[MrBill]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Battle_Scarred_Galactico', '[')b]The last vegan that argued with me that she hadn't eaten meat or drank milk or used animal products of any kind in 8-years, and never felt better, got bitten by a mosquito in Africa and died of malaria this year.


I agree 100% with your views on vegans, they always look tremedously unhealthy and have zero muscle, but wouldn't catching malaria in Africa finish off pretty much anyone. Its' not exactly a beacon of medical science out there.

[Battle_Scarred_Galactico]

but fish and animal protein have beneficial properties not available in plants.


Exactly. I consider fish to be probably the best single thing you can eat, I believe we evolved eating them, fantasic things. Why anyone would deliberatley cause themselves to be weakened is beyond me, but some seem to like doing it.

[TorrKing]

MrBill

Wild game and fish actually is very healthy to eat. It is only intensively bred, modern livestock that has a high percentage of saturated fats. The Inuits, whether they sustain off caribou or sea mammals, never had any hearth problems. In fact, they had very few problems at all. Among the Evenk reindeer herders of Siberia they eat nearly exclusively reindder and are practically never ill and have no deficiencies. One thing though: Both of these groups consume a lot raw meat and organs. Lots of minerals are washed out and vitamins destroyed by cooking. By eating enough raw meat, you don't need added salt or vitamin-C in you diet.

Again, that everyone is going to eat nearly only veggies is a total uthopy. People want meat, it is concentrated nutrition and very tasty. They will kill their neighbour to raise cattle on his land.

It may be possible for humans to live a modern, lazy life on vegetables only, without becoming deficient. But in a life where you have to work a lot physically, then that diet will not supply you with enough energy to sustain yourself in the long run. We have a very poor digestive system, we need easily accessible calories, such as meat.

[MrBill]

Totally agree about wild game, foul and fish. Much better than the farmed variety. But the reality is that we cannot harvest enough wild game to meet our needs.

Wild fish stocks are falling. Paying now CYP28 per kilo ($28/lbs.) for fresh fish in the restaurant, call it CYP14 per kilo at the fish market. Makes tuna fish in the can seem like a genuine bargain, but then again part of the decline in wild fish stocks is due to those commercial fishing boats harvesting young and immature fish before they can properly breed and produce more offspring.

Fish farming also has its own problems, but as is so often the case, it is 'the next best thing', which is why we switched from grassfed beef to feedlot beef because it was more efficient, not better, just cheaper to produce. This is one of the symptoms of resource depletion in general. Making do with inferior products due to scarcity and/or higher prices.

I am also not eating raw meat thanks. Maybe sushi, but not as a staple in my diet. Maybe jerky or smoked fish if it comes to that! ; - ) Cheers.

[kjmclark]

First, there could well be such a thing as peak grain. Any time a resource is being depleted faster than its replenishment rate, a production peak is possible. Recall that oil is also being replenished, at an extremely slow rate, from ancient sediments pushed down into the proper window for conversion to oil. That process has been occurring for eons and is still occurring today, but the replenishment rate from that process is far slower than human time frames, so a production peak is possible.

An analogous situation for grain is the soil resource. Luckily, acceptable quality soil can be replenished in human time frames, but it may well be that quality soils are being depleted at this time using current practices. In that case, as the soil quality declines, it becomes the limiting factor for food production and we could indeed end up with a "peak grain."

Consider too that we need a number of potentially limiting resources for food production: sunlight, adequate soil, NPK soil nutrients, adequate water, low salt content, proper growing conditions, other nutrients, cultivation, and plant quality. Of these, adequate water, NPK soil nutrients, low salt content, and proper growing conditions are also depletable and replenishable in human time frames. There are good arguments to be made that humans are depleting water resources faster than they can be replenished in many places, we can only maintain current productivity by constantly adding NPK fertilizers, salt loads are increasing in irrigated fields, and by altering the climate we may be damaging growing conditions. You need to look at the bigger system before making claims that food isn't something for which production could peak.

Next, what does the amount of food used to feed livestock have to do with this question? The problem noted was decreasing worldwide production. How that production is used has little or nothing to do with the total amount produced. We could certainly use more of the food produced each year to feed people if we fed less of it to livestock, but that doesn't change the amount that was produced. That's like saying that we could produce more oil if we used less oil to heat people's houses.

Finally, the vegan diet has nothing to do with susceptibility to disease. You can get all of your essential nutrients, in the proper quantities, from plants alone. Humans evolved as omnivores, so it's much easier (and I think more tasty) to get some of these nutrients concentrated in the flesh of animals, but there's no reason a vegan has to be unhealthy. There are more omnivore humans that are unhealthy, and probably a higher percentage, than vegans.

WRT Africa, birth rates in Africa are high, so that even though millions of Africans die from malaria and other diseases each year, more survive than die. Yes, Africans die of malaria as well, and your friend having been vegan had nothing to do with it. Notice too that many Africans carry the sickle-cell trait, which offers some immunity to the malaria parasite.

{thread moved from Current Energy News since it's not explicity related to energy by Shannymara}

[EnergyUnlimited]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('kjmclark', '
')WRT Africa, birth rates in Africa are high, so that even though millions of Africans die from malaria and other diseases each year, more survive than die. Yes, Africans die of malaria as well, and your friend having been vegan had nothing to do with it. Notice too that many Africans carry the sickle-cell trait, which offers some immunity to the malaria parasite.

[MrBill]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('EnergyUnlimited', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('kjmclark', '
')WRT Africa, birth rates in Africa are high, so that even though millions of Africans die from malaria and other diseases each year, more survive than die. Yes, Africans die of malaria as well, and your friend having been vegan had nothing to do with it. Notice too that many Africans carry the sickle-cell trait, which offers some immunity to the malaria parasite.

[max_power29]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Gideon', 'M')ax, I feel bad about your wife. I couldn't deal with it if my woman wasn't on board.

[max_power29]

Meat production is a moot point anyways because the rich people and their militaries will be using all the food for fuel soon.

[eastbay]

This is way too controversial for me. I'm staying out of this one.

(what do those silly meat eaters know anyhow.... shhhheesh)

[kjmclark]

"Of course, there is such a thing as peak grain. Theoretically, it would occur when every available arable acre on the planet was planted to grain and supplied with every nutrient and input available to grow it for one season... is this realistic? We could just as easily argue about how many Angels can dance on the end of a pin. But as we know the answer is six what would it bring?"

Using the same line of reasoning, peak oil shouldn't occur until we have sunk a pumpjack into every acre of land that has oil underneath it. That's not how peaking works. Think of the rich soils of the American Great Plains as the Ghawar of soil. Given enough rain, we could probably have grown grain there for centuries without fertilizers if we hadn't started ripping it up with tractors and plows. Now the original soil fertility is significantly less than what it was originally, and it would take a few centuries of prairie grasses growing there to put back the organic matter that was removed. Take away the irrigation from depleting aquifers and the artificial fertilizers and you'd end up with dust bowl, not crops.

So you can think of the artificial irrigation and the artifical fertilizers as a form of tertiary recovery for the soil. At some point, enough of that soil would have eroded away, and organic matter would have broken down, that you'd be left with only the original mineral content of the subhorizons. At that point, yields would be much lower than they were originally or at the "halfway" point, when you still had decent original soil fertility. However, we'll deplete the aquifers before that, and without that artificial water, we'll end up with poor production regardless of the remaining soil value.

Look at it this way. The original breadbasket of the world was the fertile crescent. It isn't very fertile today because the soil organic matter was essentially strip-mined for food production, much of the original soil eroded away due to farming practices, and irrigation salinated the soils. You could say that this region experienced peak grain production over 2000 years ago. In its time, it was the most productive food growing region in the world.

Those you who think that vegans are necessarily sickly people really need to do some reading on nutrition and vegan diets. For every vegan who dies from malnutrition, there are several thousand of us omnivores who are having heart attacks from clogged arteries. Most of the vegans I've known could run circles around me, and I can run circles around everyone I know but my wife, who does trail marathons and triathlons for fun (and usually places). Oh yeah, and she's a vegetarian (just dairy and eggs baked into things), though not a vegan.

[MrBill]

kjmclark
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'U')sing the same line of reasoning, peak oil shouldn't occur until we have sunk a pumpjack into every acre of land that has oil underneath it.

[kjmclark]

"Wrong, it is not the same line of reasoning because whereas oil is a finite resource for all intents, and peak is the point at which we have used up half of its existing supply whether you find that last barrel and extract it or not?"

You've utterly missed the point of timescales that I pointed out before. Never mind.

[MrBill]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('kjmclark', '"')Wrong, it is not the same line of reasoning because whereas oil is a finite resource for all intents, and peak is the point at which we have used up half of its existing supply whether you find that last barrel and extract it or not?"

You've utterly missed the point of timescales that I pointed out before. Never mind.

[rogerhb]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Gideon', 'P')eak grain, I agree, is a misuse. We could produce 10x more grain each year, every year, if we chose to. We don't.