I suspect that Gobi, Sahara or Mojave aren’t particularly good as carbon sinks go, yet they’re not very useful for herding either. Dry land isn’t composed exclusively of “packed-up-farms” and “bucollic, perfectly ecologically balanced forests”.
30% is a crap figure, we have farms in Australia that are the size of freaken countries with only a few thousand head of cattle. Some land is so marginal that growing anything on it would be nigh on impossible.
I found another estimate of 8.3kg C02/per kilo of cheese.
http://somethingspecialwi.com/documents/CarbonFootprintOfCheese-pages.pdf
I actually found several studies on this matter, but none of them seem to reference my blog. :dubious:
My pasteurized process cheese food weights 19 grams per slice which works out to .17 kg CO2 per slice of cheese. I not certain how much actual milk is involved in cheese ‘food’.
There is some interesting work by biologists trying to transplant genes from kangaroos to cattle and develop a non-flatulent cow.
Of course, chickens and turkeys are pretty efficient protein factories. I wonder if it would be easier to develop a dumber chicken, so people don’t get attached to them? How much actual brain does it take to eat and poop? I don’t how chickens compare to aquaculture farms. Maybe it would be easier to come up with a fish that tastes like chicken.
If it’s grazing land, presumably it grows grass. Allowing grass to grow is a lot better for the environment than letting cows eat it and belch methane. And there are other parts of the world where cattle farming is a serious threat to forests.
I wonder if this might be the major driving force behind private research. Bill Gates decides he wants a legal hippo-burger, so he throws a few million bucks at the problem.
And looking far ahead, I wonder if someday there will be vat-grown meats that really have no clear correspondence to animals. Your favorite meat will be a particular brand, perhaps a variety of that brand, and it’s name will be as arbitrary as a car model. I prefer a steak made from Kraft Harmongulous, but you prefer the General Mills Parfalintrask.
this kinda went under the radar, but it’s classic SD
I read an SF short story, probably while I was in high school, to this effect. The setting was a civil suit trial, one company against another, where the suing company had been hurt in market share because the sued company had come out with a new brand. The premise of the story was that people had forgotten where food naturally came from, and the trial lawyer had to tell the jury about “our primitive ancestors” food growing technology, introduce the concept of “meat” and where it came from, and finally the last line of the story was the lawyer introducing the jury to the word “cannibal”. I wish I could remember title and author. It would be perfect reading for this thread.
Logical population control tends to encounter problems like humans.
Assuming they’d need to. Spindle workers didn’t need to compete with power looms. The amount of food produced wasn’t reduced, so given an appropriate distributive system there’s no problem, right? Well, other than the starvation.
Grazing land with very poor soils, lots of rocks and large distances between towns, there are bigger issues in regards to hard hoofed animals and the degradation to soils but nothing will grow there of any commercial value, except kangaroos mmmm kangaroo steaks…
Yep, destroying rainforests for cattle is not a win win situation
Hey, I for one was pretty impressed. That takes some brains. Something few think chickens have much of as it is. Maybe they aren’t as dumb as we think they are, but few critters other than turkeys have people really believing that they are dumb enough to drown in the rain.
The Niply Elder, thank you.
That’s The Food of the Gods by Arthur C. Clarke, I think. The brand name of the food being (from memory) something like “Ambrosia Six”
My parents raised chickens when I was a kid and I’d say chickens have a lot more brains than they need to be food. I not clear about why they need more brains than a worm or a fish. We also should be able to come up with a featherless chicken. I figure feathers are just extra processing cost. I’m not sure the wings are cost effective also.
No way! I’m trying to cross them with an octopus.
You are an idiot, how dare you sully an interesting topic with a bad joke.