Yes and no. Animal feed is made from a variety of products, much of which is the leftovers from other agricultural uses. Lots of this is never intended for human consumption, but for a variety of non-food uses anyway.
On the flipside, cattle are very frequently grazed on land that would be expensive to intensively farm. It doesn’t take a very irregular landscape before it becomes difficult to employ the mechanical tools that make farming so productive. It’s also much more reasonable to hold animals on small or strangely-shaped plots instead of trying to farm them.
I also noticed this map which suggests that feed is not as important as grazing.
And… on the flip side “corn fed beef” is a selling point, used extensively in advertising to basically say “our meat is better”.
There are differences between corn fed and grass fed beef in texture and flavor. Personally, I enjoy both but in the US most of it is corn-fed, at least at the end of the animal’s life.
Not only do both soya and gluten represent allegens in a not insignificant proportion of the population, gluten is not a complete protein (does not have all of the essential amino acids) and while soya is technically a complete protein it doesn’t really have the right balance of proteins to be a complete source by itself. The bioavailabilty of protein from processed soya is also somewhat questionable. Protein from animal sources, on the other hand, is almost definitionally complete and is readily bioavailable, and are also highly efficient in terms of protein delivery to plate.
Both beef and pork are inefficient and highly polluting forms of dietary protein. (Aside from the solid/liquid waste factor, they both produce copious amounts of methane, a greenhouse gas which is 25 times a significant as carbon dioxide in terms of global average temperature influence even though it breaks down relatively quickly in the atmosphere.) No cereal or true pulse except soya is a complete protein (quinoa is not a true cereal, and global cultivation could not provide suffiicent protein or caloric content to replace animal proteins). Currently, the major sources of proteins for Americans are processed meet products (i.e. “finely textured beef” e.g. pink slime) and processed and whole chicken. Chicken is at least a reasonably efficient protein source, but the challenge in all mammalian and avian cultivation for food is the proclivity to serve as a host and reservoir for disease which can both travel through the herd/flock when cultivated in high density and make a cross-species jump to humans. We are constantly on the cusp of a potential regional epizoetic owning to how we cultivate food animals and the limited means to prevent disease transmission. The US hasn’t experienced an outbreak of hoof-and-mouth disease in nearly a century (Hud aside) but if it did–and many epidemiologists warn that it is only a matter of time–we could lose entire herds of tens of thousands. The same is true of foreign sources of beef or pork, except that we may not have prior notice and could have a global pandemic on our hands. The same is true if signs of disease like variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (a.k.a. Mad Cow disease) were found in US herds, which is something the beef industry has been fighting screening over for decades.
Insects, on the other hand, are evolved to grow in dense, colony-like structures. They seem largely immune to catastrophic viral epidemics for reasons not fully understood, and the cross-species transmission of viruses evolved in insect populations to humans or other mammals is rare (although blood-eating insects can serve as vectors for such viruses and other parasites). Insects and other arthropods are very efficient protein sources. In fact, we consume other arthropods with gusto; lobster, prawns/shrimp, and crawfish are all basically aquatic versions of insects that we eat essentially whole (after tearing them out of their exoskeletons). Although most insects are not as accessible as a nice barbequed shrimp, it is not a large leap to go from shrimp salad to termite risotto. A hundred years ago, lobster were considered good for nothing but fertilizer and abalone was peasant food; now they’ve become so popular they’ve been almost catastrophically overharvested.
Except that free-ranging of cattle, while probably the best method to raise them, is very labor intensive. Virtually all cattle produced for meat consumption (other than the paltry amount specifically produced for the all-organic crowd) are grown in feedlots, provided a diet of proteinized cornmeal (which is the remains of their predecessors ground up and sanitized), and essentially force fed to grow to maturity as quickly as possible using accelerator hormones. If we actually had to produce enough beef to feed the world its requisite protein diet, each person would have a physical footprint of several square kilometers and a carbon footprint that would probably rival all of the coal currently being burned for electical power production. The vast majority of the world’s population doesn’t eat beef on a daily basis because we just can’t afford it.
Insects and other arthropods are a valuable source of protein with the least environmental impact. In fact, for long term human space missions and indefinite habitation, crawfish and insects are pretty much the only viable source of fresh protein. (While proteins in controlled storage break down more slowly than lipids, they can’t survive indefinitely and will be degraded by cosmic radiation, so there will be a need to carry sources of protein production to ensure optimium nutrition for missions extending over several years.) Given the degradation in fish stocks and fishery habitats over the last few decades, we might as well accept that much of the world, including the United States and Europe, is going to have to at least supplement protein needs with insects. The major food production companies are already investigating how to market insects to the industrial world. And frankly, insects are no worse than slimy, bacteria-ridden chicken or fish. It’s just a matter of persepctive and acclimatization. If we can sell it as “astronaut food”, just like those repulsive ‘Dippin’ Dots’ then it’s an easy sell.
The corn that cows eat could be eaten by people but in the US people and cows eat different varieties of corn. The varieties eaten by people are harder to grow because of pests, their yields are lower per acre, they are more expensive to transport, they need to be eaten much quicker, and they are much more difficult to store.
Bottom line is that cows don’t need to eat corn. They live quite well on grasses and the like.
The acreage that grows feed corn can be devoted to food crops for people, or that “feed corn” can be used for other purposes than feeding cows which means acreage currently devoted to producing corn for industry could be reduced if we stopped needlessly feeding grains to cattle.
Then there’s the problem of cattle waste, feed lots, and other aspects of the whole industry that are damaging.
The way cattle is grown for meat in the west is wasteful and ecologically damaging.
And the reason for the glut of corn is purely political. No one with presidential aspirations wants to piss off Iowa. So we artificially make corn cheap with subsidies and we need to find uses for it like HFCS instead of sugar or honey and ethanol.
I think you severely underestimate out ability to feed ourselves and our cows. I don’t see this happening anytime in my grandchildren’s, or their grandchildren’s, lifetime.
As an American farmer I can tell you meat (beef and pork) is not going anywhere or going to be priced out of existence. If that was true I’d be getting way more money for my beef but lately prices have fallen. Tofu, which is soybeans, is also a viable protein source and soybean prices have also fallen.
No, we wont be eating bugs anytime soon unless its some sort of fad food item.
