Saturated Fat Controversy

[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.