Josh Tetrick's food revolution: saving the world one egg at a time | Hacker News Reader

Josh Tetrick's food revolution: saving the world one egg at a time

theguardian.com

9 pointsmiraj12 comments

I want to like this idea. I agree that the world's food supply is a critical issue. But I'm just not agreeing with some of the underlying assumptions.

Are eggs really the problem we need to be solving? Sure, commercial chickens farms are scary. But locally sourced eggs / backyard chickens makes more sense to me than commercially produced egg substitutes.

After all, how are those peas being produced? Is it a large monoculture operation, involving massive amount of chemicals and fertilizer? Or is it sustainable and organic? Can the operation scale if it becomes as successful as the current industry leaders?

To be fair, a brief article probably can't get into enough depth to answer those questions - maybe these guys have good answers. I'm just a bigger proponent of the local food movement vs. a new take on commercial operations.

Yeah, the answer to "commercial mass-produced eggs waste resources" isn't "let's use mass-produced X instead!"

...it's more along the lines of what you suggest: preferring locally-produced eggs from smaller producers. Preferably organic, free-range, etc. Certainly more expensive in "dollars", but ...

There aren't enough free ranges to product the eggs people want. Does everyone want tl pay $1 per egg? The answer is to be less greedy about animal produce.

The energy input for animal products is higher across the board than for plant products http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/webber-more-effici... . Even if you grow the chickens better way, you still need to grow the feed, so you are back to the original problem. If the chicken feed can be grown in a good way, then so can the peas probably.

So -- just moving from eggs to a plant based substitute, changing nothing else about the agricultural process, would reduce any negative consequences of farming.

We feed our chickens our kitchen scraps and leftovers. We also house them under our apple trees so they can catch any windfall and eat any bugs or rodents that arrive. We move the straw out of the rabbit runs and put it into a container in the chicken run, so the chickens also pick the seeds and bugs out of there, too, and start the composting process so all that material can get recycled. They also fertilize our apple trees with their waste, and the compost that comes out of this process is used in our gardens.

So the chickens pretty much take care of themselves... lets talk the next step up - the rabbits. They feed on the grass and other plants that grow in our fields, as we move their mobile runs around the property. We also provide them with straw and alfalfa that has been locally grown. (We do buy that from one of our neighbors.)

So yes, we do feed our animals - but a lot less than one might think, and most of it comes from our own land. We take advantage of materials that would otherwise be waste, and use them to have a more sustainable operation. It will always be true that the same amount of resources could produce more plants (if your gardens grow perfectly)... that math is inarguable. But if you build a full ecosystem around your animals, you can do fairly well.

How much land are you using to produce food for how many people?

Since moving to Switzerland I've learned how much better the basic old-fashioned foodstuffs are. Mayo made with egg, oil, vinegar, lemon, and mustard. No preservatives. Bread made the day you eat it, no preservatives. Amazing cheese. Amazing, but expensive, meat. The same ingredients in the u.s. are disgusting - flavorless chicken and pork, sour beef, horrible bread...

This stuff that's popular in s.f. right now seems like a step backwards to 1950s 'high-tech' food. First slurm or whatever that gray goop was, and now mayonnaise made with peas. Yeah, sounds great.

Edit: wanted to mention the sausage/salami too. Sausage made with raw pork and non pasteurized is just incredible. They've been making it this way for a thousand years. There no need to pasteurize it. Sausage in the u.s. is a pale comparison.

And also the flour is different here too - gives better croissants and bread.

> The same ingredients in the u.s. are disgusting - flavorless chicken and pork, sour beef, horrible bread...

Of course. Most of the mass produced stuff is horrible. Think about pork for example. They even put on the "other white meat" branding. Pork isn't supposed to be white. Now if you want to say that about a lot of the beautiful heirloom-y meats and produce in the farmers markets in the US, you're absolutely incorrect.

> This stuff that's popular in s.f. right now seems like a step backwards to 1950s 'high-tech' food. First slurm or whatever that gray goop was, and now mayonnaise made with peas. Yeah, sounds great.

Actually, the just mayo is fairly decent. I make my own mayo most of the time, but I can see where they're coming from with it. It's got some nice acidity and is smooth like homemade. They're also having some of the best chefs in the world working with the stuff to make sure it's up there from a quality perspective. Also, they're trying to attack things from a sustainability perspective which is pretty interesting. Is it worth it that the 6 eggs you used to make mayo cost around 300 gallons of water to make? Combine that with the fact that most factory farmed eggs taste horrible to begin with. I'm happy some place is looking at the quality _and_ sustainability.

Where does the 50 gallons of water/egg figure come from?

I've got chickens, they don't drink that much water and they don't eat that much food.

I've seen numbers from 30 to 120. I think GRACE says 53 per egg. American water says 120. Orange county water says 36 gallons, etc. It's all over the board and it depends what they're including. For straight up water, I've heard an individual hen is probably a bit less than a pint of water per day. They then start including things like how much water is used to grow the grain they feed the birds (about a half cup day per). It all depends on what's _actually_ included (as well as things like egg laying / lifetimes (hens don't get into the thick of it until probably around 6 months in)).

Unfortunately I've never been able to find a _real_ number which is indicative of the food cycle, etc.

I was curious about this, based on a cursory search it looks like the water claims are because the grain that most megafarm chickens are fed is a water-intensive grain.

It looks like one loaf of bread is supposedly 288 gallons of water due to the wheat.

What's popular in S.F. right now isn't that, it's hipster food with locally-sourced ingredients. It's pricey and complicated, but well made. The people doing it care about their craft. It does lack the old-fashioned quality you're talking about, though.

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