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Most of the world's grain is eaten by humans' food. We're really really good at efficiently producing grain -- especially field corn (which is not super desira

Most of the world's grain is eaten by humans' food. We're really really good at efficiently producing grain -- especially field corn (which is not super desirable as human food without significant processing), and we grow lots of animals of all sorts. Naturally, when we can, we feed those animals on field corn -- they don't complain, and it's the cheapest food we can produce for them. In the US we also subsidize corn pretty heavily, which has biased us towards maximizing efficiency on this crop rather than on some other grain. It's unclear to me whether we would have become more efficient with some other grain (in terms of food calories out per unit of resources/land in) had we produced as durable of an economic incentive to do so -- but regardless, it would still be a grain of some sort that ended up being the caloric efficiency maximum product, and therefore what animal feed would end up being.

Schroedingersat 4y ago
> which is not super desirable as human food without significant processing I see this repeated all the time. Is making cornmeal or cornflour really that much more involved than wheat flour, semolina, or rolled oats?
- 988747 4y ago
  It's really not about that, corn products are simply bad for health - too much sugar, to little more valuable nutrients.
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    Cornmeal is less than 1% simple sugars, as is cornflour. While it's not great compared to high fiber low gi sources like brown rice or sweet potato, it's not sugary at all. You have to split the polysachharides somehow to make it into sugar. Of course if you spend extra time, money and energy turning your relatively ordinarily healthy grain (which is admittedly a low bar) into sugar you spend more time, money and energy and wind up with sugar. It's no different from wheat in that regard other than you should maybe add a bit more fiber to the meal.
  - logifail 4y ago
    > It's really not about that, corn products are simply bad for health - too much sugar, to little more valuable nutrients For the majority, sure. In our immediate family I have to disagree, after many months of (undiagnosed) illness, and after several trips to hospital, my son was recently diagnosed with Coeliac[0]. Now corn products are now a key component of his diet. [0] https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/digestive-diseases/celiac-disease https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/digestive-disea...
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- codefreeordie 4y ago
  No, probably not. Mostly it gets said because sweet corn is tasty when prepared simply as a whole food, and it's what most people think of when they see the word "corn".
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    I mostly see it as a bad faith argument for why the only possible productive use of x fraction of land is for growing feed and herding cattle and didn't know the 'animal feed corn' and corn as a grain for people are the same crop. If it's basically the same level of involvement as as bleached flour, then the only real relevant issues are how to source a balanced protein so you don't have to eat half a kilo of carbs when you don't need the energy and how distructive other micronutrient sources are.
- h2odragon 4y ago
  A little bit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixtamalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixtamalization Best use of maize, IMO, is fermentation. Let the yeast have it first, take off the volatiles, then feed the mash leftovers to tasty critters.
  - finiteseries 4y ago
    Neither cornmeal nor cornflour are nixtamalized, but historically most consumed corn was before the inexperienced European colonizers began using it.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      To have "nixtamalized" maize appears to be what ingredients lists call "processed with lime". Pellagra epidemics have arisen through failure to process with lime. The Mayans got their cooking water from out of cenotes, skylights of limestone cave systems, which might have made it naturally nixtamalizing. Were their grinding stones of limestone? (The grinding platform, the metate, was not.) Don't know what the Navaho did or do.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- littlestymaar 4y ago
  It isn't really relevant anymore because the food source is much more diverse than what it used to be, but when some western people started cultivating corn, and feading mostly out of it, they started to suffer from acute lack of tryptophan and vitamin b3, called pellagra, causing millions of death over several centuries. Mesoamerican civilizations built on top of corn had a specific corn processing step called nixtamalization, which avoided the issue altogether, but unfortunately wasn't imported along with corn during the colonizations of the Americas. But as long as you can get enough tryptophan and vitamin b3 otherwise, corn is completely fine as a main source of energy.
goodpoint 4y ago
You keep repeating the word "efficient" but there is nothing less efficient than animal farming. By far. Both in terms of land, water and energy usage.
- baisq 4y ago
  Is there any way of obtaining beef that is more efficient than cow farming?
  - codefreeordie 4y ago
    Nope. Especially given the extent to which "cow" is a thing that we created because we wanted more/better beef. Over centuries, we have become increasingly efficient at producing beef, and are extremely efficient at it. It is probably not possible to be much more efficient using whole-plant crops and growing whole-animal beef.
- saalweachter 4y ago
  Eh, beef, maybe, but the math basically comes down to: wheat, 4 million calories per acre, corn, 15 million. Take that 15 million calories of corn and feed it to chickens for a 3:1 calorie exchange and you've got 5 million calories of chicken per acre. It's more complicated than that, but corn yields are so high that they can overpower the otherwise inefficiency of meat production. Potatoes are as good as corn, and rice nearly so, but just from a land usage perspective chicken is no worse than eating wheat bread.
  - diordiderot 4y ago
    Fascinating! I had no idea corn was so calorific. Do you know how the inputs compare? As in are the amounts of fertilizer and pesticides similar?
    - saalweachter 4y ago
      Not really; there's also the complication that you don't actually feed your chickens straight corn. Because chickens need protein in their meal, it's more like, 2 acres of corn and 1 acre of soybeans, for 36 million calories from 3 acres to get 12 million calories of chicken for a chicken-per-acre calories of 4 million. You also get your chicken manure as a fertilizer out at the end, but then, if you were already collecting your humanure it's probably not a net gain. From a pure land usage standpoint, you're still better off if we're getting most of our calories from corn, potatoes and rice directly. Once you start adding in necessary protein, you can either subsist on soy, or feed that soy with corn to chickens and pigs (which have a worse feed ratio compared to chickens, but can supplement on food waste to reclaim calories that would otherwise go to waste) for roughly similar food-per-acre footprints.
baisq 4y ago
>Most of the world's grain is eaten by humans' food. Evidently. It's like when, talking about how there are too many cars, they make a separation between "cars" and "humans", as if cars weren't driven by humans. It's very basic manipulation.
- morsch 4y ago
  You can reduce the number of cars without reducing the number of people. Human beings can, in fact, exist without a car. We can also reduce the amount of livestock we keep without reducing the number of people, by consuming less of it. This seems really obvious. How is it manipulation?

Schroedingersat 4y ago

> which is not super desirable as human food without significant processing I see this repeated all the time. Is making cornmeal or cornflour really that much more involved than wheat flour, semolina, or rolled oats?

988747 4y ago
It's really not about that, corn products are simply bad for health - too much sugar, to little more valuable nutrients.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  Cornmeal is less than 1% simple sugars, as is cornflour. While it's not great compared to high fiber low gi sources like brown rice or sweet potato, it's not sugary at all. You have to split the polysachharides somehow to make it into sugar. Of course if you spend extra time, money and energy turning your relatively ordinarily healthy grain (which is admittedly a low bar) into sugar you spend more time, money and energy and wind up with sugar. It's no different from wheat in that regard other than you should maybe add a bit more fiber to the meal.
- logifail 4y ago
  > It's really not about that, corn products are simply bad for health - too much sugar, to little more valuable nutrients For the majority, sure. In our immediate family I have to disagree, after many months of (undiagnosed) illness, and after several trips to hospital, my son was recently diagnosed with Coeliac[0]. Now corn products are now a key component of his diet. [0] https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/digestive-diseases/celiac-disease https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/digestive-disea...
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
codefreeordie 4y ago
No, probably not. Mostly it gets said because sweet corn is tasty when prepared simply as a whole food, and it's what most people think of when they see the word "corn".
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  I mostly see it as a bad faith argument for why the only possible productive use of x fraction of land is for growing feed and herding cattle and didn't know the 'animal feed corn' and corn as a grain for people are the same crop. If it's basically the same level of involvement as as bleached flour, then the only real relevant issues are how to source a balanced protein so you don't have to eat half a kilo of carbs when you don't need the energy and how distructive other micronutrient sources are.
h2odragon 4y ago
A little bit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixtamalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixtamalization Best use of maize, IMO, is fermentation. Let the yeast have it first, take off the volatiles, then feed the mash leftovers to tasty critters.
- finiteseries 4y ago
  Neither cornmeal nor cornflour are nixtamalized, but historically most consumed corn was before the inexperienced European colonizers began using it.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    To have "nixtamalized" maize appears to be what ingredients lists call "processed with lime". Pellagra epidemics have arisen through failure to process with lime. The Mayans got their cooking water from out of cenotes, skylights of limestone cave systems, which might have made it naturally nixtamalizing. Were their grinding stones of limestone? (The grinding platform, the metate, was not.) Don't know what the Navaho did or do.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
littlestymaar 4y ago
It isn't really relevant anymore because the food source is much more diverse than what it used to be, but when some western people started cultivating corn, and feading mostly out of it, they started to suffer from acute lack of tryptophan and vitamin b3, called pellagra, causing millions of death over several centuries. Mesoamerican civilizations built on top of corn had a specific corn processing step called nixtamalization, which avoided the issue altogether, but unfortunately wasn't imported along with corn during the colonizations of the Americas. But as long as you can get enough tryptophan and vitamin b3 otherwise, corn is completely fine as a main source of energy.

goodpoint 4y ago

You keep repeating the word "efficient" but there is nothing less efficient than animal farming. By far. Both in terms of land, water and energy usage.

baisq 4y ago
Is there any way of obtaining beef that is more efficient than cow farming?
- codefreeordie 4y ago
  Nope. Especially given the extent to which "cow" is a thing that we created because we wanted more/better beef. Over centuries, we have become increasingly efficient at producing beef, and are extremely efficient at it. It is probably not possible to be much more efficient using whole-plant crops and growing whole-animal beef.
saalweachter 4y ago
Eh, beef, maybe, but the math basically comes down to: wheat, 4 million calories per acre, corn, 15 million. Take that 15 million calories of corn and feed it to chickens for a 3:1 calorie exchange and you've got 5 million calories of chicken per acre. It's more complicated than that, but corn yields are so high that they can overpower the otherwise inefficiency of meat production. Potatoes are as good as corn, and rice nearly so, but just from a land usage perspective chicken is no worse than eating wheat bread.
- diordiderot 4y ago
  Fascinating! I had no idea corn was so calorific. Do you know how the inputs compare? As in are the amounts of fertilizer and pesticides similar?
  - saalweachter 4y ago
    Not really; there's also the complication that you don't actually feed your chickens straight corn. Because chickens need protein in their meal, it's more like, 2 acres of corn and 1 acre of soybeans, for 36 million calories from 3 acres to get 12 million calories of chicken for a chicken-per-acre calories of 4 million. You also get your chicken manure as a fertilizer out at the end, but then, if you were already collecting your humanure it's probably not a net gain. From a pure land usage standpoint, you're still better off if we're getting most of our calories from corn, potatoes and rice directly. Once you start adding in necessary protein, you can either subsist on soy, or feed that soy with corn to chickens and pigs (which have a worse feed ratio compared to chickens, but can supplement on food waste to reclaim calories that would otherwise go to waste) for roughly similar food-per-acre footprints.

baisq 4y ago

>Most of the world's grain is eaten by humans' food. Evidently. It's like when, talking about how there are too many cars, they make a separation between "cars" and "humans", as if cars weren't driven by humans. It's very basic manipulation.

morsch 4y ago
You can reduce the number of cars without reducing the number of people. Human beings can, in fact, exist without a car. We can also reduce the amount of livestock we keep without reducing the number of people, by consuming less of it. This seems really obvious. How is it manipulation?