> If the real concern is feeding people, you eat vegetarian.
It is counter intuitive, but this statement is not exactly a fact. The corn->protein process via chickens is actually quite efficient. I'll give some sample numbers:
1 acre corn -> 150 bushels corn -> 10,000 lbs of corn -> 4000 lbs of chicken -> 1500 lbs of protein.
1 acre of peanuts -> 3000 pounds of peanuts -> 750 lbs of protein.
So the corn->chicken process is twice as efficient at producing protein as growing peanuts which are pretty efficient. Sure, a soy protein diet is the most efficient, but who wants to exclusively eat tofu?
Eating beef is wasteful, but chicken is comparatively efficient to eating vegetarian. Most vegetarians I know eat lots of tree nuts, avacados, etc, which from a food supply point of view, is far worse than getting protein from chicken or pork.
Interesting analysis. We've bred chickens, cows, and pigs to all produce more meat for a given diet, but I guess we've done this better with the chickens. Maybe we need to focus on breeding the cows into creatures that have no legs, fit within tightly packed rectangular cages, and don't need as much internal organ space dedicated to processing food, so that the space can be devoted to tender juicy muscle instead.
I don't even see the connection, other than that you're an incredible cynic perhaps making a reference to Oryx & Crake.
It's not about pounds of meat per animal, it's about input energy to output energy. Chickens are simply better at harvesting energy from their food, and not because we've "engineered" them to be.
You think chickens aren't engineered? American farm chickens are entirely different creatures than you'll find in parts of the world where the chickens are allowed to breed freely. Even on American farms the egg-laying chickens are very different from the for-meat chickens. The for-meat chickens, in particular, are bred to be very efficient at turning food into meat.
My tongue-in-cheek proposal was that we need to breed cows to use less energy in their day-to-day lives, so they can use that energy to produce more meat. Lots of their energy goes towards creating, fueling, and maintaining their legs so they can walk around, so that seems like the first thing that can go. We'd have to selectively breed the shorter cows, and keep going while their legs get shorter and shorter over the generations until they become too short for the cow to walk when it grows up. These essentially-legless cows can then be kept in cages.
The other thing cows spend a lot of energy on is their digestive system, which is the typical multi-chamber system needed for hard to digest grasses. Most American cows don't eat wild grass anymore (unfortunately), they eat what we choose to feed them. If we feed them easier to digest food, they don't need the complex stomach anymore. This is tougher to breed for, so some genetic engineering may be necessary to kick-start the process. But eventually we can get cows with minimal digestive systems that are only able to digest some kind of highly nutritious and easily digestible paste, which we can pump right into a tube in their neck since they're cage-bound anyway. So that'll reduce the energy they need for most of their digestive system, which can be diverted to producing more meat instead.
Now, at this point, their heads and tails aren't really of much use anymore, and eliminating most of their senses and higher brain functions would probably be a blessing...
Well, like I said above, eating industrial corn was not what I was referring to. Corn->chicken still relies on corn, so even if the loss is less than for corn->beef (corned beef? ;-) it will be no better than eating corn. And you just quoted the areal intensity, not the energy intensity which is what matters.
Well, I can't edit my comment, but I wrote it from estimates in my head, and there are some serious problems. The first is something I knew, and that you can't raise chickens on corn, but rather soy, which are substitutable, but soy has a much lower yield per acre. Feeding corn to animals just makes them fat, which is not what you want.
I have looked up some of this stuff, and doing the analysis a different way, gives a different answer.
According to wikipedia, a chicken is 33% efficient at turning food protein into meat protein. Soy is the protein used in all commercial animal feeds. So if the vegetarian food has a higher protein acreage yield than 1/3 of soy, then chicken is less efficient.
So soy give 40 bushels per acre, 60 pounds per bushel, and 36% protein. = 950 lbs of protein -> 316 pounds of chicken protein. A better yield for peanuts is probably 2500 lbs per acre, and 25% protein, so 625 lbs of protein. Peanuts and soy are both better than chicken for protein efficiency, though chicken is not all that bad.
Comments
> If the real concern is feeding people, you eat vegetarian.
It is counter intuitive, but this statement is not exactly a fact. The corn->protein process via chickens is actually quite efficient. I'll give some sample numbers:
1 acre corn -> 150 bushels corn -> 10,000 lbs of corn -> 4000 lbs of chicken -> 1500 lbs of protein.
1 acre of peanuts -> 3000 pounds of peanuts -> 750 lbs of protein.
So the corn->chicken process is twice as efficient at producing protein as growing peanuts which are pretty efficient. Sure, a soy protein diet is the most efficient, but who wants to exclusively eat tofu?
Eating beef is wasteful, but chicken is comparatively efficient to eating vegetarian. Most vegetarians I know eat lots of tree nuts, avacados, etc, which from a food supply point of view, is far worse than getting protein from chicken or pork.
Interesting analysis. We've bred chickens, cows, and pigs to all produce more meat for a given diet, but I guess we've done this better with the chickens. Maybe we need to focus on breeding the cows into creatures that have no legs, fit within tightly packed rectangular cages, and don't need as much internal organ space dedicated to processing food, so that the space can be devoted to tender juicy muscle instead.
I don't even see the connection, other than that you're an incredible cynic perhaps making a reference to Oryx & Crake.
It's not about pounds of meat per animal, it's about input energy to output energy. Chickens are simply better at harvesting energy from their food, and not because we've "engineered" them to be.
I have no idea what Oryx & Crake is.
You think chickens aren't engineered? American farm chickens are entirely different creatures than you'll find in parts of the world where the chickens are allowed to breed freely. Even on American farms the egg-laying chickens are very different from the for-meat chickens. The for-meat chickens, in particular, are bred to be very efficient at turning food into meat.
My tongue-in-cheek proposal was that we need to breed cows to use less energy in their day-to-day lives, so they can use that energy to produce more meat. Lots of their energy goes towards creating, fueling, and maintaining their legs so they can walk around, so that seems like the first thing that can go. We'd have to selectively breed the shorter cows, and keep going while their legs get shorter and shorter over the generations until they become too short for the cow to walk when it grows up. These essentially-legless cows can then be kept in cages.
The other thing cows spend a lot of energy on is their digestive system, which is the typical multi-chamber system needed for hard to digest grasses. Most American cows don't eat wild grass anymore (unfortunately), they eat what we choose to feed them. If we feed them easier to digest food, they don't need the complex stomach anymore. This is tougher to breed for, so some genetic engineering may be necessary to kick-start the process. But eventually we can get cows with minimal digestive systems that are only able to digest some kind of highly nutritious and easily digestible paste, which we can pump right into a tube in their neck since they're cage-bound anyway. So that'll reduce the energy they need for most of their digestive system, which can be diverted to producing more meat instead.
Now, at this point, their heads and tails aren't really of much use anymore, and eliminating most of their senses and higher brain functions would probably be a blessing...
So deceptive. For every 8 grams of protein in some peanuts, there are an additional 6 grams of carbs and 14 grams of fat, for a total of 170 calories.
Well, like I said above, eating industrial corn was not what I was referring to. Corn->chicken still relies on corn, so even if the loss is less than for corn->beef (corned beef? ;-) it will be no better than eating corn. And you just quoted the areal intensity, not the energy intensity which is what matters.
Well, I can't edit my comment, but I wrote it from estimates in my head, and there are some serious problems. The first is something I knew, and that you can't raise chickens on corn, but rather soy, which are substitutable, but soy has a much lower yield per acre. Feeding corn to animals just makes them fat, which is not what you want.
I have looked up some of this stuff, and doing the analysis a different way, gives a different answer.
According to wikipedia, a chicken is 33% efficient at turning food protein into meat protein. Soy is the protein used in all commercial animal feeds. So if the vegetarian food has a higher protein acreage yield than 1/3 of soy, then chicken is less efficient.
So soy give 40 bushels per acre, 60 pounds per bushel, and 36% protein. = 950 lbs of protein -> 316 pounds of chicken protein. A better yield for peanuts is probably 2500 lbs per acre, and 25% protein, so 625 lbs of protein. Peanuts and soy are both better than chicken for protein efficiency, though chicken is not all that bad.
Awesome analysis, but [Citation Wanted]. (I also sent this user an email.) Hopefully he'll also add it here.