Yeah I’m not vegan but this feels like a real ‘perfect is the enemy of better’ thing.
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https://www.google.ca/search?q=calories+vs+kcal
Just 75 calories. The two terms can be confusing.
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up here in the Great White North if we all went vegan, it would mean trucking or flying every ounce of food we eat at least 1000 or 2000 miles for 7 1/2 months of the year. i always buy local when i can and i eat red meat rarely. however, the carbon footprint of veganism for everybody here and in the northern half of the U.S. would be gargantuan.
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Hi Peter Singer! Um, THAT Peter Singer?
(Thanks either way.)
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You get that about 60% of our species’ calories consumed as food are grass seeds, right? Wheat, rye, banana, plantain, millet, maize, rice, sorghum… these are all grasses.
Yes I realize that makes us canaries, gastronomically speaking. 
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Better karma, lower blood pressure, thinner wasteline, better hard-ons, easier better smelling poops, more energy, smaller environmental impact. I still eat a little meat, despite when I look at it rationally practically everything points to a plant based diet
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Don’t forget crickets, the best ratio of all!
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Trying to get up the nerve. Might need to raise my own!
Your graph does not account for non-feed sources of energy in for example, aquatic environments. Emergy is the basic physics of energy transformation. Theromodynamic efficiency is difficult to hand-wave around.
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I used to experiment a lot with diet - I was vegetarian, then vegan, then freegan (even started eating roadkill), then I started trying to get into Fukuoka-style do-nothing farming - but I kinda just ended up in a hopeless place. I just don’t see diet as a viable terrain on which to attack the structures I want to destroy. Veganism (like recycling) can give the impression that if we convince enough people to modify their behavior in a certain way, we can . . . well I don’t really know what the goal is exactly. I don’t mean to sound like a Bookchinite - we all reproduce this world daily, and the spell that binds us here is in some ways very fragile - but a deeper critique of the foundations of industry is vital here.
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Okay, so what better actions are you now taking toward that end, now that you’ve rejected less destructive forms of eating?
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I guess it depends on how one thinks about means, ends, and context. Diet-wise, I’m still mainly plant-based and I try to live on the excesses of capitalism. In a larger context I’m trying to figure out how to support some kind of infrastructure. It doesn’t have much to do with veganism, but briefly I think things like social centers, prisoner support, and child care, as well as things like libraries, publishers, and regular publications are very important.
Just wait until your corpse starts rotting.
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That must be why I can’t seem to lose any weight.
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I admit that I’m not really an expert. Still I find this statement hard to believe. As the main crop in my home country (don’t know the exact percentages for the whole country , but near where my parents live it’s about 50% of the farmland) is corn to feed the cows. The other half if grazing land. Other parts of the country specialize more in grain for human consumption, so 50% is probably high. But if it wouldn’t be cost effective I’d expect 0%.
I can only speak for my part of the US. It could certainly work differently in other places. We also have “corn fed Beef”, but that usually means corn in some form being fed as a “finishing diet” or a supplement to forage. But even then, it is a very small percentage (less than one) of the cow’s total weight. Or that is the USDA recommendation. Damaged corn can be used for this.
We give our cows a small amount of “sweet feed” every day. It is grain based, but is primarily about nutritional supplements. It is sweetened with molasses, and they like it a lot. It serves to train them to come when called. But it is tiny amounts, and probably not a measurable percentage of their total feed, which is different grasses.
Maybe a corn person could add useful info to the conversation. I know they also sell “deer corn” as well, but I do not know if that is purpose grown, or just a byproduct of human corn production.
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People eating less is a better solution to a wider variety of problems.
“Deer corn” is just yellow field corn packaged for small purchases(40lb bags), primarily sold to deer hunters or wildlife feeding nature enthusiasts as a bait. When a bushel of corn goes for $3.60 (56 lbs) and a bag of deer corn goes for $6+, it is a pretty sweet markup.
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