Mother Nature Wants Us to Shift to Plant-Based Diets | Hacker News Reader

Mother Nature Wants Us to Shift to Plant-Based Diets

adetokunbo.substack.com

12 pointsgbenga4real10 comments

> Mother Nature Wants Us to Shift to Plant-Based Diets

Who is "Mother Nature" and for which NGO does it work ?

One thing not often discussed is that plant based foods require more gasoline to produce than meat: https://youtu.be/REId8lfmmhI?t=492 per kg and per kg of protein delivered.

Adding an extra step will not reduce the energy use, it will increase it.

Plant -> People vs Plants -> Animal -> People

Edit: Getting downvoted so I'll add a link that refutes your argument. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-per-protein-poore

Extra step? Can equate animal feed with human plant food? This is not right as it depends on the feed, how it’s done. Also that link is greenhouse gas not oil. Something more direct please

You don't have to equate them, the fact is still that it's an extra step and this extra step will require extra energy input. Someone has to grow these crops, harvest them, transport them to the animals, feed them, butcher the animals and send it to the stores. A lot of extra steps that require energy compared to growing a crop and feeding ut to people directly.

Oil is a part of those numbers, just looking at it in isolation doesn't make sense. Imagine if the farmer used electrical equipment for producing and transporting his crops, then he would have used no oil at all... Yet he still uses energy and likely used oil indirectly. CO2equivalents is basically a proxy for energy use here since we're comparing two food types and we can clearly see that animal protein requires more energy input than plant protein.

But this isn't what we see, why it's so surprising. Counterintuitive. Maybe it's an artifact of the realpolitik / realphysiq of global food production supply chain? Your argument is nice and logical, and sounds like it should make sense, but doesn't reflect reality: that's OK, as the guy in the video says, almost nobody knows this. If you want to read more about this, check out Vaclav Smil, How the world really works, and the relevant numbers are:

Oil per weight - Source to table

1kg of chicken - 300ml oil

1kg of bread - 210ml oil

1kg of tomato - 650ml oil

Nutrition per oil

Chicken - 0.9g protein/ml oil

Bread - 0.42g protein/ml oil

Tomato - 0.1g protein/ml oil

I watched the relevant parts of the video before I originally replied. That Youtuber is comparing apples to oranges, which makes it look surprising but it's not. I don't know if he knowingly does that, but such glaring misuse of statistics would make me very cautious of his other "wisdom" as well.

To understand why, you need to be aware of the protein contents of the mentioned foods.

Chicken has ~27g protein/100g

Bread ~9g protein/100g

Tomato ~1g protein/100g

Tomato is basically not a protein source and it is an energy intensive fruit as well. Bread is better, but it's not where you would usually get your protein from and most of the "oil use" comes from actually baking the bread which is the energy intensive step. That's problematic in and of itself as there is such a huge variability in the energy mixes of different countries that you can't claim this as a universally correct number. A further question I have is whether the chicken is in its cooked or its raw form? Since the bread is in its cooked form, I would expect the chicken is as well?

Anyway lets go back to the statistics I posted earlier, where common sources of protein are compared.

Peanuts (groundnuts) has ~24g protein/100g

Beans/chickpeas (other pulses) ~21g/100g

Peas ~4g/100g

Now look at their CO2eq. The conclusion is that the energy use of plant-based sources is lower, for reasons I and the other commenter have already explained. One caveat though is that most plant-based sources aren't full protein sources, so the actual numbers will turn out to be slightly higher in a well-rounded diet.

Given that all the protein in meat ultimately comes from inefficiently transformed plant based foods, this makes no physical sense. How did you come to believe such an obvious counterfactual?

Maybe you’re smarter than me. That's OK. Tho I'm sorry but it doesn’t make sense what you say. Can you explain with some numbers?

dTal, Looks like you can't (explain with numbers). That's OK. It's counterintuitive but not counterfactual. Maybe you're not smarter than me afterall. Here are some numbers for you: