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Based on some rough napkin calculations, the caloric efficiency by land of broccoli is about the same as industrial meat. Optimizing diet for land efficiency p
by blix 6y ago
Based on some rough napkin calculations, the caloric efficiency by land of broccoli is about the same as industrial meat.
Optimizing diet for land efficiency probably does not produce healthy diets. You can find strong evidence for this trade-off in the changes of average human health at the advent of agriculture.
- arrosenberg 6y agoMuch lower water usage and impact on the land used though, even if it's bad soil and you have to use a ton of fertilizer.
- dilettantism 6y agoNot to mention broccoli probably doesn't feel the conscious terror of its imminent death.
- hombre_fatal 6y ago> Based on some rough napkin calculations, the caloric efficiency by land of broccoli is about the same as industrial meat. Not even close. Did you forget to consider the inputs into meat? If you want to check against someone else's math, here's a paper that claims we can increase global calorie availability by 70% by shifting crops grown for animal feed (40% of crops in USA btw) to crops grown for human consumption: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/8/3/034015/pdf https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/8/3/034...
- blix 6y agoI did include the inputs, with the assumption of high efficiency feed for industrial meat production, i.e. a feed conversion rate of about 6. This paper is about shifting animal corn to human corn, not about shifting animal corn to broccoli. Corn produces about 6 times as many calories per hectare as broccoli.
- jamil7 6y agoNot this again, why is it always broccoli that gets brought up in this argument? Nobody is eating kgs broccoli per day to get their calories. Compare industrial meat with beans or rice.
- blix 6y agoThe point is that, as a source of calories, many vegetables are about as inefficient by land as industrial meat. Optimizing calories per unit land is an implicit or explicit goal of many of the comments throughout this thread. I think this is a poor optimization target and there are much better arguments against meat consumption that aren't also applicable to broccoli. I chose broccoli because it is my favorite vegetable and I eat quite a lot of it.
- jamil7 6y agoFair point! it was a bit of knee jerk reaction on my part as a previous thread I'd read on HN about climate an animal agriculture had the exact same broccoli point.