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Comment by Gordonjcp | Hacker News Reader

3. If you can figure out how to eat grass, you'll be rich.

1. and 3. are the same thing: Corn.

The trouble is that it is pretty damn tough to pivot from corn to some crop meant for direct human consumption. The machinery and infrastructure we have in place to grow, transport, and process corn is almost unimaginable in size.

A pivot like this would require incredible gov't subsidies and take decades.

Yes, but feeding cows corn is silly. They can't digest it and you end up with bland greasy inedible meat, and corn is quite hard to grow.

100% on the cows, wrong on hard to grow. Growing in mass quantities is hard on the local environment (global if you count the affects from usage). Corn fed beef is bad.

ahem, wrong it gets converted to fatty acids see https://www.lakeforest.edu/news/a-difficult-reality-to-diges...

Its why they have fast weight gains

In fact reducing corn yields and switching to a different crop will save farmers money as framers have to over supply fertilizer as they are planting corn too close together to get yields without using fertilizer i.e. corn take out more from soil than it gives back

Yeah, but you get bland greasy meat that's barely worth using for pet food.

I like polenta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polenta (yellow corn hot porridge).

Also, my family is from the north of Argentina, so during the holidays there during one or two weeks fresh corn was very cheap. So we ate sweet humita and spicy humita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humita, sweet corn pie and spicy corn pie, also whole fresh corns, and other stuff. We joked that we ate some dish with corn for lunch and some dish with corn for dinner for a week.

Tamale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamale , Corn Tortilla https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_tortilla . I guess someone from Mexico can add more recipes. (I think they prefer white corn and we prefer yellow corn.)

Ha ha, I call them grits, and eat yellow grits every day for breakfast. Through on a couple pieces of bacon or sausage, and some hot sauce.

1. Feed it to a grazing animal. 2. Eat that animal, or use its milk to make food.

Surely, we must know how to do this. I mean, we know how grass-eating ruminants break down the cellulose to obtain energy with various enzymes and whatnot. We could probably invent some kind of exo-stomach to pre-digest grass into an edible state. :)

I guess if you really wanted to, you could take cellulase in the way that people can take lactase to mitigate the effects of lactose intolerance.

How you'd actually get your stomach to brew that up into anything useful in time is anyone's guess, and what it would do to the rest of you is an exercise for the keen experimenter.

We are basically too active and too large to eat grass, even if we had lactase.

I think they were imagining something more like a bakery / brewery / chemical plant that would turn grasses into edible bread / porridge / slop.

Well, you've got a chemical plant that can turn tough cellulose-y grasses and leaves and heather into stuff we can eat, it's called a sheep.

Right, but the efficiency on that is what, 8%? Can we come up with a better model?

Starch and cellulose are both glucose polymers. The only difference is the way in which the glucose units are attached to one another. Existing enzymes can only cleave one or the other. Ruminants don't actually have the necessary enzyme, but instead rely on bacteria in their stomach to do this for them.

soylent green, perhaps?

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