| December 29, 2011 | 22
Different foods require different amounts of energy to produce. Meat is four times as demanding as grains are. If consumers would gravitate toward less intensive foods, energy use would drop. Reducing the enormous amount of food that is wasted would save energy as well. Check out the data and commentary below, expanding on "More Food, Less Energy" in the January 2012 issue of Scientific American.
Credit: Jen Christiansen, Source: University of Texas at Austin
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22 Comments
Add CommentThis is absolute nonsense because it makes huge assumptions that are based on abstractions of agribusiness.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSuppose you have a home in the country, with rocky soil such as one finds in New Hampshire. With virtually no expenditure of energy, you can raise chickens and harvest eggs. They can forage, eating bugs and scrub vegetation, and household food scraps. Now compare that with the huge energy expenditures necessary to dig up and remove the rocks, and/or truck in soil and manure, and cut down trees in order to plant grain. In such a case your list is 100% wrong. In fact there are many such environments including much of Mongolia, mountainous Peru, Arctic tundra, on and on. Articles like this are rigged to promote a vegetarian agenda but aren't based in reality or even a respect for the earth.
The assumptions are based on how the vast majority of people get their food, from the supermarket, which gets it's food from giant agribusiness.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisVery, very few people have chickens in the backyard and feed them table scraps anymore. Supermarket eggs come from giant industrial barns and use enough energy to power a small city.
This is nonsense in another respect. The comparison of energy input should be per unit energy output not per pound weight. The energy obtained from consuming a pound of nuts, for example, is much greater than from a pound of vegetables. The reduction in energy inputs when making a substitution will be much less than the chart would suggest.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@rickbb - If we are only talking about US, sure most people get their food from the supermarket. World-wide, you can't make such a blanket statement. I think janera has a good point. There are plenty of places where following such information indiscriminately would actually present more problems than it would solve. We do need to be careful what kind of assumptions we carry with us when we read (and write) stuff like this. Now, whether or not there's a vegetarian agenda, I don't know. I haven't read the entire article, just the summaries provided.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is unscientific to say that eggs are inefficient when in fact you're trying to say that agribusiness methods of producing eggs are inefficient. Virtually every ecologically sound and sustainable indigenous culture consumes meat, and they don't use agribusiness methods. Well-meaning persons citing "scientific" articles like this are quick to rush into such places and tell the natives that they should stop eating guinea pigs and plant wheat instead. This of course brings disaster, malnutrition and starvation to places that had been doing just fine, thank you. Read about the Irish Potato Famine to see what misery this type of effort can bring.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFor places where food or energy is scarce- grains may be the way to go.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFor us in the US- the problem isn't that food is scarce- we have lots of it- too much of it. It would be nice if it could be transported to those that need it- but that doesn't happen.
Grain may be more energy efficient- but it is also the basis of a less healthy diet- increased medical costs and other problems.
A switch to vegtables- and meats produced from eating "greens" instead of "grains" would be more expensive and more energy hungry. It would however be more healthy and better for our longevity.
It's a matter of money and energy vs health and happiness.
I'm not convinced that it is best to compare by weight (kg). Nutrinionally, the reason to eat meat is to get the proteins. Maybe you should make the comparison per gram of (essential) proteins.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is also sad that this comparison doesn't also show the difference between differently produced foods. Clearly, an animal that grew up on an extensive farm has practically used no non-renewable energy to grow. So there must be very large variations. Would be nice to know if products with those fancy 'green' labels actually do make a difference.
Gotta agree with some commenters, as presented, the graph is not as useful as it could be.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEnergy in, weight out? Why not avaiable energy out? As commenter @tonycolwell brings up, a pound of, say, rice, is a very different source of energy than a pound of nuts. Or a pound of meat or fish. Or a pound of eggs.
And what if you rearranged the graph to place the emphasis on food waste? At least they included that number, but it apparently plays no role in "grading" the food sources. What's the point of using half the energy if you throw out twice as much of the food produced?
"Articles like this are rigged to promote a vegetarian agenda but aren't based in reality or even a respect for the earth."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDirty, stinking hippie scientists! Of course, you're right, Janera. Let's draw our generalizations from backyard hobby farmers, as you suggest. Why bother ourselves with structured problems arising from industrialized farming, which provides 99 percent of the food for 99 percent of the readers of Scientific American?
If there were actually science in this article in "Scientific American," then we could use it to answer a question such as "Would the USA run more sustainably and efficiently with respect to energy if every household used 100 square feet to raise a some chickens in their back yard, or wheat?" Unfortunately the wrong information presented here will lead you to the wrong conclusion. In fact, the only conclusion that you could reasonably reach is that Agribusiness makes the world better and promotes the most responsible solutions to feeding the world, but nothing could be further from the truth. The path that is promoted by this is poisoning the Gulf of Mexico with pesticides, and has created a dead zone of about 7,000 square miles.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://serc.carleton.edu/microbelife/topics/deadzone/
It has led to genetically modified corn that feeds you pesticides with every chip you eat.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45807933/ns/business-retail/t/bugs-may-be-resistant-genetically-modified-corn/#.Tvy59lawVP8
And soybeans, one of the world's most important food crops, have been almost universally tainted by genetic modification genes placed there not to improve taste or yield, but to have the plants survive a dousing with the herbicide "Roundup."
http://www.ucsusa.org/food_and_agriculture/science_and_impacts/impacts_genetic_engineering/roundup-ready-soybeans.html
Unlike you, real scientists can recognize when the 99 percent are being fed a diet of garbage, and use carefully conducted and presented SCIENCE to find a way out of the morass.
Janera, Bravo to you. You are correct and right on target on so many levels. For the past three years I have been working on a project which is stand alone, 100 percent sustainable and energy efficient. It is an environmentally friendly group of specialty technologies, brought together to form a simple platform, designed help communities, mainly in third world and developing nations help themselves reduce poverty, hunger and disease through a cooperative effort at the local grass roots level with management support of a Humanitarian Foundation funded by a very wealthy individual who "just wants to help his people". He is putting his money where his mouth is, to the tune of 250 billion dollars, he is making it possible and we are helping his dream come true. When phase two has been completed the program will have created over 10,000 jobs, have provided training and education to many more in an effort provide a hand up instead of a hand out. In this program everyone profits. Our mission is to bring light and hope to the darkest corners of humanity.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisyou are right Janera. This is nonsense in another respect. The comparison of energy input should be per unit energy output not per pound weight.<a href="http://freehouseinteriordesignideas.com">interior design</a>. great
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisyes you are right. <a href="http://freehouseinteriordesignideas.com">interior design</a>
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis may appear to be absolute nonsense to some, but if you comp in the amount of WATER used to produce the above foods the results are more than scary. Water is already a scarce commodity and becoming more scarce in many cuntries including USA. We continue to eat as we do now at our peril. Soozzeeq
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes, and just as homegrown eggs require less energy than factory farmed eggs, grass-fed beef can be raised far more sustainably than grain-fed beef. Sustainable beef farming is low density, with pasture rotation, so that the animals and the environment remain healthy. Waste is fertilizer, naturally sequestered into the soil, without transport by energy-consuming equipment. The meat is healthier, and many of us find it tastier.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisUsing Wolfram Alpha I Calculated Btu/Cal and Btu/gram protein. I chose some common foods from each group and evenly divided 1 lb among them. So for grains there is 0.33 lb wheat + 0.33 lb corn + 0.33 lb oat. I'm not sure what dairy is so I split the group.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCal Protein Carb Fat
Grain (wheat, field corn, oat) 1261 38 262 12
Vegetable (carrot, celery, potato, lettuce, tomato) 160 5 35 1
Fruit (apple, orange, pear, banana) 279 3 73 1
Nuts (peanut, almond, pecan, walnut, pistachio) 2783 80 90 255
Dairy (milk, 2% fat) 277 15 22 9
Dairy (cheese) 1326 99 16 96
Meat (beef, pork, chicken, turkey, tuna, salmon) 821 109 4 37
Eggs 649 57 3 43
Btu/Cal Btu/g protein
Grain 4.5 150
Veg 72.5 2320
Fruit 45.5 4233
Nut 4.9 170
Milk 59.2 1093
Cheese 12.4 166
Animal 27.4 206
Egg 36.2 412
And apparently extra whitespace is cut out. :/
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisUnfortunately all this yadda yadda yadda misses the point. WATER is the most important need. Water is needed to grow any food consumed whether by animals or humans. Beef cattle drink water, they eat food which required water to grow. Energy and waste are also vital but without water NOTHING grows. Over population of our planet will be a joke as starvation will be the greatest problem and will keep numbers in check. Whichever way climate change goes our food resources will be imperilled unless we first of all find low energy methods of producing sufficient clean water.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAre legumes, the noble bean, source of half the protein in low-meat diets, grains, or did you just leave them out of the chart?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHow do we expect folks to take this seriously, when the info is Hal-baked and incomplete.
I tilt at inept presentation of crucial facts.
Beating The Drum of Popularism; Change what was learned for large population to reach older age: The most efficient answer will focus to absorption of nutrients. How to better use a food, so less quantity is used and more of the food does not go to waste. Sample: IGF1, found naturally in Milk & Honey helps with the absorption of amino acids. If, Billy takes a Colustrum capsule with his meat. The affect: Billy should eat less meat at dinner. Hence, less Cattle need to be raised to satisfy Billy's hunger. Or more Cattle can now be exported to satisfy the growing world population, with more people reaching older age. However, more research needs to be started on increasing the absorption of amino acids and a scale to measure absorption by.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMichael Webber need not go as far afield as Juehnde, Germany to find manure digestion fueling biogas electricity generation. Central Vermont Public Service, through a program called "Cow Power", has 6 dairy farms already online generating electricity for Vermont, and more to come. This program shows that such installations are feasable and economically viable (at least in New England, where electricity is expensive). These are large dairy farms by Vermont measure, but I suspect quite small compared to dairy farms elsewhere. I was surprised that Webber did not mention this succesful program in the article, as it is a source of pride for CVPS and Vermont. The web page is http://www.cvps.com/cowpower/Cow%20Power%20home.html.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisObservation would suggest that we waste nearly as much as we eat .. more efficient use of food could make us healthier and cheaper..
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this