[gorilla_fight]

> If someone can find a way to make a product near-indistinguishable from meat without raising and killing animals, it would be a massive victory for the environment (meat production is CO2-intensive), for the cause of bringing decent food to poor people, and for reducing animal suffering.

I'm all for reducing animal suffering (especially from CAFOs) but replacing meat with plants isn't necessarily a victory for the environment.

Widespread factory farming agriculture has destroyed entire ecosystems. Ever flown over the midwest? You see miles and miles of plots of the same crops repeated over and over... monocultures with very little of the original grassland remaining. Agriculture has accomplished the wholesale destruction of entire ecosystems.

"70% of all water from rivers and underground reserves is being spread onto ... irrigated land that grows one-third of the world’s food", according to _When the Rivers Run Dry: Water--The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-first Century_ by Fred Pearce. In some regions up to 90% of the water from the environment is used for irrigation.

The green revolution as we know it is only possible due to fossil fuels, the Haber-Bosch process breaking down oil to create nitrogen fertilizer. With industrial farming, all in all an acre of corn requires about fifty gallons of oil according to _The Omnivores Dilemma_ by Michael Pollan. How much fossil fuel does a typical acre of wheat or soy consume? How sustainable is it compared to pastured meat, which thrives on the renewable resource of grassland?

Bringing decent food to poor people is also a noble goal, but is fraught with a moral hazard. Many developed nations have agricultural subsidies, including the US at $1.173 billion for wheat and $610 million for soybeans as of the 2004 USDA report. The billions of dollars in subsidies causes an oversupply, and the developed nations are all too willing to dump onto other countries, putting local farmers out of business and advancing an imperialist dependency. Lierre Keith, vegan for 20 years (now ex-vegan), in her book _The Vegetarian Myth_ says it best:

> Why should people in Cambodia be dependent on the US for their basic sustenance? It condemns them to participating in a market economy where they will have to dedicate their labor and local resources to produce raw materials, like timber and metal ore, or cheap consumer goods like sneakers or computer chips, for rich nations. With the pennies they get in return, they will then have to buy food from the same rich nations or their progeny, the grain cartels. This is a destructive, inhumane, and oppressive arrangement. I have to believe that the political vegetarians haven’t thought it through.

[maxxxxx]

" I have to believe that the political vegetarians haven’t thought it through."

Most farm animals don't live on green pastures but get their food from the big monocultures you are writing about. It would be much more efficient to eat the plants straight instead of feeding them to animals to get their meat.

Either you haven't thought your points through or the facts you are working with are wrong.

[gorilla_fight]

> It would be much more efficient to eat the plants straight instead of feeding them to animals to get their meat.

The problem is although plants have nutrients, most of them are inaccessible to the human digestion system.

Cellulose = indigestible fiber, yet forms the bulk of the structural component of green plants. C6H10O5, a polysaccharide which would be very valuable if we could use it. The most abundant organic polymer on earth. But we can't eat grass; or we can try, it is non-toxic but no nutrients to speak of will be acquired from chewing and swallowing it.

Grasslands cover about 30% of the earth's surface (more before the rise of agriculture), an abundant resource which cannot be ignored. So how can we derive nutrition from it?

Ruminants have found an answer: bacteria. More specifically, 200 trillion bacteria, 4 billion protozoans, millions of yeast and fungi present in the rumen of a cow, the first of the cow's two stomachs. The cow can't directly digest grass either, but the contents of her rumen can do it for her, then she absorbs the output.

This large complicated digestive system however is very expensive. Is there a more efficient mechanism of acquiring nutrients? Fortunately, early primates discovered a way. "Eating meat led to smaller stomachs, bigger brains" (Harvard Gazette, 2008). Encephalization, the 3rd stage that led humans to civilization (1st: terrestriality, going down from the trees, 2nd: bipedalism), trading off a larger brain for a smaller gut:

> But growing brain size presented a metabolic problem. A gram of brain tissue takes 20 times more energy to grow and maintain than a gram of tissue from the kidney, heart, or liver, she said. Gut tissue is metabolically expensive too — so as brains grew gut sizes shrank.

> It’s likely that meat eating “made it possible for humans to evolve a larger brain size,” said Aiello. Early human ancestors probably consumed more animal foods — termites and small mammals – than the 2 percent of carnivorous caloric intake associated with chimpanzees.

There are quite a few essential nutrients not present in plants. Of those that are, they are often less bioavailable or are found along side anti-nutrients. I'll mention just one: docosahexaenoic acid, an essential omega-3 fatty acid important for normal brain function. Has been with us for a while, Michael A. Crawford calls it "nutritional armor in evolution", and curiously it is photosensitive; photoreceptor cells contains high levels of DHA.

The human body can make DHA itself (being an essential nutrient after all, you would hope so), by converting from ALA, but this process is inefficient so vegetarians often have lower levels of DHA than meat-eaters. Apparently it is also found in microalgaes so some vegetarians supplement. But what else are they missing? What are they missing that we don't even know about yet?

An example of an anti-nutrient in plants: phytic acid in legumes, interfering with the absorption of iron, zinc, and calcium. Some plant foods do contain iron, but it is less easily absorbed than the type of iron only found in meat: heme-iron. This makes vegetarians especially women more prone to anemia. I've even heard of women who stopped having their periods after a vegan diet for many years, which promptly resumed when eating meat. Other animals with larger stomachs are more equipped at processing these substances in plants than humans.

Granted there are other mechanisms for unlocking the nutrients caged away in plants. The Aztecs invented grinding corn soaked in limewater, now known as nixtamalization, to increase nutritional value (converting bound niacin to free nicin, helping prevent pellagra) and decrease mycotoxins. But having ruminants eat grass, which humans then in turn eat in the form of meat and milk, is a very efficient and effective process.

This process repeats itself in other systems: for example, small crustaceans/plankton eaten by feeder fish like herrings, eaten by larger fish like salmon, eaten by mammals like bears. The "Food Chain".

[philipkglass]

How much food per hectare can you get out of ruminants sustainably grazing on grassland?

The table here indicates that beef yields 2.2 g/m^2 of protein, soybeans 40 g/m^2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edible_protein_per_unit_area_o...

Perhaps animal protein should get a quality factor bonus over vegetable protein. But even if it's twice as good as vegetable protein, that's still a much lower yield of effective-protein-per-acre. Is it enough for everyone?

If people should be eating 60 grams of animal protein per day[1], and beef yields 2.2 grams/m^2/year, that's

60 * 365 / 2.2 = 9954 m^2 per person, or almost exactly one hectare.

0.9954 ha * 7.4 billion people = 74 million km^2 of pasture land required. According to the FAO, as of 2011 the world's total land used for agriculture was 49 million km^2.

It looks like feeding everyone from beef grazing on grassland would require claiming significantly more of the planet's surface for agriculture. That makes intuitive sense too -- if grazing animals produced as much food per unit area as fertilized and irrigated plants tended with machines, farmers wouldn't have bought the fertilizers, irrigation, or machines in the first place.

[1] You might set this number higher, since in other comments you have supported a low-carb, high-meat diet.

[dc_gregory]

What do you think the animals are being fed exactly...?

[gorilla_fight]

I regret butchering the paraphrasing in my previous reply to you, this is I believe the most powerful point (at least the most convincing to me personally) so I want to make sure it is clearly communicated as possible, quoting another ex-vegan:

> Start with Africa seven million years ago, because that’s where human life began. The climate, the creation of our ancestors—our beloved kin of bacteria, fungi, and plants—eased from wet to dry. The trees gave way to grasses and a tide of savannas rippled across the world. Cradled in the grasses were large herbivores. Twenty-five million years ago, in the exuberance of evolution, a few plants tried growing from their bases instead of their tips. Grazing would not kill these plants; quite the opposite. It would encourage them by stimulating root growth. All plants want nitrogen and predigested nutrients, and ruminants could provide those to the grasses as they grazed. This is why, unlike other plants, grasses contain no toxins or chemical repellents, no mechanical deterrents like thorns or spines to discourage animals. Grasses want to be grazed. It was grass that created cows; human “domestication” was, in comparison, just the tiniest tug on the bovine genome, and cows tugged back with the lactose tolerance gene.

- Lierre Keith, _The Vegetarian Myth_: Chapter 4, Nutritional Vegetarians, pg. 139

Put another way, the grass depends on the cows as much as the cows depend on the grass. A symbiotic interdependence.

If the implied argument is to instead of eating animals that eat plants, to eat their plants directly, in the spirit of "refuting the central point" in Paul Graham's hierarchy, I responded in depth to @maxxxxx elsewhere in this thread who made the same point, but long story short humans cannot digest the grass which cows (naturally) eat. I definitely wouldn't advocate for grain-feeding, it is indefensible, but even grain-finished cows eat grass. Through the marvel of the rumen, indigestible (to us) cellulose is turned into delicious meat, milk, and (to grass) fertilizer.

Pastured grassfed beef does not depend on industrial agriculture/grain farming (corn, wheat, soy, etc.), and is in fact directly opposed to it. Instead of disrupting ecosystems by planting rows and rows of monocultures, grasslands of clover, millet, bluegrass, plantain timothy, sweet grass, fescue, etc. are sustainably nurtured by ruminants. Working with nature, instead of against it.

[gorilla_fight]

Cattle naturally eat grass, in a symbiotic relationship with the grasslands.

Joel Salatin, legendary proprietor of Polyface Farms, considers himself a "grass farmer". He maintains the grassland, which the cattle graze on and perform several important functions. Not only does grazing stimulate root growth, but the cow digests cellulose (or technically, the bacteria in her rumen ferment it) and emits fertilizer, feeding the plants ever hungry for more nitrogen and predigested nutrients. Grass uniquely grows from its base instead of its tips, so the cows eating and grazing on grass doesn't kill the plant, but rather the opposite.

Contrast with other plants with thorns or spines or chemical deterrents (such as coffee, caffeine originally a pesticide generated by the plant to deter predators, now cultivated by humans as a stimulant) or anti-nutrients or toxins. Grass has none of these. Lierre Keith explains in her usually floral prose how grasses want to be grazed, metaphorically: the grass created the cows (a similar point can be made about human domestication and lactose tolerance gene).

Of course, concentrated animal feed operations additionally feed cattle with grains. Grains are a recent invention on the evolutionary timescale: they didn't exist until humans domesticated annual grasses about 12,000 years ago, whereas the progenitors of the domestic cow, the aurochs, were around more than 2 million years ago. Cattle aren't adapted for grain, upsetting the delicate balance bacterial balance of their rumen, causing sickness. Poultry fed too much grain will develop fatty liver. So why do it?

Grains are cheap, very cheap. An ideal commodity, storable and portable. A dense organic form of energy, most likely converted from fossil fuel fertilizer thanks to Fritz Haber. And they cause explosive growth in animals, dramatically increasing both meat and milk production. The economic incentives are there.

That doesn't mean it is a good idea, or is sustainable or ecologically wise or nutritionally healthy.

Fortunately, grassfed grass-finished pastured beef is getting easier and easier to find. Thousands of years ago, used to be the only kind there was, now we are coming back full circle.