> Is feeding the world a real problem?

Yes, but it is not a production capacity problem. The constraints on food are mostly in the logistics chain, often having to do with corruption or distribution targets (food goes where the money is), or regulation (did you know that cherry growers in the Upper Midwest are required --_by Federal law_-- to destroy unsold crops?).

A huge amount of food goes to waste simply because of regulation or subsidies, at least within the United States.

I recommend you visiting the Brazilian region of Pantanal, if possible travel through Mato Grosso do Sul -> Mato Grosso -> southern Pará where it transitions into the Amazon.

You will see vast areas of cattle ranching, soybeans plantation used for cattle feed, and other crops that can be used as cattle feed. All that area used to be the Pantanal and Amazon, now transformed to grow beef.

If we would reduce the calories wasted on beef, this area could still have a lot more native vegetation. Of course, it's purely wishful thinking because this ship has sailed, beef consumption will take a long time to stop growing, these farms will fight for their lives to keep producing, and we've lost a huge area of incredible nature to eat some steaks and burgers.

It's the leading cause of deforestation which is a major factor in climate change. It also is a major contributor to climate change for other reasons. Since you mentioned energy, it's also much less energy efficient.

Isn't this something to care about?

Solve our energy problems first? How would decreasing cattle stop work on improving our energy system? I think a lot points to that we need to do both (and yesterday). It’s not like agriculture is a small part of our greenhouse gas emissions (25-35% globally).

Exactly. The current world population is 8.3 billion and is expected to peak at 10.3 billion in 2080 and then begin declining. Now, there are a number of other reasons we might have food shortages, but population per se I don't think is a significant factor.

Agreed. The market should decide if beef consumption is viable. Ultimately energy is the basis all food production. Cheap and plentiful energy solves the food production and distribution problem, then its just matter of preferences.

Feeding the world is mostly a political-economic problem. Political-economic decisions make it hard to feed everybody, when we technically have more than enough to feed everybody. But one of the decisions that make it hard to feed everybody is the decision to eat lots of beef in rich countries. Land that's used to grow food for cattle could (in many but not all cases) also be used to grow food for poor people, but there's no money in that.

That's not the only one; there's lots of other ways in which food is wasted or used inefficiently. Although the situation has improved tremendously over the past half century, there are still a lot of people suffering from malnutrition.

meat uses up enormous quantities of water. potatoes for instance use about 75 gallons to produce 2000 calories compared to say 1500 to 2500 gallons for 2000 calories of beef.

> edit: I understand the environmental impacts. I think we should solve our energy problems first.

There's no "first." There's not a queue of problems that the people of the world work on one by one. It's not a matter of limited labor/money either, we're talking about policies to change allocation. If anything is limited here it's political will, but that doesn't really work like money or physical limitations, it's more abstract and nonlinear. It's quite possible that a platform containing more changes earns more will than one with fewer, so budgeting is the wrong impulse.

This is being downvoted, but is raising a serious point.

- Nearly 90% of Americans eat red meat [1].

- Environmental activity against meat has led a lot of people (26% of Americans) to believe that there is a push to ban red meat. This issue does not poll well [1].

- Despite the above, Americans are eating less red meat than we used to [2].

- The vast majority of people who choose to reduce their meat intake do so for cost or health reasons, not environmental [3].

Putting all that together... studies like this do not help the environmental cause. Sure, they find something that's vaguely interesting, and can possibly be a bullet point on an environmentalist slide. However, a far better research study would be one focusing on human health impacts of red meat, or demonstrating economic benefits to red meat alternatives.

tl;ld - This study is not useful, and is probably damaging to it's own cause.

[1]: https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/nearly-nine-ten-ameri...

[2]: https://www.pcrm.org/news/news-releases/new-survey-reveals-r...

[3]: https://www.seattletimes.com/life/food-drink/two-thirds-of-a...

We have 8 billion people. We have enough people to solve both the energy problem and the food efficiency problem.

That said, it's very, very funny that you responded to an article about energy inefficiency (calorie -> calorie) and said we should solve our energy problems. Beef is an energy problem! We're putting 30x the energy into the product against the energy we get out! Thats wasted energy!

> I understand the environmental impacts. I think we should solve our energy problems first.

You don’t think the two are related at all? When you say “solve” energy problems, do you mean from supply-side solutions or demand-side solutions?

>I understand the environmental impacts. I think we should solve our energy problems first.

is there a rational argument in here or is this just a cheap psychological reflex to keep eating beef? Because it's not clear to me how solving our energy problems and the consumption of beef even intersect so that we couldn't do both at the same time.

You might as well have said "man I really should stop drinking and smoking, but we gotta solve the energy problems first"

The question is, whats the bigger environmental impact, more people using smart phones, computers, cars, planes, buying the newest fashion to show their style,... or feeding them with beef?

You are completely right, who the fuck cares?

I know you warned us, but this overly flippant.

There's plenty of obvious reasons we shouldn't be wasting land, energy, water and labor on producing things that don't get utilized. Even in the most selfish capitalist sensibility, we are wasting money. Yes the energy issue is much bigger than this but wasted energy utilization is part of that problem. I know this is politically fraught, but that should not have any bearing on scholarship. This is just data to add to our understanding.

And also that this study is global, not purely applicable to America. Republicans can exploit outrage with lies to their base, but that isn't such a slam dunk everywhere in the world

> Is feeding the world a real problem?

In light of recent, uhm, "challenges" to fertilizer supply chains?

> Not trying to be overly flippant... who cares?

Congratulations on being overly flippant without trying. Evidently a lot of people care, and environmental impacts and energy problems are closely related.

> Is feeding the world a real problem?

Yes.

> I've yet to see compelling evidence that it really is except as a secondary effect of logistics, energy supply, and war.

I don't know how to respond to this. It's like saying you don't think breathing underwater is difficult, except for the secondary effects of water. War is a problem. Energy supply is a problem. Logistics is a problem. All these problems lead to starvation. People starving is a real problem.

Another reason people starve is economics and market forces. The market decides it wants to use up more water and grain to feed cows. That grain and water is now not available for purchase as human food. That means it is more scarce on the human-feeding market. Scarcity drives up prices. So livestock feed makes grain more expensive, making it harder to purchase, for people to eat.

(I'm using "starve" as a euphemism for "malnutrition that not only severely impacts bodily health, reduces quality of life, and increases mortality, but also decreases economic productivity")

Now, if the point you're trying to make is "we could solve world hunger", then absolutely the answer is yes, humans produce more than enough grain to feed everyone in the world, and we have the money to transport it everywhere, even assist with cooking fuel. But because of all the categories you think don't apply, and markets, and economics, we are not fixing it. We are choosing to let people starve.

They aren't just amazingly efficient in converting calories to protein, they're great at eating things without much other (agricultural) value to us. They eat the invasive spotted lantern fly!

Actually, the last time I looked into it, if you grow 2 acres of corn and 1 acre of soy, and feed it to chickens, you get out a similar number of calories (and more protein?) as 3 acres of soy.

Soy is pretty good, but corn is insane.

Legumes and soy in particular is a pretty common allergy... it's nearly impossible to get sufficient protein without meat if you have a legume allergy.

The impact of non-natural feeds on the overall nutrition profile for chickens and pork are larger than with ruminant animals. Chickens have been bred and changed a lot through environmental manipulation to grow much faster than in nature.

There are a few breeds of cows that are producing more muscle mass than most, they've gotten quite a bit larger through breeding as well, though the difference in time to maturation doesn't come close to what we've done with chickens... I'm not sure it's for the better though.

It absolutely is and in some ways we've only just started! Although we definitely shouldn't move fast and break things with living animals and our food supply;)

This is the kind of proposal that might fly well when it comes to the discourse over meat. People say “but we could be growing other crops instead of feed for cows”. Well yes, but you need protein in the diet. You can’t grow potatoes and veggies and expect people to survive only on that. Then there’s the question of land utilization. Historically cattle was raised for meat and dairy where agriculture was more difficult as compared to grazing cows, sheep, goats etc. The modern corn, soybean and alpha alpha farms may be able to grow other crops, but would they be able to support the crops that are needed in nutrition? Chicken and other more efficient substitutions may be the answer here.

> EAT-Lancet healthy reference diet

I am unable to find this diet. It's likely referring to something called Planetary Health Diet [0]

[0] https://eatforum.org/eat-lancet/the-planetary-health-diet/

On the other hand I read chicken is much worse than beef in terms of animal suffering. But that's much more dependent on the producer than the energy calculation and climate impact I guess.

It’s really, really not. Crop land per capita has been going down for decades despite richer diets, and all the biofuels and livestock feed [1]. Let’s not forget that advanced drugs to stop people from overeating the abundant food are a $60 billion and rapidly growing market.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cropland-per-person-over-...

I think it's important to a point, to be pedantic. But yes, global food production is well over the hurdle of production volume to "feed everyone", even for highly redundant crop yields. The remaining challenge is purely logistical and of course combating unchecked profit motive that's become malignant.

Exactly. Beef could be sustainable if it was done on a much smaller scale. But everybody wants beef, so we feed it enormous amounts of corn.

I think a vast majority of the beef we eat is grainfed unless you're buying the super hip, small-scale, expensive stuff

you type like using land from semi-deserts isn't destroyed for meat production...

you need to plant, fertilize and apply pesticides to maintain grass! or do you think grass with sometimes 60% of protein per gram grows out of nowhere? or that the global grain production, which more than 85% goes into feeding livestock that it's sometimes 20 times less efficient to produce the same quantity of protein, can't be distributed to the population?

I honestly can't tell what conclusion you want us to draw? The vast majority of cows raise for agriculture are not raised in the ways you describe. Beef is the leading cause of deforestation in the rainforest!

commercial beef cows eat grain not grass...

its in the paper....and some of us on this site grew up working for commercial beef ranchers.....for instance me!

Indeed my cattle mostly eat weeds, and eat things my chickens can't really eat. I don't feed either of them mass-produced crops, which actually also have ecological consequences in terms of huge amounts of petrochemicals needed both to fuel tractors and combines and to keep fertilising, topsoil losses, the amount of herbicides and pesticides sprayed, and so on.

Don't forget that cattle agriculture can make rainforests into wastelands.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802...

> If the market demands more chicken over beef, producers are perfectly capable of making a switch.

Depends on local laws. In Canada, you cannot simply switch to chicken. It is supply managed.

Exactly. A major problem with the usefulness of these studies (many of which make it into major journals) is that they seldom account for the fact that a lot of animal feed and human food sources do not compete with each other. For example, cattle are fed processed corn stocks and leaves after the cobs are removed. Corn stalks and leaves would otherwise rot if not consumed by livestock. Cows do not compete with humans for this calorie source.

What's the matter, honey? You've barely touched your corn in canola oil.

Depends how the farming is done....

https://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_fight_desertif...

I'm starting to see goat herds used a lot for wildfire brush abatement for large business properties on steep hillsides (not sure if I've seen an individual residential lot goat-abated but maybe it happens too). Normally hard and dangerous work for people with power tools, but the goats seem happy and in their element.

then your next step is to cite research from the guy who used to hunt elephants in Africa and it's the heirs of a multi-million livestock industry, doing TED talks about the topic meanwhile no independent or state funded research except their organization could replicate the findings over the decades?

This is a really big shocker to most people, especially in America. We see these big huge farmlands with rows and rows of corn. We hear the propaganda that farmers are the backbone of this nation and we can't live without them. Songs sing in our heads, "amber waves of grain, from sea to shining sea". People get a warm and fuzzy feeling. Country music psyop perpetuates this. Meanwhile a substantial portion (as noted here) is garbage. It's genetically modified crap from a fortune 100 company that requires fertilizer and herbicide from the same fortune 100 company and any seeds harvested contractually cannot be re-used so the grower needs to re-buy every year. And it's not for human consumption! A lot of it isn't even for animal consumption, it's for ethanol or other uses. Whole situation just kinda cracks me up.

A large amount of beef is mostly grass fed and finished on a grain feed lot the last month of life.

And they are very likely right.

<looks out of the window>

Yup, that's grass they're eating.

Most cows don't eat grass like a wandering herd. Most cows eat stuff we grow on farms that could grow stuff we can eat instead.

https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2024/december/ers-data-...

and

https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/corn-and-other-feed-gr...

Let me surface a more direct article: https://insideanimalag.org/land-use-for-animal-ag/#:~:text=1...

Of the total land area of the contiguous 48 states, ~45% is used for animal ag. This includes: Land for grazing livestock at ~35%. Land for crops going specifically to animal feed at ~9%. Animal ag farmsteads at <1%.[1-3]

Cattle feed is more than grass

To add to that, it is environmentally destructive and cruel.

Yes let me eat 5.7kg of broccoli per day instead of 500g of beef to meet my protein macros

Yes, it'S more efficient to eat vegans, it tastes nearly the same but silences the people that want to tell you what you do have to eat.

> hay in the the winter

Here in the UK, we use silage because the weather is a bit too variable to trust with letting hay dry out. It feels like it's probably more energy-dense and has more nutrition in it, you certainly don't need to feed as much.

Other things that work well are sugar beet (grows well as part of a cycle of crop rotation, clears weeds pretty well) and all that barley left over from brewing beer and making whisky.

Even soya-based cattle feed is made from the tough cellulosey bits that humans can't eat. If you want to try, I'm sure I can get you some - but maybe have something on hand for the inevitable constipation because it is all fibre.

> My nutritionist tells me that recovering this quickly would have probably been just about impossible for a vegetarian or vegan, without having an iron infusion done.

"probably been just about impossible" doesn't mean "impossible", it more likely means changing your eating habits to a point where you'd have to be really conscious and careful of what you eat iron-wise unlike someone without Celiacs (vegan or not) or someone who likes and can afford beef and can eat as much of it as they want.

There are lentils, beans, tofu, dark leafy greens and other sources of iron. There are iron-fortified foods. IIRC there are other considerations that might prevent careless or food-addicted people from getting enough iron like vitamin C to help with the iron absorption or not eating foods that decrease it.

There are plenty of vegans with Celiacs who manage their iron adequately. But even if you're one of those cases where iron needs to be supplemented, even IV - why not? If you disregard all the arguments against beef or animal products in general it's easy to make the argument that beef would be the best solution.

This reads like appeal to authority (the nutritionist) but a lot of nutritionists take the easy road ("just eat beef") or aren't good at all (haven't kept up with research). That's true of the majority of doctors and the majority of programmers (something people here will be able to relate to in case they haven't realized how useless most doctors are). I've been in and out of hospitals for several relatives for years and have heard doctors tell me outright falsehoods that show they have a only basic understanding of something. That makes sense since those doctors must know about so much more than the patient (thousands of diseases, lots of scientific knowledge about biology) but with a depth-first search into a topic you can spot how most of them have either stopped reading new studies or have lost their motivation to explore all option or have just stopped caring for providing the best kind of care. I hope people here don't have to go through what I have. That was a bit of a tangent, but I already wrote it so I'll keep it as a mini-rant.

> Beef is kind of an important thing in our diets, that's all. Now that I'm back to a more normal level I'll go back to eating less of it, but I am now very conscious how important red meat is in a rounded diet.

That's not really true. I'm sure you could ask vegans or vegetarians or Hindus or anyone who doesn't eat beef but has Celiacs and you'd get a whole bunch of options for managing it. Sure, you'll find ignorant people who think eating fruits all the time is enough but that's the same kind of carelessness that leads to non-vegans eating the standard Western diet all the time or doing other basic mistakes.

The same is true for almost everything. Almost nothing is "an important thing in our diets". People live without nuts or fruits or vegetables or legumes or meat or eggs or dairy (not all at once, of course, although I wouldn't be surprised if someone managed to avoid all these) and are able to manage pretty much any disease other groups of people can manage.

> calories are only part of the picture when it comes to food

True, people should care about the macros and micros. But with the internet it's trivial to do so both wrt learning what does what and how much is needed, and to track how much one eats from each.

Another alternative take : calories don't exist, food don't contain "calories", we can't isolate a system to count calories in and out. It's mostly believing something because society claims others supposedly serious people think think they exist.

Soybeans do pretty well a lot more efficiently. Not perfect, naturally, but close, and other stuff can cover gaps.

Obviously not all land is good for crops, but a lot of land used for animals or animal feed could be used for crops.

Cows are sometimes fed human-consumable calories (eg corn).

Other crops that humans can digest can be produced on land currently used for grass.

Other animal species that eat grass require fewer feed cal per calorie produced.

The grass most cows eat also need to be planted. The point of this post is that we could be planting stuff we can eat so you don't have to 'pay' the conversion cost.

90% of the feed they get is not for human consumption. But the rest that feed is for human consumption. And that human-edible feed makes up 75% of all US cropland. Most of our crops are grown just to feed cows. Meaning the majority of the grain we produce is going to grow a steak, when it could be used to feed many more humans than a steak will.