Talk About Diets

1. 2 Responses to “What are the energy requirements to produce meat for american diets as oppsed to vegitarian food sources?”

2. By Curt on Dec 8, 2009 | Reply

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   My sisters are vegan. The energy required has got to be more for vegitarians and vegans because all my sisters eat is veggie processed foods like the Morning Star brand stuff.

   They don’t just eat veggies. Meat on the other hand is only the electricity and heat required in slaughter houses.

   If you point is that carnivores require more energy for their food versus vegitarians, you’re probably going to be wrong!!

3. By maggie on Dec 10, 2009 | Reply

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   Great question!

   Some quotes on what it takes to make a single pound of beef - focusing on the energy used to make beef:

   GRAIN USED TO MAKE BEEF

   It takes sixteen pounds of grain to make the average pound of feed live beef. And virtually all the grain eaten in the United States is feed live beef; and in all modern industrialized countries too. Sixteen pounds of grain to make a pound of beef, that’s the feed conversion ratio. Well it only takes one pound of grain to make a pound of whole wheat bread or to prepare a pound of rice. We’re wasting the other fifteen pounds. It’s just basically going into manure which doesn’t get used as a fertilizer because that’s how the system has gone out of whack; it just becomes a pollutant in the water table. What happens when you eat lower on the food chain, you eat a more plant-based diet, you move in a vegetarian or vegan direction, you are in effect consuming far less resources, and therefore there is less water pollution, there is less air pollution, there is less soil erosion, there are fewer greenhouse gases involved.

   WATER USED TO MAKE BEEF

   To date, probably the most reliable and widely-accepted water estimate to produce a pound of beef is the figure of 2,500 gallons/pound. Newsweek once put it another way: the water that goes into a 1,000 pound steer would float a destroyer.

   If you gave up beef, you’d save over 300,000 gallons a year. A whole lot more than you could save by never showering.

   LAND USED TO MAKE BEEF (Emphasis on clearing rainforests)

   It takes a lot of rainforest land, water, and energy to make a fast-food hamburger. As a matter of fact, fifty-five square feet of rainforest is destroyed for every quarter pound hamburger that comes from a cleared rainforest. That’s the size of a small kitchen! Not only that, but since the soil in the rainforest does not contain many nutrients, after a few years of cattle ranching it becomes very difficult to grow anything on the land— even grass. What was once a beautiful, lush, living rainforest becomes a dry, desert-like wasteland. When this happens, even more rainforest is slashed and burned for cattle ranching.

   ENERGY USE TO MAKE BEEF/IMPACT ON PLANET

   Livestock are responsible for 18 per cent of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming, more than cars, planes and all other forms of transport put together.

   Burning fuel to produce fertiliser to grow feed, to produce meat and to transport it - and clearing vegetation for grazing - produces 9 per cent of all emissions of carbon dioxide, the most common greenhouse gas. And their wind and manure emit more than one third of emissions of another, methane, which warms the world 20 times faster than carbon dioxide.

   The fossil fuels and carbon emissions involved in farming, transporting, processing and distributing food is enormous, said Eshel. Also, because it takes 10 times as much energy to grow a pound of beef than to grow a pound of corn, it’s a lot more efficient for humans to eat the vegetables directly, when possible.

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