Comment by esarbe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by esarbe | Hacker News Reader

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I'm very sorry to disagree, in my opinion this is nitpicking. Yes, you cannot live from wheat alone, insofar you are correct. But that was not the point of my reply.

The point of my reply - to flesh it out - was that you need only use about 10 percent of the area required for cattle if we instead consume these calories directly. That doesn't have to be wheat, it can be peas, beans, nuts, beets, potatoes, celery and on and on.

If you are concerned about nutrients, there's always chickens. Chickens are so vastly more efficient when it comes to land use than cattle, it's not even funny anymore. I hope that we soon have some reasonable supply chain of non-vertebrate protein (i.e. insects) at an affordable price.

Thanks for your reply!

Edit: I'm not a vegan, by the way. Not even a vegetarian. I enjoy the taste of meat and especially beef. But I'm convinced that the amount of resources we spend on meat - especially on beef - cannot be justified by anyone in good conscience.

I'm having trouble squaring the received wisdom on this with the numbers on this[1] page. Beef is 6 times less efficient than wheat, yes. But it's up to half as efficient as soybeans. Pork is actually a more efficient use of land than soybeans (and almost identical to celery[2], while containing vastly more nutrition). Chicken's nothing special.

[1] http://www.waldeneffect.org/blog/Calories_per_acre_for_vario...

[2] ((1/(6 inch)) * (1/ (2 foot)) plants/m^2) * (8 stalks / plant) * (64 grams / stalk) * (17kcal / 110 grams) = 3.448 million kcal / acre; planting guidelines from https://harvesttotable.com/vegetable_crop_yields_plants_p/ and nutrition information from https://recipeland.com/ingredients/celery-stalks-13931

Maybe the unsourced numbers on the page you linked to are plain wrong? I know, it's the first hit when you google, but let's do some more "research". I raise you a Wikipedia!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edible_protein_per_unit_area_o...

According to these numbers, soy beans produce about 16 times(!) as much protein for a given plot of land compared to beef. That's quite a difference.

Thanks for the reply!

Edit: I hope this doesn't sound condescending or suchalike. I'm really interested what the real numbers are, but the page you linked to (while honestly very intersting; permaculture! No-till-agriculture) is somewhat lacking in credibility. I hope we can find a tabulation that satisfies our curiosity and our purpose.

Oh, it's not condescending - like you say I just googled quickly and the beef one seemed close enough to be plausible, so I took a gamble that they were roughly right - To be honest I did the numbers manually on the celery first, then I got impatient. Thanks for the Wikipedia link - although it bears noting that edible protein is distinct from calories, and a good example of the complexity that calorie-focused "bioefficiency" metrics miss.

Glad I didn't offend!

And thanks for the nice exchange - much appreciated!

>> I hope that we soon have some reasonable supply chain of non-vertebrate protein (i.e. insects) at an affordable price.

If insetcs ever become a staple protein source, you can rest assured that they will be consumed by all the poor people. Rich people will keep eating as much beef as they please.

So I think that what you are proposing, in good will I have no doubt, is not a solution to the problem of feeding many people healthy and nutritious food. It's one more way to disenfranchise and humiliate the majority of the population, by throwing them scraps.

At the same time, perfectly good food goes to waste because market forces, rather than any taboo about consuming certain types of food, demand it.

> If insetcs ever become a staple protein source, you can rest assured that they will be consumed by all the poor people. Rich people will keep eating as much beef as they please.

Yeah, so what? The rich have always done as they pleased. This will only change when the revolution comes.

> [...] to disenfranchise and humiliate the majority of the population, by throwing them scraps.

Protein is protein. I happily eat heart and intestines and liver and brain and tongue and whatever parts of an animal there are. Just as almost all my ancestors (and yours, for that matter) did. As long as it's free of disease and contaminants, I'm fine with that.

You have to understand that this picking of choosing of "better" or "worse" food is only possible because of an incredible, unsustainable exploitation of our natural habitat. We are killing our own biological support system. This has to stop.

> At the same time, perfectly good food goes to waste because market forces, rather than any taboo about consuming certain types of food, demand it.

I don't propose we let any food go to waste. I propose we use more efficient means to produce enough calories for everyone on this planet, so we can all prosper without the predatory exploitation of the ecosystem that is required nowadays.

That said; beef and mutton and pig is way too cheap. How about we actually include all the externalized costs in the price and let the market work it out?

I'm sorry, I didn't understand your comment about my ancestors eating hearts and livers etc. I am Greek and we don't consider offal to be inedible, quite the contrary. For example, we make an absolutely heavely dish called kokoretsi that consists of the heart, lungs, liver and spleen of a lamb wrapped up in its long intestine. I've made a couple of them myself (although it's a bitch to clean the intestines properly because they're full of shit). We make soups from the same bits of the animal, and/or its stomachs, as well as a kind of sausage with its organs stuffed into its intestine, and so on.

We also eat snails, in a red sauce with garlic and parsley (but not any kind of insect).

All these are considered delicacies, to be enjoyed in special times (religious feasts and the like), and with some good wine to accompany them, it goes without saying.

Perhaps this is a reason why I see the matter differently than you do? My people are used to the idea of it not being right to throw out anything when we slaughter an animal to eat it. If (further) Westerners did the same, meat consumption would significantly improve in efficiency.

I also don't understand your comment about "the revolution". What revolution is that?

The comment about ancestry was mainly intended for perspective.

For most of humanities time on earth, we didn't have the luxury to throw away perfectly fine food. We'd eat offal and insects and everything that came our way just to get by. People nowadays tend to forget that.

I quite enjoy snails, although usually with french-style herbal sauce. I also like eating insects, although (I mentioned that before) they are much to expensive.

And they'll have to get cheaper if we want to feed any significant number of people with healthy protein. Because, let's be clear about that, we're not going to do that with beef or mutton or pig. There's not enough land to go around for that, if we want to keep any semblance of an intact ecosystem. Anywhere on earth.

Feeding the whole planet with beef or mutton or pig would mean to strip down every last acre of forest and turn it into pasture or giant monocultures for feeding livestock. And that's not how ecosystems work.

All in all, I don't actually think that we see things that differently.

Have fun!

Edit: Ah, yes. The Revolution bit was a reference/joke with regards to "The Rich". ;)

I'm not poor and I think crickets are tasty. I've had them fried I've had them as flour and I've had them on pizza. All they really need is their Impossible Burger moment to go viral because it's not the taste it's the idea of eating bugs that's unattractive here.

Sorry. I eat crustaceans, which are basically sea insects. But, crickets? Yew.

That said, I've seen some insects that are traditionally eaten. I seem to remember a kind of big, fat, white grub that is eaten in Mexico? Pictures I saw looked quite appetising.

But, crickets? Yew. They're like cockroaches with little violins. No thanks.

Well, that's very similar to what most people thing about eating liver or lung or snails!

I tried fried crickets at a local agricultural fair and I got to say they're not half bad as snacks. As an actual food source, well, I think we need to find other ways of eating them than just eating them fried with various spices.

The day someone creates some kind of mince-meat substitute using insects will be the day insects end up on the menu of the general populace in developed countries. We do love our burgers! :)

I'll just drop this here...

https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-think-we-should-star...

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