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When you eat an animal, you are consuming (in this analysis) all nutrients it has consumed over its entire life, of which 90% are wasted vs. just eating those n
by ahelwer 7y ago
When you eat an animal, you are consuming (in this analysis) all nutrients it has consumed over its entire life, of which 90% are wasted vs. just eating those nutrients yourself. It isn't talking about bioavailability or whatever.
- andreitp1 7y agoHow exactly would they be "wasted"? Seems to me that they would just end up back in nature and deeding other organisms as part of the food chain.
- kurthr 7y agoExactly, what if the animal just dies without being eaten... are 100% of it's nutrients wasted? Or did it lead a full life and return from which ot came?
- dredmorbius 7y agoThis is where scavengers and decomposers come in. It's relatively rare that living organisms die without being part of some further biological change, though that does happen. Fossil fuels are formed through lack of biological decomposition, as are precursor materials: peat bogs, kerogenated biomass, abiotic methane. Deaths in desert, arctic, or alpine conditions may simply dessicate and degrade rather than being eaten. The entropic channel may pass through biological mechanism, but there's no obligation that it must.
- Diederich 7y ago> How exactly would they be "wasted"? Increased entropy mostly in the form of heat.
- perl4ever 7y agoCompared to not eating it, or compared to the animal never having existed? I can't follow how, either way.
- ahelwer 7y agoSome are, in the form of excrement. Most are not, because they're released as heat with the animal moving around and maintaining homeostasis. It's the same for us except all our excrement ends up in a landfill.
- dredmorbius 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- masklinn 7y ago> When you eat an animal, you are consuming (in this analysis) all nutrients it has consumed over its entire life, of which 90% are wasted vs. just eating those nutrients yourself. Most of those nutrients you, as a human being, either can't eat at all or get nothing from. Humans can't feed on hay and silage.
- ahelwer 7y agoYeah, and the vast amounts of land used to grow those things can be redirected to other things that humans can eat. I have no idea why otherwise smart people get such a brain block on the topic of meat-eating. These "gotcha" points fall apart if you take 10 seconds to think about it.
- whatshisface 7y agoI'm not an expert on global agriculture, but a lot of the famous Texas cattle ranches can basically only grow grass. If the natural state of the land is brush that only goes up to your ankles you aren't going to feed much other than grazers off it. The efficient solution would be to use the good land to grow food and the rest of the land to feed livestock, and that's what tends to happen (feedlot factory farms fueled by cereal crops notwithstanding).