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If meat gets more expensive, people buy more vegetables instead. If people buy more vegetables, vegetables get more expensive. Plenty of people in America alrea

If meat gets more expensive, people buy more vegetables instead. If people buy more vegetables, vegetables get more expensive. Plenty of people in America already go hungry. In a crisis with increased unemployement and decreased food production, more people will go hungry. It's not a famine (in the US), but it's a serious problem. How many studies have suggested that just giving kids breakfast would be the number one thing to improve school performance?

ip26 7y ago
The good news is many vegetables go from seed to harvest in ninety days or so.
- carapace 7y ago
  Not only that, a pound of meat takes like a hundred pounds of veggies to feed the animal (I pulled that number out of my ass for rhetorical effect, whatever the real number it's large. One or two orders of magnitude.)
  - wahern 7y ago
    It's not even close to two orders of magnitude, and usually significantly less than one order of magnitude. For chicken and fish the feed conversion ratio (FCR) can be less than 2. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_conversion_ratio#Conversion_ratios_for_livestock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_conversion_ratio#Conversi... (FCR can be 1 or even <1, though the difference there presumably comes from water weight--input feed is dehydrated while outputs are measured by weight, which includes some amount of water. Whether FCR includes only dressed meat depends on the data source, but for chickens and fish it's mostly irrelevant because everything ends up being processed into food, and by weight the carcasses are mostly protein. If we're pessimistic about published FCR numbers I think we can ignore the water weight difference.) Also, farmed animals aren't very picky about the look of their food. In some aspects industrial meat production permits us to make more efficient use of agricultural land in terms of providing calories and especially proteins for human consumption. What's hidden in the FCR number is the energy required to process the feed stock to get those high FCRs. But a human consuming "whole foods" also needs more of that input for the same amount of useable calories. Flours and similarly processed foodstuffs require more energy than that required for the inputs to livestock. So in terms of energy use we're basically just looking at the fixed overhead of the animal conversion as captured by FCR, possibly offset by some efficiencies that would be absent in direct-to-human consumption. TL;DR--modern industrial agriculture is crazy efficient. Beef isn't as horribly bad as we think (notwithstanding the methane problem), but consuming pork and, especially, chicken and farmed fish shouldn't be very guilt inducing, ceteris paribus.
    - carapace 7y ago
      Wow! Thank you very much.
      - wahern 7y ago
        I did a little more digging regarding water content. By weight dressed chicken is ~60-65% water, so not insubstantial. Dry feed is ~10% water. But even if we double FCR to offset the water weight we're still under 1 order of magnitude, at least for chicken and fish.[1] I think the point still stands. If we consider all the context, such as nutritional needs (can't simply replace all animal protein and fat with processed corn), maximization of diverse agricultural resources, industrial efficiency, relative inefficiencies of whole vegetables and fruits, etc, then some moderate amount of meat consumption is readily defensible. [1] Using other metrics there's a lot of literature that defends beef production, but that doesn't make for good napkin math, and I'm somewhat skeptical of it, anyhow--much of it seems to be published by the beef industry, and if you pick your metric you can make anything look good. Nonetheless, beef production is pretty darned efficient as far as it goes.
deleted 7y ago
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dawnerd 7y ago
Recent news reports were of farmers throwing away produce because demand dropped from all the restaurants closing down. I think we’ll be ok.
- klmadfejno 7y ago
  I hadn't heard about that. Googling it suggests most of this is due to supply chain problems preventing farmers who normally sell to restaurants being unable to sell to grocery stores; and labor not being available to pick food https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=farmers+throwing+away+produce&atb=v198-1&ia=news&iai=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mercurynews.com%2F2020%2F04%2F20%2Fcalifornia-farmers-are-forced-to-let-crops-rot-and-throw-away-milk-while-food-bank-demand-soars%2F https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=farmers+throwing+away+produ...
pacomerh 7y ago
If people buy more vegetables then we all win
- klmadfejno 7y ago
  Not the people who were already struggling to afford vegetables

ip26 7y ago

The good news is many vegetables go from seed to harvest in ninety days or so.

carapace 7y ago
Not only that, a pound of meat takes like a hundred pounds of veggies to feed the animal (I pulled that number out of my ass for rhetorical effect, whatever the real number it's large. One or two orders of magnitude.)
- wahern 7y ago
  It's not even close to two orders of magnitude, and usually significantly less than one order of magnitude. For chicken and fish the feed conversion ratio (FCR) can be less than 2. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_conversion_ratio#Conversion_ratios_for_livestock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_conversion_ratio#Conversi... (FCR can be 1 or even <1, though the difference there presumably comes from water weight--input feed is dehydrated while outputs are measured by weight, which includes some amount of water. Whether FCR includes only dressed meat depends on the data source, but for chickens and fish it's mostly irrelevant because everything ends up being processed into food, and by weight the carcasses are mostly protein. If we're pessimistic about published FCR numbers I think we can ignore the water weight difference.) Also, farmed animals aren't very picky about the look of their food. In some aspects industrial meat production permits us to make more efficient use of agricultural land in terms of providing calories and especially proteins for human consumption. What's hidden in the FCR number is the energy required to process the feed stock to get those high FCRs. But a human consuming "whole foods" also needs more of that input for the same amount of useable calories. Flours and similarly processed foodstuffs require more energy than that required for the inputs to livestock. So in terms of energy use we're basically just looking at the fixed overhead of the animal conversion as captured by FCR, possibly offset by some efficiencies that would be absent in direct-to-human consumption. TL;DR--modern industrial agriculture is crazy efficient. Beef isn't as horribly bad as we think (notwithstanding the methane problem), but consuming pork and, especially, chicken and farmed fish shouldn't be very guilt inducing, ceteris paribus.
  - carapace 7y ago
    Wow! Thank you very much.
    - wahern 7y ago
      I did a little more digging regarding water content. By weight dressed chicken is ~60-65% water, so not insubstantial. Dry feed is ~10% water. But even if we double FCR to offset the water weight we're still under 1 order of magnitude, at least for chicken and fish.[1] I think the point still stands. If we consider all the context, such as nutritional needs (can't simply replace all animal protein and fat with processed corn), maximization of diverse agricultural resources, industrial efficiency, relative inefficiencies of whole vegetables and fruits, etc, then some moderate amount of meat consumption is readily defensible. [1] Using other metrics there's a lot of literature that defends beef production, but that doesn't make for good napkin math, and I'm somewhat skeptical of it, anyhow--much of it seems to be published by the beef industry, and if you pick your metric you can make anything look good. Nonetheless, beef production is pretty darned efficient as far as it goes.

deleted 7y ago

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dawnerd 7y ago

Recent news reports were of farmers throwing away produce because demand dropped from all the restaurants closing down. I think we’ll be ok.

klmadfejno 7y ago
I hadn't heard about that. Googling it suggests most of this is due to supply chain problems preventing farmers who normally sell to restaurants being unable to sell to grocery stores; and labor not being available to pick food https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=farmers+throwing+away+produce&atb=v198-1&ia=news&iai=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mercurynews.com%2F2020%2F04%2F20%2Fcalifornia-farmers-are-forced-to-let-crops-rot-and-throw-away-milk-while-food-bank-demand-soars%2F https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=farmers+throwing+away+produ...

pacomerh 7y ago

If people buy more vegetables then we all win

klmadfejno 7y ago
Not the people who were already struggling to afford vegetables