Re:Tyson Foods takes out full-page ad: “The Supply Chain is ...
by carapace on Monday April 27, 2020 @10:30PM
(#23002712)
Wow! Thank you very much.
Re:Tyson Foods takes out full-page ad: “The Supply Chain is ...
by wahern on Tuesday April 28, 2020 @01:08PM
(#23009122)
I did a little more digging regarding water content. By weight dressed chicken is ~60-65% water, so not insubstantial. Dry feed is ~10% water. But even if we double FCR to offset the water weight we're still under 1 order of magnitude, at least for chicken and fish.[1] I think the point still stands. If we consider all the context, such as nutritional needs (can't simply replace all animal protein and fat with processed corn), maximization of diverse agricultural resources, industrial efficiency, relative inefficiencies of whole vegetables and fruits, etc, then some moderate amount of meat consumption is readily defensible.
[1] Using other metrics there's a lot of literature that defends beef production, but that doesn't make for good napkin math, and I'm somewhat skeptical of it, anyhow--much of it seems to be published by the beef industry, and if you pick your metric you can make anything look good. Nonetheless, beef production is pretty darned efficient as far as it goes.
Also, farmed animals aren't very picky about the look of their food. In some aspects industrial meat production permits us to make more efficient use of agricultural land in terms of providing calories and especially proteins for human consumption.
What's hidden in the FCR number is the energy required to process the feed stock to get those high FCRs. But a human consuming "whole foods" also needs more of that input for the same amount of useable calories. Flours and similarly processed foodstuffs require more energy than that required for the inputs to livestock. So in terms of energy use we're basically just looking at the fixed overhead of the animal conversion as captured by FCR, possibly offset by some efficiencies that would be absent in direct-to-human consumption.
TL;DR--modern industrial agriculture is crazy efficient. Beef isn't as horribly bad as we think (notwithstanding the methane problem), but consuming pork and, especially, chicken and farmed fish shouldn't be very guilt inducing, ceteris paribus.