Saturated Fat Controversy

[FlatAssembler]

Why do you care about what other people eat?

Well, because slaughterhouses don't have glass walls, and there is a lot of propaganda out there preventing people from making informed decisions. And what people eat can cause a lot of unnecessary suffering.

And recieives a point by point rebuttal on sciencebasedmedicine.org.

If they are claiming that saturated fat doesn't cause heart disease, they are obviously going against mainstream science, so they are probably not worth listening to.

You mean like death being a food borne disease?

Many people do die of the diseases caused by improper diet.

Cattle wander the fields, sheep wander the mountains, free range chickens are ubiquitous and pigs are cleaner than humans.

Cows raised for milk are sometimes grass-fed. About a third of them, I think. That's because milk of grain-fed cows doesn't contain omega-3, and many people believe (without evidence) that omega-3s protect against heart disease.
Cows raised for meat are almost exclusively kept in factory farms, and so are chickens and pigs. I can't find any statistics on that, but I've never seen pigs let to graze near my town. On the pastures near my town, you can see sheep, horses, goats and cows, but you can't see pigs and chickens there. And I know where pigs are being kept, I've never actually been inside there, but it's very stinky even when you get just near that factory farm.

So go moan at the muslims and stop wasting my time.

The fact that people who manage slaughterhouses care more about meeting the halal standards than about animal welfare is rather telling. And it's not just the halal standards. Why are they suffocating the pigs with CO2, rather, than, for instance, beheading them (which nearly all neuroscientists agree would be painless)? Money, maybe?

And do you know why hamsters are useful in testing?

No, and I don't care about that any more than I care about the apologetics the Nazis were making for their useless medical experiments.

See, there is that zealotry again.

What do you mean by "zealotry"?

There are studies that show coffee causes cancer. There are studies that show coffee cures cancer.

Then we need to see which studies are better designed, or backed up by harder sciences.

All you are doing is cherry picking the studies you are told to pick by your "pope".

There is nothing like a pope in veganism.

Then cite them.

Here are a few of them:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ar...739190346Q
http://evidenceba.se/facts/31-milk-cause...rt-disease
I can link you to some more if you like. It's very frustrating search engines don't link you to the actual studies, but to pages that may or may not link to them, especially since I only have access to the slow and expensive cellular Internet right now, and the connection breaks quite often today for some reason. Optima ISP said they will fix my Internet today. Let's hope they will, it hasn't been working for months now.

So what?

Well, that strongly suggests those studies linking milk intake with heart disease are telling the truth.

Eat a fucking banana once in a while.

Well, that's not what people are being told to do. They are told cow's milk somehow provides enough of everything their body needs. If people believe that, they are going to make wrong dietary decisions which lead to heart disease.

No they require EVIDENCE. Science does not operate on the basis of faith unlike your vegan religion.

To a large degree, science operates on the basis of faith that those who are greater experts than you are interpreting the evidence right. The evidence is not always easy to interpret.

What I said was that I have no need of B12 supplements thanks to a balanced diet.

What do you mean by "balanced diet"? You mean one in which the proportions of the nutrients are similar to that of in human milk? Because I bet that you aren't eating a balanced diet then. In human milk, about 3% of the calories comes from protein. Almost everybody is eating too much protein these days.

Shame that is not what evolutionary biology is all about then.

Sure. But trying to use that part of evolutionary biology (guesses about what our ancestors were eating tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago) to contradict nutritional science is using a softer science to contradict a hard one.

If one were to uncritically accept youtube videos

Again, I don't accept what YouTubers have to say if it obviously contradicts mainstream science.

Sure, some gullible people will fall for them

OK, what is more gullible, to believe that your parents somehow got what is the best diet for humans right, or that Michael Greger, one of the most respected nutritionists of our time, got it right?

Right up to the point they try to shove it forcibly up my nose.

More like calling you out for what you say. Though making meat illegal probably makes more sense than making cars running on fossil fuels illegal, which many politicians propose.

Sure, whatever, but it has bugger all to do with veganism.

Veganism could probably lessen the issue, because people eating meat raises the prices of grain. We are producing around 2-3 times as much grain as we actually need because we are feeding animals we eat with grain. Eliminating those animals would cause a drop of the demand for grain, and thus would decrease the prices. It's simple supply-and-demand.

[FlatAssembler]

Another thing about veganism being a religion... Vegans often argue that carnism is a religion. For one thing, belief that eating meat is ethical and healthy makes people reject science on quite a few issues. Many anti-vegetarians reject the scientific consensus that animals we eat are sentient and conscious. And many anti-vegetarians reject the scientific consensus that saturated fat intake leads to heart disease. In fact, it makes some people, most notably Nina Teicholz, openly reject the entire nutritional science. Eating meat is a fertile ground for such beliefs, much like Christianity or Islam are for creationism.

[The Grand Nudger]

Im not going to wade into the nutrition aspect of this, but there are realities of agricultural production not taken into account in your opinions (and, widely, in the opinions so often espoused by vegans). We don't actually produce more grain than we need, for example. People are starving. Additionally, the majority of grain grown isn't fit for human consumption and the land it's grown on doesn't support production for human consumption. Nor, for that matter, is the land that we raise cattle on widely suitable for producing something else. There's a reason that cattle dominate the scrubland rather than the river valleys...and why you don't see blocks of tomato growing on pasture.

Not all fields and crops are created equal, lol.

As to the issue of domesticated animals and their prospect for life outside of that system...well.... Domesticated animals respond positively to what would be, in a natural environment, a predator. Ourselves, our dogs, etc. They've been bred and conditioned for affability and receptiveness, so that we can manage them more effectively and with less labor. All the barnyard animals in the world, set loose, would literally waddle right up to the plate.

Where they'll be eaten alive, asshole first. You can test this yourself if you have any livestock or pets. Stop caring for them. They'll either find another human benefactor, or they'll starve and/or be exterminated as pests. Best case scenario (and only because we already exterminated their natural predators..aside from ourselves, as pests).

This one, though, deserves special attention, even if it;s short and sweet.

Eliminating those animals would cause a drop of the demand for grain, and thus would decrease the prices. It's simple supply-and-demand.

Grain production isn't allowed to operate on a supply and demand basis. We learned long ago that fluctuations in the price of grain had miserable human consequences. If the price of grain drops..producers will switch to something else. So, institutionally, we create a floor and we operate a variety of crop insurance schemes (or what amounts to them).

All that eliminating animals that we eat would do, is create a greater number of starving people, while impoverishing the producers themselves.

Using the place I'm in as an example - the bluegrass. Right know, it's dominated by calving operations supported by a three crop rotation of soy, corn, and winter grains. If we nixed cattle......they'd go to burley tobacco. If they dropped that....hay. If they dropped that...real estate. We know this, because that's what people do when they get out of cattle. They don't auto-magically start making people food because it doesn't make economic sense any more than grain producers are going to start (or keep) producing grain if the price falls - and in production...that's a reality that can't be ignored.

Its a reality we're trying to change, in this region, specifically, with melon production...but were not there yet, and it's really only the bottom of their hills that will ever be productive in that sector. They still have to pay the note on the top of the hill.....

...and on that note, if we really wanted to eliminate the livestock (regardless of it being a terrible idea that would starve people and throw a wrench in all sorts of shit that people don't realize contain animal products...), all it would take is offering the producer the difference, in cash, between that livestock and whatever they switch too. That's how we get them to switch. Land grant institutions have programs and funds offered through Extension that persuade and compensate producers for changing crops to something of interest to researchers.

Recently, we've been turning landlocked cattle pasture into marine shrimp facilities..and a whole host of other aquacultural whatsits. Wrap your head around that, lol.

In sum, if you wanted to feed more people, the solution isn't killing the cows or reducing the amount of -anything- we eat currently produced..because, as noted..in fantasy utopia land we'd have our food situation handled already..but in reality we don't. It's offering producers greater incentives. Anything, really, even cattle. More fundamentally, it's offering non producers incentive to become producers, as a dwindling fraction of a percent of people are farmers and those farmers are uniformly about to die of old age...their kids were strongly encouraged to leave the farm, they receive something like 16 cents on the dollar for what they produce..and what they produce is intentionally kept at a low price so that consumers can afford it.

It's the best worst job in the world..and you pretty much have to love it to stick with it, because the land is worth more as a housing development than it is as a strawberry field. If you want a thorough explanation of the above and why the reality of production doesn't match that particular vegan talking point, look into agricultural land use classification and maps, here.

https://websoilsurvey.sc.egov.usda.gov/App/HomePage.htm

If you absorb the info on those maps you'll be able to understand why there are so many cattle, and why there are so many cattle in specific places - and it's not an issue that can be resolved by ideology because the productive capacity of any piece of this earth doesn't give two shits about how we feel..about eating meat. The majority of land in use, in the us and globally, isn't physically capable of supporting anything but livestock and feed grain. At least not in it's current state, and it's not like there are oodles of ameros floating around in redneckistan for the infrastructure and land improvements that would be required to change that.

[Abaddon_ire]

Why do you care about what other people eat?

Well, because slaughterhouses don't have glass walls, and there is a lot of propaganda out there preventing people from making informed decisions. And what people eat can cause a lot of unnecessary suffering.

Like veganism does? In fact veganism would appear to harm more animals as this paper shows.

https://fewd.univie.ac.at/fileadmin/user...Ethics.pdf

And recieives a point by point rebuttal on sciencebasedmedicine.org.

If they are claiming that saturated fat doesn't cause heart disease, they are obviously going against mainstream science, so they are probably not worth listening to.

If you are going to reject science based medicine, then you have a problem. Do you know what else rejects science? Religion. And thus we are back with more evidence that veganism is a religion.
Furthermore, the Inuit have nearly an exclusive meat diet out of necessity. Oddly this should give them an increased incidence of CVD, but it doesn't.

You mean like death being a food borne disease?

Many people do die of the diseases caused by improper diet.

So what? That is a matter of education. Or are you claiming that veganism is the only "proper" diet? Like how religions claim theirs is the only "proper" way to live?

Cattle wander the fields, sheep wander the mountains, free range chickens are ubiquitous and pigs are cleaner than humans.

Cows raised for milk are sometimes grass-fed. About a third of them, I think. That's because milk of grain-fed cows doesn't contain omega-3, and many people believe (without evidence) that omega-3s protect against heart disease.

They are 100% grass fed here.
Next.

Cows raised for meat are almost exclusively kept in factory farms, and so are chickens and pigs.

False.

I can't find any statistics on that, but I've never seen pigs let to graze near my town.

Pigs don't graze.

On the pastures near my town, you can see sheep, horses, goats and cows, but you can't see pigs and chickens there.

Chickens don't graze either.

And I know where pigs are being kept, I've never actually been inside there, but it's very stinky even when you get just near that factory farm.

Farming is by nature a rather smelly business. Even if the entire world went vegan, it would remain a rather smelly business.

So go moan at the muslims and stop wasting my time.

The fact that people who manage slaughterhouses care more about meeting the halal standards than about animal welfare is rather telling. And it's not just the halal standards. Why are they suffocating the pigs with CO2, rather, than, for instance, beheading them (which nearly all neuroscientists agree would be painless)? Money, maybe?

Once again, I simply don't care what superstitious nonsense muslims believe.

And do you know why hamsters are useful in testing?

No, and I don't care about that any more than I care about the apologetics the Nazis were making for their useless medical experiments.

Like a typical religonist, you simply don't care about the facts, only your vegan religion. And you Godwined the thread. How nice.

See, there is that zealotry again.

What do you mean by "zealotry"?

I mean you are so zealous for your religion that you reject facts and science. You have just demonstrated that BY YOUR OWN SCREED.

There are studies that show coffee causes cancer. There are studies that show coffee cures cancer.

Then we need to see which studies are better designed, or backed up by harder sciences.

Pointless. You have already told use and demonstrated that you don't care about science.

All you are doing is cherry picking the studies you are told to pick by your "pope".

There is nothing like a pope in veganism.

You sure treat your pal Dr. Greger like one even though he trots out egregiously false claims.

Then cite them.

Here are a few of them:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ar...739190346Q
http://evidenceba.se/facts/31-milk-cause...rt-disease
I can link you to some more if you like.

Those are age related You have to live a long time for any such effects to appear,

It's very frustrating search engines don't link you to the actual studies, but to pages that may or may not link to them,

A. Use a better search engine, and
B. Pay the subscription.

Nevertheless, your statement makes it clear that you have not yourself read the studies you cite. That tells me you are simply posting links you have been told support your view, but not having read them, have no idea if they really do.

especially since I only have access to the slow and expensive cellular Internet right now, and the connection breaks quite often today for some reason. Optima ISP said they will fix my Internet today. Let's hope they will, it hasn't been working for months now.

Not my problem.

So what?

Well, that strongly suggests those studies linking milk intake with heart disease are telling the truth.

Nope.

Conclusions: Milk consumption does appear to be strongly related to CHD death in communities where susceptible people live long enough.

From your citations. Did you not read that part?

Eat a fucking banana once in a while.

Well, that's not what people are being told to do. They are told cow's milk somehow provides enough of everything their body needs. If people believe that, they are going to make wrong dietary decisions which lead to heart disease.

If you are gullible enough to believe marketing pap, then that explains why you are a vegan.

No they require EVIDENCE. Science does not operate on the basis of faith unlike your vegan religion.

To a large degree, science operates on the basis of faith that those who are greater experts than you are interpreting the evidence right. The evidence is not always easy to interpret.

Do you know who else claims that science operates on faith? Young earth creationists. That alone is confirmation that you have a religion.

What I said was that I have no need of B12 supplements thanks to a balanced diet.

What do you mean by "balanced diet"? You mean one in which the proportions of the nutrients are similar to that of in human milk? Because I bet that you aren't eating a balanced diet then. In human milk, about 3% of the calories comes from protein. Almost everybody is eating too much protein these days.

Strawman. On what fucking planet did I ever suggest anything to do with human milk? What are you smoking or otherwise imbibing? 

And human milk? Wait, what? What the actual fuck?

Shame that is not what evolutionary biology is all about then.

Sure. But trying to use that part of evolutionary biology (guesses about what our ancestors were eating tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago) to contradict nutritional science is using a softer science to contradict a hard one.

Still haven't figured out that this is not what evolutionary biology is about, eh. There's a clue in the title.

If one were to uncritically accept youtube videos

Again, I don't accept what YouTubers have to say if it obviously contradicts mainstream science.

You have done nothing but contradict mainstream science.

Sure, some gullible people will fall for them

OK, what is more gullible, to believe that your parents somehow got what is the best diet for humans right, or that Michael Greger, one of the most respected nutritionists of our time, got it right?

False dichotomy. Is there any logical fallacy you will not deploy? And how exactly the fuck have you any clue what diet my parents provided for me? You don't. Admit it.

In fact, my parents provided the best table, all prepared from fresh produce, always tasty and nutritious. They are long since dead, but I continue to do so for my kids and furthermore to teach them how to do so for themselves. So kindly stop attempting to ram your wild assumptions down my throat. It won't wash, that dog don't hunt

Right up to the point they try to shove it forcibly up my nose.

More like calling you out for what you say. Though making meat illegal probably makes more sense than making cars running on fossil fuels illegal, which many politicians propose.

Do not conflate different issues. At least attempt to stay on target.

Sure, whatever, but it has bugger all to do with veganism.

Veganism could probably lessen the issue, because people eating meat raises the prices of grain. We are producing around 2-3 times as much grain as we actually need because we are feeding animals we eat with grain. Eliminating those animals would cause a drop of the demand for grain, and thus would decrease the prices. It's simple supply-and-demand.

False as demonstrated in the actually readable citation I provided you above which you probably will not read. Because it confounds your religion.

[FlatAssembler]

We don't actually produce more grain than we need, for example. People are starving.

Famines have little or nothing to do with our ability to produce food. In Venezuela, food production is record high now, yet people are starving. It's just epic economic mismanagement by incompetent politicians. Even during the Great Chinese Famine, the food production did decrease due to the poor weather and the Four Pests Policy, but only slightly. Over-reportings of the amounts of food people actually had, that's what played a major role there.

Additionally, the majority of grain grown isn't fit for human consumption and the land it's grown on doesn't support production for human consumption.

What makes you think that most of the grain that's produced isn't fit for human consumption? How can it be determined which grain is fit for humans and which isn't? Do you have some statistics that show that most of the grain that's fed to farmed animals isn't fit for humans?
My grandfather used to keep chickens, and the food he way buying for them was mostly grains of maize, apparently those same grains of maize that we cook and eat.
I realize it may sound unfair to ask for references for such claims, but you need to understand that the amount of effort needed to produce nonsense is way lower than the amount of effort needed to refute it.

why you don't see blocks of tomato growing on pasture.

Well, yes, some plants, such as tomatoes and lettuce, have special needs from the ground to grow successfully. But, if I am not mistaken, trefoil and pea have about the same needs, and wherever trefoil grows, pea can also be grown. And wheat and corn generally require even less nutrients and water to grow, except that they, unlike trefoil and pea, can't grow where the soil is very low in ammonia.

They've been bred and conditioned for affability and receptiveness

And we can't get out of that hole by digging.

Grain production isn't allowed to operate on a supply and demand basis.

As far as I know, nearly all economists are against subsidies and price controls, except perhaps in the cases of emergencies (most economists think price controls aren't useful even in emergencies, but it's not like you can't find an economist who would argue they are useful then).

In fact veganism would appear to harm more animals as this paper shows.

Yup, that tired old "Well, growing plants for food also causes deaths of some animals, such as mice." argument. Taken at the face value, it's true. However, you need to consider that there are basically two ways of growing cows for meat:
1. Feed them with grains, and kill about 5 times more mice than if you ate those plants directly.
2. Try to feed those cows with grass. And since grass is much less rich in nutrients cows need than grains are, it's going to need much more land. That means cutting down the forests, and again unintentionally killing countless animals.

If you are going to reject science based medicine, then you have a problem.

If they reject the mainstream science that saturated fat intake leads to heart disease (I haven't found them saying anything like that, but you seem to imply they say that.), then it's not science based, it's fringe theory based.

Furthermore, the Inuit have nearly an exclusive meat diet out of necessity. Oddly this should give them an increased incidence of CVD, but it doesn't.

Ah, this tired old Inuit argument. Do I even have to explain why that's wrong?
1. Inuits mostly eat fish, and meat from fish isn't as high in saturated fat as milk, eggs and meat from birds and mammals are.
2. The Inuits actually suffer from atherosclerosis more often than people in the US do. It's a myth that they have an exceptionally low rate of heart disease.

Among GOCADAN participants, the age-adjusted prevalence of carotid atherosclerosis exceeded that of U.S. black and white population-based samples.

3. As their diets get more westernized, the heart disease rates among Inuit population decreases, rather than increases.

Heart disease mortality for Alaska Native people declined 25% between 1979 and 2003.

If omega-3s in fish protect against heart disease, how is this possible? It looks like eating a lot of fish also increases your risk of getting heart disease, that saturated fat in fish increases your risk of heart disease more than omega-3 decreases it (if it decreases it at all).
4. Don't you think bringing up such hard-to-test claims (that Inuits have a low rate of heart disease) is a form of Gish-Gallop?

Or are you claiming that veganism is the only "proper" diet?

It's hard to tell. But you don't need to know the right answer to recognize a wrong one. A diet that includes a significant amount of meat, dairy and eggs will, in all likelihood, include a lot of saturated fat, it will include a lot more calcium than human body needs but a lot less Vitamin K than human body needs, and it will include a lot more protein than human body needs, possibly even more than it can take.

They are 100% grass fed here.

Where? And extraordinary claims require evidence.

Pigs don't graze.

Pigs can eat grass. Now, whether they can, like cows, get all the nutrients from grass by eating it all their waking hours, I don't know about that.

Chickens don't graze either.

Chickens can also eat grass. Again, I don't know if they can get all the nutrients they need from grass.

Farming is by nature a rather smelly business

I am not sure what you mean. I meant that the place that pigs are kept near my town is rather smelly, and, if it was clean, it wouldn't be smelly.

Once again, I simply don't care what superstitious nonsense muslims believe.

Unfortunately, beliefs inform actions and actions have consequences. The fact that they demand cows be slaughtered without stunning has horrible consequences. The fact that those who operate slaughterhouses apparently care about what Muslims believe more than they care about animal welfare also has horrible consequences. And the fact that they won't use a more effective stunning method for pigs than suffocating them with CO2 for some reason also has terrible consequences.

You sure treat your pal Dr. Greger like one even though he trots out egregiously false claims.

And those egregiously false claims are...

You have to live a long time for any such effects to appear,

Well, the same goes for, for example, smoking and cancer, right?

Not my problem.

OK, they fixed it.

Milk consumption does appear to be strongly related to CHD death in communities where susceptible people live long enough.

What do you think that means? Are you trying to say you probably aren't susceptible? How can you possibly know that? Or that you don't expect to live long? Why?

Do you know who else claims that science operates on faith? Young earth creationists. That alone is confirmation that you have a religion.

Affirming the Consequent Fallacy.

On what fucking planet did I ever suggest anything to do with human milk?

And what does "balanced diet" mean, if it doesn't mean that the proportion of nutrients in it is similar to that in human milk?

Still haven't figured out that this is not what evolutionary biology is about, eh. There's a clue in the title.

Do you agree with me that it can't tell us anything about nutrition?

You have done nothing but contradict mainstream science.

Where?

And how exactly the fuck have you any clue what diet my parents provided for me?

They told you eating meat and drinking milk was good, right?

[The Grand Nudger]

Famines have little or nothing to do with our ability to produce food. In Venezuela, food production is record high now, yet people are starving. It's just epic economic mismanagement by incompetent politicians. Even during the Great Chinese Famine, the food production did decrease due to the poor weather and the Four Pests Policy, but only slightly. Over-reportings of the amounts of food people actually had, that's what played a major role there.

Politicians don't control the flow of food (or..rather, the lack thereof)..they aren't wizards.  Private citizens do, making sound financial decisions..and those sound financial decisions often starve people.  I know that it might seem like this is an easy argument to rebut, but it isn't..since those private citizens could also starve if they made poor financial decisions.  We can hardly criticize a person for looking out for their own first on this topic of having something to eat.  

This is why it makes no sense to say we "produce enough grain" and letting it hang as an unqualified statement.  If the metric is eating, we don't produce enough grain until everyone is eating - full stop.  

In any competent plan, loss, mismanagement, and inefficiency are realities that have to be accounted for...not things we can wish away.

What makes you think that most of the grain that's produced isn't fit for human consumption? How can it be determined which grain is fit for humans and which isn't? Do you have some statistics that show that most of the grain that's fed to farmed animals isn't fit for humans?
My grandfather used to keep chickens, and the food he way buying for them was mostly grains of maize, apparently those same grains of maize that we cook and eat.
I realize it may sound unfair to ask for references for such claims, but you need to understand that the amount of effort needed to produce nonsense is way lower than the amount of effort needed to refute it.

"Those same grains of maize" are not actually the same grains of maize - there are numerous cultivars, some specifically bred as feed..but if your dad was feeding chickens canned corn then your dad was overpaying.  That would make your dads chickens pets, not livestock...and an drain on the system. Bit like a dog.

What makes me think things like this..is that I do it for a living and advocate for these issues on my own time and dime. Specifically, I'm looking to increase the amount of livestock we keep..and to position that industry in economically depressed areas - for the dual purposes of addressing rural poverty and so that we don't have to collapse our wild stock. Its just a side benefit/hustle that the methods available are greener and more productive than conventional ag.

Well, yes, some plants, such as tomatoes and lettuce, have special needs from the ground to grow successfully. But, if I am not mistaken, trefoil and pea have about the same needs, and wherever trefoil grows, pea can also be grown. And wheat and corn generally require even less nutrients and water to grow, except that they, unlike trefoil and pea, can't grow where the soil is very low in ammonia.

-ALL- crops have "special needs"...and different cultivars of the same crop have different needs, and different characteristics as far as their edibility.  Crops fit for human consumption have an immense irrigation requirement, in addition to safety measures not relevant to the production of feed not fit for human consumption.  All of this costs, and farmers aren't a rich demographic.  

And we can't get out of that hole by digging.

.......what hole?  The hole of breeding animals so that people don't starve? WTF?

As far as I know, nearly all economists are against subsidies and price controls, except perhaps in the cases of emergencies (most economists think price controls aren't useful even in emergencies, but it's not like you can't find an economist who would argue they are useful then).

Isn't that nice, economists are against price controls.  Well, to rebut, all humans are for eating.   I..personally, have the benefit of deferring to the for eating camp before I worry about the economist's commodity trading on grain.  OFC they're for instability, instability creates profit opportunities. I mean, ideally..the holy grail of alt ag, is to make those two motivations align, but were not even remotely near there yet, since the economic motivation is very literally the thing starving people. The system I'm using, for example, is hundreds of times more productive than a field.....but it costs about 1.6mil per acre as opposed to a couple grand. This immediately brings back what we opened with above. Productivity is moot in the face of many other realities of ag.

To be very clear, I think that your being aware of these issues is a good thing..but it's also evident that your awareness of these issues has been tainted by other, completely irrelevant and demonstrably untrue ideological commitments. If we're going to be serious about the issue of getting people fed, piggybacking that shit into the arena is counterproductive. Go, feed people if starving people bother you...stop bitching about the livestock required to feed them because some moonie fed you a line of bullshit. That's all I ask, lol.

[LastPoet]

Why do you care about what other people eat?

Well, because slaughterhouses don't have glass walls, and there is a lot of propaganda out there preventing people from making informed decisions. And what people eat can cause a lot of unnecessary suffering.

Well, I know the insides and out of the slaughterhouse i work in. I can tell you those pigs don't feel a thing. ISO 22000 has rules.

Can't speak for other slaughterhouses.

[The Grand Nudger]

Ironically, slaughter houses are one of the few places on earth in which the welfare of animals is transformed into enforceable laws and best practices.

Largely through the work of just one person. Temple Grandin.

[FlatAssembler]

Private citizens do, making sound financial decisions..and those sound financial decisions often starve people.

I don't really understand what you mean.
Do you mean that there are poor people because people are making horrible life decisions, and thereby sabotaging themselves and people around themselves? Vojko recently made a song in which he expressed that idea, it's called "Kako to", it's quite popular in Croatia now. Though it sounds humorous and smart, I don't agree with the basic message.
It's just hard to deny that famines are caused by epic government failures. No substantial famine has ever occured in a country that values free speech, that allows public criticism of the government.
For people to make sound financial decisions, they need to have access to the real prices. Prices are a way to communicate what the society needs more and what it needs less. They aren't perfect, but, when the government intervenes, they almost always make things worse. In Venezuela, people see apparent prices, but they don't see the actual prices, the prices they see, and thus the information prices convey, are very distorted because of the inflation and price controls. During the Great Chinese Famine, they basically tried to abolish prices, and came up with a system of communication about what the society needs which is based on bureaucracy, which, of course, failed spectacularly.

"Those same grains of maize" are not actually the same grains of maize - there are numerous cultivars, some specifically bred as feed

Well, like I've said, I haven't really studied it that much. I just assumed that "Most of the grain we can eat is given to the animals." is a well-known and uncontroversial statement. And it's a little hard to argue about what's moral to do and what isn't when people don't agree about the facts.
Why do the estimates abot what percentage of grain is being fed to farmed animals vary so widely? Some studies show it's close to 90%, and some show it's around 60%. Do those studies that show it's around 60% control for the fact that some grain that's given to the farmed animals can't be eaten by humans? I haven't looked much into it.

-ALL- crops have "special needs"

Well, as far I understand, cows also have special needs about which grass they can eat. The grass they eat has to contain the nutrients they need, although it's much less nutrient-dense than grain is. The best pastures are ones with many trefloils, and if trefoils can grow there, so can peas.
I think the right questions to ask here is why is the meat of grass-fed animals more expensive than meat of grain-fed animals, and why is meat significantly more expensive than most of the plant food? Meat has always beeen more expensive than grains and most of the plant food, it's not because of the government interventions. In the 3rd century, emperor Hui of Jin showed his exceptional incompetence when, upon learning that people had no rice to eat, he wondered why people don't eat meat instead.

Crops fit for human consumption have an immense irrigation requirement, in addition to safety measures not relevant to the production of feed not fit for human consumption.

As far as I understand it, the safety measures are mostly useless, it's just that the big corporations are lobbying for them because it hurts the competition more than it hurts them.

The hole of breeding animals so that people don't starve?

Don't you think that owning animals is comparable to slavery, and is thus wrong even if we think the consequences will be good?

Well, I know the insides and out of the slaughterhouse i work in. I can tell you those pigs don't feel a thing. ISO 22000 has rules.

So, as far as I know, the usual way of killing pigs today in slaughterhouse is to suffocate them with CO2. I want an honest answer, why?
First of all, why CO2? CO2 in blood directly activates the nociceptors, thus leading to extreme pain. Why not nitrogen? Nitrogen poisoning is at least known to be painless in humans. I don't know how certain we are that it's painless for pigs, since we know nitrogen poisoning isn't painless for moles (moles, unlike humans, can detect lack of oxygen in their blood), but we know for certain CO2 poisoning is painful.
Second, if people actually care about painlessly killing the farmed animals, why not simply behead them? Nearly all neuroscientists would agree beheading is, if properly done, a painless way to die. So why not do that?

[The Grand Nudger]

No, I don't mean that there are poor people because they make horrible life decisions. I was commenting on how good financial decisions made by producers are not equivalent to decisions that feed starving people, and, in fact, those good financial decisions made by producers actively starve people. The other side of that is that if those producers made some other choice, there's a very real possibility that -they- would then be counted among the starving. Take as an example a producer here in the bluegrass. Half a million USD can pass through their hands in a season. Their chunk of that half a mil, though, can be below poverty wages. We might imagine that they could just switch crops, but it's not that simple. You could grow beans out here until you were buried in a pile of them..The Kentucky Wonder Pole Bean is famous, a garden favorite.....but there's no infrastructure to store, buy or distribute them, and if you're growing beans commercially, you're growing bush beans with a more compact habit and definite maturation period, amenable to mechanical labor rather than a rolling handpick. Blaming this on politicians is lazy and uninformed.

No, I don't think that owning animals is comparable to slavery, not even remotely. Whether the consequences are good..whatever metric were using for good, is a moot point. Livestock is a non negotiable requirement of feeding people....a job that we're not fully accomplishing yet, no less. The consequences could be terrible..and it would still be a requirement. This may change in the future, though at present there isn't the foggiest idea as to how that may change. You may read things about lab grown meat, for example..but that's ad copy. More fundamentally, even if we stopped eating meat entirely, that still wouldn't remove the necessity of livestock.

We use CO2 to anesthetize animals -before- we do anything like behead them. No one...anywhere..thinks that grabbing an animal out of the yard and chopping it's head off is ethical. I don't know why you think that. It's fucking gruesome. I use dry ice and a cooler, myself - obviously this won't work for cattle, they don't fit in a cooler like my fish, lol. It's that simple...plus, I couldn't afford a legit gassing setup and the whole point of what I do is to come up with ways to cut costs so that poor people can afford to do this for food and profit.

As far as safety measures being useless.....yeah, sure. Go ahead and wolf down a big handful on non rei-d veggies and die from a lethal dose of systemic pesticide. Be my guest. Season your food with e-coli, or any number of other things that would be in your food if you ate fodder. Not that you could even chew it if you tried..since it wasn't bred or grown with you or your teeth or your stomach in mind. The simplest way to put this, is that livestock can process things that we can't, and that can be produced more economically and on more meager land than anything for human consumption can be - other than livestock. This is even more pronounced in what I do...since no human being can so much as breathe in water, let alone subsist on fish food. Think of them as nutrient processing fridges with a slow spool up time. I have serious, fact based reservations on the state of cattle production, as an example...but I do understand that cattle production doesn't have to go the way it currently does and that cattle are a useful tool in combating poverty and hunger.

I'd suggest some of Michael Pollans books and essays to you, as a primer, for a consumer interested in figuring out why (and how) we do what we do. You could get more specific information from extension production manuals...but those guys aren't quite as good at writing as he is, lol..so they won't hold a non producers attention. The short version of a long story is that it's damned near magic..and doesn't work anything even remotely near to the way that people imagine it does.