... studies like this do not help the environmental cause. Sure, they find something that's vaguely interesting, and can possibly be a bullet point on an environmentalist slide. However, a far better research study would be one focusing on human health impacts of red meat, or demonstrating economic benefits to red meat alternatives.
tl;ld - This study is not useful, and is probably damaging to it's own cause.
[1]: https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/nearly-nine-ten-ameri...
[2]: https://www.pcrm.org/news/news-releases/new-survey-reveals-r...
[3]: https://www.seattletimes.com/life/food-drink/two-thirds-of-a...
> Is feeding the world a real problem?
Yes.
> I've yet to see compelling evidence that it really is except as a secondary effect of logistics, energy supply, and war.
I don't know how to respond to this. It's like saying you don't think breathing underwater is difficult, except for the secondary effects of water. War is a problem. Energy supply is a problem. Logistics is a problem. All these problems lead to starvation. People starving is a real problem.
Another reason people starve is economics and market forces. The market decides it wants to use up more water and grain to feed cows. That grain and water is now not available for purchase as human food. That means it is more scarce on the human-feeding market. Scarcity drives up prices. So livestock feed makes grain more expensive, making it harder to purchase, for people to eat.
(I'm using "starve" as a euphemism for "malnutrition that not only severely impacts bodily health, reduces quality of life, and increases mortality, but also decreases economic productivity")
Now, if the point you're trying to make is "we could solve world hunger", then absolutely the answer is yes, humans produce more than enough grain to feed everyone in the world, and we have the money to transport it everywhere, even assist with cooking fuel. But because of all the categories you think don't apply, and markets, and economics, we are not fixing it. We are choosing to let people starve.
> I understand the environmental impacts. I think we should solve our energy problems first.
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?
You are completely right, who the fuck cares?
That's not the only one; there's lots of other ways in which food is wasted or used inefficiently. Although the situation has improved tremendously over the past half century, there are still a lot of people suffering from malnutrition.
> 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 bred chickens to be meat machines in a way we haven't with cows.
> 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.
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 cattle are a close substitute.
But we eat a lot more cattle than Texas & Montana can support.
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.
The stronger arguments are:
- Local air, water, and soil pollution.
- Climate change 16±2% contribution.
- Antibiotic resistant bacteria evolution because the antibiotics over used in livestock are typically used in humans through the mostly different veterinary supply chain but they're the same fundamental molecules.
- Pandemic virus evolution due to both wildlife and (human, for now) workers getting very, very close to animals and animal waste crowded together creating a Petri dish. It's already happened several times throughout history.
Or the annoying cowbells :)
> we need the calories to feed a growing population
> population doubles
> we need the calories to feed a growing population
you always have to pay to continue the process, and sometimes to put it on hold.
Transfer of Energy between Trophic Levels:
https://bio.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Introductory_and_Gene...
Ecological efficiency:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_efficiency
Food waste is another kind of "slack" in the food supply chain that would help. Imagine how the world would look if food supply was as optimized as e.g. microchips and then we got any kind of disruption... except now you starve rather than not being able to upgrade your car.
Fat and carbs are energy, properly treated as calories. Protein is not (in a non-starving person) used for energy, and it should be measured in grams not calories. The input calories weren't lost, they were converted to protein for use building body structure instead of energetic use.
If the authors wanted to make an honest argument here, they would show the relative conversion of feed calories to animal protein across different livestock.
Since about 2019 I have been anemic. My iron levels were just a hair above being low enough to require an immediate infusion, and my doctor kept pushing me to eat more iron. She would often ask if I was a vegetarian or vegan, presumably she was assuming I was bad at it. I would always tell her the same thing. "I don't eat much beef but I do eat it"
Last summer I was diagnosed with celiac. Suddenly it all makes sense. I'm low on iron because my gut cannot absorb it.
So I start eating gluten free, and I start eating way more red meat than I used to, because building your iron levels takes a lot more iron intake than maintaining it. Now, about 8-9 months later I'm finally starting to feel better and my blood tests are showing my iron slowly creeping out of the danger zone
My nutritionist tells me that recovering this quickly would have probably been just about impossible for a vegetarian or vegan, without having an iron infusion done.
Anyways. Beef is kind of an important thing in our diets, that's all. Now that I'm back to a more normal level I'll go back to eating less of it, but I am now very conscious how important red meat is in a rounded diet
Edit: I guess my point is that calories are only part of the picture when it comes to food and there are a lot of other concerns as well, which are arguably more important to being healthy. You get calories from basically anything food you eat (assuming it's not some kind of engineered zero calorie diet food) but other minerals and vitamins are harder to source.
An alternate take: if calorie efficiency is so important we should focus on consumption more than production.
Dude cites study after study pretty much all with the same conclusion: Eating animal products is bad for your health.
What we need is nutrient density. 0% of those feed calories have, eg, creatine. 100% of the beef calories do.
> "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