Syndication of Vegetarian Energy Saving Calculation
Awhile ago I made a comment on nathanlounge's blog where I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation demonstrating something I intuitively knew. Since then I've wanted to find the reference a few times, and I got sick of digging through the archives of someone else's blog looking for an entry titled "Food" from late 2009.
Originally posted 2009.8.25:(with minor edits)
I never went to England, but I heard in London a basic lunch will run you like 6 pounds or so. In Ontario, a pint of beer in a pub is $4-$5 in general. Ordering a pizza to your residence in Tokyo is $30-$40. And there are still restaurants in London, pubs in Ontario, and pizza delivery services in Tokyo that get business. I don't dine at American-styled fast food much here (Japan), but it's probably on the order of 2-3 times the cost as in the US.
I'm not opposed to genetic engineering in general. I also hate Monsanto and so on. I'd be with you for not patenting genes or music and extend it to software as well.
In terms of the cost of production of food, you seem to miss the main point of at least my primary opposition to hardcore farmed meat-eating: inefficiency. Go one step up the food chain and you drop an order of magnitude in food output. Some people give the counter argument that grazing land is not generally arable land, but this could easily be changed in a matter of years with proper agricultural practices (many instances in India, for example, where land was made useless by bad farming practices and re-vitalized by non-nimrods). So if you took all the consumption of meat from farm animals and replaced it with non-meat, you get something like a factor of 10 more available caloric content. Googling up some random statistics I quote that the world average is 432 meat-calories per capita, and China is above average. Assuming most people live in low income countries (this will under-estimate the total effect) and quoting 2100 calories per day, for every person's meat production that is converted to non-meat consumption allocates the total calories for 1.9 people per day*. In other words, convert all world meat consumption into non-meat consuption, and you can support present-day per capita calorie intake in a world that has 12.4 billion people. Minus distribution considerations, this solves all global food problems. Since I used the average meat consumption per capita (where the average might not be the most relevant statistical value) and I used the lowest food consumption average, I assume this will make up for any discrepancies in things like distribution and arability.* (432 * 9 = 3888) / 2100 = 1.85, where I multiply by 9 for the factor of 10 gained in efficiency, and I use 10-1=9 so I can supplement the calorie intake of the person I took the meat away from. There might be some legitimate opposition to my argument based on "naturally harvested" animals, but the environmental devastation is another huge problem that I'm not even considering here, which is alleviated by this. And the total number of world calories on, say, Michigan deer hunting or something (an example of a natural meat population that isn't in danger) is likely negligible. Besides, I make the most extreme case of replace all meat consumption, and even a 50% conversion gets you about 9 million people the world can support with current diets.Nathan's basic response was: I fear you'll have to contend with the opposition that meat is delicious. There's not a lot of ways around that.I then found an error in my calculation:
So first, I should say that I came back online just to post an error in my calculation.
I took one person's meat consumption, gave them back the caloric content, and then figured out how many people I could feed with the resulting energy. So when I then re-calculate sustained world popluation, it is 1.85 + 1 = 2.85 as a factor I need to multiply by current global popuation. The plus one is because I already gave back each average person supplemental calories before I calculated how many people the resulting energy feeds.
So actually, it's 19.1 billion people you can support at current food-energy consumption rates.
And you're not arguing with me, but I throw out a few more caveats. I took the "low income country" calories by assuming 2 things. The first is that most people are poor. The second is assuming a non-linear meat-consumption scaling; that is, if I go to a rich country and increase calorie consumption, a higher percent of the average diet will be from meat. Glancing at the color map on meat consumption, this basic assumption appears valid.
So yeah, this is a "back of the envelope" calculation, and the end value of 19.1 billion is only a ballpark estimate. But I think for demonstration purposes, I don't make any assumptions which are grossly inaccurate, and the basic point that you could easily support double (or better) the world's population by this means is a valid conclusion to draw, since none of the confounding factors give reason to retract the assessment of the data.
I get a little annoyed personally that the "meat is tasty" argument is so compelling to so many people, since I have a lot of logically sound arguments for why veganism/vegetarianism ought to be preferred, although I don't disagree that it's a likely reason my theory won't come into practice. It's basically the problem of selfishness. Personally, this mentality of sustainability is a reason I don't eat meat, which kind of makes me think I'm a better person than a lot of other people since I'm willing to alter my own habits for the greater good. Maybe I'm not, but I am making the effort, in any case.
And for America as the most influential country, that depends on the influence. Politically China and India aren't as big of players. But they've each got aroud 20% of the world's population. So, for example, if Americans double their meat consumption, the global averages don't shift too much, particularly since America has more available farming land to compensate. If Chinese doubled their meat consumption to 1,000 calories per capita, that would have serious windfall effects I believe. In that way, I don't think America is the most influential in this discussion, but maybe it's because our own main points are rather different.Some additional points I will make today that would have been off-topic for the original thread that initiated this work.
Basically, I assume that people who would argue with me will mainly be motivated by disliking my conclusions rather than anything about my method and approach to the problem, and I will say that at the outset this is basically a totally biased way to argue. You might counter that I've made these points based on a conclusion I wanted to reach ("eating meat is bad") but that is in fact false, and I decided eating meat was bad *after* careful consideration of the relevant inputs, as I did used to eat meat!
In any case, having been a vegetarian/vegan/low meat consumer for 9 years now, I will say that of all the times I ever discussed the matter with meat eaters (most often at their own inquiries rather than some rhetorical moral authoritarian attitude on my behalf), there was only one person ever who made relevant claims, and another who at least debated the matter with me, if only coming to entirely erroneous conclusions and making false assumptions.
The shame in the whole matter, actually, is that most people I've discussed this with are like "but we are not trying to argue with you" because, in other words which are my own and less flattering, "we are too simple minded to be burdened by a complex thought to decide how we ought to act, and we just prefer to be animalistic in our approach to life." These are arguments perspectives that either say "meat is tasty" or that "we evolved to eat meat, QED." The former is just ridiculous, and while people often call me out via ad absurdum, I don't think it's absurd at all to say that I was evolved to procreate and so I'm going to rape whatever women I feel like, or if I found out that eating other humans was tasty, this is a good enough justification for cannibalism after murder. A meat eater sees it as absurd because, much more often than not, they refuse to process a complex thought (or refuse to equate killing a human with killing an animal, in other words a highly speciesist approach to life where we are inherently better than all other lifeforms on this planet), and merely want to use so-called reasoning to justify a conclusion they have already reached, which again, is entirely faulty logic. A hypothesis should not arbitrarily sought to be justified by subjective interpretation of the relevant data. Besides, perhaps a less "absurd" counterpoint to omnivorous evolution is actually one of my primary reasoning for concluding not to eat meat, because it isn't necessary for our survival. Of course many things in life are not necessary to survival, but I highly doubt that meat eating is that enhancive to one's daily experience to enjoy life; some people are so averse to avoid a complex thought that they must ask "what do you eat" as if it's so difficult to imagine non-meat products one might get a balanced diet from. When I reply with lists of things I eat, again, much more often than not, people have either 1) Never heard of these things 2) Never eaten them 3) Rarely eat them. So from this point, people are not even sampling the alternatives of greatly tasty food by which one can have a very pleasurable eating experience, not at the expense of eating animals. In other words, the logic is perfectly circular: 1) Assume eating meat is tastier than everything else 2) Conclude eating meat is tasty.
A friend of mine made the only relevant counter-points I've ever heard, one of which is addressed above, and the other of which was not relevant to address under the original topic. The first was conversion of land, which, as I argue, with proper practices, and in fact known cases in India where destroyed farmland was reclaimed, we can imagine this is not a problem. Not only that, but even if the land was *not* used for farming at all, there is land that is being used for farming that is feeding the livestock. Since I prove that we can support about triple the world's population if people don't eat meat, then certainly with the present population we don't need to convert cattle grazing land into wheat and soy fields in order to stop feeding corn to chickens and instead feed it to people. The other point he made was a matter of implementation, in that I urge people to "stop now" and by Kant's categorical imperative (which I invoke myself for discussions of this matter), if everyone did what I do right now, then there would be not only a lot of wasted food that's already been produced, but lots of livestock we now have no solution for but ought to ethically feed, and also many people in the meat industry that would lose their jobs, which clearly I ought not favor in an ethics argument. However, as long as I don't stipulate that these things must be done immediately, but that we have a gradual global change from meat consumption to non-meat consumption, then I can't see how any of these things remain relevant. And in fact, as far as the energy usage arguments as above go, things like hunting deer is fine environmentally, if nothing else, because humans have eradicated all the natural predators of deer in most areas in America, and so they become over-populated and either starve or get killed by motor vehicles that run on highways and roadways through their natural habitats.
So suppose you somehow manage a feat of intellect never before accomplished by any human known to me, and manage in any reasonable way to refute my above claims on energy saving. That's merely one bloody reason I have for not eating meat, and you're not going to come out of the forest to find yourself in a nice clearing, but traverse from the forest into a thick jungle which your logic will, in all probability, never prove superior to mine, and you will be back to the only case of "meat is tasty" and being an ethical, selfish prick.
As a brief glimpse at a couple of those ideas, consider things like how it's healthier to eat significantly less meat than is per capita consumed in the US and Canada. I don't argue that it's impossible for meat consumption to be part of a healthy diet, but the type and amount should be greatly reduced.
And what about how bad your shit stinks and constipation. Go stop eating meat for a month and tell me the difference. Maybe you don't care because you leave the bathroom rank, but some others of us have the unfortunate experience to enter after yours truly, and it's rather a point of common courtesy not to eat meat from this point of view.
You might also argue that, say, with fishing we are not feeding the fish, and so the arguments of energy savings do not apply. Firstly, this would be relevant only after you converted away from refusing to eat all farmed meat products, because otherwise you are making arguments you don't want to apply to your own lifestyle, but want to use to prove me wrong as an imaginary example. But so let's say you are convinced by my arguments on energy use reduction and stop eating all farmed meat. Now look at the business of fishing and see how it's devastating ecosystems all over the world. (Let's say just two examples: blue fin tuna in the Mediterranean and shark fin soup.) So then you say, fine you won't eat farmed meat products, and you won't eat any sea creatures that are commercially caught in ways that devastate the environment, but you still want to get out the shotgun to shoot deer in the face and catch your own fish in the local river (if it's not too polluted to eat them without risking a health hazard to yourself.) In that case, I will agree that your meat eating is not unethical on the point of energy consumption. So there, I've already shown you how you can eat meat and abide by my first point. Of course, if you go deer hunting and use a gun, pheromones, and devices to emit proper animal sounds, I'll tell you you're a two time loser who doesn't even like a fair fight, and go shoot it with nothing but a bow and arrow and street clothes, or, better still, chase the fucker down and brawl with it until you break its neck. Supposedly, this is how some natives to the area that is now Mexico used to hunt deer. Okay, yeah, that's pretty honorable. You are allowed to eat the salmon you catch jumping out of the water like a grizzly bear and eat the deer you chase down and brawl to death. Happy hunting, goatface.
Originally posted 2009.8.25:(with minor edits)
I never went to England, but I heard in London a basic lunch will run you like 6 pounds or so. In Ontario, a pint of beer in a pub is $4-$5 in general. Ordering a pizza to your residence in Tokyo is $30-$40. And there are still restaurants in London, pubs in Ontario, and pizza delivery services in Tokyo that get business. I don't dine at American-styled fast food much here (Japan), but it's probably on the order of 2-3 times the cost as in the US.
I'm not opposed to genetic engineering in general. I also hate Monsanto and so on. I'd be with you for not patenting genes or music and extend it to software as well.
In terms of the cost of production of food, you seem to miss the main point of at least my primary opposition to hardcore farmed meat-eating: inefficiency. Go one step up the food chain and you drop an order of magnitude in food output. Some people give the counter argument that grazing land is not generally arable land, but this could easily be changed in a matter of years with proper agricultural practices (many instances in India, for example, where land was made useless by bad farming practices and re-vitalized by non-nimrods). So if you took all the consumption of meat from farm animals and replaced it with non-meat, you get something like a factor of 10 more available caloric content. Googling up some random statistics I quote that the world average is 432 meat-calories per capita, and China is above average. Assuming most people live in low income countries (this will under-estimate the total effect) and quoting 2100 calories per day, for every person's meat production that is converted to non-meat consumption allocates the total calories for 1.9 people per day*. In other words, convert all world meat consumption into non-meat consuption, and you can support present-day per capita calorie intake in a world that has 12.4 billion people. Minus distribution considerations, this solves all global food problems. Since I used the average meat consumption per capita (where the average might not be the most relevant statistical value) and I used the lowest food consumption average, I assume this will make up for any discrepancies in things like distribution and arability.* (432 * 9 = 3888) / 2100 = 1.85, where I multiply by 9 for the factor of 10 gained in efficiency, and I use 10-1=9 so I can supplement the calorie intake of the person I took the meat away from. There might be some legitimate opposition to my argument based on "naturally harvested" animals, but the environmental devastation is another huge problem that I'm not even considering here, which is alleviated by this. And the total number of world calories on, say, Michigan deer hunting or something (an example of a natural meat population that isn't in danger) is likely negligible. Besides, I make the most extreme case of replace all meat consumption, and even a 50% conversion gets you about 9 million people the world can support with current diets.Nathan's basic response was: I fear you'll have to contend with the opposition that meat is delicious. There's not a lot of ways around that.I then found an error in my calculation:
So first, I should say that I came back online just to post an error in my calculation.
I took one person's meat consumption, gave them back the caloric content, and then figured out how many people I could feed with the resulting energy. So when I then re-calculate sustained world popluation, it is 1.85 + 1 = 2.85 as a factor I need to multiply by current global popuation. The plus one is because I already gave back each average person supplemental calories before I calculated how many people the resulting energy feeds.
So actually, it's 19.1 billion people you can support at current food-energy consumption rates.
And you're not arguing with me, but I throw out a few more caveats. I took the "low income country" calories by assuming 2 things. The first is that most people are poor. The second is assuming a non-linear meat-consumption scaling; that is, if I go to a rich country and increase calorie consumption, a higher percent of the average diet will be from meat. Glancing at the color map on meat consumption, this basic assumption appears valid.
So yeah, this is a "back of the envelope" calculation, and the end value of 19.1 billion is only a ballpark estimate. But I think for demonstration purposes, I don't make any assumptions which are grossly inaccurate, and the basic point that you could easily support double (or better) the world's population by this means is a valid conclusion to draw, since none of the confounding factors give reason to retract the assessment of the data.
I get a little annoyed personally that the "meat is tasty" argument is so compelling to so many people, since I have a lot of logically sound arguments for why veganism/vegetarianism ought to be preferred, although I don't disagree that it's a likely reason my theory won't come into practice. It's basically the problem of selfishness. Personally, this mentality of sustainability is a reason I don't eat meat, which kind of makes me think I'm a better person than a lot of other people since I'm willing to alter my own habits for the greater good. Maybe I'm not, but I am making the effort, in any case.
And for America as the most influential country, that depends on the influence. Politically China and India aren't as big of players. But they've each got aroud 20% of the world's population. So, for example, if Americans double their meat consumption, the global averages don't shift too much, particularly since America has more available farming land to compensate. If Chinese doubled their meat consumption to 1,000 calories per capita, that would have serious windfall effects I believe. In that way, I don't think America is the most influential in this discussion, but maybe it's because our own main points are rather different.Some additional points I will make today that would have been off-topic for the original thread that initiated this work.
Basically, I assume that people who would argue with me will mainly be motivated by disliking my conclusions rather than anything about my method and approach to the problem, and I will say that at the outset this is basically a totally biased way to argue. You might counter that I've made these points based on a conclusion I wanted to reach ("eating meat is bad") but that is in fact false, and I decided eating meat was bad *after* careful consideration of the relevant inputs, as I did used to eat meat!
In any case, having been a vegetarian/vegan/low meat consumer for 9 years now, I will say that of all the times I ever discussed the matter with meat eaters (most often at their own inquiries rather than some rhetorical moral authoritarian attitude on my behalf), there was only one person ever who made relevant claims, and another who at least debated the matter with me, if only coming to entirely erroneous conclusions and making false assumptions.
The shame in the whole matter, actually, is that most people I've discussed this with are like "but we are not trying to argue with you" because, in other words which are my own and less flattering, "we are too simple minded to be burdened by a complex thought to decide how we ought to act, and we just prefer to be animalistic in our approach to life." These are arguments perspectives that either say "meat is tasty" or that "we evolved to eat meat, QED." The former is just ridiculous, and while people often call me out via ad absurdum, I don't think it's absurd at all to say that I was evolved to procreate and so I'm going to rape whatever women I feel like, or if I found out that eating other humans was tasty, this is a good enough justification for cannibalism after murder. A meat eater sees it as absurd because, much more often than not, they refuse to process a complex thought (or refuse to equate killing a human with killing an animal, in other words a highly speciesist approach to life where we are inherently better than all other lifeforms on this planet), and merely want to use so-called reasoning to justify a conclusion they have already reached, which again, is entirely faulty logic. A hypothesis should not arbitrarily sought to be justified by subjective interpretation of the relevant data. Besides, perhaps a less "absurd" counterpoint to omnivorous evolution is actually one of my primary reasoning for concluding not to eat meat, because it isn't necessary for our survival. Of course many things in life are not necessary to survival, but I highly doubt that meat eating is that enhancive to one's daily experience to enjoy life; some people are so averse to avoid a complex thought that they must ask "what do you eat" as if it's so difficult to imagine non-meat products one might get a balanced diet from. When I reply with lists of things I eat, again, much more often than not, people have either 1) Never heard of these things 2) Never eaten them 3) Rarely eat them. So from this point, people are not even sampling the alternatives of greatly tasty food by which one can have a very pleasurable eating experience, not at the expense of eating animals. In other words, the logic is perfectly circular: 1) Assume eating meat is tastier than everything else 2) Conclude eating meat is tasty.
A friend of mine made the only relevant counter-points I've ever heard, one of which is addressed above, and the other of which was not relevant to address under the original topic. The first was conversion of land, which, as I argue, with proper practices, and in fact known cases in India where destroyed farmland was reclaimed, we can imagine this is not a problem. Not only that, but even if the land was *not* used for farming at all, there is land that is being used for farming that is feeding the livestock. Since I prove that we can support about triple the world's population if people don't eat meat, then certainly with the present population we don't need to convert cattle grazing land into wheat and soy fields in order to stop feeding corn to chickens and instead feed it to people. The other point he made was a matter of implementation, in that I urge people to "stop now" and by Kant's categorical imperative (which I invoke myself for discussions of this matter), if everyone did what I do right now, then there would be not only a lot of wasted food that's already been produced, but lots of livestock we now have no solution for but ought to ethically feed, and also many people in the meat industry that would lose their jobs, which clearly I ought not favor in an ethics argument. However, as long as I don't stipulate that these things must be done immediately, but that we have a gradual global change from meat consumption to non-meat consumption, then I can't see how any of these things remain relevant. And in fact, as far as the energy usage arguments as above go, things like hunting deer is fine environmentally, if nothing else, because humans have eradicated all the natural predators of deer in most areas in America, and so they become over-populated and either starve or get killed by motor vehicles that run on highways and roadways through their natural habitats.
So suppose you somehow manage a feat of intellect never before accomplished by any human known to me, and manage in any reasonable way to refute my above claims on energy saving. That's merely one bloody reason I have for not eating meat, and you're not going to come out of the forest to find yourself in a nice clearing, but traverse from the forest into a thick jungle which your logic will, in all probability, never prove superior to mine, and you will be back to the only case of "meat is tasty" and being an ethical, selfish prick.
As a brief glimpse at a couple of those ideas, consider things like how it's healthier to eat significantly less meat than is per capita consumed in the US and Canada. I don't argue that it's impossible for meat consumption to be part of a healthy diet, but the type and amount should be greatly reduced.
And what about how bad your shit stinks and constipation. Go stop eating meat for a month and tell me the difference. Maybe you don't care because you leave the bathroom rank, but some others of us have the unfortunate experience to enter after yours truly, and it's rather a point of common courtesy not to eat meat from this point of view.
You might also argue that, say, with fishing we are not feeding the fish, and so the arguments of energy savings do not apply. Firstly, this would be relevant only after you converted away from refusing to eat all farmed meat products, because otherwise you are making arguments you don't want to apply to your own lifestyle, but want to use to prove me wrong as an imaginary example. But so let's say you are convinced by my arguments on energy use reduction and stop eating all farmed meat. Now look at the business of fishing and see how it's devastating ecosystems all over the world. (Let's say just two examples: blue fin tuna in the Mediterranean and shark fin soup.) So then you say, fine you won't eat farmed meat products, and you won't eat any sea creatures that are commercially caught in ways that devastate the environment, but you still want to get out the shotgun to shoot deer in the face and catch your own fish in the local river (if it's not too polluted to eat them without risking a health hazard to yourself.) In that case, I will agree that your meat eating is not unethical on the point of energy consumption. So there, I've already shown you how you can eat meat and abide by my first point. Of course, if you go deer hunting and use a gun, pheromones, and devices to emit proper animal sounds, I'll tell you you're a two time loser who doesn't even like a fair fight, and go shoot it with nothing but a bow and arrow and street clothes, or, better still, chase the fucker down and brawl with it until you break its neck. Supposedly, this is how some natives to the area that is now Mexico used to hunt deer. Okay, yeah, that's pretty honorable. You are allowed to eat the salmon you catch jumping out of the water like a grizzly bear and eat the deer you chase down and brawl to death. Happy hunting, goatface.