Wise use of resources by vegans: 10 times better?

[purpletigron]

From that regular fount of wisdom, the BBC Education for Schools programme, I have today learned about inefficiencies in the food chain (spot who didn't do biology at 'O' level :-) Apparently, the average efficiency in the natural food chain is 10% per step. That is to say, any given organism uses ~90% of the energy which it ingests on its own life processes, and stores ~10% in its body, available to predators.

This suggests that vegans are a base factor of ~10 more efficient in resource use for food than are omnivores, assuming that they directly eat the food which would have otherwise been used to feed animals which omnivores would then eat. Obviously, this doesn't take into account the plant-based food eaten by the omnivores, but also neglects any extra steps in the food chain, and the sustainability of the source of the resources which are used. Consider a vegan whose staple foods are grown locally, without agrochemicals (e.g. Organic) and with the minimum of mechanisation (less non-renewable fossil fuel use). This vegan will have a diet which is significantly more than a factor of 10 more resource efficient than an omnivore who bases their diet on animal products, which imported from around the world, grown with agrochemicals (which are often biproducts of the oil industry), and with the maximum of mechanisation (efficient in money at the moment, but not in energy).

(I'm 'thinking around' the subject of home-grown food, as I'm in my second year of doing allotment gardening).

Comments

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

Don't forget that many animals are fed on things we can't eat (grass) or can't eat without much processing (grain), grown on land not suitable for anything else (say sheep on hillfarms). And there's lots of fish protein from the largest foodchain in the world.

The small numbers of vegans presumably are at a disadvantage due to poor economies of scale, as are allotment gardeners when their time is taken into account.

Also do many vegans have to rely on pharacutically derived vitamin supplements. I'm sure you can get a balanced vegan diet, but it must be a lot of work. Paging (celestialweasel)

Going into more detail...

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

Grains can be eaten with only moderate processing, in cracked, rolled and sprouted forms e.g. pilafs, porridges etc. Domestic farmed animals eat a large fraction of their diet in foods that we can eat, such as soy and grains. Hillfarmland is highly suitable to other things ... such as their natural climate ecological state, of woodlands, which can be financially productive if that's what matters.

Not sure what you mean about fish protein - as I understand it, world fish stocks are dangerously overexploited.

Vegans eat a lot of the same foods that omnivores eat, so can benefit from the existing economies of scale e.g. in vegetable farming. Allotment gardeners do not consider the food which they produce as the only useful output from their work: you cannot make a direct comparison between a commercial farmer driving a tractor to scrape a living, and a passionate allotment leisure gardener picking the first strawberries of the season for their own enjoyment.

Even strict life-long vegans only absolutely require one supplement: vitamin B12. A well varied diet will supply everything else - and there is evidence that e.g. nuts and seeds are very important to an omnivorous diet, to supply fatty acids needed for healthy brain function; and e.g. kale is a considerably better source of calcium to to protect against osteoporosis than are dairy products.

(That isn't _literally_ a page to celestialweasel, is it? If it is, what's the LJ tag? :-)

Re: Going into more detail...

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

I don't understand your questiona about the LJ tag.

Re: Going into more detail...

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

I was making a geeky joke ... what's the difference between saying that you're paging another LJ user, and using LJ to actually page them?

Re: Going into more detail...

[overconvergent.livejournal.com]

I think that you may be mixing up "sustainable" and "vegan" - you don't have to be both. I'd add honey as a useful food to vicarage's list - bees convert pollen (fairly useless to humans) into honey - tasty and useful to us.

There seems to be a holy war amongst vegans as to whether honey is vegan or not, but either way it provides something in a fairly sustainable way.

***

I was under the impression that the world *could* feed itself - it's "only a distribution problem". Actually getting the food to where it's most needed is more difficult of course.

Re: Going into more detail...

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

Indeed - the question of whether it is exploitative of bees to take honey, and whether that is a problem, is not directly relevant to this question. That said, beekeeping takes skill. Also, pollen is useful to those of us who eat flowers, and as I understand, honey is effectively concentrated nectar.

More importantly, there is no "only" about equitable distribution of resources. Human beings will always have a tendency to take more than their fair share, as an insurance policy against future lean times - that is a vital survival instinct. I don't have any solution to that. But there is a chance that in learning to use resources more efficiently, we can make progress on increasing the access to resources of the most impoverished people.

Re: Going into more detail...

[overconvergent.livejournal.com]

People eat flowers?!? I guess that I learn something every day :) I wouldn't have thought that they had enough calories to be useful ... but I live and learn.

I wasn't thinking about distributing resources equally, but I seem to recall from somewhere like this that food *production* isn't the problem - massive improvements in food tech since the 1960s have meant that we have enough food for everyone, and that some nations (eg the USA) could increase food production by a lot if it was profitable to.

The difficulty is getting the food to people who need it - a drought-ridden African nation hasn't got the infrastructure to get food everywhere (rather than to the local warlord), and the rest of the world doesn't care enough to get the food there. When "getting the food there" would effectively mean having to fight a war against the current government of Godknowswhereistan to let the UN give food to the government's enemies, it's not surprising that there just isn't enough political will to do so.

Re: Going into more detail...

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

Even reasonably ordinary people eat flower buds ... capers ... and then there's nasturiums in salads, elderflower fritters, borage flowers on Pimms... it's not uncommon. Why would the calorie content of a food be the only criterion to decide whether something is edible? How about taste, texture, colour ... and micronutrients?

I would say at my current level of understanding that food tech has been a mixed blessing for the hungry - mainly because the industrialisation of food production can lead to greater inequity in distribution. Also, because food is most nutritious when eaten very fresh, what poor people really need is land rights, so that communities can grow their own food and avoid vitamin and other trace nutrient deficiencies at low cost, rather than e.g. having to pay more than they can afford for a high-tech GM fix.

War is the enemy of human rights, and much hunger is caused by political corruption. I agree. And food technology can't solve those problems.

Re: Going into more detail...

[purplecthulhu.livejournal.com]

A lot of the cattle land in Canada and the US is n ot useful for anything else, and was always poor grassland. They generally don't get high protein diet supplements, so are in fact using natural resources that are not really accessible to us in any other way. Before cattle, the land belonged to buffalo and caribou doing just the same thing.

Upland sheep farms in the UK have been such for so long that they have their own ecology established, with unique plant, bird and other populations, and not all of it can be forested - some of that land is above the tree line, and would be populated by hill sheep in its 'natural' state.