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The current push for plant-based alternatives to everything reminds me of the effort to replace butter with margarine and tallow with vegetable shortening. I b

The current push for plant-based alternatives to everything reminds me of the effort to replace butter with margarine and tallow with vegetable shortening. I believe the consensus these days is that butter is superior to margarine health-wise. Wouldn't be surprised if we see a resurgence in rendered animal fats for cooking as well at some point. The thing that is great about animals (ruminants specifically) is that they can take a feed source that isn't useful to humans (grass) on land that isn't tillable and convert it into a useful food source (meat / milk / fat). The whole idea behind margarine was a chemist figured if cows could get fat from plants, he could skip the cow and just get the fat from the plant. Very similar to current thinking on vegan meats, etc. Except it turns out that the end product was loaded with trans fats that turned out to be super bad for you. Oops. I would expect most meat alternatives to run into similar issues as we study them more.

rsynnott 7y ago
> The thing that is great about animals (ruminants specifically) is that they can take a feed source that isn't useful to humans (grass) on land that isn't tillable and convert it into a useful food source (meat / milk / fat). While that's true as far as it goes, the reality is that most animals are not farmed that way; they're fed largely stuff grown on land that could be used to farm crops for humans (and indeed often stuff that humans can eat directly).
- chrisco255 7y ago
  Crop land is more intensive than grassland. To grow crops today profitably, you have to use synthetic fertilizer and pesticides. So cows for example largely eat grass. They also get some hay and some silage (which is made from the stalks of corn, inedible for humans). Even soy beans, which are used to feed pigs and chickens, only about 20% of the bean is useful for human consumption so they already extract that (soybean oil) and use it in many products. The rest is used for meal, and fed to livestock.

rsynnott 7y ago

> The thing that is great about animals (ruminants specifically) is that they can take a feed source that isn't useful to humans (grass) on land that isn't tillable and convert it into a useful food source (meat / milk / fat). While that's true as far as it goes, the reality is that most animals are not farmed that way; they're fed largely stuff grown on land that could be used to farm crops for humans (and indeed often stuff that humans can eat directly).

chrisco255 7y ago
Crop land is more intensive than grassland. To grow crops today profitably, you have to use synthetic fertilizer and pesticides. So cows for example largely eat grass. They also get some hay and some silage (which is made from the stalks of corn, inedible for humans). Even soy beans, which are used to feed pigs and chickens, only about 20% of the bean is useful for human consumption so they already extract that (soybean oil) and use it in many products. The rest is used for meal, and fed to livestock.