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  CORN THREAD, COMIN THROUGH This is a thread about human ecology and the political calculus behind feeding 7 billion people. Human ecology and agroecology are broad interdisciplinary fields that are governed and shaped by economics and politics as much as any other. I studied human anthropology and ecology in undergraduate and am (slowly) finishing up an environmental health science master's degree.  A Few Ground Rules- Please no Malthusian hand-wringing. - Please no arguing about GMOs, the Monsanto thread is there for that  - My posts at least are going to deal with resource cycling and not specifically nutrition. Mentions of “calories” are pretty abstract at an ecological level and tend to relate to sufficiency and efficiency rather than completeness or organism-level health. There's threads up in YLLS if you're concerned about UR GAYNS, but distribution discussions as well as standard of living issues are absolutely on point. I'll start off with some knowledge about basic ecology and soil science, to skip to the Debatable and Discussable, scroll down to the glitter text below the bigger images. - - -  A Brief Primer on Energy and EcosystemsThe primary and original source of energy available to living things on the planet is solar radiation. There's some organisms that have eked out a niche on the ocean floor around geothermal vents, but for our purposes that's pretty much off the table because we aren't big swimmers. A ballpark estimate of about 7x1017 kilocalories of solar energy are captured in plant matter (biomass) every year. A human being needs to secure about 700,000 of those to survive. On a practical timeline, energy flows through organisms on the planet through a series of consumption and conversion loosely referred to as trophic levels. What you learn about in elementary school as the food chain is a simplification of this concept.  Roughly speaking, the available energy decreases by an order of magnitude between each level. This also tends to naturally balance the quantity of organisms that exist at each level. For the example in the graphic, assuming each organism has comparable energy needs, to support one eagle it needs to be able to prey upon ten snakes, which in turn each need to prey upon ten rabbits, which in turn each need to graze or munch on a certain area of plant life. In a natural ecosystem, this all happens on a pretty straightforward basis: plants take resources out of the soil, organisms eat plants, they in turn get eaten, poop, die and return the resources sequestered in their bodies to the soil. Rinse, repeat, self-regulate. Enter human beings. The cool and terrifying thing about humans is that we have developed ways to manipulate the flow of these resources in huge quantities, and in a timeframe relevant to a human lifespan. Agriculture is basically a turbo-charged artificial ecosystem put in place for the purpose of keeping the top trophic level, us, alive and kicking. For most of human history the concentration and lifespan of settled people has been so low that we could essentially move from ecosystem to ecosystem as necessary, depleting the resources available in the local soil and moving on. When you hear “slash and burn” agriculture, this is the phenomenon in a modern context. However, modern urbanized populations can't up sticks and move whenever a field acidifies, desertifies, or gully erodes into the nearest river. So, for the last two thousand years or so, we've come up with increasingly clever ways to maintain existing arable land against the pressures of a natural system that really, REALLY wants to balance itself back to normal.  This clever balance starts with the substrate of the planet, the soil on which we walk, build, and plant crops. Farms are fundamentally dependent on their soil. - - -  Soil Ecology and Chemistry BasicsSoil itself is comprised of three types of inorganic particles differentiated by size:
The ratio of these particles within the soil plays a huge role in how water and other resources flow into and through the dirt, but for our purposes the only real important thing to remember is that a good soil is a blend of all three of these and a healthy balance of organic matter. You might remember from basic chemistry classes that living things are composed primarily of six elements, CHNOPS. Carbon, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Oxygen, Phosphorus, and Sulfur. For the purposes of farming, Sulfur is replaced by Potassium, elemental symbol K. You can't have plants without these things, and a food crop won't grow without a correct ratio of these resources available from the environment! Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Carbon – these are taken up by the plant both from the soil in the form of water (H2O) or dissolved organic matter, and via photosynthetic processes in the form of CO2, the ol' devil gas carbon dioxide. These are relatively abundant materials. The Big 3 of agriculture are NPK:    Nitrogen – Nitrogen is available to a plant from the soil, but it's technically available from the air as well. In the soil, it is contained within some organic matter that is broken down and released via decay processes as well as through erosion of minerals. It can also be deposited via rain or dust. The principally important thing about Nitrogen is this: you can also plant crops (like soybeans, clover, peanuts, other legumes) to fix atmospheric Nitrogen into the soil via bacterial activity, replenishing it to be available to other crops. Phosphorus – Phosphorus is available to the plant via the soil. It is dissolved from minerals, decayed into a usable form from dead organic material, and can be deposited via rain or dust. Potassium – Potassium is available to the plant via the soil, in a similar fashion to phosphorus via decay, dissolved minerals or deposition. Other characteristics of the soil including pH (how acidic it is), trace mineral pollution, and elevation / slope also play a role in determining just how much food we can yank out of a particular patch of ground.  Soil is also an ecosystem unto itself. It provides a habitat for billions of bacteria, nematodes (holy poo poo, the nematodes), arthropods, annelids, and ultimately even some small macrofauna species. Intensive farming wrecks the poo poo out of the “normal” soil ecosystem in a given environment, and the most productive soils tend to have a very healthy local ecosystem. Biodiversity and productivity are linked, and to a certain degree, the relationship flows both ways. A productive soil helps foster a diverse community of microbes and wee beasties by providing resources and living space in abundance. Various crops require various levels of nutrients and biodiversity support in the soil itself. The critical issue in a global economy with static growing regions is this: When you plant, grow, and then harvest a crop, you are removing those nutrients from the soil to put them into people. In the case of food crops in a distributed economy, you are also removing them from the local ecosystem. In order to then maintain the productivity of the soil, those nutrients must be replenished. The fundamental trick that humans have worked out over the last several millennia has been how to do this, mainly by subsidizing and augmenting natural processes with artificial ones. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROrpKx3aIjA This is how we do that. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the development of incredibly advanced extractive techniques enabled us to bypass the planet's resource cycling and start providing NPK directly to crops in tremendous quantities. An enterprising German named Fritz Haber developed a way to synthesize ammonia (NH3) from atmospheric hydrogen and nitrogen in a cataclysmic, crazily energy intensive process that basically allowed us to create huge amounts of nitrogen fertilizer. In one of my favorite environmental health articles ever just for this statistic, 80% of nitrogen found in human bodies today was originally made available by the Haber process. That explosion is a building full of ammonium nitrate in Texas cooking the gently caress off in one go. We mine phosphorus-containing minerals out of enormous, open-pit mines, process the heavy metals out of the naturally occurring deposits (and if lucky dispose of them properly), and ship/train/truck that rock around the planet to sprinkle on food crops. Used to be you could burn down hardwood forests to create potash, the primary source of potassium fertilizer, but we frown on that practice nowadays and so stick to traditional shaft-mining of ancient marine deposits of potassium chloride buried under eons of geological activity. We make all of this possible by burning fossil fuels to provide the energy to sustain enormous mining, shipping, spraying, and in the case of nitrogen hellfire-creating, industries that exist solely to furnish farmland with nutrients. The exchange involves a lot of steps but basically it boils down to how we turn coal, oil and natural gas into food.  You do! The most important reason is "because you need to eat". Just like people 80 years ago needed to eat:  The dust bowl! Interplay of soil ecology, human greed, and weather. Starved the U.S. for the better part of ten years. What's in the news lately?  Venezuelan unrest has been predicated on, among other things, food shortages and chronic lack of availability of food. A quick Google pops up lots of articles opining on the role the global food supply plays in government stability around the globe.  Mr. Putin here is upset about (among a zillion other things) the global energy market, which directly supports our ability to mechanize and maintain our farming practices. Also recall that, right before the Arab Spring in 2010, Russia's wheat harvest literally went up in smoke as wildfires ravaged the breadbasket of the country. You probably don't remember this, but:  The Loess Plateau, an enormous, once incredibly fertile region of China that was intensively and irresponsibly farmed for centuries and basically energy-funded the development of early Chinese civilization. In the process the entire area (about 650,000 square kilometers, a mind bogglingly large expanse of arable land) was essentially turned into a desert by human hands. A totally cool dude named John Liu undertook a pioneering attempt to stop local Chinese from cultivating the land for a long enough period to reintroduce a stable ecosystem on a large scale. Surprise surprise, after the interventions, the land could still produce enough edible food to support the local population as well as maintain profitable food export activity. All it took was the government's willingness to support farmers while they learned new techniques and changed their approach to their trade. anonumos posted:Corn. Absolutely ridiculous if we weren't talking about the crop that wins you votes for senate and president in this ridiculous country. Abroad, the global economics of food distribution result in neoliberal landgrabs and desperate monoculture conducted by poor farmers in order to survive. In the absence of education about sustainable practice, this leads into a spiral of devastated soil ecology and reduced yields, i.e., mini-Loess Plateaus cropping up around the world. - - - Some Things To Talk About In This Thread: - Standards of living: China currently faces the rise of a middle class the size of the population of the United States, and what do they want? MEAT. Recall that you lose 90% of the available food energy to go from a plant to a cow or a pig. - Distribution issues: the economics of food are bottlenecked at the distributor leg of the supply chain. You go from thousands of producers to millions of consumers through a tightly-controlled oligopoly of shipping and distributing companies. lovely market forces and good ol' rear end in a top hat capitalism account for an enormous amount of spoilage: 141 trillion calories' worth in the U.S. alone in 2010. If we could optimize a system of distribution to return even 50% of that spoilage to circulation, we could feed another 100 million people. - "Sustainability": This is the buzziest buzzword kicking around since "green", and is really hard to pin down what it means in different contexts. For soil resource cultivation, you technically can't really achieve total "sustainability" because the trophic leap from photosynthesis to harvesting tools is just too great. Usually the goal with farming is to "increase sustainability" or make things "more sustainable". - Environmental issues: The result of chemical intensive agriculture is a lot of runoff and erosion as the soil structure is disrupted and refreshed with what's basically nitrogen and phosphorus powders. This can lead to harmful algal blooms (HABs), displacement of huge quantities of soil, and desertification. - Water: I deliberately left out water from a lot of consideration because it is frequently just "assumed" that a crop will have sufficient water to grow. These days that's a pretty stupid assumption. Suggested Reading: Would You Like To Know More? Cribbed straight from the D&D book thread:
I'm studying this stuff because I think it's awesome that even the adoption of simple farming practices (for example, not plowing or tilling ever) can reduce reliance on chemical inputs and actually increase yields in traditional large farm settings. I will probably be writing my thesis on phosphorus cycling and the impending crisis of dwindling mineral phosphate reserves. The challenge of agroecology goes hand in hand with that of climate change, the surefire thing that's going to kill us all in the next hundred years.
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Dec 19, 2014 21:12
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"Sustainable" means stationary phase. We know what's next The green revolution "credited with saving over a billion people from starvation" is just us living on borrowed time. If we don't send a DNA-based-life payload to another planet soon, we probably never will. This is our shot at producing a fruiting body. We can do it, I believe in us.
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Dec 19, 2014 21:34
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Epitope posted:"Sustainable" means stationary phase. We know what's next The next big step we would need to take terrestrially would be "Green Revolution" equivalent in reclamation technology. Soil resources never leave the overall planetary system, and the only serious sequestration concern is how many living organisms there are at any given time. Provided we can shift to an energy source (cough, nuclear, cough) that can subsidize the energy needs of reclamation activities without utterly loving the atmosphere, the potential is out there. But blah blah humans are short sighted and greedy blah blah
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Dec 19, 2014 21:57
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Epitope posted:"Sustainable" means stationary phase. We know what's next Because in the former case we "only" have a few hundred years, in the latter case we have like thousands!
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Dec 19, 2014 22:01
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Nessus posted:While death is certain, does that exponential model graph represent 20th century agriculture or all agriculture ever It's a batch culture (i.e. no input of energy sources) of bacteria, so hopefully we can figure out a way to not follow that curve.
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Dec 19, 2014 22:09
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The phenomenon by which an increased standard of living exponentially increases energy demand in the form of higher order foodstuffs is balanced quite nicely by plummeting birthrates in developing countries. There's an inverse correlation between the wealth or GDI of a population and birthrate, mainly as women can A) afford to control their own reproduction and B) exist within a system of laws that supports the practice of birth control and provides economically feasible alternatives to makin' babies.
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Dec 19, 2014 22:18
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Epitope posted:It's a batch culture (i.e. no input of energy sources) of bacteria, so hopefully we can figure out a way to not follow that curve. We won't, because we're not in a closed system. At least, for the next five and a half billion years or so.
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Dec 19, 2014 22:47
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Killer-of-Lawyers posted:We won't, because we're not in a closed system. At least, for the next five and a half billion years or so. Except that we're, almost literally, eating oil.
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Dec 19, 2014 23:17
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I know it gets jokingly broached from time to time, but I'm honestly interested in exploring insects as a general animal protein source. Aquaculture can give you similar superior yields compared to traditional land based animals in terms of efficiency due to the buoyancy of water alleviating the need to spend energy fighting gravity, but there are very large water quality issues associated with aquaculture. Seems to me that in terms of energy and land footprint, insects really are a superior choice.
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Dec 19, 2014 23:53
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whitey delenda est posted:The phenomenon by which an increased standard of living exponentially increases energy demand in the form of higher order foodstuffs is balanced quite nicely by plummeting birthrates in developing countries. There's an inverse correlation between the wealth or GDI of a population and birthrate, mainly as women can A) afford to control their own reproduction and B) exist within a system of laws that supports the practice of birth control and provides economically feasible alternatives to makin' babies. What are the emerging reclamation technologies? Besides those Swedish toilets that collect it from piss or poo poo or whatever, I mean?
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Dec 19, 2014 23:58
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Epitope posted:Except that we're, almost literally, eating oil. mainly out of convenience rather than necessity
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Dec 20, 2014 00:00
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Really great OP, enjoyed reading it.
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Dec 20, 2014 00:18
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GhostofJohnMuir posted:I know it gets jokingly broached from time to time, but I'm honestly interested in exploring insects as a general animal protein source. Aquaculture can give you similar superior yields compared to traditional land based animals in terms of efficiency due to the buoyancy of water alleviating the need to spend energy fighting gravity, but there are very large water quality issues associated with aquaculture. Seems to me that in terms of energy and land footprint, insects really are a superior choice. I was curious about this as well. What would the results be of essentially shifting ranching down a trophic level? Trade cows, pigs, and chickens for crickets? Would they be more efficient with regards to land use? Could you grow enough of them to feed the same number of people (or hopefully more) as traditional meat animals but with less harm to the environment? Do grasshoppers taste good?
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Dec 20, 2014 00:23
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GhostofJohnMuir posted:I know it gets jokingly broached from time to time, but I'm honestly interested in exploring insects as a general animal protein source. Aquaculture can give you similar superior yields compared to traditional land based animals in terms of efficiency due to the buoyancy of water alleviating the need to spend energy fighting gravity, but there are very large water quality issues associated with aquaculture. Seems to me that in terms of energy and land footprint, insects really are a superior choice. Chickens only have slightly more environmental impact than soy, and there's no cultural prohibitions against eating them.
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Dec 20, 2014 00:26
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The mass usage of phosphate fertilizers came up during fishmech's age o' corn derail that had me wondering, if most of this stuff ends up in the oceans can't we just extract it similarly to how people have been going on about getting uranium out of seawater?
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Dec 20, 2014 00:29
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paragon1 posted:I was curious about this as well. What would the results be of essentially shifting ranching down a trophic level? Trade cows, pigs, and chickens for crickets? Would they be more efficient with regards to land use? Could you grow enough of them to feed the same number of people (or hopefully more) as traditional meat animals but with less harm to the environment? From what I've heard most insects people eat don't have much of a flavor at all, it tastes like whatever you cook it with. Texture can be off putting though, especially if you don't like bugs. computer parts posted:Chickens only have slightly more environmental impact than soy, and there's no cultural prohibitions against eating them. I guess it depends on how desperate of measures are called for. Chicken definitely beats pork and beef by a mile, but a quick look found the figure of 2.5 kg of feed per kg of chicken, while crickets are at 1.7 kg of feed per kg. A one third reduction in feed isn't exactly a minor savings. They both seem to have around the same land footprint though, and environmentally that's probably a bigger deal. Neither chickens nor crickets are going to drive deforestation in the way that beef does.
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Dec 20, 2014 00:35
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I imagine that processing the crickets into a form that people find palatable (protein powder or something) would take extra energy. Not everyone's gonna be cool with eating an insect that looks like an insect
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Dec 20, 2014 00:38
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GhostofJohnMuir posted:I know it gets jokingly broached from time to time, but I'm honestly interested in exploring insects as a general animal protein source. Aquaculture can give you similar superior yields compared to traditional land based animals in terms of efficiency due to the buoyancy of water alleviating the need to spend energy fighting gravity, but there are very large water quality issues associated with aquaculture. Seems to me that in terms of energy and land footprint, insects really are a superior choice. Some cultures do eat bugs and bugs prepared properly can be quite good. Ants, for example, taste fantastic when you cover them in chocolate. Some American tribes used to actually roast ants in baskets over campfires and it was apparently really, really good. While some cultures are totally cool with eating insects you're going to run into trouble convincing, say, a suburban American to eat a bug. If you look at it overall humans will eat practically anything but one major issue that prosperity has led to is people being pickier. When was the last time you heard of an American eating brains or blood sausage?
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Dec 20, 2014 00:41
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Torka posted:I imagine that processing the crickets into a form that people find palatable (protein powder or something) would take extra energy. Not everyone's gonna be cool with eating an insect that looks like an insect No more energy than all the factory processing and frying we do for animals now, surely?
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Dec 20, 2014 00:45
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What next, syn-foods? Fair enough that we should cut down on red meat and perhaps all meat, but I don't think the make or break thing for the world ecology is going to be that we decided to eat chicken (or similar fowls) instead of insects. Another factor with pigs and chickens is that you can feed them with leftovers, at least in theory. Chickens can peck at the ground, hogs can eat vegetable waste. I doubt you want to turn crickets loose in the fields.
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Dec 20, 2014 00:52
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Torka posted:I imagine that processing the crickets into a form that people find palatable (protein powder or something) would take extra energy. Not everyone's gonna be cool with eating an insect that looks like an insect Yeah, but chicken is often already processed to hell and back. I mean, I honestly don't know how the energy balance would play out when you calculated in the energy saved by growing and transporting less feed, while on the opposite side you may have the need of more energy to process the crickets or mealworms or whatever into a widely palatable form. I think moving to more locally sourced food and encouraging vegetable rich diets are probably better objectives to focus on rather than immediately going full insect diet, but to me it seems as if it has some promise. edit: Nessus posted:What next, syn-foods? Fair enough that we should cut down on red meat and perhaps all meat, but I don't think the make or break thing for the world ecology is going to be that we decided to eat chicken (or similar fowls) instead of insects. Right, but I think this is from an industrial agriculture standpoint with battery farmed chickens and indoor vats of insects rather than for pastoral subsistence agriculture. The increase in efficiency really shows up in bulk production anyway. ToxicSlurpee posted:If you look at it overall humans will eat practically anything but one major issue that prosperity has led to is people being pickier. When was the last time you heard of an American eating brains or blood sausage? Maybe part of my openness to the idea comes from being the type of person who eats things like blood sausage (not brains though, prions worry me). You don't have to like everything, but everything should be tried at least once before writing it off. GhostofJohnMuir fucked around with this message at 00:58 on Dec 20, 2014 |
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Dec 20, 2014 00:54
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ToxicSlurpee posted:If you look at it overall humans will eat practically anything but one major issue that prosperity has led to is people being pickier. When was the last time you heard of an American eating brains or blood sausage? That's partially because brains and blood sausage still look pretty gross and weird to most people though. I've seen people grind crickets up into a flour and mix it with ordinary flour to make a high protein bread that tastes just like normal bread, something like that would probably catch on a lot easier than eating whole bugs.
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Dec 20, 2014 00:59
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If you had`nt had blood sausage you haven`t truly lived. There is so much food being wasted today that a lot can be done to stave off starvation by just not tossing poo poo away before you have to. Encouraging white suburbanites to eat all parts of the animal ( the guts, the liver, the blood, and yes the brain, the eyes etc) is also a good idea. If we are going to still mass produce meat, let`s at least make the most of every pound we produce. I also love the idea of using Insects. Even if the western world can`t be convinced to eat it crickets can be used as feed in the aquaculture industry. Rigth now we are basically vaacuming the oceans for small fish that we feed to the bigger fish in the aquafarms. That`s not terribly efficent or very suistanble in the long run. Heck just actully enforcing suistainble fishing quotas will do a lot to improve food safety. Too bad that`s not very profitable in the short term, so expect massive extinction of fish that are suitable for human consumption. I fear that our grandchildren will never know the taste of Tuna, wild salmon is not looking too good either.
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Dec 20, 2014 01:30
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GhostofJohnMuir posted:I know it gets jokingly broached from time to time, but I'm honestly interested in exploring insects as a general animal protein source. Aquaculture can give you similar superior yields compared to traditional land based animals in terms of efficiency due to the buoyancy of water alleviating the need to spend energy fighting gravity, but there are very large water quality issues associated with aquaculture. Seems to me that in terms of energy and land footprint, insects really are a superior choice. 
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Dec 20, 2014 02:16
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lol people bring up the babies line but the back of the train getting grossed out by that revelation was easily the dumbest part of that movie. Like, motherfuckers y'all were all cannibals at one point how does this gross you out?
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Dec 20, 2014 02:23
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GhostofJohnMuir posted:I guess it depends on how desperate of measures are called for. Chicken definitely beats pork and beef by a mile, but a quick look found the figure of 2.5 kg of feed per kg of chicken, while crickets are at 1.7 kg of feed per kg. A one third reduction in feed isn't exactly a minor savings. They both seem to have around the same land footprint though, and environmentally that's probably a bigger deal. Neither chickens nor crickets are going to drive deforestation in the way that beef does. It's not a 1/3 reduction if you're switching from red meat to a substitute, it would be like 85% versus 80% (made up numbers).
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Dec 20, 2014 02:38
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GhostofJohnMuir posted:Maybe part of my openness to the idea comes from being the type of person who eats things like blood sausage (not brains though, prions worry me). You don't have to like everything, but everything should be tried at least once before writing it off. Most Americans won't even get as far as trying something. People not being horrified that I tried and really enjoy a good blood sausage are the exception. The idea of eating blood is utterly alien to a lot of people. Which is absurd because most of the people I've met that were horrified at eating blood swear by eating steak rare. Which means that it's bloody. Yeah. MaxxBot posted:That's partially because brains and blood sausage still look pretty gross and weird to most people though. I've seen people grind crickets up into a flour and mix it with ordinary flour to make a high protein bread that tastes just like normal bread, something like that would probably catch on a lot easier than eating whole bugs. And how many Americans would lose their minds of they found out their bread had bugs in it? The other big issue is in the protein side of things. Yeah we need a certain amount of protein to not die but Americans consume way, way more protein than we actually need. It's actually surprising how little meat you actually need to get your protein. Yes I know technically the answer is "none" and we don't need to eat meat at all but a standard human diet actually has a very low need for protein. Baudolino posted:If you had`nt had blood sausage you haven`t truly lived. There is so much food being wasted today that a lot can be done to stave off starvation by just not tossing poo poo away before you have to. Encouraging white suburbanites to eat all parts of the animal ( the guts, the liver, the blood, and yes the brain, the eyes etc) is also a good idea. If we are going to still mass produce meat, let`s at least make the most of every pound we produce. Part of the problem once again comes from the issues with affluence. A major, major component of buying a $20 steak is advertising to everybody nearby "hey everybody, I can afford this $20 steak! Aren't I awesome?" It's also extremely difficult to convince the affluent to cut back. One of the weird things about my situation is I came from a dirt rear end poor background where every calorie was precious and you didn't waste food. Now I'm around college students from upper middle class backgrounds that have never known hunger and they don't even think about food waste. I've ended up inheriting some piles of food from time to time from students that were leaving for the summer and had a refrigerator full of stuff. I'm like "what, you're just going to throw it all out?" The affluent just flat out don't think about it or just plain don't care. Hell some people will deliberately waste food just because they can. I'm being really serious when I say that some of the people I've met in college are just baffled at the idea of hitting the buffet and only taking what you can actually eat. There is also the issue of certain things being poor people food and certain things being rich people food. Beef is one of the big killers. Beef is hideously inefficient but good luck convincing Americans to eat less of it. And even then you get people that will only eat the best cuts and don't really care what happens to the rest of the cow because whatever, who cares, I can afford it. People that can't afford it are lesser than me and deserve to starve. Why should I think about some poor person not getting enough to eat?
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Dec 20, 2014 02:52
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ToxicSlurpee posted:
Though from what I've heard there's not a *downside* to consuming excessive amounts of protein, at least from a health perspective.
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Dec 20, 2014 02:54
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computer parts posted:Though from what I've heard there's not a *downside* to consuming excessive amounts of protein, at least from a health perspective. Depends on the amount. Too much protein can turn you into a giant fatty but that's coupled with America's problem of being a bunch of gluttonous fatties in general. But yeah, the biggest issues with protein is the economic side. Americans tend to eat meat with literally every meal every single day, which is absolutely overkill. Hell eating meat even once a day every day is overkill.
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Dec 20, 2014 02:57
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computer parts posted:It's not a 1/3 reduction if you're switching from red meat to a substitute, it would be like 85% versus 80% (made up numbers). I'm not sure I understand, the source I'm looking at, found with a bit of googling (report should be somewhere here: http://www.fao.org/forestry/edibleinsects/en/ ) says that for each kg of animal protein you need 10 kg of feed for beef, 5 kg for pigs, 2.5 kg for chicken and 1.7 for crickets. According to people I know in aquaculture, it tends to fall somewhere in between the chicken and cricket numbers. Unless there's something I'm misunderstanding, which is certainly possible, a certain amount of chicken only use 25% of the feed a comparable amount of beef would need and crickets need roughly 68% of what chickens need, thus a nearly 1/3 reduction in feed from chicken and over 4/5 reduction in feed from beef.
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Dec 20, 2014 03:37
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computer parts and GhostofJohnMuir you're both correct: computer parts is talking about metabolically, how much energy is required to grow a chicken full stop, and relative to the amount of energy required to grow an equivalent amount of cows his math checks out. GoJM is approaching it looking at the... I guess the part of the animal we're "after" in that regard. Because a chicken is far from all protein, obviously there's fat and skin and feathers etc. and protein is the least calorie-dense part of the animal. This where my caveat in the OP comes sort of sneaking in, people don't just eat straight-up chicken protein. The animal grows how it grows and to really efficiently utilize the first trophic level calories you'd want to eat every goddamn bit of that bird. It is pretty well understood that of factory-farmed domestic animals, chickens are the way to go. They also eat drat near everything, bugs, grains, grasses, weeds. In that way they are part of a potential strong farm ecosystem as well if they are left to free-range feed. Gunshow Poophole fucked around with this message at 03:54 on Dec 20, 2014 |
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Dec 20, 2014 03:45
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whitey delenda est posted:computer parts and GhostofJohnMuir you're both correct: computer parts is talking about metabolically, how much energy is required to grow a chicken full stop, and relative to the amount of energy required to grow an equivalent amount of cows his math checks out. Ah, ok if we're going by what percentage is edible what I'm reading up to 80% of the cricket is edible as opposed to 55% for chicken and pigs and 40% for cattle, which don't seem like minor differences to me. I mean, again I don't think this necessarily means that insect eating is the way to go, but these seem like some pretty significant gains if you shifted to crickets from any of the traditional animals, the type that can't just be brushed off with "they're icky".
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Dec 20, 2014 03:54
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Yes I know technically the answer is "none" and we don't need to eat meat at all but a standard human diet actually has a very low need for protein. I'm always a bit leery when I hear this because often when you ask the person who says it what the right amount is, they'll give you what the medical literature says is the minimum amount required to survive. There's a significant difference between the amount required to stave off kwashiorkor and the amount that leads to optimal health.
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Dec 20, 2014 04:04
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Baudolino posted:If you had`nt had blood sausage you haven`t truly lived. There is so much food being wasted today that a lot can be done to stave off starvation by just not tossing poo poo away before you have to. Encouraging white suburbanites to eat all parts of the animal ( the guts, the liver, the blood, and yes the brain, the eyes etc) is also a good idea. If we are going to still mass produce meat, let`s at least make the most of every pound we produce. This is why I never understood the furor over "pink slime". It tastes the same as regular ground beef and it's an efficient use of additional parts of the animal.
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Dec 20, 2014 04:06
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Torka posted:I'm always a bit leery when I hear this because often when you ask the person who says it what the right amount is, they'll give you what the medical literature says is the minimum amount required to survive. There's a significant difference between the amount required to stave off kwashiorkor and the amount that leads to optimal health. The amount required for optimal health is still far, far less than what Americans tend to consume. As a nation we eat way, way too much meat.
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Dec 20, 2014 04:07
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:This is why I never understood the furor over "pink slime". It tastes the same as regular ground beef and it's an efficient use of additional parts of the animal. Also a machine did it so it must be bad and sinful and wrong.
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Dec 20, 2014 04:08
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^ beaten while posting, I can only imagine the reaction to "bug slime"GhostofJohnMuir posted:Ah, ok if we're going by what percentage is edible what I'm reading up to 80% of the cricket is edible as opposed to 55% for chicken and pigs and 40% for cattle, which don't seem like minor differences to me. I mean, again I don't think this necessarily means that insect eating is the way to go, but these seem like some pretty significant gains if you shifted to crickets from any of the traditional animals, the type that can't just be brushed off with "they're icky". Absolutely agreed. The challenge (that I'm sure some brilliant entrepreneurs would innovate rapidly if really pressed) would be to mechanize and scale up cricket production in the way that we've done it with chickens and cows. At first blush the advantage of macrofauna protein sources seems to me, clearly not an industrial engineer, to be that separation of edible from inedible Bits is somewhat straightforward. Cricket exoskeleton / chitinous bits are teensy and somewhat noxious even in small amounts, I would guess there would be a chemical process involved and everything would get reduced to a paste anyway.
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Dec 20, 2014 04:10
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GhostofJohnMuir posted:Ah, ok if we're going by what percentage is edible what I'm reading up to 80% of the cricket is edible as opposed to 55% for chicken and pigs and 40% for cattle, which don't seem like minor differences to me. I mean, again I don't think this necessarily means that insect eating is the way to go, but these seem like some pretty significant gains if you shifted to crickets from any of the traditional animals, the type that can't just be brushed off with "they're icky". I could probably be brought round to eating crickets as an occasional thing if they were well prepared. I would probably, if given the choice between going full vegetarian and having the only animal protein be crickets, just go full vegetarian.
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Dec 20, 2014 04:10
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ToxicSlurpee posted:The amount required for optimal health is still far, far less than what Americans tend to consume. As a nation we eat way, way too much meat. Too much meat for sure, but that's not the same thing as too much protein. If someone's getting too many calories it's because they're eating fat or carbs along with their protein, not because of protein itself, which the human body loving sucks at turning into energy. Gluconeogenesis wastes like 30% of the useable energy in the conversion process.
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Dec 20, 2014 04:17
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Americans may eat way too much meat, but that isn't necessarily the same thing as protein. If anything the key would be to produce that protein is a more sustainable and less intensive way. As an aside though, food prices likes like oil prices aren't necessarily determined by strict interpretations of supply and demand, and if anything the economics of food is an whole other discussion. (This thread seems more on the mechanics of food protection).
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Dec 20, 2014 04:28
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