Sorry a bit late to the party but IIRC certain high yield crops like dent corn are not really palatable for humans but can make up 2/3rds of the diet of a chicken.
Also low quality bushels of other cereals, legumes and even cotton seed can be turned into feed.
Edit: Although we eat too much meat now I believe the appropriate amount of meat consumption is well above 0
That is an absurd question and may I bring the absurdity to it's final form? where do the calories in the plant then come from? Is the next raccomandation to eat CO2 and Sun Rays?
Napkin maths from the first source suggests 5kg of feed to produce a 200g steak. All while losing all but 4% of the original calories. This is of course ignoring the vast water consumption and emissions (and of course ethical problems) which are issues worth talking about in themselves.
Conclusion is quite the opposite of your original comment, it seems we could feed the world MANY times over using less land on a 'plant based' diet.
That is the natural Conservation of Energy into play. Noone is saying that you get more calories than you put in.
But the form of those calories is more useful for our consuption.
I'll take your example: While it takes 25KG of grass/other plant to get 1KG of meat The human body get's much more value from precessing that 1KG of meat than processing 25KG of grass. You can not just eat 25KG of corn plant and expect it to be the same as 1KG of meat.
This is not even a question. The need for Animal Proteins in our body is well documented and although many plants contain various forms of proteins they can not eliminate the need for Animal Proteins. There are various products that try to supplement this need artifically for those who oppose the consuption of animals on Moral grounds but that is another issue because there are also those who have a moral issue with consuming Plants; Why should one have more weight than the other?
And this is also Why I am very sceptical of this issue because people try to push other moral views and conflate them into one.
All I care in this context is the enviormental impact. I can say with a clear conscience that I dont care about your other moral dilemas in this case because the issue is much larger than some people needs to self congratulate on their choices and their need to recruit more people into those choice to validate themselves.
Comparing the weight of animal feed and consumable meat isn’t very useful because almost 100% of animal feed isn’t edible by humans. It’s not like that 5kg of feed is going to be eaten by people instead of going the animals.
There are lots of inefficiencies that are perfectly normal. Compare the amount of sunlight needed to produce a single gram of plants. Why does that ratio matter?
It’s not valuable to compare even beans to steak as they are completely different nutrients. 100g of steak has 271 calories with 19g fat and 25g protein [0]. 100g of cooked black beans has 132 calories with 24g carb, 9g protein, and 1g fat [1].
You don’t compare these foods by weight if you’re talking about human diet.
Animals consuming massive amounts of stuff people can’t eat is a feature, not a bug. That’s the point of cows, that they graze on grass and build up nutrients for people to eat.
Now the issue of factory farming having cows in a pen being force fed is a separate problem. But meat itself is useful for feeding people.
Of course it's more complicated than just naming numbers.
Why is water consumption an issue perse? What did the 5kg of food consist of? Is that 5kg we humans could've ate? I doubt it. Throughout time we've given our animals scraps which we think is beneath us.
Take for example a cow in England eating grass and drinking water which directly came from the rain. What is inherently bad about that?
Don't get me wrong, I think that the bio industry has taken things to the extreme, but simply saying meat is inefficient and naming some numbers is not giving us a proper basis for discussion to really address how we can make things durable.
It was a specific rebuttal to the parent comment which seemed to not understand the reality of resources in vs resources out of animal agriculture. Of course you can caveat a lot about my comment, beef for instance is arguably the most inefficient example of meat you could cite (amongst slightly less inefficient alternatives) but illustrates the problem well. That is the nature of compressing such a complex issue into a small HN comment.
> Why is water consumption an issue perse? What did the 5kg of food consist of? Is that 5kg we humans could've ate? I doubt it. Throughout time we've given our animals scraps which we think is beneath us.
Right - the discussion is about land use. We don't typically eat animal feed but allocate an enormous sq footage that could have been used to grow something we would might like to consume directly.
> Take for example a cow in England eating grass and drinking water which directly came from the rain. What is inherently bad about that?
Agree, we have plentiful access to drinking water in the UK and so have enough to allocate to irrigation and all the other water intensive activities involved to do this. Unfortunately on this particular point, the majority of the beef you eat does not come from here. This issue becomes much more pertinent if you live in say California or Spain.
Where do you think the calories in meat ultimately comes from?