The Last Drops of Mexico City

Re:The Last Drops of Mexico City by fakedang on Thursday March 20, 2025 @07:23PM (#43430183)

You're comparing whole oranges with orange slices. When comparing vegan food with animal protein, bother to take into account the entire package rather than one part. Animals are actually a much more energy intensive source of nutrition, and excellent for efficiency in terms of calories delivered. Our bodies process more nutrients from animal protein, while deriving nutrition from grains is a more recent evolution for us. You could easily feed entire villages with a couple of cows (as is done even today in many parts of the world). And this isn't including their value as milk producers and fertilizer generators.

On the other hand, almonds are a very niche crop, grown for a select few types of customers, but the sheer concentration of their agriculture in California - that too by a single farming billionaire family, the Resnicks - has caused the situation to become dire to such an extent never seen before in any other place.

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Re:The Last Drops of Mexico City by hombre_fatal on Friday March 21, 2025 @01:39AM (#43432134)

<2% of input calories become beef calories. <4% of input protein becomes beef protein. Animal food products require an eye-watering amount more land than plant food products, even milk.

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

It is always more efficient to grow and eat plant protein directly like tofu. And even if it were true that you absorb fewer nutrients from something like tofu, then aren't you lucky, you get to eat more food.

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Re:The Last Drops of Mexico City by AngryData on Friday March 21, 2025 @01:51AM (#43432194)

While you are correct, you also have to consider the fact that cows are fed alfalfa, which is a crop that requires no fertilizer or pesticides and actually produces excess nitrogen fertilizer, which otherwise must be produced from natural gas. It also takes very little physical labor to harvest and store grasses and alfalfa compared to human food sources.

The only downside to alfalfa and feeding cows with it is the water usage, but for large parts of the country that aren't California and get decent rainfall, growing alfalfa takes no irrigation. You could maybe also consider the land area needed for it, but US cropland utilization has been dropping for decade after decade and isn't really a concern.

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Re:The Last Drops of Mexico City by aziaziazi on Friday March 21, 2025 @07:09AM (#43434242)

I eat alfalfa too, and sell some in my shop. But neither me or the cows eat only that: we like to diversify our intake to stay healthy and (global or local) logistic bring us a variety of other food/nutrients.

Sure some cows eat more alfalfa than me but most of them never taste a bit of that and only knows corn, soy and friends.

Some other superplants in the soy/quinoa category to consider: buckwheat and lupinus. Yummy.

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