Is There Enough Meat for Everyone? | Hacker News Reader

Is There Enough Meat for Everyone?

gatesnotes.com

51 pointsmhb105 comments

Joel Salatin is one of the first people that comes to mind after reading the article. He might not rub you the right way (as he's an evangelical Christian, etc) but he sure does seem to have some interesting ideas about raising cattle in a natural way that's also highly productive. His way of farming seems to be about 4x as land efficient as his neighbors (if you believe him, I tend to) which is a big deal. It also seems to be relatively low input (not buying lots of feed) and low capital; he uses mostly cheap electric fence.

If I sound like a fanboy it's because I'm leaning that way. It really feels like he's "hacking" farming and I have a big appreciation for that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjzvtM-Wo4c

He isn't done 'hacking' either. He brings younger people to teach them what he knows and to learn from them and their ideas.

A BBC Horizons documentary with subtitle "How to Feed the Planet" (popsci--I'm aware) was posted to reddit a few months ago. The conclusion, IIRC, suggested that even the best hacks in beef farming don't hold a candle when compared to approaches that lean more heavily towards transitioning away from beef to other types of meat, especially chicken.

Cattle have a FCR of between 5 and 20 or so. Chickens more like 2ish. If beef is bad because it takes 20 units of food to make one unit of beef and you have a way to make 4x the units of food per acre, then your effective FCR (relative to traditional methods) drops from 20 (at the worst) to 5. If it was at 5 then your effective FCR could be as low as 1.25 If it was more in the middle at say 10ish then the effective FCR could be at 2.5 which is pretty respectable. This is made better because you're also getting eggs from the sanitizing chickens and meat from the broiling chickens that are all making multiple passes over the same land at different times.

This is of course predicated on grass fed beef with the farmer taking a substantial interest in raising as much grass as possible (sanitizing chickens and paddock system). It's not a lot of work, but it does take more effort than just throwing grain at cows in a feedlot.

I don't know what a sanitizing chicken is, and apparently neither does Google. I assume from context it means chickens bred to lay eggs?

In this case it's chickens which get carted around a few days behind the cows. Cows eat grass. Cows poop on field. Flies lay eggs in poop. Eggs hatch into maggots, which eat poop. Chickens dig through poop looking for maggots. This spreads the poop out and gives the chickens an excellent source of protein.

Cow poop is actually a good fertilizer for grass, but it's too concentrated normally. The chickens spread it out to a more reasonable concentration and produce eggs in the process.

How are they farming the chickens? Free range, or in broiler barns?

I'm not going to rewatch it, but the facility they visited used uncaged chickens housed in a barn. If you're making a point about the ethics of it, note that even the concepts of "intensive farming" and "humane treatment of animals" aren't mutually exclusive.

Agreed. But broiler barns and cows in fields isn't a fair comparison.

I am also a big fan of Salatin, though I'm not convinced his method is the answer to our problem. Not because I don't think it works, but rather because his approach doesn't currently fit into our food system. He has stated that he has no intention of scaling up and only sells to consumers in his region. This means that we would need thousands more operations like his to meet our current demand and I just don't see that happening. There aren't enough incentives for farmers to make the switch and I feel confident saying that Salatin's approach requires a lot more work than most of our farmers are used to these days.

Not to mention we live in a society that demands fast, cheap, convenient food. It's easier to walk down the street to Whole Foods than it is to find a local farm in your area, figure out what's in season, and then figure out how to obtain it. Whole Foods isn't even cheap by most people's standards and buying directly from a local farm is going to be even more expensive.

Don't get me wrong, I would love to see the food system return to local communities! I just don't think society is willing to change...yet.

On the other hand, gardens seem like they would be much easier to integrate into society today. We can obtain far more calories per acre growing food than we can raising it and most people have the capacity and space to grow something, e.g., window sills, rooftops, backyards, empty lots, etc. This still doesn't really get around the problem though because it doesn't address the demand for meat. I have and will continue to advocate in favor of reducing demand. This seems like the most logical choice given our current situation.

EDIT: Just wanted to add: Support local farms!!

The way I read it is that he's not trying to become a mega-corp. I suspect that he knows that's the fastest way to ruin what he's doing; getting big would mean that the company grows faster than the culture and new folks might be tempted to cut corners, etc.

I also think he's more interested in seeing thousands of independent farmers have some control over their own destiny rather than getting caught up in the commercial debt cycle that a lot of them tend to.

You wouldn't need all the farmers in the US to convert to his methods, since he's far more productive per acre you could have 1/4 of the acreage (and presumably 1/4 of the farmers) that are used in conventional farming and still produce the same output.

Given that he uses very little in the way of inputs and sells higher priced outputs (free range chickens, grass fed beef, etc) it's entirely likely that he's far more profitable than traditional farms. That kind of competitive advantage might make it possible for start-up farms to grow and slowly buy out retiring farmers so that no tremendous upheaval is necessary for new ideas to become the norm.

I find myself agreeing with most of what you said, but just wanted to address a couple things.

>>You wouldn't need all the farmers in the US to convert to his methods, since he's far more productive per acre you could have 1/4 of the acreage (and presumably 1/4 of the farmers) that are used in conventional farming and still produce the same output.

I'm not sure about this. It seems today that most conventional farm operations are fairly large (speaking from my experience in the Midwest). Not only would they need to restructure their operations, they would also need to scale down significantly. So we would actually need more farmers. Not to mention that Salatin's region is well suited for raising animals. I would venture to guess that farmers in arid regions would not fare as well.

Furthermore, this still wouldn't meet our demands. Salatin talks about seasonality; there are certain times of the year when it makes sense to slaughter cows, chickens, pigs, etc. We demand all of these meats even when they are out of season. It wasn't to long ago that we reserved beef for special occasions. Now some people eat beef multiple times a day on a consistent basis.

>>That kind of competitive advantage might make it possible for start-up farms to grow and slowly buy out retiring farmers so that no tremendous upheaval is necessary for new ideas to become the norm.

I am hoping that something like this will happen, but Wall Street is also interested in this land[0]. We need to decrease our demand in the cheap, convenient food that Wall Street makes money off of and increase our demand in high quality, local food. If we do this then our demand for meat will also decrease because we will start to eat with the seasons in mind.

[0] - http://www.wsj.com/articles/more-individuals-are-looking-to-...

On the first point, you're right. It will require more farmers. But if you increase the productivity of the land and don't grow an intermediate feed it might not be as bad. And because there are multiple things going on (cows, meat chickens, egg chickens, etc) that does help from a productivity standpoint.

On the second point, I think it'a s business that's decidedly unfriendly to scale which means that it's protected (to an extent) from being over financialized or otherwise exploited. Wealthy folks may buy land, but in this farming model it's not the land that's the limiting factor; it's farmers. And there are plenty of young people who can't get real jobs these days that are getting pretty fed up with their traditional prospects. If you could earn a real living farming that doesn't require you to sell your soul that might look very attractive to a lot of people.

Now the wealthy folks bidding up the price of land such that "normal" people can't afford enough land to make a go of it, well, that's a real risk. But since the land is so much more productive it's easier to make it happen. You don't need to farm 1000 acres to make a living if you spend little/nothing on inputs and sell fairly pricey outputs. 50 acres might be enough to earn a low middle class income that you can slowly grow to upper middle class as your herd grows and you buy more land.

> Furthermore, this still wouldn't meet our demands.

Well, nothing will ever meet our demands: we want everything, for nothing. But if the prices of meats were allowed to fluctuate in the open market, then people would eat less when there's less to go around, and more when there's more.

This was good, thanks for posting.

A basic vegetarian argument is that meat is inefficient compared to grain, and there just isn't enough resource. But if this were true, then older cultures with far less resources would never have wasted food on raising meat. Clearly, they did.

Animals are a way of turning inedible things into edible things. Grass? Well, you could till it all, or just turn sheep and cattle loose on it. Grain hulls? Throw them away, or feed them to the chickens. Spoiled garbage? Pigs will eat it. For as long as we've farmed, animals have increased rather than decreased the food supply.

Exactly. I grew up on cattle ranches in Montana and Wyoming. The short growing season, rocky soil, and dry conditions would make any attempt at farming laughable, but the cattle did just fine. Driving them into the high mountains for summer grazing allowed the mountain grass to also be converted to beef. None of that land was appropriate to farming, which means that any beef grown there is extra food for the planet.

What always amazes me about capitalism is how it often manages to allocate resources efficiently. Nobody is raising large cattle herds down in farm country. Land that can be farmed is generally farmed, because that provides the best return. Land that can't be farmed, is ranched. This idea that you have to give up farming to have meat doesn't take this into account.

This doesn't mean corn-fed meat isn't wasteful, of course. But it does mean that meat itself isn't the cause of hunger elsewhere.

If it is wasteful, I wonder how much is caused by corn subsidies.

Yes, it does. You just don't realize that we've used up all available pasture land.

Nonsense. There is pasture land that is not being used to capacity that would be used if beef prices increased. Go take a drive through rural America and Canada.

You and Malthus like to extrapolate, but extrapolation is rarely a smart idea, unless you're trying to scare people.

Just like there will never be a day when we go from having oil to not having oil, the same will occur with meat. As the demand for a commodity outpaces supply, the price will rise. Some people will find ways to use less of the commodity, some people will find ways to replace the commodity, and some people will find ways to increase the supply of the commodity, now that the higher price allows more expensive methods to be profitably used.

What resources did older cultures have less of?

Energy, information, and complex machinery.

Try moving 500 bushels of stuff a quarter mile with a tractor, and without it.

This is only true when there is plenty of grass available. In fact, you're wholly incorrect because of the extent to which we've used up this planet as an input for meat production. We've essentially turned all of the available arable land into farmland, and all of the available grassland into pasture. There is nothing left but forest, and we are quickly replacing that to our great detriment.

We are tapped out. If the rest of the planet starts eating meat at the rate that the first world does (~150 kg of beef per person per year), we'll need another planet to feed them. There is literally not enough land to do it on.

I recommend this XKCD for an idea of the scale to which we've appropriated Earth for raising our livestock:

https://xkcd.com/1338/

And this UN FAO report, "Livestock's long shadow", on how much of Earth we've actually used for raising livestock, and the devastating environmental consequences:

http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/a0701e/a0701e00.htm

edit: adding this figure from the report about land usage just so you understand the situation clearly:

http://i.imgur.com/rvbCwA0.png

Historically, my argument is correct. There is a strong argument that Green Revolution agricultural techniques have changed the equation substantially, and our current meat consumption is without historical precedent. But that doesn't make my argument incorrect - just opens up the fact that we need to think differently now.

Green Revolution agriculture would be destructive even if it were 100% vegetarian.

No, it really wouldn't, not to the same extent. 90%, literally, of agriculture is used to feed animals for meat production. If we were all vegetarian, our impact on the planet would literally be 10 fold lower in these terms.

Historically, your argument is correct, but you're inferring that meat is efficient in the present, when it plainly is not. The planet is resource-strapped, and meat consumption is the main reason. And this is without a majority of earth eating a meat-heavy diet.

You're assuming a pound-for-pound, calorie-for-calorie equivalence - that humans could eat 100% of the biomass consumed by animals (and would, with other options available). This is obviously not true. Much of what we feed to animals - corncobs and wheat hulls, for example - is inedible to humans. Most of the rest requires extensive processing to be edible. Corn and soybeans are fed to humans mostly in the form of factory-processed junk food, not as fresh vegetables.

The human population has more than doubled since the 1960s. This is due to a massive increase in food supply. Increased meat consumption is a side effect of this luxury. The root problems, to address your concerns, are not meat - they're pump-driven irrigation, diesel-powered tractors, nitrogen fertilizers, chemical pesticides and herbicides, and all the other things that have both increased the arable land supply and increased the productivity of that arable land.

>> 90%, literally, of agriculture is used to feed animals for meat production.

How did you get that number?

>>but you're inferring that meat is efficient in the present

Apart from the first world countries, agriculture productivity in most poor and developing countries is still at where it was middle ages. In my own country(India) there are farmers that still plough the land with cattle, the remaining grain processing methods are super outdated. These sort of stone age farming practices, combined with stagnant government policies making it difficult for importing agriculture equipment, add to this no coherent thought or depth in making long term investments in irrigation infrastructure is what makes this whole process inefficient. Not Meat.

>>The planet is resource-strapped

The planet has plenty of resources we just need to know how to tap into them efficiently.

>The planet has plenty of resources we just need to know how to tap into them efficiently.

This is an empty phrase. Where is the arable land? Where is the pasture land? How are you going to raise meat in the future when there is nowhere left to raise it?

Part of this "efficiency" is to stop taking grain/roughage and running it through an animal's metabolism in order to produce protein for human consumption. There are better ways, like http://impossiblefoods.com/.

I don't understand. Are you saying that using arable land causes that land to stop existing? There will always be a place to raise both plants and animals, unless all the continents disappear into the sea.

As for "Impossible Foods", I don't understand the fixation on making fake meat and dairy products. To me, that's just encouraging the shift away from natural and minimally processed foods, toward a junk food diet of things manufactured in factories from raw resources of industrial agriculture - monocropped fields of soy and corn farmed with industrial poisons and lab engineering.

Factory junk food is our diet problem, not meat. It's also our environmental destruction problem.

150 kg of beef per person per year

Where the hell did you get this number from? I buy all my beef from a farmer who's a friend of a friend. A year's supply is purchased all at once, so I have a pretty good idea of how much of it we eat. My family of four goes through less than 250 lbs (about 110kg) of beef in a year, yet your statistic is that we should be eating roughly half a ton of it per year?

If you're going to make shit up, at least make it sound reasonable.

I imagine he's counting carcass weight rather than dressed weight.

Your argument is wrong for obvious reasons. Of course you have to invest loads of resources into a single cow before you can eat it ... I mean that's not hard to grasp.

Furthermore it is completely pointless to compare economics of ancient cultures with a modern industrialized civilization.

> But if this were true, then older cultures with far less resources would never have wasted food on raising meat. Clearly, they did.

Partly they didn't, they hunted the animal. Or the animal provided other stuff - milk, eggs, leather, bones. People need a source of protien that contains all the amino acids they need and for earlier societies meat is an easy way robust way to get that.

And earlier societies were not great anout effificent ise of land and animals. The near extinction of the Amercan bison is one examples.

Agricultural societies completely trounced hunting societies. Hunting has been mostly sport in all but far corners of humanity for thousands of years. Humans have been raising cows, pigs, sheep, chickens, llamas, and other animals for food (and other things) since even before plant agriculture.

And if you can't till the land efficiently, sheep and cattle are a very efficient use of it. If you can, having pigs and chickens eat the plant waste is also very efficient.

The way the US society discourages vegetarianism (even for people who a traditionally vegetarian) is mind boggling. When you ask for a vegetarian option, one would be lucky if he does not get stared like a space alien, esp. in the country.

Try veganism, it's life on Hard Mode.

Oh, it's not that bad :) I would call it "very deliberate mode".

Tried travelling in a third-world country where you don't speak the language?

My gf is a vegetarian and she has never had that problem...?

We do live in a big city tho.

Eh. Blame the FDR administration: the US's institutionalized focus on standardization, commoditization, and industrialized processing above all other facets of agriculture (like nutrition and taste) has left us with a glut of bland vegetables that no one really wants to eat.

This is starting to change but yeah, it is saddening how many people think you need meat to survive and grow. Bill Gates left his intelligence behind on this one.

All protein on this planet was created by plants via photosynthesis.

You are leaving off exotic bacteria (extremophiles) and ignoring or papering over the fact that animals can synthesize amino acids:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amino_acid_synthesis

The great majority of energy in the biosphere is certainly captured by way of photosynthesis, but it is silly to complain about an oversimplification and then turn around and make one.

Amino acid "synthesis" in animals works by ripping apart existing amino acids and sticking on new side chains. Animals cannot create an amino acid from nothing. To do this requires fixing nitrogen, which can only be done by certain bacteria, plants that have a symbiotic relationship with them, or the industrial Haber process for making ammonia.

Yeah, I wish I had thought to mention how much industrial nitrogen ends up in our food.

I guess you could twist that around and say that it is produced using photosynthesis that was captured in the natural gas that is used, but I don't think the poster meant readers to unpack all that out of 'created by plants'.

Yes, (most) protein on this planet was created by plants, but not all protein is equal. Most proteins from plants are not complete proteins and cannot sustain a human being. This is not true of animal protein. Yes you can combine various plant proteins together to form complete proteins, but the answer is not as simple as: just eat plants.

This is incorrect. What, pray tell, is a "complete protein?" There are no amino acids in animals that are not found in plants. You appear to be wholly misinformed on this subject.

"A complete protein (or whole protein) is a source of protein that contains an adequate proportion of all nine of the essential amino acids necessary for the dietary needs of humans or other animals"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_protein

Many plants have "complete" amino acid profiles but one or more amino acids are too low to be completely adequate for humans. In this case, another protein source with a supplemental amino acid profile is required in order to balance out the deficiency in the first.

Quoting from your own source: >Nearly all foods contain all twenty amino acids in some quantity, and nearly all of them contain the essential amino acids in sufficient quantity.

You don't need to eat meat to get your protein.

But traditional foods in America included beans, corn, squash. Presumably to get a reliable source of protein. The natives weren't dieticians; they ate that because villages with that tradition thrived.

So protein quality and quantity can't likely be insured by eating any old vegetables. Its not as simple as 'don't eat meat'.

> Most proteins from plants are not complete proteins and cannot sustain a human being.

There are many individual plant protein sources that are not complete proteins, and some of the ones that provide complete proteins provide a low ratio of protein to other macronutrients and may not, for that reason, be suitable alone as a primary protein source. But there are plants that individually supply complete protein without this problem, and more importantly there are well-known and combinations of plant protein sources that do this -- they are often the staple foods of various cultures, since in pre-modern times very most agriculture societies didn't produce meat in sufficient quantities for it to be the main protein source, so if adequate plant sources didn't exist, neither would civilization.

(That being said, the heavy focus on soy in the market means there aren't as many convenient options meat-avoiding, soy-allergic/intolerant people as for either meat eaters or soy-tolerant folks.)

All protein on this planet was created by plants via photosynthesis.

This isn't accurate. The grass that cows eat doesn't contain enough amino acids to support the cow's growth.

It's actually the bacteria the cow's gut that digests the grass (mostly carbohydrate) and converts some of it into amino acids that the cow absorbs.

That's not all amino acids, since the cow's body can create some of it's own (just like humans).

Culturally people who are vegetarians in practice just ask for a salad or whatever and are good with it. The public self identifier of vegetarian has been stolen by folks who engage in intense proselytizing. So culturally people don't know how to react to people who self identify as vegetarians... are they "cool" in which case they can play it cool and friendly in response, or is the slogan shouting and poster waving about to start in which case they might have to contact security ... so it creates that awkwardness you mention. Some folks tolerate or support the proselytizing, maybe because they like watching the world burn, who knows.

By analogy, imagine if it was "normal" culturally if when a non-member is at a church for a friends wedding or whatever for that non-member to break out into a string of religious slurs about the members and attempt aggressive recruitment into the non-members religion. You can totally imagine in a society like that, if you're in a catholic church and tell people you're an evang, they'll recoil in horror and start worrying if security will need to evict you. Because most people act a little more civilized in church, most of the time no one freaks out when they discover a non-member attends.

This sounds like the South Park strawman of vegetarianism and its advocates.

Oh no! Exactly the point I was not trying to make! The problem being everyone has had a runoff with the small proportion of non-civilized advocates, leading to fear / awkwardness / uncomfortable feeling with the majority of civilized participants. And the culture doesn't self police strongly enough to keep the non-civilized fraction under control.

No one wants to sit thru a lecture of "my self denial makes me superior" "I'm morally superior" "meat is murder" "hey wanna see some slaughterhouse pixs" "hey look at me this is my special snowflake reason" "I'm saving the planet, all by myself".

OPs question of why vegetarians are looked at like space aliens is because its impossible to predict if the next couple minutes are going to be agony or fun. Probably gonna be all right, but...

(edited to add, come on guys, cut it out with the world doesn't exist stuff, my very own sister pulled the "hey look at me this is my special snowflake reason" for a couple months when she was about 14... now stand by for a round of "well I'm not sure sisters exist in the real world, after all I only have brothers and my buddy is an only child so citation needed...")

(And slayed0 is a better writer than I am...)

Are you trolling man? Trolling's not cool, you know.

Have they really? In my experience prying into people retelling this story, the whole vegetarian zealot thing is one of those moral panic things that everyone claims to have had run-ins with but really most people are just citing the one main caricature.

I've certainly seen way, way more people say "I'll eat two steaks for every sanctimonious vegetarian I engage with" than actual vegetarians, particularly after becoming an engineer.

> The problem being everyone has had a runoff with the small proportion of non-civilized advocates

Everyone, apparently, except for me. Yet despite the dearth of obnoxious advocates, I have run into dozens or more who complain about their existence.

I think the obnoxious advocate trope is just a trope, and I'm convinced the the vast majority of complainers are complaining about the idea of a reification of the trope or something they've seen on television, rather than any actual live instances of the trope they've had run-ins with.

Interestingly, I was listening to a vegan friend complaining about exactly that this week - that he finds the vegan community itself nearly insufferable due to smugness and proselytizing. He's vegan for religious reasons, but doesn't want to impose his faith on anyone else and doesn't feel it makes him superior. Sadly, not true of many vegans.

My daughter, a budding chef and foodie with many vegan friends, gets a lot of grief over it too. For her part, she's trying to get the vegans to eat decent food, as most of the ones she knows eat what she calls "vegan junk food" - factory products rather than actual cooking of fresh ingredients.

so vegans are smug and proselytizing, and your non-vegan daughter goes around calling what they eat junk food, trying to get them to switch diets.

interesting.

I don't think you understand. She tries to teach them to cook good vegan food. She totally respects their choice to be vegan. She worries that they're eating factory food from a box rather than something more natural and healthier. She would never, ever try to make a vegan break their veganism. She will make them food that is tastier and more nutritious than what they normally eat, but is still vegan.

I don't think you understand. She is trying to get them to eat something different (proselytizing), for reasons that she believes are important and true, even though they don't currently agree with her themselves (smug).

Sounds a lot like ethical vegans to me.

It's one thing to try to make people better at their own diet, and another thing to try to make them choose another diet. Not all help is proselytizing. There's a TREMENDOUS difference between "I understand you're a vegan, here's some homemade lentil stew that's better for you than the potato chips you're eating", and "You are a filthy murderer for eating that burger!", or "You're a stupid pansy who needs to eat a burger!"

If you can't understand that distinction...

That's not the difference between proselytizing and not proselytizing, that's a difference in how you go about it.

If you want to make the case that your daughter is a really nice proselytizer for healthy eating, and that vegetarians are really awful, we can just compare anecdata.

You went out of your way to quote second-hand sources for "filthy murderer" vegans, suggesting it hasn't been your experience. How many people who've called vegetarians pansies do you personally know?

Actually, I just made those quotes up.

As for "proselytizing"... rather than bickering over the word, bicker the intent. Do you think it's a bad thing for a non-vegan to cook vegan food for a vegan? To teach them about cooking and nutrition? To encourage them to make their own food rather than eating something put in a bag in a factory?

I don't see how what she's doing can be reasonably considered negative. So if it's proselytizing, then proselytizing is itself not a negative. If you think it's negative, I'd love to understand why.

Do you think it's bad for someone to persuade someone else to stop eating factory-farmed meat?

I don't see how that can be considered negative either. Can you?

The problem is when it stops being persuading, and starts being haranguing and elitism... using veganism as a way to feel and act superior to others. Which surely happens. As I said earlier, a vegan friend was complaining to me this week about exactly that, and he's not the first, nor will he be the last.

If my daughter was just getting on the vegans she knows for eating junk food, not good food like she does, it would be one thing. Instead, she leads by example, teaching them to be better and healthier vegans.

Something analogous would be a vegan making a beautiful, delicious vegan meal for a meat eater who thinks a vegetarian diet is dull and poor in nutrition. That's not proselytizing, imho.

I'm not sure you have an unbiased perspective on what constitutes elitist or haranguing. Progressives were called sanctimonious niggerlovers, butch (women) and effeminate (men) when they rallied for the progressive issues of their day, and all of this talk about them "acting superior" seems like a lazy coat of paint on top of not liking what they're preaching. Additionally, it seems to be all second-hand, as is usually the case. I've never ran into militant vegetarians, they honestly seem like a figment of the american imagination.

And at the very end you're trying to go back on admitting your daughter is proselytizing, by complimenting her cooking skills. I think you're quite confused about your principles.

His/her point is that the strawman is self inflicted. There is a silent majority that inherits the stigma of the crazed minority. Of course not all vegetarians are like this, but the few who are give a bad name to the rest.

As someone who lives near the coast in Southern California we have lots of vegetarian and vegan options.

It depends on where you live, what the food culture is like.

I live in Minneapolis, one of the best places in the world to eat. Excellent vegetarian options are widely available here. Sure, there are restaurants where that's not good, but it's not like there aren't plenty of other restaurants.

A personal experience I have made in trying to live off the land a few times autonomously is that it is quite sustainable when you are hunting animals.

When you rely solely on plants you need to roam HUGE swatches of land in comparison and extract almost all of the plants you find.

Another issue is what parts of the animal we eat or don't eat. At least here in the UK, many wouldn't touch liver, heart, kidneys etc with a barge pole, despite never having even tried them.

While offal has gained ground in restaurants in recent years, it's still absent from most homes.

Offal makes up a decent chunk[1] of cattle and pigs, and fresh, well cooked offal is a delicious thing. There should be more effort by the meat industry to persuade people to try it.

[1] http://www.ers.usda.gov/media/147867/ldpm20901.pdf

A lot of UK farmers are now shipping offal (or the "5th quarter") to other locations such as China and the Middle East. So a lot does get eaten, even if not locally.

Source for this is Farming Today podcast on Radio 4.

A good point - people are not so 'scared' of offal in some other cultures

I quite often eat liver, have eaten heart when a kid and happily wolf down a steak and kidney pie.

I will not go anywhere near tripe.

>> At least here in the UK, many wouldn't touch liver, heart, kidneys etc with a barge pole, despite never having even tried them.

Really?

I thought we were pretty good about liver (on its own or in pate) kidneys (steak and kidney pie). Plus black pudding and haggis kinda need offal.

Compared to the USA where people universally seem to think black pudding is made of blood and disgusting* . I guess with the exception of cajun Boudin Noir... I thought we were pretty good.

(*they're wrong, it's made of blood and delicious!)

Older people tend to have no problems with liver and kidneys. But most younger people won't go near offal*

None of the butchers within a 10 mile radius of me make steak and kidney pies, only steak pies. I'm rather partial to steak and kidney pie, so I did go looking :) Each one said the same thing, that nobody wants kidney in their pie anymore.

* OK, pate, black pudding and haggis are exceptions; but you can't 'see' the offal in these, so it doesn't look like offal

As usual, Gates gets the true problem completely wrong. The real issue here are the numerous and significant unpriced economic externalities associated with animal flesh production, whose impact is rendered enormous by the scale of this industry. Animal rearing produces a major portion of global greenhouse gases, rivers of faeces, pollutes waterways and overtaxes water resources, not because of a lack of capacity to technologically innovate cleaner solutions, but because collective interests in these resources are not being properly acknowledged and protected through the negotiation and enforcement of pricing.

This is a classic economic problem. Bill Gates does the issue no favours with his starry-eyed techno-optimism or his attempts depict food supply as a selfless global communal endeavour. No, food supply is a market of profit-seeking individuals using their resources to generate goods considered valuable enough to trade by other individuals. There is simply an overproduction of these goods because they are being sold without their externalised costs being factored in. Food producers can make their products too cheaply, so too many are made.

Tackle the pricing problem and technological development to minimise environmental impacts will naturally emerge. Absent this step, efforts to develop and promulgate technological improvements will never get far.

These satellite pictures of the waste lagoons from feedlots that went round last year are pretty scary http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2014/05/start/meat-m...

This is of course not unique to animal farming. Where I grew up animal farming is much more environmentally friendly than grain farming. It uses green water and native prairie, without chemical use or plowing. (Plowing is generally much more environmentally destructive than chemical use).

In Saskatchewan, higher pricing of externalities would increase animal production, not lower it.

> Where I grew up

Well that is the problem here. Farming has changed. Particularly so in America. A handful slaughterhouses, heavy corn use, chemically power washed eggs, all within a framework that is made for economical returns and not animal welfare or taste. And it is not a US-only problem. Denmark for example is facing huge issues with pig farming and here in Norway we are seeing problems with use of antibiotics in chickens.

The article briefly touches on this, but substituting more efficient (< 2 to 1 conversion ratio) meats like chicken and farmed fish seems like a good idea. The high price of beef right now certainly has changed my shopping habits, and I can't say I really miss it -- nor do other Americans according to some sources[1].

p.s. take chicken drumsticks, pat dry, salt and pepper, iron skillet for 1 hour at 450 :)

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/02/chicken-vs-beef_n_4...

Not sure where you are, but it's the same story in the UK. I rarely eat beef or lamb nowadays just because it's so expensive, and instead eat more chicken, pork and local game.

In the UK it's really noticeable how beef has shot up in price, chicken is starting to climb a price/quality tradeoff (cheap mystery chicken is everywhere, nice standalone chicken breast quite pricey), and pork is still cheap. Lamb I'm less interested in but is all imported from NZ anyway. Venison is becoming a thing. Ostrich didn't, to the disappointment of a number of early investors.

Try going with whole chicken and separating the pieces yourself. You can even throw it into a slow cooker completely frozen if you're lazy. The downside is the time it takes to do the separation, but I've found that in aggregate it's actually a marked convenience, even compared to buying already separated chicken breasts. 1 whole chicken = 8 meals for me, and prepping it only takes about half an hour.

Last year I essentially switched to chicken as my only meat source for meals eaten at home, mostly by default. I sort of ditched that around Christmas after becoming bored of it, but I've found that after doing 1 hour of prep time (half an hour for chicken, half an hour for packing salads) twice a week with the whole chicken approach, it's hard to go back spending 1-2 hours a day in the kitchen, 5-7 days a week--which is a routine I managed for years up until then.

I prefer to pepper after cooking because it can burn and taste bad

Conversion ratio is a very misleading number. Beef cattle very inefficiently convert corn, that's true. That's because beef cattle evolved to eat grass. When fed grass, they convert it efficiently. You can get a low more calories by growing hay, feeding the whole plant to a cow and then drinking the milk; than by growing grain, throwing away the stalk, feeding the seeds to a chicken, and then eating the chicken.

20 years ago we were talking about shellfish aquaculture as the answer to this problem (which was obvious even then). The lower on the food chain you go, typically, the lower the production costs. Filter feeding mussels, scallops, and oysters are about as low as you can get and still call it "meat". Many producers were touting these creatures as the answer to getting protein in the future. Since then water pollution has seriously curtailed the growth of that industry. It is still worth exploring as an option though.

> Since then water pollution has seriously curtailed the growth of that industry.

Interesting. I'd like to know more. Do you have a source for that?

The BBC Horizons documentary I mentioned above also looked into mussels as a source of meat. I don't recall pollution being mentioned as an issue, but it gave other reasons why even optimistic outlooks could only consider them a partial replacement, given the numbers we have for meat consumption today (not to mention decades from now).

I don't - offhand. Back when I was taking classes in it, the industry was collapsing in China because of water pollution. I have been reading about blue-green algae tides and chemical spills and other issues affecting the industry these days, but I don't have a specific source detailing its impact. Sorry. (Good one for calling me out on that!)

I don't know if the problem is just water pollution; according to NOAA aquaculture is 20-30% of shellfish production. In the U.S. at least the preference for chicken and beef has displaced our willingness to eat "critters" in most of the country.

We've also got a marketing problem; quick frozen seafood is actually pretty good compared to seafood that's been lying in a display case for a week. (Also, it's less likely to give you worms if you undercook it) Any Asian market has a frozen seafood section that dwarfs any Midwest megasupermarket. Basically, Americans by-and-large have forgotten how to seafood.

I love meat. My neighbours have cows and sheep and pigs and I own chickens. I've been up close with all those animals and they're pretty cool in their own way.

I sometimes thing that if meat could be grown in a lab and animals didn't have to die, I'd be happy with that. But then I realise that arsehole food scientists from somewhere like Kraft would get hold of it and ruin it.

Meat infused with their yellow cheese powder

Yeah, and hydrogenated vegetable oil, food dye, fillers, lego offcuts etc.

What are the numbers on the chart in the linked page supposed to mean? Average meat consumption per capita per year, organized by country? And the bigger question: how do this kinds of charts keep getting made, and how do articles that otherwise make no hint at their own charts' existence keep being published?

It is a good question.

I think it refers to carcass per person. This means that they're counting the weight of non-eaten tissue (bones, skin, intestines, brains, etc).

The chart sounds odd to me. I am Brazilian and I know that Argentinians and Uruguayans consume a lot more meat than us, I believe even more than the Americans.

When it comes to non-carcass, edible meat only we are at 37 kg per person/year. The Uruguayans are at 60 kg.

tl;dr: no (at least not at the moment):

> Returning to the question at hand — how can we make enough meat without destroying the planet? — one solution would be to ask the biggest carnivores Americans and others) to cut back, by as much as half. [...]

> But there are reasons to be optimistic. For one thing, the world’s appetite for meat may eventually level off. [...] I also believe that innovation will improve our ability to produce meat. Cheaper energy and better crop varieties will drive up agricultural productivity, especially in Africa, so we won’t have to choose as often between feeding animals and feeding people.

I'm grateful Gates and others are funding meat alternatives. He briefly touched on the ethical issues (by proxy), but we hardly ever do here on HN. I remember in 2011 Zuckerberg resolved to only eat meat that he killed himself. I think more people ought to try that. I know I wouldn't be able to hunt and slaughter my own food, and I respect people that do much more than the status quo of outsourcing animal murder.

It's pretty hypocritical of this society to elect ~4 species of animals that we endorse killing. But we think about eating dog or dolphin and rageface.

Oh, if people get hungry enough, they'll eat dogs and dolphins, all right.

At the end of WWII, rats had been exterminated in Berlin. That was all there was to eat.

I invited my 93 year old gran to a barbecue (she's 97 now) and asked her if there is anything she doesn't eat or wouldn't like.

Gran: Whale meat

Me: Er, OK. I can do that.

Gran: We had it during the war on rationing. You didn't know if you were eating meaty fish or fishy meat.

There is also this company: http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/silicon-valleys-fake-eggs-a...

that is planning to create synthetic eggs (even though eggs are pretty much are the perfect food).

Like carbon caps, governments could introduce meat production limits if none of the other solutions pan out.

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