4 ms·

You can feed ten times as many people with the wheat that grows on a similarly sized wheat field. Or keep feeding just one person and turn the rest into a mead

by esarbe 7y ago

You can feed ten times as many people with the wheat that grows on a similarly sized wheat field. Or keep feeding just one person and turn the rest into a meadow with flowers, bushes, hedges and trees. Imagine that.

_Microft 7y ago
For the ones interested, here's something in Wikipedia about this topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophic_level https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophic_level https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_efficiency#Ten_percent_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_efficiency#Ten_perc...
dTal 7y ago
You can't, because "man cannot live off bread alone". Wheat lacks many basic nutrients that meat contains. Calories are not fungible - you can live off meat essentially indefinitely (especially if you eat the organ meat), but you'll rapidly a nasty case of iron deficiency and scurvy if you try to live off wheat. I feel this fact is often omitted from naive assessments of food efficiency. It's not nitpicking, it's a fundamental law - bioaccumulating reasonable levels of nutrient density will always take more energy that just building up raw calories. Vegans need to eat fatty, nutrient-dense plants like nuts and avocados to survive - these foods invariably have a much worse environmental footprint to wheat. I'd be interested to see comparative estimates of the impact of a "careless vegan" who eats exotic, problematic foods versus a "conscientious meat eater", who only eats locally sourced pasture-raised livestock.
- adrianN 7y ago
  Given that chicken is reasonably good from a CO2/calorie viewpoint, my guess is that avocados flown in from the other side of the world are worse, but I'd also be interested in sources.
- esarbe 7y ago
  I'm very sorry to disagree, in my opinion this is nitpicking. Yes, you cannot live from wheat alone, insofar you are correct. But that was not the point of my reply. The point of my reply - to flesh it out - was that you need only use about 10 percent of the area required for cattle if we instead consume these calories directly. That doesn't have to be wheat, it can be peas, beans, nuts, beets, potatoes, celery and on and on. If you are concerned about nutrients, there's always chickens. Chickens are so vastly more efficient when it comes to land use than cattle, it's not even funny anymore. I hope that we soon have some reasonable supply chain of non-vertebrate protein (i.e. insects) at an affordable price. Thanks for your reply! Edit: I'm not a vegan, by the way. Not even a vegetarian. I enjoy the taste of meat and especially beef. But I'm convinced that the amount of resources we spend on meat - especially on beef - cannot be justified by anyone in good conscience.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
    >> I hope that we soon have some reasonable supply chain of non-vertebrate protein (i.e. insects) at an affordable price. If insetcs ever become a staple protein source, you can rest assured that they will be consumed by all the poor people. Rich people will keep eating as much beef as they please. So I think that what you are proposing, in good will I have no doubt, is not a solution to the problem of feeding many people healthy and nutritious food. It's one more way to disenfranchise and humiliate the majority of the population, by throwing them scraps. At the same time, perfectly good food goes to waste because market forces, rather than any taboo about consuming certain types of food, demand it.
    - esarbe 7y ago
      > If insetcs ever become a staple protein source, you can rest assured that they will be consumed by all the poor people. Rich people will keep eating as much beef as they please. Yeah, so what? The rich have always done as they pleased. This will only change when the revolution comes. > [...] to disenfranchise and humiliate the majority of the population, by throwing them scraps. Protein is protein. I happily eat heart and intestines and liver and brain and tongue and whatever parts of an animal there are. Just as almost all my ancestors (and yours, for that matter) did. As long as it's free of disease and contaminants, I'm fine with that. You have to understand that this picking of choosing of "better" or "worse" food is only possible because of an incredible, unsustainable exploitation of our natural habitat. We are killing our own biological support system. This has to stop. > At the same time, perfectly good food goes to waste because market forces, rather than any taboo about consuming certain types of food, demand it. I don't propose we let any food go to waste. I propose we use more efficient means to produce enough calories for everyone on this planet, so we can all prosper without the predatory exploitation of the ecosystem that is required nowadays. That said; beef and mutton and pig is way too cheap. How about we actually include all the externalized costs in the price and let the market work it out?
      - YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
        I'm sorry, I didn't understand your comment about my ancestors eating hearts and livers etc. I am Greek and we don't consider offal to be inedible, quite the contrary. For example, we make an absolutely heavely dish called kokoretsi that consists of the heart, lungs, liver and spleen of a lamb wrapped up in its long intestine. I've made a couple of them myself (although it's a bitch to clean the intestines properly because they're full of shit). We make soups from the same bits of the animal, and/or its stomachs, as well as a kind of sausage with its organs stuffed into its intestine, and so on. We also eat snails, in a red sauce with garlic and parsley (but not any kind of insect). All these are considered delicacies, to be enjoyed in special times (religious feasts and the like), and with some good wine to accompany them, it goes without saying. Perhaps this is a reason why I see the matter differently than you do? My people are used to the idea of it not being right to throw out anything when we slaughter an animal to eat it. If (further) Westerners did the same, meat consumption would significantly improve in efficiency. I also don't understand your comment about "the revolution". What revolution is that?
- YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
  I generally agree with you - I don't think that you can survive well on just plants. At the same time I think that modern people eat way more meat than people used to eat in any other period of history, and probably much more than is necessary. For example, the way I understand it, how people used to eat where I'm from (Greece) in the past is that they fed themselves very well on pulses, legumes, vegetables, fruit, plenty of fish, metric shittons of olive oil, and then only ate red meat in religious feasts, where a lamb or an ox would be sacrificed in ancient times, or just roasted on a spit and eaten whole, offal and all, in more modern times.
  - dTal 7y ago
    To be sure, I wasn't saying it was impossible to survive well on just plants (though it's certainly a bit more challenging and risky). It's just that naive comparisons of food efficiency don't tell the whole story. You need a lot of trace vitamins which you can only obtain by 1) taking a lot of a low-density source and concentrating it (like cooking an entire bag of spinach into a souffle to get iron), or 2) eating something which has done the concentrating for you, usually over a period of time. Either way, living off plants is considerably less efficient than "meat vs wheat" would suggest. "Plenty of fish" is a problematic addition to the diet you describe - that's meat, plain and simple, with all of the bioefficiency loss and ecosystem disruption that entails. It's just less visible because it's underwater.

by esarbe 7y ago

_Microft 7y ago

For the ones interested, here's something in Wikipedia about this topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophic_level https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophic_level https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_efficiency#Ten_percent_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_efficiency#Ten_perc...

dTal 7y ago

You can't, because "man cannot live off bread alone". Wheat lacks many basic nutrients that meat contains. Calories are not fungible - you can live off meat essentially indefinitely (especially if you eat the organ meat), but you'll rapidly a nasty case of iron deficiency and scurvy if you try to live off wheat. I feel this fact is often omitted from naive assessments of food efficiency. It's not nitpicking, it's a fundamental law - bioaccumulating reasonable levels of nutrient density will always take more energy that just building up raw calories. Vegans need to eat fatty, nutrient-dense plants like nuts and avocados to survive - these foods invariably have a much worse environmental footprint to wheat. I'd be interested to see comparative estimates of the impact of a "careless vegan" who eats exotic, problematic foods versus a "conscientious meat eater", who only eats locally sourced pasture-raised livestock.

adrianN 7y ago
Given that chicken is reasonably good from a CO2/calorie viewpoint, my guess is that avocados flown in from the other side of the world are worse, but I'd also be interested in sources.
esarbe 7y ago
I'm very sorry to disagree, in my opinion this is nitpicking. Yes, you cannot live from wheat alone, insofar you are correct. But that was not the point of my reply. The point of my reply - to flesh it out - was that you need only use about 10 percent of the area required for cattle if we instead consume these calories directly. That doesn't have to be wheat, it can be peas, beans, nuts, beets, potatoes, celery and on and on. If you are concerned about nutrients, there's always chickens. Chickens are so vastly more efficient when it comes to land use than cattle, it's not even funny anymore. I hope that we soon have some reasonable supply chain of non-vertebrate protein (i.e. insects) at an affordable price. Thanks for your reply! Edit: I'm not a vegan, by the way. Not even a vegetarian. I enjoy the taste of meat and especially beef. But I'm convinced that the amount of resources we spend on meat - especially on beef - cannot be justified by anyone in good conscience.
- YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
  >> I hope that we soon have some reasonable supply chain of non-vertebrate protein (i.e. insects) at an affordable price. If insetcs ever become a staple protein source, you can rest assured that they will be consumed by all the poor people. Rich people will keep eating as much beef as they please. So I think that what you are proposing, in good will I have no doubt, is not a solution to the problem of feeding many people healthy and nutritious food. It's one more way to disenfranchise and humiliate the majority of the population, by throwing them scraps. At the same time, perfectly good food goes to waste because market forces, rather than any taboo about consuming certain types of food, demand it.
  - esarbe 7y ago
    > If insetcs ever become a staple protein source, you can rest assured that they will be consumed by all the poor people. Rich people will keep eating as much beef as they please. Yeah, so what? The rich have always done as they pleased. This will only change when the revolution comes. > [...] to disenfranchise and humiliate the majority of the population, by throwing them scraps. Protein is protein. I happily eat heart and intestines and liver and brain and tongue and whatever parts of an animal there are. Just as almost all my ancestors (and yours, for that matter) did. As long as it's free of disease and contaminants, I'm fine with that. You have to understand that this picking of choosing of "better" or "worse" food is only possible because of an incredible, unsustainable exploitation of our natural habitat. We are killing our own biological support system. This has to stop. > At the same time, perfectly good food goes to waste because market forces, rather than any taboo about consuming certain types of food, demand it. I don't propose we let any food go to waste. I propose we use more efficient means to produce enough calories for everyone on this planet, so we can all prosper without the predatory exploitation of the ecosystem that is required nowadays. That said; beef and mutton and pig is way too cheap. How about we actually include all the externalized costs in the price and let the market work it out?
    - YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
      I'm sorry, I didn't understand your comment about my ancestors eating hearts and livers etc. I am Greek and we don't consider offal to be inedible, quite the contrary. For example, we make an absolutely heavely dish called kokoretsi that consists of the heart, lungs, liver and spleen of a lamb wrapped up in its long intestine. I've made a couple of them myself (although it's a bitch to clean the intestines properly because they're full of shit). We make soups from the same bits of the animal, and/or its stomachs, as well as a kind of sausage with its organs stuffed into its intestine, and so on. We also eat snails, in a red sauce with garlic and parsley (but not any kind of insect). All these are considered delicacies, to be enjoyed in special times (religious feasts and the like), and with some good wine to accompany them, it goes without saying. Perhaps this is a reason why I see the matter differently than you do? My people are used to the idea of it not being right to throw out anything when we slaughter an animal to eat it. If (further) Westerners did the same, meat consumption would significantly improve in efficiency. I also don't understand your comment about "the revolution". What revolution is that?
YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
I generally agree with you - I don't think that you can survive well on just plants. At the same time I think that modern people eat way more meat than people used to eat in any other period of history, and probably much more than is necessary. For example, the way I understand it, how people used to eat where I'm from (Greece) in the past is that they fed themselves very well on pulses, legumes, vegetables, fruit, plenty of fish, metric shittons of olive oil, and then only ate red meat in religious feasts, where a lamb or an ox would be sacrificed in ancient times, or just roasted on a spit and eaten whole, offal and all, in more modern times.
- dTal 7y ago
  To be sure, I wasn't saying it was impossible to survive well on just plants (though it's certainly a bit more challenging and risky). It's just that naive comparisons of food efficiency don't tell the whole story. You need a lot of trace vitamins which you can only obtain by 1) taking a lot of a low-density source and concentrating it (like cooking an entire bag of spinach into a souffle to get iron), or 2) eating something which has done the concentrating for you, usually over a period of time. Either way, living off plants is considerably less efficient than "meat vs wheat" would suggest. "Plenty of fish" is a problematic addition to the diet you describe - that's meat, plain and simple, with all of the bioefficiency loss and ecosystem disruption that entails. It's just less visible because it's underwater.