"Livestock use 83% of the world's farmland and give back just 18% of our calories."
There it is. The killer stat, lifted off the infographic, courtesy of Poore and Nemecek's enormous 2018 study in Science: nearly 38,700 farms across 119 countries. Damning. Wildly inefficient. Somebody fetch the cow a P45.
One small question before sentencing. Where is that 83% of land?
It's grass. Worldwide, around two-thirds of all farmland isn't cropland at all; it's pasture and rough grazing. Fell, moor, steppe, marsh, scrub.
Marginal land, to use the term of art. Too steep, thin, wet, or cold to grow a single thing a human can chew.
In Britain, about 65% of farmland is good for grass and little else. You are welcome to plant lentils on a Cumbrian hillside. You will then watch them sit there, baffled, and die.
What that land does grow is cellulose, the most abundant biomass on Earth and a substance your gut regards as scaffolding. You cannot eat it. Nor can any pig, chicken, or vegan.
A ruminant can. That is the entire trick. She walks across the inedible two-thirds of the world's farmland and turns it into milk and meat.
So the cow isn't squatting on prime arable while the nation starves; she's working the land that grows precisely one crop, grass, which she eats, which is the whole point of her.
Calling that inefficient is like calling a fishing boat inefficient for its poor performance on the motorway.
Then there's the calorie sleight of hand, which is somehow the dafter half.
Yes, beef is a modest share of calories. So is a glass of cooking oil. You can get calories from a spoon of sugar. Calories are the easy part.
The hard part is everything else the steak is carrying. On DIAAS, the actual measure of protein quality, beef scores about 1.0 to 1.1, with milk and eggs a shade higher.
Wheat limps in around 0.45. Almonds manage 0.40. The FAO won't let a protein scoring under 0.75 make a quality claim at all, which quietly disqualifies most of the plant kingdom.
Then there's B12, of which plants contain essentially none, plus heme iron and zinc in a form your body can actually be bothered to absorb.
Ranking food by raw calories and declaring the steak a failure is like ranking a library by how well the books burn.
By that measure, petrol is the finest meal in Britain.
What the Netflix documentary needs you to believe a cow is:
- A methane factory with a vendetta
- Personally melting a glacier right now
- Sinking water like a frat lad
- Bulldozing the Amazon between mouthfuls
- Mugging children for their grain
- A coronary wrapped in leather
- A mastermind that can't open a gate
- Smug, and unforgivably so
What a cow is actually up to out there:
- Chewing grass you physically cannot
- Drinking rain, handing most straight back
- Farming a hillside no tractor survives
- Muck-spreading the field for free
- Breathing out last August's carbon
- Six months of food off one animal
- Leaving the soil richer than it found it
- Unaware it's been cast as the villain
The cow has been framed.
The bloke who made the documentary flew there to do it.
A Titillating Alphabet
Bet you've never seen the alphabet presented quite like this, have you?
I'm curious, can you guess which lady will be featured for each letter? Let me know in the comments how many you guessed correctly, and which was your favourite.
#rule34#AIart