So the question is what's more sustainable. Palm oil from another continent or locally sourced tallow from farmers supplying meat locally as well. And I have no idea what the answer is, only that it is an incredibly hard question.
Obviously this doesn't work at industrial scales, but if you really want to be ecological, try working things out locally first with the stuff that's getting tossed.
Same for pork. In the 1940's, lard was highly valuable, and pigs were bred to maximize lard production.
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=chi.096205135&view=1u...
My citation for hogs... my father was a breeder of fine, pedigreed Duroc-Jersey swine. He literally lived through (and helped lead) the switch from selecting for maximum lard production to selecting for minimum back-fat.
By the time I was cleaning barns after school, we were well into the "minimize fat" era. Which in my opinion has been taken too far, as pork now is often very dry. A little marbling would go a long way.
(Aside: I vividly recall one night, near the end of the second cup of coffee, a nasty differential equations pset that was kicking my ass. I remember to this day saying to myself: You have two options here: a) wrap your mind around diffeq, and get that engineering degree, or b) go home and clean hog barns for the rest of your life. I chose option 'a'. Powerful motivation.)
But it is an IMO superior (health and taste) fat for cooking and its absolutely crazy that people don't gobble it up, instead opting for canola, palm, safflower, etc.
Tallow making: https://twitter.com/simonsarris/status/1191748243429957632
(Note that this here is scrap cuttings and the leaf fat, around the kidneys, is more ideal for making large quantities, but is also often thrown away!)
Tallow slow-fried fries: https://twitter.com/simonsarris/status/1215090611264610304
That seemed to happen rather quickly, at least once the evidence became overwhelming. The FDA was only a few years behind major cities like San Francisco, though some European countries were way ahead of the curve.
Red meat and dairy have significant amounts of trans fats. You're still probably better off with vegetable fats if you can help it, at least where partially hydrogenated oils are banned.
Natural trans fats [1] are made by bacteria in the rumen, and are rather different than manufactured trans fats created from seed oils with hydrogen gas and catalysts.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjugated_linoleic_acid - "The biological activity of CLA was noted by researchers in 1979 who found it to inhibit chemically induced cancer in mice [...] In 2008, the United States Food and Drug Administration categorized CLA as generally recognized as safe (GRAS)."
> You're still probably better off with vegetable fats if you can help it, at least where partially hydrogenated oils are banned.
Most polyunsaturated oils are deodorized ("refined"), so customers don't realize they're eating rancid oil.
I bought unrefined grape seed oil years ago. Didn't know what to do with the obviously-rancid oil. Now I would give it to my father, so he could use it to help start his barbecue's charcoal.
Then again, trans fats isn't the addictive high-margin industrial product... :(
Making a big show of banning one while letting the other run wild is very bad optics.
(Then again, I'm not sure how we might even go about curtailing sugars, they're just way too embedded in our culture.)
I get that, but I don't think the empirical science supports a claim that sugar is more costly than trans fats from a public health perspective; and certainly not that it's 1000x worse. In any event, the effects of sugar are indirect and complex. For example, AFAIU a high sugar but low calorie diet isn't particularly bad for you. By contrast, trans fats have a simple, clear, and substantial causal relation to arteriosclerosis.
50 years of prescribing partially hydrogenated oils and low-fat foods was based on poor, incomplete, and sloppy science. Going forward maybe we should instead base public policy on sound, concrete, reproducible science and straight-forward regulations. Not everything needs to be fixed with government mandates, and usually shouldn't without clear reasons.
Electricity and the lightbulb depleted demand for candles (and tallow).
The cows are produced for money. Muscle meat is one of the most lucrative products, but demand for any part of the cow incentivizes more cows.
It's possible that it would still be ecologically the lesser evil because the market value is low and what you might choose as an alternative isn't necessarily better, but it's not so clear cut as you make it sound.
Does anyone making biofuel still get their feedstock for free?
The appropriate way to calculate efficiency might to be separate out the rendered tallow from a nutrient-weighted food output (today, we don't actually have a calorie shortage, but we are definitely nutrient deficient) and an life cycle analysis of all the inputs.
In terms of other aspects of environmental footprint, it also depends a lot on how the animal was raised. While conventional beef might be 30+ kg CO2eq/kg, full LCA has shown regenerative beef can be net negative (due to soil carbon sequestration): https://blog.whiteoakpastures.com/hubfs/WOP-LCA-Quantis-2019... Water footprint also is similarly nuanced and needs to be split into green/blue/grey water.
There's a lot to unpack there. What is "marginal crop land"?
It conjures images of scrubland in the North American west or the African savanna. But more than half the cattle in the world live in Brazil and India. My understanding is that rainforests take up so many nutrients that the soil is actually very poor and unsuitable for most kinds of agriculture. So one could easily say that recently burned Amazon rainforest is "marginal crop land", and that would make this statement technically true while still being no consolation at all.
The next biggest chunk of the earth's cattle live in China, where my understanding is that they're effectively creating their own "marginal crop land" - they graze, they take up the nutrients in the soil, then they're slaughtered and their meat is shipped overseas, taking those nutrients along with them. So the soil keeps getting less fertile. Grazing is supposedly a major factor in the expansion of the Gobi desert.
The USA? I don't know. Perhaps all the biggest CAFOs are located in marginal crop land, but the grain they're feeding to the cattle is all grown on prime crop land.
Perhaps some specialty farms are creating eddies in the current, but it's hard to see much evidence that they're changing the overall flow unless we're very careful about how we frame the conversation.
The analogy between modern cattle and the wild grazing of buffalo isn't perfect. There are problems with modern grazing that need to be addressed. The North American grasslands are prone to desertification if over- or under-grazed. The work of the Savory Institute is largely about promoting "regenerative grazing", not just in North America but also eg Africa[1].
Anyway, if you live in North America and eat/utilise relatively local beef, then you aren't a participant in some kind of misuse of "prime crop land".
[0]: https://www.cgiar.org/news-events/news/fao-sets-the-record-s...
I suspect at this point that former rainforest land accounts for most of the grazing heads, but it's difficult to find numbers.
> My understanding is that rainforests take up so many nutrients that the soil is actually very poor and unsuitable for most kinds of agriculture.
That's a characteristic of the Amazon forest specifically (and not even all of it). The soil is poor because it's an old land with a lot of raining, that carries the nutrients away, it's not a fault of the forest. Other rain forests have different characteristics.
Not true.
https://beef2live.com/story-world-beef-production-ranking-co...
> So one could easily say that recently burned Amazon rainforest is "marginal crop land", and that would make this statement technically true while still being no consolation at all.
The point is that cattle can be raised in marginal crop land. Palm trees cannot. Yes, we should stop cutting down rainforest for cattle and palm oil. The difference is that we can raise cattle in the tons of marginal crop land we have around the world.
> The next biggest chunk of the earth's cattle live in China
Not true.
https://beef2live.com/story-world-beef-production-ranking-co...
> Grazing is supposedly a major factor in the expansion of the Gobi desert.
Supposedly? Care to provide a source for that?
> Perhaps all the biggest CAFOs are located in marginal crop land, but the grain they're feeding to the cattle is all grown on prime crop land.
Care to provide source for that?
If you really are concerned about the rain forests, then you should be against palm oil and raising cattle in the amazon rainforest. But it seems like you are just against raising cattle.