|
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?
|
#
¿
Dec 20, 2014 00:41
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 14, 2024 00:40 |
|
|
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?
|
|
#
¿
Dec 20, 2014 02:52
|
|
|
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.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 20, 2014 02:57
|
|
|
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.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 20, 2014 04:07
|
|
|
whitey delenda est posted:If you want to talk about the economics of food here please do. I don't know nearly enough about that particular subject which is why I mainly alluded to neoliberal monoculture encouragement etc. rather than tried to do a full breakdown. If you want to know more about the economics of food as it applies to the States give King Corn a watch sometime. The tl;dr of it is that corn is massively, massively subsidized in America to the point where it's so cheap it's literally impossible to actually profit off of the corn itself. The corn crop is a record yield every year and just keeps growing. The cost of corn being so massively low is the reason why corn is in everything. It's dirt rear end cheap to buy insane amounts of corn so the food industry is constantly looking for new stuff to do with it, which is also why corn syrup of various types has gotten into everything. Of course this is also why corn is being used to feed livestock even though it's less than ideal and, for example, kills the poo poo out of cows that eat nothing but corn. It's far cheaper to grow corn on land then feed it to animals in a factory farm than it is to actually graze animals. A full breakdown gets difficult however in that it's a massively complex subject. If one crop fails then it can have a ripple effect through other things. Think of things like when the pumpkin crop failed. Suddenly the pumpkin pie filling ran out so people were buying more of other types of pies. The demand for every other type of pie filling went up because the supply of pumpkin pie went down. Similarly fuel prices going up tends to drive up food prices because food needs to be delivered and farm machinery uses oil. Now that ethanol is becoming increasingly popular there is a link between corn and gasoline. If fossil fuel prices get high enough that it's cheaper to produce ethanol suddenly you have an increased demand for ethanol, which can gently caress up the food supply.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 20, 2014 04:42
|
|
|
open24hours posted:I can only talk about Australia here, but we have a similar average farmer age and this statistic gets thrown around a lot by people trying to draw attention to the perceived crisis of young people avoiding agriculture. While it is correct, it misses a lot of the detail. The average age of farmers is skewed by older farmers staying on the land without much actual productive agricultural activity going on, and the productive farms tend to be very large and with few employees. I think other things skewing the numbers are the fact that the population as a whole is getting older and there just aren't as many people needed to grow food now as there were in the past. It was actually very, very recently in history that most humans were still farmers. Now comparatively few of us are. Fewer people are going into agriculture because fewer people are needed.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 21, 2014 02:58
|
|
|
Rent-A-Cop posted:If you have some kind of problem with the idea of deep frying a whole pig then you're not a true American. What? No, you don't get it. Dip it in chocolate next.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 22, 2014 17:37
|
|
|
Discendo Vox posted:If it's so energy intensive, it may straight up be a worse option than conventional farming. This partially depends on what the energy costs come from. That also depends on how you define "conventional farming." One of the major issues that current farming methods have right now is that it's extremely, excessively dependant on chemical fertilizers and monocultures. One thing that has been shown time and and time again is that growing the same crop on the same land repeatedly is a terrible idea but a lot of contemporary farming methods rely heavily on just that. The corn that America grows is probably one of the worst for that sort of thing. Really, there just aren't a lot of good answers.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 22, 2014 17:52
|
|
|
LemonDrizzle posted:That's really not likely to happen - we'll use the easiest and most accessible resources until they start getting scarce/expensive, at which point people will have an incentive to start introducing alternatives. It's not like we're going to wake up one day and go 'ooops, all the productive land/phosphate/whatever is all gone, time to die.' Actually if you look at human history we very well may do that. There are pretty huge swathes of land on Earth that are now completely and totally unproductive thanks to human activity. The phosphates are also running out and you kind of need those for current farming techniques. Which are leeching nutrients out of the soil something fierce. Same with the American corn crop. It relies extremely heavily on ammonia, which eats a lot of gas to produce. No gas, no ammonia. No ammonia, no record corn crops. Yeah it might not exactly cause the human race to totally extinct itself but having 7 billion of us? Good luck with that.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 22, 2014 18:47
|
|
|
rudatron posted:It's actually much worse though, because the assumption, that rising prices will lead automatically (magically) to new alternatives, still assumes a rising price from a falling supply. Thing is, fertilizer is going to be used in any kind of agriculture, and everyone needs to eat. So a falling supply will lead to a rising price until demand falls to meet supply, so the theory goes. But what does a 'falling demand' mean in this context? People being unable to feed themselves, because they can't afford to. Then we should be dumping piles of money into research already because the number of people that can't find enough to eat regularly is already 10 digits. In many parts of the world you're lucky if you didn't starve to death as a child.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 22, 2014 19:31
|
|
|
Killer-of-Lawyers posted:Yeah, but it's not like it's a mystery on how to use other sources of energy, or other feed stocks (Electrolized water, for example.) The idea that as fuels decline we're going to suddenly find ourselves with out fertilizer is a pretty common one, and it doesn't make any more sense than the sort of people that think one day oil is just going to disappear (I wish it would.) It isn't that people are necessarily worried about that stuff just vanishing but rather people are worried about it becoming increasingly scarce. A big problem we're going to run into is that the easy sources of these things are being exploited into nothing. There is also the mathematical fact that there is a finite amount of this stuff around thanks to the Earth only being so large. Eventually the energy required to produce enough food for all of us is going to be more than can be expended. That's the issue. It's comparable to the whole "destroy the Earth" thing. We'd have a hard time actually destroying it but it's on the way to becoming uninhabitable as far as we're concerned. Sure, this stuff will eventually run out if enough of it gets used but we'd have much larger problems long before the well goes dry.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 23, 2014 00:41
|
|
|
Killer-of-Lawyers posted:Sure, but it's not just the type of meat that causes the problem. For example, you could have a very dense industrial rabbit farm, with tons of rabbits being fed manufactured food pellets, or you could have a lot of cattle on marginal grazing land that isn't really good for anything else. The biggest issue is that humans tend to strongly prefer beef which is hideously inefficient. From what I understand there is a push for more chicken simply because chicken is more efficient. You get more chicken per pound of feed than you do beef. Dairy is a whole different ball game but the massive demand for beef causes all sorts of issues. Just encouraging eating anything that isn't cow would actually be a big improvement.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 20, 2015 17:41
|
|
|
Killer-of-Lawyers posted:Yes, that's true. There's too much of a demand for beef. Not going to argue that. Still, when you make policy you have to look at a lot of different issues. There's a certain amount of beef production that's good to have (Since they eat things a lot of other animals can't.) just like there's a specific carrying capacity for every other animals. People tend to want a panacea, like "If we all ate X then it'd be rainbows." but that's rarely the case. I'm not saying that beef is bad in and of itself just that there is too much of it. One of the major issues with food production is that people gravitate toward the "best" food. Part of the issue with food waste, especially in the developed world, is that when you have a poo poo load of options people just won't eat certain things. In the past people happily chowed down on all sorts of things that now make Americans go "gently caress, people ate that?" Even parts of the cow. How many people eat beef tongue? Blood pudding? Black sausage? Pig's feet? As much as people demand beef there are even cuts that aren't in high demand. There's also the status of it; part of eating the $20 steak is saying "I can afford this $20 steak." Buying the cheaper, more sensible steak comes with the connotation of being viewed as poor. Granted I'm kind of an odd duck in that my favorite part is the stew beef cooked in a stir fry but I digress... The hardest part is convincing people, especially the well off, to think more closely about their food choices. If you look at it Americans just don't really. It's all cheeseburgers all the time. Beef is loving everywhere and telling people they should eat less of it is met with outright hostility. I can afford beef so why the gently caress should I care about how it hurts if I eat it? If they can't afford beef then they're lesser than I am and deserve whatever problems it causes. You also see the hostility coming out when you have somebody like Michelle Obama saying "maybe we shouldn't eat so many cheeseburgers and like eat a vegetable sometimes." Some people can be swayed by that argument but more people just flat out don't care or just say "gently caress you" and keep their awful eating habits. I know it isn't all rainbows and sunshine if we all ate X and nothing but X but let's be honest, the American food system is fundamentally broken overall and the massive consumption of beef is part of it.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 20, 2015 18:04
|
|
|
Killer-of-Lawyers posted:I expanded my post a little while you replied, and touched on that a little. That said, I'm from Texas, so pigs feet, cow stomach stew (Menudo), and a lot of those 'icky' foods are alive and well down here. Not that it discounts your point. People in the south eat those sorts of things because they're poorer, and I agree that availability tends to whittle down choices over time in the population. I think location and local culture also factors into it a lot as well. I live in PA and there are a lot of people who turn up their noses at all sorts of things that are perfectly edible (and, dare I say, loving delicious if made right) and outright refuse to try them. Classism is part of it in that certain foods are associated with the poor but the other issues are part of it too. Most people I've spoken to that I've told about blood sausage are absolutely horrified at the idea of eating blood. I tried it, poo poo's good, but it's tremendously difficult to find just because nobody buys it. Then you have the Amish. They'll eat practically anything and make a point of not wasting food even though they're generally not poor at all. They tend to be wealthy enough that they could afford to eat only "good" food but culturally they make a point of eating the whole loving cow if they decide to eat a cow. There are people that think that that is incredibly strange. Why would you eat X part, that's gross? Well, because X part is edible and if you cook it right it's tasty. Why would you not eat X part? A lot of America does have a strange relationship with food. I've introduced a lot of people to various Polish foods and the reactions are sometimes similar; often the ingredients are things that are dirt rear end cheap to buy and the food will look kind of icky but the poo poo is good. Haluski is one that comes to mind. The way I know to make it is basically cabbage, butter, onions, and noodles. Pretty cheap to make a whole big pot of and fantastic but I've met way too many people that won't eat it because it's not "good" food. There are some people that are also thoroughly baffled that I make a point of not eating meat most days and rarely eat beef. A typical American diet has meat with every meal which is way, way more meat than the human body needs. Well technically the human body doesn't need meat at all but that's a different story entirely.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 21, 2015 23:46
|
|
|
Discendo Vox posted:Botulinum is organic! It's nature reclaiming factory-processed food! Make it a part of yourself! Oddly enough there are actually a lot of foods that remain perfectly edible and don't end up with botulism well beyond traditional sell by dates. There are also odd little rules about what foods are edible how long beyond their sell by dates. Depends on the food but some stuff keeps longer than the box says. Granted you can also boil meat and make it edible even if it's so rotten it has maggots. Which you can also boil and eat, apparently. Part of that looks back to Americas incredible, irrational fear of germs and tendency to sue everybody for any reason at all. Food safety standards can sometimes fly direct into the region of insanity. ToxicSlurpee fucked around with this message at 03:15 on Jan 22, 2015 |
|
#
¿
Jan 22, 2015 03:12
|
|
|
Bottled water is dumb for reasons entirely separate from water but yes that's a good way of putting it. I kind of wonder how much of it is ultimately lobbying from agribusiness that we should focus entirely on the things that don't actually use that much water. Like we always hear about "TAKE SHORTER SHOWERS OR YOU'LL DESTROY THE WORLD!!!!" when if literally every person in America took an hour long shower every day it wouldn't come anywhere near what agribusiness uses. Criticisms of modern agriculture however are generally pretty legit. No we should not be going back to ancient farming techniques but we should also not be relying so heavily on monoculture farming that relies so heavily on chemicals and heavy irrigation. There's actually things to be said for crop rotation and the like though that is also a fairly recent thing if you look at history. The major issue is that our agriculture, as we do it now, is not sustainable. It will collapse. There's no way around it. Certain chemicals are just flat out running out, ammonia production for corn farming relies very heavily on natural gas, and the aquifers are running dry. Climate change is altering the landscape while certain crops are getting just outright hosed up. Plus you have companies like Monsanto that would like nothing more than total, complete control over the food supply. This won't last much longer. We're relying very heavily on finite resources but not doing a lot to answer the question of "OK, what next?" Of course other snags with the cash crop criticism comes from the fact that there are places where food crops grow pretty badly. Coffee is a very good cash crop because demand for it is very high worldwide. Humans loving love coffee and you can grow crap loads of it on pretty marginal land. It grows best on freaking mountains. From a purely economic standpoint it's far better for land that's ideal for coffee to have coffee grown on it than staple foods that will grow badly there. Certain crops strongly prefer certain conditions and altering the area to fit crops that don't grow there can cause massive problems so freaking yes let's grow things and trade. Part of the problems that come about from modern agriculture is specifically because we keep trying to do things like grow rice on top of mountains. That's part of why food transportation happens. Yes it's good to try to buy local but like...I live in a place that's incredibly bad for growing citrus fruits. Why the hell would we try to grow oranges here? They'd freeze and die every year. Better to grow the things that do well here (apples, cows, cabbage, berries, etc.) and trade it for the stuff that does not grow well here. Some of the stuff that does well here grows like complete rear end where citrus grows. That's the whole point of trade and why it isn't really all that dumb for people to grow whatever grows best locally, even if it's only cash crops.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 19, 2015 17:30
|
|
|
Powercrazy posted:There is obviously some nuance to the position of "eat local." It should actually be something like "grow local, with minimal external inputs." A good example is my 'favorite' crop and darling of middle America, Corn. Corn has some of the highest subsidies and is an incredibly thirsty crop, and yet it's grown in the great plains, which are pretty arid all things considered. Why are we growing corn instead of any other crop? That policy goes back to the Cold War. The plan was "grow as much goddamned grain as possible in any way possible." Environmental science was still somewhat nascent and not all that influential at the time so it wasn't entirely obvious that growing a poo poo load of corn in an arid area was a bad idea. The plan was to basically become the primary grain producer so everybody would like the U.S. instead of Russia while demonstrating how much better capitalism was by just having so goddamned much food there was no way we could even hope to eat it all.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 19, 2015 17:56
|
|
|
Killer-of-Lawyers posted:Then we move them off the farm. We should focus on developing the third world, not coming up with a stupid list of best practices for subsistence farmers. My plan is to increase production in the parts of the world where it makes sense, grow grain there, and drop it out the back of c-130's for the hungry. That's how you solve food crises. Incidentally, we're pretty food secure in the developed world, so it stands to reason that making the entire world modern and developed would do a lot for food security. Since, as we've already established, there is more than enough food being made for everyone. We just need to get it to them, and it'll be a hell of a lot easier if they're living in urban areas than if they're spread across hell and back. One of the biggest issues is in food waste. Yeah we produce enough to feed everybody but the first world has major issues with food just being thrown out because whatever gently caress it who cares I can afford more. Work in a restaurant for a while and you'll see just how uncaring western society is to food waste. The fact that that increases food scarcity for others is met with "meh, not my problem. I'm not them."
|
|
#
¿
Mar 19, 2015 20:02
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 14, 2024 00:40 |
|
|
Shbobdb posted:NGS is getting cheaper every day. We just need a massive sequencing project for the Amazon. Then we can burn it to the ground. Yeah gently caress oxygen, who needs that poo poo?
|
|
#
¿
Mar 20, 2015 19:30
|
|