72B of those 80 are chickens, cattle come in at 325M. At least chickens are a superfood animal in terms of converting calories into food, and generally being lower impact than cattle, pork, etc.
Maybe compared to beef but when chickens are being fed crops they're not efficient compared to eating crops directly. 72 billion chickens is still an insane number of extra lives to support.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_efficiency
"In comparing the cultivation of animals versus plants, there is a clear difference in magnitude of energy efficiency. Edible kilocalories produced from kilocalories of energy required for cultivation are: 18.1% for chicken, 6.7% for grass-fed beef, 5.7% for farmed salmon, and 0.9% for shrimp. In contrast, potatoes yield 123%, corn produce 250%, and soy results in 415% of input calories converted to calories able to be utilized by humans.[4] This disparity in efficiency reflects the reduction in production from moving up trophic levels. Thus, it is more energetically efficient to form a diet from lower trophic levels."
For any humans it is very easy to cover most of their energy needs with vegetable food and the majority of them, for whom the expenses for food form a non-negligible part of their budget, have very strong incentives to do this, because calories from vegetables are many times cheaper than calories from animals.
Animals are not eaten as a source of calories, but mainly as a source of proteins.
When discussing the efficiency of using animals for food, they must be compared with the vegetables used for their food based on their protein content, not on their calories content.
When vegetable protein extracts are compared with meat, all the energy and chemicals consumed for protein separation and any other additional costs must be taken into account.
> When discussing the efficiency of using animals for food, they must be compared with the vegetables used for their food based on their protein content, not on their calories content.
Why do you think that? I think you're overestimating how much protein people need and underestimating how much protein regular plant-based food contain.
Potatoes are about the cheapest food, not renowned to be high in protein and yet eating 2000g of them a day will give you ~40g of protein and ~2000 calories which is close to the recommended amounts even if you're not trying to get protein. A cheap can of cooked chickpeas or beans is an easy 40g of protein, even cheaper if you cook from dry beans. Seitan (you make it by washing flour dough with water until it's mostly protein + gluten left) is about 75% protein, even more than steak: https://www.menshealth.com/uk/nutrition/food-drink/a25976250...
gluten is protein.
I cook and eat chickpeas from time to time, but less frequently than lentils or peas, which have a higher protein content than chickpeas, so I am aware of their properties.
While you are right that 200 g of chickpeas would provide 40 g of proteins and this is not a quantity of chickpeas too large for being eaten during a day, that is only at most a half of the recommended protein intake for a 75 kg human.
While the energy requirements for doing some hard physical work are more similar between different people, the basal energy consumption rates when doing sedentary work in front of a computer, only interspersed with short exercises or walks, vary much more from human to human.
Eating 2 kg of potatoes in a single day, i.e. 2000 calories, would be enough for a large gain of weight per day in my case. I eat around 1600-1700 calories for a stable weight around 76 kg (before starting to count calories, during many years I had a stable weight of over 110 kg).
Moreover, counting all the 40 g of proteins from 2 kg potatoes as part of the necessary protein intake is incorrect.
There exists indeed a minimum protein intake, which is required to ensure a sufficient nitrogen intake, in the form of the amino- group, which can be transferred from amino-acids that are in excess to those that are deficient, to balance their proportions.
However, the real required protein intake is frequently much larger than that needed to provide enough nitrogen. The required protein intake must be high enough so that the required intakes are satisfied for all of the essential amino-acids.
So the recommended protein intake, which varies between studies, depending on methodology, from 0.8 to 1.2 g of protein per kilogram of body weight, is valid only for proteins from animal sources.
The proteins from vegetables like potatoes or chickpeas, have an unbalanced amino-acid profile, so they must provide a higher protein quantity to also contain enough of their more scarce amino-acids.
I am too lazy to make the computation now, but it is likely that a 75 kg human would have to eat no less than 5 kg of potatoes per day, i.e. more than 4000 calories, to get enough proteins, with enough of each amino-acid. Unless doing a lot of hard work, that would be impossible.
About seitan, even if wheat has a high-protein content in comparison with most other cereals, where I live the price of wheat flour divided by its protein content is only 3 times less than the price of chicken breast divided by its protein content.
However, proteins from wheat have only half of the lysine needed by humans, so you need a double quantity of wheat proteins. So correcting for the lysine content makes chicken breast only 1.5 times more expensive than wheat flour.
If you add the value of the time lost with making seitan from wheat flour, it is hard to compete in price with chicken breast.
How do your protein and calorie recommendation line up with what e.g. the US or UK recommend? You think they're missing something? So are you saying you think most people on plant-based diets are likely deficient in protein? And what does that do to their health?
I only meant potato as an example of how you'll get close to protein targets by eating enough daily calories of even things that aren't considered to be high in protein, so with a balanced plant-based diet where you hit daily calorie targets, I think protein is a nonissue that's overblown.
Crop-fed chicken might be cheap, but how does it make sense that it can be cheaper than eating the crops directly?
You could use chickens to deal with food waste, but you could waste less food? Most chickens are grain fed anyways—typically corn and soybean. Those calories are already food, you don't need to convert them besides cooking them. You're also using a living being as a means to an end and giving most of them a terrible existence to fit 72B on the terrestrial surface.
That is the main usefulness of chicken, because from vegetable food it is very difficult to get enough proteins without simultaneously getting too many calories.
There are methods to extract proteins from vegetables, but for some reason the current methods are inadequate, because the price of vegetable protein extracts is much higher than the price of chicken meat, for the same quantity of proteins, so few people can afford to eat them, even if they might like the idea of vegan food.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/28/well/eat/how-much-protein...
"The recommended intake for a healthy adult is 46 grams of protein a day for women and 56 grams for men. And while protein malnutrition is a problem for millions of people around the globe, for the average adult in developed countries, we are eating far more protein than we actually need.
Most American adults eat about 100 grams of protein per day, or roughly twice the recommended amount. Even on a vegan diet people can easily get 60 to 80 grams of protein throughout the day from foods like beans, legumes, nuts, broccoli and whole grains."
> so few people can afford to eat them, even if they might like the idea of vegan food.
Chickpeas, soybeans and other beans can be about 20% protein, lentils about 10%, and they're cheap.
Nevertheless, even if the dry legumes have about the same protein content as raw lean meat, while in raw lean meat the rest of the content is mainly water, dry legumes contains at least twice as much starch as proteins, so when eating the same quantity of proteins as legumes instead of meat, one will eat at least 3 times more calories.
I actually eat about 2 thirds of my daily protein intake from high-protein vegetables, e.g. lentils or peas, and only 1 third from meat, but if I would replace the last third, of proteins from meat, also with proteins from vegetables I could not avoid gaining weight. I have made various experiments with different diets, so I know this for sure.
Moreover, I am able to eat 2 thirds of the protein intake from vegetable sources only because I normally do not eat any cereals or any other starchy food that would provide additional calories over those that are automatically ingested together with the vegetable proteins. So this is a problem that I have studied during a long time, until succeeding to find a balance between protein intake and energy intake, without gaining weight. Most people, who also eat things like bread or sweets, would not be able to eat such a large part of their protein intake from vegetable sources, without becoming overweight.
That recommended protein intake of 46 g / 56 g per day, quoted by you, comes from an older study whose methodology has been severely criticized. Other studies, which are more credible in my opinion, conclude that the real recommended protein intake should be at least 50% higher, so closer to 100 g per day than to 56 g per day (and the 56 g per day was for a 70 kg male, any bigger individual must eat a proportionally greater quantity).