Additionally, if we stop rising live-stock, where roughly 10 units of plant create one unit of meat, there should be even more calories available.
People love non-commercial applewood.
Not easy in the city to get cheap fruitwood that’s never been sprayed with anything.
The energy market is willing to outbid the food market, so I wouldn't expect the conversion of agricultural inputs into fuel outputs to decelerate.
Eventually, that effect should bring down the amount that energy companies want to pay for corn. But lots of people might starve first...
Someone who's poor and starving will direct their own very limited economic purchasing power toward food. But the marketas a whole includes those who are wealthy (far fewer in number, but individually having vastly greater purchasing power), who might prioritise energy purchases generally.
It's not the poor's own food-vs-energy deceisions, but poor-food vs. rich-energy, which are in play.
Those units are not remotely fungible.
Protein quality of plant protein (as measured by PER or other metrics not explicitly designed to favor soy) is horrendous compared to beef.
Much of the plant material fed to cows is also not even slightly edible to humans, like soy meal.
I would rather have 1lb beef than 10lb nominally edible soy extractives (or wheat, or grass, or inedible soy meal, or other inputs to cattle production).
There is more land on which you can make meat than land on which you can make plants. Animals can graze on non-arable scrubland, grassland, etc.
Growing staple crops is harder on the land than raising animals. Staple crops deplete soil nitrogen and other nutrients.
Raising crops typically requires massive importation of fertilizer from petrochemical plants, whereas cattle grazing (for example) does not require significant additional petrochemical input.
A classic tale of how animals unfairly take the heat for plants: we often hear about how the amazon is being cut down "for cattle". If you actually look into it, what's happening is that farmers are cutting down the amazon to grow soy for around 3 years, until the soil is totally depleted, at which point they will put some cattle on the land because the cattle can extract value from land destroyed by soy and helps the farmers maintain land claims.
We raise very few animals purely through grazing on non-arable land. If nothing else, they need feeding through part of the year in many climates, and more typically, supplementary feed to increase intensity. Pure free range non-arable grazing ruminants constitute a relatively low percentage of total meat produced.
A somewhat more common thing is to raise cattle on arable fallow land between crop cycles. This is better than keeping permanent pastures, but nowadays we still often supplement the feed or intensively finish.
Battery farms, which is purely fed on crops grown where humans could grow food, accounts for about 70% of beef and 99% of pork and chicken. Often the soy being grown in the rainforest is to support these animals.
The other thing is a lot of "non-arable" and fallow land is actually a lot more arable with modern agriculture than it used to be, it's just more profitable to grow animals. A lot of the plant matter that used to be considered as only usable for animal feed can also now be processed for further use in human food.
Meat production isn't quite as bad as people sometimes suggest, but it's still pretty bad. There are some cases where it is still a good option (e.g. low intensity lamb grazing on rocky/hilly terrain) and if we scaled our meat production to only these cases, we'd be in a much better situation, but there's also be way less meat.
They are mostly fed on the byproducts of human food production. Human-edible material has higher margins than cattle feed, so cattle feed either comes from human ag byproducts (like soy meal) or from land that probably isn't good for much except hay.
the distinction here is critical
I think some other beans like kidney beans fare somewhat better, although I don't recall numbers. Still not close to mammal meat.
thank you
Another example is soy, which has been studied some [2] . The problem is with longterm vegans that consume a huge amount of soy over a long term.
[1] https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/anti-nutrients/
There's even this quote: "Studies on vegetarians who eat diets high in plant foods containing anti-nutrients do not generally show deficiencies in iron and zinc, so the body may be adapting to the presence of anti-nutrients by increasing the absorption of these minerals in the gut." indicating that it may not be a real problem to eat foods that contain these 'anti-nutrients'.
Vegans I have known said that a heavy soy diet over an extended amount of time does impact the thyroid more. While it was anecdotal hearing this, it was not anti-soy, just, about soy quantities over a long time, and the need for a diverse diet for vegans too.
Some of the anti-nutrients seem positive in one way too, which makes it even more complex.
The argument is not "eat soy extractives instead of meat".
It's more like "lunch on veggies 2 or 3 days per week instead of having meat on every meal, including breakfast".
It obviously includes repurposing some of the land used to raise cattle into other things more suitable for direct human consumption. No one is talking about making you eat grass.
Doing that mid-season is of course something of a challenge.