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Comment by whatajoke | Hacker News Reader

To quote from the article:

In particular hard cheese, which takes a lot of milk to produce, can have a bigger footprint per kilo than chicken.

This is super stupid. Hard cheese contains more than double the calories of chicken. And nobody in their right minds will consume hard cheese as the main food item.

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Moreover, all these calculations of how much energy is required to grow meat fall flat when you consider grass-fed beef & pastured chickens (a la Saladin); unlike corn-fed beef, grass-fed beef can be self sustaining & actually rejuvenate the land.

Choosing veganism over corn-fed carnivory is the lesser of two evils, only because veganism requires less monocropping. However, at best it can only slow--never reverse--environmental destruction (without animals, the NPK source is petroleum).

From an environmental standpoint, the disease is "growing crops without animal input," and corn-fed beef is merely a symptom.

Ironically, the only way to turn veganism into a closed system is to avoid the large-scale monocropping of grains and re-introduce animals for a nitrogen source.

That veganism is "sustainable" is another myth. It requires massive energy subsidies. It's not that long ago in Northern Europe (let alone Canada, Russia, etc) that if you wouldn't use animal products or labour you'd starve or freeze.

From the Volkskrant (newspaper): cheese takes more kg of food for the cows to produce per protein than chicken. For vegerarians cheese is an important source of protein.

link?

For vegerarians cheese is an important source of protein.

Sorry, but the vegetarian you talk of is doing it wrong.

My primary source of proteins is pulses. Especially the red kidney beans contain the same amount of protein as chicken, 24 gm out of 100 gm.

Reference:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_(food)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_bean#Red_or_kidney_beans

Interesting. Sainsbury's has chicken at 30g and kidney beans at 7g. You can search for nutritional information very easily here:

http://www.sainsburys.co.uk/groceries/index.jsp

Wolfram Alpha agrees, for what it's worth:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=kidney+bean+100g

I wouldn't trust Wikipedia to give correct nutritional information. I've noticed they've been incorrect about this before.

More generally, "I wouldn't trust Wikipedia to give correct $TOPIC information. I've noticed they've been incorrect about this before."

Articles like the one under discussion would be a helluva lot more persuasive if they linked to some resources for their stats. The claims about vegetarianism struck me as clutching at straws just to be contrarian.

To clarify what I meant, for what it's worth, I have personally experienced Wikipedia to be inaccurate with nutritional data, and that's something I've spent a deal of time looking at.

The two wikipedia pages list the USDA Nutrient Database as their source.

http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/search/

You can put "chicken" in the search field wade through the many choices, or you can put input the NDB numbers from my own searches, listed below.

The two wiki pages don't say exactly which variation of bean or chicken from the database they're using, so I went with these:

chicken breast raw, NDB # 05057, 20.85g protein/100g chicken

chicken breast stewed, NDB # 05061, 27.39g p/100g

kidney beans raw, NDB # 16027, 23.58g p/100g

kidney beans boiled, NDB # 16028, 8.67g p/100g

So, whatajoke's source for beans looks like it's for raw beans, and tome's looks like it's for cooked.

Does anyone eat raw kidney beans?

Nobody eats raw mature beans. They have several chemicals that will make you ill if you eat more than a tiny amount. You can eat the immature beans raw, that's what green beans/string beans are after all.

Right - They're talking about cheeses like parmesan reggiano, which are typically grated and used in small quantities. Nobody eats a pound of parm at a time, just like nobody eats black pepper by the pound.

Being the UK, I would imagine we're talking about cheddar, which occupies the lion's share of UK cheese production. Give me a good cheddar (Montgomery's is excellent), a nice bottle of wine, packet of biscuits and the complete series of The Thick Of It on BBC iPlayer and I'll do my level best to get through that pound.

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