On Mon, 3 Mar 2008 23:50:47 -0800 (PST), Rudy Canoza <notgenx32@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
wrote:
>On Feb 25, 10:24 am, Robert <n...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>> On Mon, 25 Feb 2008 11:23:30 -0600, "tlmfru" <la...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>>
>> >Robert <n...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
>> >news:l234s3hpts90me8a577d53vdqdf4opfbg9@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>> >> On Sun, 24 Feb 2008 12:16:05 -0600, "tlmfru" <la...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>>
>> >> A meat eater walking consumes more energy than a car traveling the
same
>> >distance.
>>
>> >> ""It is actually quite astounding how much energy is wasted by the
>> >standard American
>> >> diet-style. Even driving many gas-guzzling luxury cars can conserve
energy
>> >over walking --
>> >> that is, when the calories you burn walking come from the standard
>> >American diet! This is
>> >> because the energy needed to produce the food you would burn in
walking a
>> >given distance
>> >> is greater than the energy needed to fuel your car to travel the
same
>> >distance, assuming
>> >> that the car gets 24 miles per gallon or better."
>> >>http://bicycleuniverse.info/transpo/beef.html
>>
>> >Red herring, I'd say. We have to eat! Even a pure vegetarian diet
won't
>> >help, as (I've read somewhere) that growing edible crops is very low
in
>> >efficiency, perhaps less than 2%.
>>
>> Even if that were true, it takes 16 pounds of edible crops to produce
one pound of edible
>> beef.
>
>No, that's false. The grain fed to cattle, so-called "dent" corn, is
>not edible by humans. It is grown as animal feed.
About 15% of it is 'flint' corn. In other parts of the world, especially
Europe, half is
flint.
Sweet corn eaten by humans is less than 1% of corn grown, and isn't even
included in corn
production statistics.
>> So meat is 16 times as inefficient.
>
>That's not true, either. That shows a fundamental misunderstanding of
>the idea of efficiency, as well as a misunderstanding of consumer
>demand.
>
>Consumers don't demand undifferentiated food calories, any more than
>they demand undifferentiated "trans****tation". Cars are far more
>inefficient to produce than bicycles, but no one - well, no one with a
>brain - suggests we ought to stop producing cars because bicycles will
>work just as well at getting people from point A to point B. And so
>with food. Nutritionally, a pound of beef may be equivalent to a
>pound of some kind of vegetable matter (except it isn't, but for the
>sake of argument); but a pound of beef and a pound of wheat don't
>enter into people's preference functions equally.
>
>To say that a given amount of land (and other resources) could produce
>more nutrition in the form of vegetables rather than meat, and that
>therefore this makes meat "inefficient", is a fundamental
>misunderstanding of efficiency.
You are saying the land used to produce meat (via corn & soybeans) could
not grow an
equivalent amount of food for people. That's not true. Before I explain
why, I need to lay
some fundamental groundwork that most armchair experts do not understand.
ALL CROPS (with three exceptions) PRODUCE THE SAME YIELD.
The yield is 2-3 thousand pounds per acre. It doesn't matter whether
you're growing
kumquats, asparagus, pecans, tobacco, soybeans (for animal feed), barley
(for beer) or
wheat (for bread). They all produce 2-3 thousand pounds per acre. Think
about that.
The exceptions are:
1. Corn produces 7,280 pounds (130 bushels) per acre. That's WHY it is
used for animal
feed, because it is so productive.
2. Rice produces about 7,000 pounds per acre. That's WHY it is the base of
most Asian
cuisines.
3. Crops with high water content produce 20,000 to 50,000 pounds per acre,
Examples are
potatoes, onions, sugar beets, bananas, oranges, grapes, pumpkins, silage,
etc.
Discounting 90% water, the actual plant material is in the 2-3 thousand
pound per acre
range. In the case of sugar beets and cane, the refined sugar yield is
2,500 pounds per
acre.
Now to the issue at hand. An acre of corn field produces 7,280 pounds of
corn, which
becomes 455 pounds of beef, which is 75% water, 20% protein and 5% other.
You're getting
only 91 pounds of protein. The same acre could produce 3,600 pounds (60
bushels) of wheat,
which contains 360 pounds of protein.
You will say people cannot live on wheat, they demand variety. That's not
true. Their
menus now revolve around six things: beef, chicken, ****k, fish, eggs and
dairy. For proof,
take a typical restaurant menu and try to find a dish that doesn't name
one in its title
or feature it. Even salads are often loaded with meat. Where's the variety
in that? There
isn't any; they're stuck in a rut.
Ok, give them variety. Instead of growing wheat on that acre, grow a
variety of grains,
fruits and vegetables. Fruits are low in protein, about 2%, vegetables and
grains are
around 5%. If the average is 4%, the plants from that acre contain 80-120
pounds of
protein, about the same as beef, and a hell of a lot more micronutrients,
vitamins,
minerals, etc. Most im****tantly, people REALLY WOULD have variety.
>If you have a factory producing
>refrigerators, your measure of efficiency is how many refrigerators
>you can produce for a given amount of input resources; or,
>alternatively, for a given output of refrigerators, what's the lowest
>possible amount of resources required to make it. It is incorrect to
>say that the factory is "inefficient" because it could, if slightly
>reconfigured, produce twice as many wa****ng machines. People aren't
>interested in undifferentiated consumer durables, and they're not
>interested in undifferentiated units of calories.
You are making a circular argument. Meat is better because people (think
they) want meat.
No they don't; they want nutrition and good taste. What they lack is the
culinary skill to
cook plants.
>Another issue that gets messed up in this absurd efficiency debate is
>that cattle, at least, spend most of their lives grazing on land that
>is unsuitable for any sort of crop production. This means there isn't
>any efficiency issue at all as far as the use of that land goes.
That's true. I wouldn't object to beef if US cattle were grass-fed as they
are in
Australia and New Zealand. (Chickens and pigs cannot be fed that way.)
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