alt Hacker News> If excess beef consumption were reduced to healthy quantities, as defined by the EAT-Lancet healthy reference diet, and substituted with chicken in forty-eight higher-income countries, the lost calories avoided would be enough to meet the caloric needs of 850 million people.
It's really impressive how efficient chickens are compared to beef. Obviously thinks like legumes are way more efficient, but we've really bred chickens to be meat machines in a way we haven't with cows.
Replies
Actually, the last time I looked into it, if you grow 2 acres of corn and 1 acre of soy, and feed it to chickens, you get out a similar number of calories (and more protein?) as 3 acres of soy.
Soy is pretty good, but corn is insane.
Legumes and soy in particular is a pretty common allergy... it's nearly impossible to get sufficient protein without meat if you have a legume allergy.
The impact of non-natural feeds on the overall nutrition profile for chickens and pork are larger than with ruminant animals. Chickens have been bred and changed a lot through environmental manipulation to grow much faster than in nature.
There are a few breeds of cows that are producing more muscle mass than most, they've gotten quite a bit larger through breeding as well, though the difference in time to maturation doesn't come close to what we've done with chickens... I'm not sure it's for the better though.
It absolutely is and in some ways we've only just started! Although we definitely shouldn't move fast and break things with living animals and our food supply;)
> EAT-Lancet healthy reference diet
I am unable to find this diet. It's likely referring to something called Planetary Health Diet [0]
[0] https://eatforum.org/eat-lancet/the-planetary-health-diet/
On the other hand I read chicken is much worse than beef in terms of animal suffering. But that's much more dependent on the producer than the energy calculation and climate impact I guess.
This is the kind of proposal that might fly well when it comes to the discourse over meat. People say “but we could be growing other crops instead of feed for cows”. Well yes, but you need protein in the diet. You can’t grow potatoes and veggies and expect people to survive only on that. Then there’s the question of land utilization. Historically cattle was raised for meat and dairy where agriculture was more difficult as compared to grazing cows, sheep, goats etc. The modern corn, soybean and alpha alpha farms may be able to grow other crops, but would they be able to support the crops that are needed in nutrition? Chicken and other more efficient substitutions may be the answer here.
They aren't just amazingly efficient in converting calories to protein, they're great at eating things without much other (agricultural) value to us. They eat the invasive spotted lantern fly!