On Feb 26, 10:42 am, CodonAUG <elsbe...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Humans are caught up on the whole 'natural' > unnatural thing. Its a
> logical fallacy and I can't get other people to stop using it. I have
> heard biology students and general people all react negatively to the
> idea of GM crops and even when I explain that less people will starve
> and we'll be healthier with it they insist its wrong.
There are a lot of myths/misunderstandings that I'd like to see
cleared up too;
1. The food chain isn't as cut and dry as Mega portrays it. People
tend to eat primary consumers (cows, pigs, and chickens) rather than
secondary consumers (lions and tigers and bears) and while 1 kg of cow
needing 100 kg of wheat seems exorbitantly expensive, you're talking
about 25-50 kg of wheat/kg of cow a year, depending on how quickly you
'harvest' the cow. It varies widely, but one cow per acre is a pretty
good rule of thumb. Moreover, long before fermentation and IC engines,
farmers were using livestock to convert the 'inedible' parts of wheat
and soybeans into mechanical energy and usable goods, pushing down the
'cost' of consuming the cow and raising the 'cost' of producing wheat
and soybeans without a cow. I wouldn't pretend that beef can be
reliably produced en masse as cheaply as soy, but saying it takes 10
tons of wheat for humans to survive on 1 kg of lion is biased to the
point of being disingenuous.
2. Soy isn't "uniquely complete". Buckwheat, Oats, Quinoa, Spirulina
and several other algaes are all 'complete' vegetable-source proteins.
Beans and rice make a complete protein even if consumed in separate
meals. Oats aren't touted as a 'complete protein' next to soy because
you'd have to ~1.2 g of oats to get the same amount of lysine as 1 g
of soy (big deal). See the next point.
3. 'Complete protein' is a loose description of an niche idea. There
are few absolutely incomplete protein sources and the term 'complete'
doesn't address other nutrients or energy transduction as a whole.
That is, if you picked a random fertile 25 acres of land and gave one
farmer 15 acres and said he could only grow/consume soy and gave
another 10 and said grow anything he liked, the soy-only farmer will
die while the farmer with 10 acres is going to have a cow, orange
trees or strawberries, a wife, maybe some kids, and a silo full of
grain or a barn full of cane. The "open" farmer will be trading his
strawberries with the soy farmer so that he can get soy oil to run his
tractor and the soy farmer can avoid getting scurvy. Soy is about 1/3
the efficiency of other crops at collecting energy and, depending on
the part of the world, just as much if not more troublesome to grow.
Lots of technology and energy is expended keeping soybean fields free
of grasses like wheat and corn that would naturally overrun them. On
top of that, soy contains about 3X the amount of water as other rice
or wheat so you expend more energy to either dry or ship and store
water when you consider soy as a nutrient source.
4. Meat and grain-based diets generate diseases that reflect excessive
consumption (it should be noted that this can only result from
excessive production). Replacing processed meats and grain with
processed soy and algae doesn't fix the consumption (or production)
problem. A twinkie made with soy flour, 'raw sugar', battered with
rice flour and fried in olive oil is no more healthy (is efficiency
even relevant?) than one made of wheat flour, sweetened with corn
syrup, battered with wheat flour, and fried in animal fat.
Again, not saying soy is a bad food. It's just not phenomenally more
efficient or nutritious than rice, wheat, or corn and switching/basing
our industrial food chain to it would have a minimal impact in health,
efficiency, or productivity.
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