The Oil Drum

157 comments on DrumBeat: February 24, 2008

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AlanfromBigEasy on February 24, 2008 - 3:04pm

Three errors.

Cattle, in particular, can take only a small percentage of their diet as distillers grains, Too much and they get "scours", diarrhea.

And the ethanol industry is fast approaching that limit.

One gets more meat & milk from unprocessed grains (you are taking away many of the calories when distilling).

And the BEST response to food shortages is less meat and milk and more tortillas, etc. Save some for your fellow man even if you can afford to keep your belly full (or obese).

Alan

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ET on February 24, 2008 - 6:27pm

And the BEST response to food shortages is less meat and milk and more tortillas, etc. Save some for your fellow man even if you can afford to keep your belly full (or obese).

RE: "Good Calories, Bad Calories"
It may be the case that 'we can feed more people' on veggie matter (carbohydrates) but that they would be much healthier eating a more ecologically expensive diet high in meats and fats and low in carbs. IMO Gary Taubes' hypothesis has been extremely well researched and presents us with quite a dilemma. Healthy but possibly ecologically unsustainable diet, or less healthy but ecologically sustainable diet.

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POBox on February 24, 2008 - 6:47pm

Taubes, Pollan, and Weston Price would probably all agree on the health aspects, especially their distaste for the highly manufactured Western diet. I've never seen a life cycle analysis of factory farming techniques versus the old fashioned ways - for example how much does grass-fed/grass-finished beef cost relative to the feedlot grain-fed variety? If you got rid of the manufactured fertilizers, processed animal feed, antibiotics and supplements would the cost of meat increase or decrease? How about dairy? I have no clue. What if you add in the cost of fouled water supplies,
increased need for expensive health care, natural gas depletion, soil depletion, .... Oh rats, I'm getting ahead of myself...

I guess what I'm trying to say is there's a system level view of this; we can't regard it as an isolated subsystem.

Chris