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Comment by lkbm | Hacker News Reader

> If excess beef consumption were reduced to healthy quantities, as defined by the EAT-Lancet healthy reference diet, and substituted with chicken in forty-eight higher-income countries, the lost calories avoided would be enough to meet the caloric needs of 850 million people.

It's really impressive how efficient chickens are compared to beef. Obviously thinks like legumes are way more efficient, but we've really bred chickens to be meat machines in a way we haven't with cows.

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They aren't just amazingly efficient in converting calories to protein, they're great at eating things without much other (agricultural) value to us. They eat the invasive spotted lantern fly!

True for chickens in general! But the Cornish Crosses in the factory farms probably never see a lanternfly, and wouldn't want to get away from the feeder long enough to go after one.

Actually, the last time I looked into it, if you grow 2 acres of corn and 1 acre of soy, and feed it to chickens, you get out a similar number of calories (and more protein?) as 3 acres of soy.

Soy is pretty good, but corn is insane.

what?!?!

Corn produces something like 15M calories per acre, soybeans like 6-8.

When you feed those 36M calories to chickens, you get back 12M calories of chicken, which is actually less than 6 x 3 = 18M calories for the soybeans, so I'm misremembering something (maybe it's just an equivalent amount of protein? maybe chicken feed is a 3:1 corn:soy ratio?) or was just wrong.

Legumes and soy in particular is a pretty common allergy... it's nearly impossible to get sufficient protein without meat if you have a legume allergy.

The impact of non-natural feeds on the overall nutrition profile for chickens and pork are larger than with ruminant animals. Chickens have been bred and changed a lot through environmental manipulation to grow much faster than in nature.

There are a few breeds of cows that are producing more muscle mass than most, they've gotten quite a bit larger through breeding as well, though the difference in time to maturation doesn't come close to what we've done with chickens... I'm not sure it's for the better though.

Overall legume allergies affect 1-5% of the population, this is all legumes combined including peanuts etc. Soy allergies are 0.3 - 0.5%, not sure what you qualify as pretty common. For the record I have a fairly serious peanut allergy and abstain from meat and dairy with zero issues.

FWIW, I have pretty bad reactions to most foods outside of eggs and ruminant meat... so whatever the limited number of the population; across billions, you're still talking about millions of people. And it's pretty bad when you're one of those people, and there's others literally want to outlaw your food supply.

It absolutely is and in some ways we've only just started! Although we definitely shouldn't move fast and break things with living animals and our food supply;)

Insects are even more efficient, much as people don't want to eat them, at least in western cultures.

> EAT-Lancet healthy reference diet

I am unable to find this diet. It's likely referring to something called Planetary Health Diet [0]

[0] https://eatforum.org/eat-lancet/the-planetary-health-diet/

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On the other hand I read chicken is much worse than beef in terms of animal suffering. But that's much more dependent on the producer than the energy calculation and climate impact I guess.

Yeah, the kurzgesagt episode on meat production did note that overall cows have a pretty good life right up until the final fattening feed lots which is pretty bad. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sVfTPaxRwk

They did note though, that it wouldn't cost that much, relatively, to give chickens pretty good lives. That really we're doing this just to drive the price down by pretty small amounts.

It depends I suppose as well whether one counts suffering the same in a cow vs a chicken vs a fish vs an insect.

This is the kind of proposal that might fly well when it comes to the discourse over meat. People say “but we could be growing other crops instead of feed for cows”. Well yes, but you need protein in the diet. You can’t grow potatoes and veggies and expect people to survive only on that. Then there’s the question of land utilization. Historically cattle was raised for meat and dairy where agriculture was more difficult as compared to grazing cows, sheep, goats etc. The modern corn, soybean and alpha alpha farms may be able to grow other crops, but would they be able to support the crops that are needed in nutrition? Chicken and other more efficient substitutions may be the answer here.

> You can’t grow potatoes and veggies and expect people to survive only on that.

I'm sure most medieval people survived (without food types being a detriment to their health/lifespan) on vastly less meat than most of us eat nowadays.

I don't want to live a "medieval peasant" lifestyle, obviously, but I don't think the food part of it would be unhealthy (assuming enough food).

Yes, I believe we could cut beef consumption in half in the US and probably be healthier for it, without even compromising people’s standard of living (beef more as a “treat” than everyday ingredient).

We’d be healthier, and the reduction of water use from all of the crops grown for feed would eliminate all water shortages in the west

Medieval people were a lot shorter too. When I was in Saint Basil Cathedral in Moscow I was amazed how narrow and low were the corridors inside those side towers. I hit my head multiple in that church.

Btw- the average male and female height adjusted for location keeps increasing which points to protein deficit: https://ourworldindata.org/human-height

(In the world graph towards the end the height seems to decrease since 1990s-this is because countries with shorter people have a higher birth rate. Within the same population the height is still increasing)

At 6' I'm unlikely to ever dunk on my 6'4" brother, which is a bummer, but ego aside I'm not really impacted much by my height since I can secure food and shelter by pressing buttons and pushing a mouse. From an evolutionary perspective I understand the preference to be bigger, but I wonder if it's still a logical aspiration for modern humans. More cells means a higher risk of cancer, after all.

Starving people in North Korea are surviving (since per definition they are surviving if they are not dead). Doesn’t mean North Korean diet is something we should strive for.

So much this ^^^^^.

Average North Korean is now about 3 inches shorter than the average South Korean [0]. 70 years ago they were the same people with the same height... Both nations have very little in the way of immigration so this difference is all due to the environment (i.e. in this case nutrition).

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17774210

You can absolutely survive and thrive on a vegetarian diet, and there is decent evidence suggesting you're health will be better.

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