Animals on average convert about 10% of the mass they eat into their own body mass.
Comment on those damn vegans!
TheVeganWerewolf@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Cool Fact: Vegans consume a total of less plants than omnivores. Animals eat plants, so if you eat them, you’re eating an animal plus everything it ate to grow up.
cymbal_king@lemmy.world 3 months ago
bstix@feddit.dk 3 months ago
So when a lion dies and turns to grass, the antilopes only get back 10% of the grass they ate to make meat for the lion.
Circle of life, my ass. More like a trickle down pyramid scheme.
groet@feddit.de 3 months ago
It’s even less. The Antilope converts 10% of grass to meat, the lion converts 10% of Antilope meat to lion meat. So it’s 10% of 10% bringing us back to the root problem of everything… The 1%!!!
robotica@lemmy.world 3 months ago
I mean, obviously you won’t get 100% of the energy back because most of it is spent on heating you up and moving and also heating you up, but yeah, I feel like God could’ve really done with some optimization techniques.
verysoft@kbin.social 3 months ago
Only a matter of time before plant-based alternatives fully take over from meat. Meat farming is not sustainable, as you mention all the land used to farm food for animals could be used to just farm more food for us directly.
We just have to get rid of the stigma around plant-based "meat".
Riven@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 months ago
At this point it isn’t so much the stigma as it is the price for a lot of us. If it was the same or cheaper than regular meat prices in my area I would buy it instead.
verysoft@kbin.social 3 months ago
Prices are coming down, but they won't come down a lot until more people buy it, but more people wont buy it unless it's cheaper...
Here's hoping there's some more restrictions imposed on meat.
Riven@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 months ago
Yea it’s a catch 22 unfortunately.
Demdaru@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Huh. Now that you mention it, even where I live i actually didn’t hear any comments after soy shit fell. I didn’t notice. Still ain’t buyin substitute cu I love meat but it’s no longer due to hearing how bad it tastes - in fact I did hear some good comments lately.
Everythingispenguins@lemmy.world 3 months ago
It is worth mentioning that the types of plants that people and animals eat are different. Humans can’t digest cellulose and hemicellulose where herbivores can.
Dasus@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Yeah, we can’t really eat grass, but thinking that most cattle nowadays actually graze is… inaccurate, to put it mildly.
Factory-farmed cattle are almost always fed grain made of up corn and soy, both of which are completely fine for humans to eat, in case someone was unaware.
Producing 1kg of beef takes about 25kg of feed.
Everythingispenguins@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Just so you know cattle are only grain finished, personally I don’t like the practice. More details in my reply to a different comment. lemmy.world/comment/8250179
chetradley@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Grass fed: small minority of beef cattle, finished on grain after grazing for about a year. Typically slaughtered at 18-24 months of age.
Grass finished: even smaller minority not fed grains and allowed to graze their entire lives. Typically slaughtered around 18-24 months of age.
Normal: majority raised in feedlots on heavy grain-based diets. Typically slaughtered closer to 16 months of age.All are slaughtered well shy of the 20+ year life expectancy of a cow in a sanctuary.
philm@slrpnk.net 3 months ago
I’d agree if there would ba a “could” in there or something. The reality is that a lot of soy (that humans can digest) is fed to animals…
Everythingispenguins@lemmy.world 3 months ago
I can’t digest soy, soy is actually one of the most common allergies. I am actually finding that as I get older all legumes are getting a little hard for me to digest (not sure what that is about). I am someone who would have not lived though childhood with out the ability to have both the protein and calories I got from eating meat. (I couldn’t do dairy as a child either)
I get what is being said about gain finishing. A practice that is really more of a result of corporate agriculture than anything else. I just find these black and white statements about how non ag people think ag should work. Fail to take into account pastoralism or dry land grazing, while also glossing over petrochemical fertilizer uses. All the best studies I have read on the climate affects of any type of agriculture come to the conclusion that it is near impossible to tell, due to the vast number of variables. The ones that come to some strong conclusion tend to throw out a lot of data because it is too hard to use.
I have nothing against reducing meat intake nor will I ever say that vegetation diets are “bad” I just find that people are often unwilling to understand the systems they want to change.
Dasus@lemmy.world 3 months ago
I am someone who would have not lived though childhood with out the ability to have both the protein and calories I got from eating meat. (I couldn’t do dairy as a child either)
A soy allergy isn’t a death sentence. Eggs exist, and so do tons and tons of other sources of protein.
Cannabis seeds, for one, are great source of protein and contain all the essential aminoacids.
I was unaware of the term “grain finished”, so I looked it up.
When beef is grain-finished, cattle are free to eat a balanced diet of grain, local feed ingredients, like potato hulls or sugar beets, and hay or forage at the feedyard.
You’re not seriously suggesting that most cattle enjoy such conditions?
If you just plain do the math of the area needed for grazing versus the average consumption of beef per capita you can see that most cattle is definitely not just “grain finished”.
Leviathan@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Yeah, instead of using that land to grow monocultured grass, we could use it to grow plants we do eat. It’s not like we would keep growing grass there and say “Darn! We can’t eat this grass!”, we wouldn’t need to plant plants we don’t eat in the first place.
Everythingispenguins@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Yeah I agree and we need to start with lawns.
huffpost.com/…/lawn-largest-crop-america_n_55d0dc…
Also many animals are grassed on areas which are unsuitable for farming. And if done in a responsible manner allows for the natural diversity of an area to be maintained.
Monocroping corn or potatoes is just as bad.
Leviathan@lemmy.world 3 months ago
I totally agree, lawns are a huge waste of space and resources. I’ve torn up every lawn on every property I’ve rented or owned and replaced it with local plants for native pollinators (honeybees are invasive and harm native pollinators).
ikidd@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Except 95% of what an animal eats ends up back in the soil as manure.
hamid@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Hi, what is it like to be stupid? I really would like your expert opinion on this
ikidd@lemmy.world 3 months ago
If you ever had a clue, it died of terminal loneliness.
hamid@lemmy.world 3 months ago
If you ever had a friend they would ditch you immediately
dream_weasel@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
This seems like a dubious line of reasoning. It’s like making the claim that if you eat moss your net water consumption is lower than if you eat the leaves off an oak tree because of all the water it takes to grow. I mean I guess it’s sort of true but it’s also sorta weird. The argument is basically eat closer to the bottom of the food chain and the younger the better, but I don’t think you’re going to be happy if people eat more puppies and veal…
naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 months ago
So it’s about efficiency. A given organism is going to have a particular conversion ratio in terms of how much mass/calories/nutrients whatever you’re measuring it has to take in to increase it’s own content an equivalent amount.
Since the vast quantity of food consumed by animals goes into energy rather than body mass they’re very inefficient. Particularly larger creatures like cows which “waste” (obviously not from the cow’s perspective) that energy breathing, moving, pumping blood, digesting, feeling and so on.
jettrscga@lemmy.world 3 months ago
I absolutely agree, eating meat should count as eating at least one salad too.
Annoyed_Crabby@monyet.cc 3 months ago
Take that, doctor.