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Comment by sbooher | Hacker News Reader

Pea protein isolates, rice protein, mung bean protein, canola oil etc are Not food. I would not feed this to my dog. In fact, lined up against a bag of cheap dog food, you might pick the dog food... In a world awash in heavily-processed food, we now add this to the mix and get excited about it.

Statements about how "inefficient" cows are in making meat re calories ingested, usually fail to mention that for most of the cow's life they are eating grass on a range, which is not used for anything else. We didn't need to make that grass, it's sitting there. Statements on the use on land assume we would have condos and coffee shops sitting there, but for the cows on it.

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Less than 3% of cattle wander around eating wild grass. Most cattle are fed grains, grass, and alfalfa that was farmed on purpose as cattle feed. If cattle didn't need the grass, the farmer would be growing human food on that land.

I'd be interested in seeing a source for that less than 3% number.

However most cattle are certainly finished on grain without a doubt. Grain that could possibly put to better uses (or not grown and save the fuel and water).

TFA said it: "America gets 97 percent of its beef from feedlots."

Here's another one:

https://www.reference.com/pets-animals/cows-eat-a677816334f1...

So they go through the feedlots but most cattle are not in the feedlot at once (feedlots are a smaller part of the time a cow is alive, some months only).

The largest number of cattle, currently, if you counted them all up, are still on pasture.

Not that this detracts from your point, mostly a minor semantic quibble.

I think it's a pretty huge point that's overlooked, not just a quibble.

If a group of kids were fed healthy, home-made meals all week and then get a piece of chocolate cake on Sunday night, it's clearly misleading to say "100% of these children were raised on chocolate cake!".

Not where I live. There's lots of beef farming but the alternative of rock farming is unproductive and generally gives poor enough returns on investment that most families leave for the city within a generation.

Less than 3% of cattle wander around eating wild grass.

True, if you limit the 3% to wild grass. But most cows are still primarily fed grass until their final few months when they are fattened on grain.

Taking food and washing off the carbs gives you not-food? Grinding up food and putting it through a filter gives you not-food? Come on. "Processing" is very vaguely defined, and doesn't correlate very well with health. You can process food to make it healthier just about as easily as you can process it to make it less healthy.

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