I only read it for the pictures, honestly

The Netherlands seem to be on the chart twice, at 30 (79.6kg) and 41 (70.43kg). Is that one of the “anomalous features”, or am I reading it wrong somehow? I’m not sure if the difference between the two is enough to mess up your calculations if 30 is the right rank, but it’s odd, anyway.

The table is rubbish. It lists annual consumption of mutton and goat for Kyrgyzstan (no. 59) at 0. When I lived there from 2007-2010 I ate mutton almost every day as did most of the Kyrgyz I knew. It also lists annual consumption of goat and mutton for Ghana (no. 150) at 0. I eat goat a couple times a week and I am sure many people eat it more often than I do.

Oops again Ghana is 151. The chart is hard to read. But, the figure of 0 for mutton and goat for Kyrgyzstan and Ghana is just not accurate.

Reading around on Dutch websites puts Dutch meat use on 88 kg/year/person, but meat consumption around 40 kg/year/person.

The difference is apparently that meat use is based on weight of the animal carcasses, while meat consumption is the end product.

On other words: the table is pointless fake data, with 7 digits of empty accuracy

Yeah I’m not buying Irelands mutton consumption rates, and the figure for cow seems pretty conservative. However they’ve captured our taste for pigs and indifference to all other meats accurately

The “not-a-lot-of-beef-but-a-lot-of-chicken” countries also include Saint Lucia, the Bahamas and Antigua

Makes sense; none of those countries, splendid though they are, are blessed with large expanses of rolling grassland on which to raise cattle.

3: that is weird. The FAO lists a more realistic-sounding 8.5 kg of mutton and goat per Kirghiz per year. (Still not a huge amount – they eat a lot more beef than mutton.)

Agree with JOP that it’s hard to escape mutton in Kyrghizstan.

Yes, but Adams, unlike the NYT, didn’t have a working business model for making himself rich by telling the rich it was OK to be rich.

The quote is from an escort in “So Long And Thanks For All The Fish” – who definitely did have such a business model…

Let’s not be Stakhanovite about food

The problem is indeed obviously one of maldistribution, not underproduction. People in the nations at the high end of the chart get between 4 and 8 times more protein than they need per day, in meat alone, not counting all the other sources of protein in the diet. Even the mean of 37kg per year is too much protein, in meat alone. Not only is the overconsumption bad nutrition in itself (least controversially by way of all the excess animal fat all that animal protein puts into the diet, but also less clearly because too much protein itself may encourage a destructive hypermetabolism), but the overproduction is bought at the price of all sorts of disastrous externalities that the industry manages to not compensate for.

Supply-side thinking, thinking about food solely in terms of achieving high production figures, is what got the high end of this chart in trouble. We don’t want to repeat that mistake as we strive to achieve food security for the rest of the chart.

Being on the high end of this chart is pretty clearly a marker, not of nutritional achievement and security, but of the loss of control of the majority of people in these countries over their diet. No one needs that much meat. No one would want that much meat unless the quality of food preparation had dropped off a cliff. That much meat is bad in every way the issue can be looked at. You can only imagine that people got up to eating that much meat by way of losing meaningful control over their diets to industrial developement gone wild and out of control. Meat is the easiest thing for slothful cooks to prepare in ways that result in a half-way palatable meal, and it offers the highest profit margin for the industry, and that conspiracy of sloth and greed — and nothing else — means that in nations on the high end, meat is on the menu breakfast, lunch and dinner every day of the year.

Nations on the low end of this chart may indeed be there because they are unable to produce enough food. Low meat consumption can indeed be a marker of poverty. But they could also be there because greed and sloth haven’t beaten down traditional food production and preparation in those countries — yet. Japan and India clearly owe their relatively low places on the chart to nutritional success, not failure.

India, to take an example, almost certainly has both an underproduction problem, and a virtuous (from every point of view) tradition of vegetarianism, to explain its dead last place on the chart. Where there are actual underproduction problems reflected in this sort of data, by all means we need to help with production. But I think the very worst thing to do (I mean, the worst thing once we’ve got to the point of actually determining to help, which is by no means a given yet. The worst thing to do is to do nothing.) would be to increase supply in ways that tend to break down traditional diets. Limit the interventions to insuring that traditional foodstuffs, prepared in the traditional way, are available and distributed so as to be available to all. That probably means that in most cases meat production doesn’t need to be on the menu of such help. Countries that have learned to do without much meat need to have the supply insured of whatever else they eat instead to achieve the really not very high or stringent daily protein requirement, rather than helped to start down the wrong path of hypercarnivoracity.

Food distribution runs into a few traditional problems. In likely order of importance.

1) Government corruption: Thug X in charge of region/country X takes the food and sells it for cash. There currently are no non-violent solutions for this problem. Maybe some could be found.
2) Rich countries produce a significant portion of the worlds food. Gifting the food, as seen with disaster relief food aid, destroys whole sections of the receiving nations economy. This is better than starving, but a problem none the less.
3) GMO food crops. The US is both a major food producer and GMO user. Europe has moved to block this type of food from Africa via threat of trade sanctions against Africa. So one major donor nation may not be available for any proposals.

What surprises me about data sets like this is how extremely high the high end numbers are. Pace Glen, I surely eat more meat than is good for me (I’m not pushing vegetarianism which has nothing virtuous about it but that’s for another thread…); and just as certainly I do not come close to the US average. And this chart presumably counts everyone – including babies. This means that some subset of the Western populations must eat incredible amounts of meat.

@Matt

You’re reading it wrong. The one at rank 30 is the Netherlands Antilles, which is a (two) group of islands in the Caribbean. They are part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, but (mostly) not of the country The Netherlands (it’s status is a mixture of separate countries and Dutch communities.) And in the context of eating habits, they are certainly not at all the same or even comparable.

20

Well they eat a lot fish here and most of it is freshwater from the lake. But, my guess is that both fish and non-animal forms of protein such as soy, rice and beans, etc. are going to narrow rather than widen the gap between North and South. Lack of protein was a huge problem here a couple of decades ago. It is not a huge problem here now. Instead now we have increasing problems with hypertension, type two diabetes, and other ailments related to eating too much rather than too little. Despite the western stereotype of all Africans suffering from famine and malnutrition, I have actually seen quite a bit of obesity in the greater Accra region.

It is worth noting btw that meat’s dietary contribution is modest even in high-meat consumption countries. For example, by FAO statistics, meat constitutes only 12% of US food energy; cereals excl. beer 22%, sugar and sweeteners 17%, vegetable oils 18%, milk excl. butter 10%. Globally, meat constitutes 8% of food energy. It seems counter-intuitive – Americans consume three times the average amount. The discrepancy must in part be due to Americans preferring leaner meat. If those statistics are really that reliable, of which I am not so sure.

piglet @26: The fundamental fact is that both meat and biofuels production threaten global food security, are environmentally destructive and cause deforestation pressure. What we need to do is at least raise awareness of that fact.

Hear, hear. (BTW, considering your enlightened anti-meat views, perhaps you’d consider changing your nom de plume to “sproutlet” or “beetlet” or “chardlet”?)

27
Thinking about protein in terms of caloric content is not the right approach, so the statistics for that are meaningless.

Calories measure energy, and are thus an appropriate measure for carbs and fats, which we eat for their energy content. But proteins are used structurally, to replace the enzymes and muscles and connective tissue in our body as it wears out.

Calorie-producing food is burnt up every day as it is used, but we do not have to replace protein structure at a high rate. Most of it doesn’t wear out at a high rate (enzymes are the exception), and we have excellent pathways to reclaim and reuse whatever does wear out. We only have to replace by taking in new protein in the diet every day, a very small fraction of the total protein content in our existing structure.

It’s relatively easy to come up with fairly close estimates of daily calorie needs, because energy expenditure is directly measurable, so we can say how much you need per day in the way of carbs and fats. The need for protein has no such ready measurability. The best we can do is try to figure out how much will barely keep you out of kwashiorkor, which can be hard to pin down with much accuracy. Doing that, and adding in a wide margin of safety, the accepted figure is 35-70 gm per day. Personally, I’ve never seen vegans get into any trouble even down to 20-30 gm per day, so I have always assumed that the conventional standard has a wide safety margin built in.

But whatever the standard you accept, I think everyone agrees that it needs to be expressed in grams of protein (available protein if it’s vegetable protein), not calories.

Replacing meat by enslaving and killing billions more chicken would likely be one of the most most evil act possible to do, given the torture and killing intrinsic to chicken “production” and our ample knowledge of those conditions.

I wonder who here approves of the practices depicted and described here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BD8iUsEKYbI
http://www.mercyforanimals.org/poultry.asp
http://www.mercyforanimals.org/maine-eggs/

21
While vegetarianism is often touted by the people who practice it (of whom I am not one) for its supposed direct ethical superiority — the notion that it’s immoral to kill animals — what I meant by “virtuous in every way” was to bounce off that meaning to the undsiputed practical advantages of minimizing meat consumption and production. I have no opinion on the ethics of killing animals, but it’s a fact that meat production is an inherently vicious, in terms of energy wasted, way to get protein into the diet. Add to that virtue the virtue that veganism is the most direct way to avoid all the vices of the animal fat that comes with meat protein, then add to that the fact that if we had sane levels of meat consumption in this country we wouldn’t need to let the industry get away with the false economies and false efficiencies they have to practice to maintain inherently unsustainable levels of production.

I think it’s perfectly reasonable to talk about vegetarianism in general and veganism in particular, as being virtuous, even if there is absolutely nothing to the idea that it’s wrong to kill animals. They do themselves and the rest of us real and tangible good, whether or not they are right about killing Bambi’s mother.

33
Well, I was just reporting a conventionally accepted standard when I referred to 70 grams a day. I use the lower, also accpeted, standard of 35 gm with my patients, and actually would put the number lower, but I have to stick to the standard of practice.

Of that 35 gm, there is absolutely no need that all of it come from meat, or even meat plus fish, or these plus eggs and dairy. It is almost certainly a good idea to have some of it as vegetable protein. The better the diet, and I mean that from both the health and the culinary perpsective, the closer meat consumption gets to hovering near zero. The best practice is to slay the fatted calf only on big occasions — for the return of the Prodigal, say — and almost never otherwise. It’s better for health, and makes the cook smarter about everything he or she prepares, even meat.

As for people having difficulty on a reduction diet that doesn’t lean heavily on meat, well, I don’t advise reduction diets. They don’t work. I advise people to get control of their diet, because that works, and reduction diets are “the noise before defeat”, as Sun Tzu put it, of getting control of your diet. The first step is control. Make everything you eat from scratch, so that you actually know what and how much you are eating. If you can’t or won’t do that necessary and basic first step, nothing else you do down the line will work. Once you have control of your diet, external restricitons aren’t necessary. Learn how to cook, and you won’t want more than an ounce or two of meat a day. If you do, you still haven’t learned how to cook, and it’s back to the kitchen with you.

In practice, almost none of my American-born patients can even imagine getting control of their diets. Practical, everyday cooking is one of the artes perditae in this country. All memory of it is gone. Fortunately, I have a lot of damned furriners on my panel, from places low on that list of John’s, and they can get their diet under control unless they’ve been in this country so long that their work ethic has been hopelessly corrupted. Real Americans cannot take any work that isn’t paid for cash on the barrel at all seriously. That’s deadly, and if our society goes under, that will be why. More traditional people know better. The only success I ever have with Real Americans owes to the fact that they have to flunk a solvency test to get into my clinic, so they are mostly unemployed, so some will respond to the idea that learning how to cook so as not to kill themselves is now their full-time job.

Fortunately, I have a lot of damned furriners on my panel, from places low on that list of John’s, and they can get their diet under control unless they’ve been in this country so long that their work ethic has been hopelessly corrupted. Real Americans cannot take any work that isn’t paid for cash on the barrel at all seriously.

Have you ever considered that this attitude may be linked to your apparent failure to convince them?

Glen: Make everything you eat from scratch

This is indeed the alpha and the omega. There should be a constitutional amendment …

ajay 28: “You sound as though you’re thinking “Americans eat three times as much meat as average, they should get three times as much of their calories from meat as the average””

No that’s not what I’m thinking and it not what I’m sounding either. Since you are curious, the US calorie supply per capita and day is estimated by FAO at 3750, 450 from meat, vs. a world average of 2800 and 218 from meat. If these figures are reliable, then US meat has on average 1340 kcal/kg versus a global average of 1980 kcal/kg.

This is indeed the alpha and the omega.

Probably the intended meaning of ‘from scratch’ should be carefully and precisely specified if it’s to be the alpha and omega.

But also. Dismissing the wellness of people for not having the time, resources, and willpower to invest in pursuing an entirely new second career is the right wing resentment squad’s game, not ours. That shouldn’t change just because the second career in mind is ‘cook’ and the work will be unpaid. Glen’s statement, when applied socially rather than individually, is basically demanding that every human being take on an intensive unpaid and untrained internship, indefinitely, until their skill at producing their own food becomes both (1) approximately as tasty and palatable to them as the standardized industrial products they currently consume and (2) not much more costly than those products. That’s a hell of a lot of work to expect people to go do on their own.

Now, I get that Glen’s a doctor and is providing insight into what he would recommendation an individual patient. But unless I’m severely misinterpreting, the statement “There should be a constitutional amendment” was a playful way of asserting that we should apply this recommendation socially, as a principle of social organization.

But you should know that “I can do this, so why can’t everybody else” is a dangerously callous statement for a vast variety of choices of ‘it.’ It can’t be too terribly hard to see why cooking from scratch would fall under that, can it? I get that nobody’s in the business of being cruel here, but what’s up with this kind of dismissive everyone should pursue a private solution to a public problem because that’s what I did and I’m happy with it type proposal?

Everyone should make their own food from scratch. : If they’re not healthy, hey, they chose that. :: Everyone should find a good full-time decent-paying job. : If they’re not financially secure, hey, they chose that.

It makes a lot more sense (in the US at least) to argue for a VAT on derivative agricultural products, including all meat, while subsidizing a variety of alternative protein sources. Given that the price of meat and soy is already artificially set (in the US) by subsidies, and given that we haven’t seen any massive social uprising in response to various fluctuations in those subsidies and corresponding prices so far, this seems like a superior approach to accomplishing a widespread and lasting reduction in meat consumption. Heck, we could put together an advisory board like we did for cheese, to prod the existing food industry into increasing their use of nonmeat protein products. But proposing that everything would be ok if people would just be as virtuous as us (for whatever definition of virtue) does not work well as a mechanism for social change, except in the context of brutal suppression that neither of us would support.

geo 29, that is sooo tasteless!

No no, tofulet would be tasteless. Beets have plenty of flavor. … _I’ll get my coat._

“People actually do need to know how to cook.”

Are you familiar with the concept of division of labour?

There is a very objectionable tone of implied superiority about much of this thread. I think Salient says it well. Not everyone wants to be a cook, or engage in home production generally.

“Are you familiar with the concept of division of labour?”

Are you familiar with the long history of left-wing criticism of it?

*Salem*, I will say just one thing:

It’s safe to say that if you don’t want to cook, or clean, or do any other domestic chores, you’ll have to have someone else do it. In a just and free world, how often would it be, really, that you’d be able to pay for any of that, in quality?

JQ, you haven’t seen the flame wars, insults, flouncing and so on that this issue provokes on, say, pandagon or LGM? It is a very reliable flashpoint. Usually with some self-appointed spokesperson for the downtrodden masses alleging that it is just impossible for ordinary people to cook nutritious meals for themselves. As an ordinary person who has cooked nutritious meals for my family for 30 years while working full time, I find it astonishing. Glen above @ 37 implies that this is a general attitude among his patients also. There is something very different in the general food culture in the US, no doubt.

Never seen the flame wars etc., and I haven’t even had time to read this thread thoroughly but here goes. I think I’m going to put this in several comments, otherwise it will be far too long.

I was born in 1950 in the American midwest. Both my parents grew up poor, in very different contexts: my mom a rural Baptist of what I might call old American stock, my dad the son of Italian immigrants who lived in town, the small one I eventually grew up in. Despite the huge cultural, religious, and contextual (town vs country) differences between the families, both had huge gardens. Both my grandmas cooked everything their families ate, and grew and canned a lot of it as well.

My parents, raising a family after WWII, did not have a garden, and viewed it as a step up in the world that they were no longer so poor that they needed to grow their own food. The knowledge of how to have a garden was thus lost, and when I wanted to have one as a young adult, I had to go find it in books, mostly, plus the snippets my one grandma would write me in letters. “How to start lettuce the way we hayseeds do,” I remember as the heading of one letter. (Scatter seeds on the surface of an area damp earth and cover with a board until they germinate.)

By the time I was raising my family (both my kids are in their mid-twenties now), a lot of the middle-class people we lived amongst, including us, spent a lot of mealtimes either at work or at sports practices and games. Meals were much more catch-as-catch-can and random than they had been when I was growing up, when we sat down to a family dinner every night of every week of every year, except when we were at one of the grandmas’ houses and the family grouping was even bigger.

For a lot of Americans, the art of cooking has been lost by my generation just as the art of gardening was lost by the previous one.

Realizing as I go along that I’m probably not going to succeed at condensing my thoughts into blog-size bits, and not wanting to drag the thread too far off topic anyhow, here are nevertheless a few more random things about food:

1. Food deserts in the US, this deceptively “richest” of countries.

2. I used to love to eat out. Now it mostly sucks. Granted I live in rural Maine, not a hotbed of fine dining, but even the good locally-owned restaurants (the ones that serve fresh food, often made with local ingredients) mostly serve food that has enough salt in it to choke an elephant. This is what we as a culture have normalized to.

3. the basic arithmetic of energy used – energy consumed = fat burned seems to work pretty well.

I think it’s more complicated than this in that there’s an absorption issue that complexifies the arithmetic. I won’t inflict my personal wild theories about nutrition on the CT readership except to say that when I stopped eating wheat about fifteen years ago, because someone whose notions I trusted suggested that it might help me get an auto-immune skin condition under better control, I lost thirty pounds (gradually, over the course of a year and a half) without even trying.

I think the wheat/gluten was irritating my gut so badly that I just hadn’t been absorbing nutrients in the right way, so I was always naggingly and unpleasantly hungry and never felt really satisfied. Now, I haven’t had a skin outbreak in years and when I’m hungry, eh, no big deal. And I weigh what I weighed as a young adult. I still miss good bread (hey, I’m half Italian), but I feel better in all kinds of ways than I did in the last few years before I quit eating wheat.

If you’re not good at it, and don’t enjoy it, or just have something better to do with your time…

Playing a round of golf or reading the Sunday papers spring to mind.

Sorry, JQ, will do. My last crossed with yours.

Sorry, JQ, didn’t read your last comment before posting.

No *Helen*–

This is the problem I have with you people. People should be able to cook. That societies prevent them from being able to cook when they need to. That society prevents them from ever learning, or ever having the time/energy to cook–That is the root cause, and we should change SOCIETY such that poor people can effin’ cook. Doesn’t mean that they want to, most of the time, but it shouldn’t be so hard for them to do so if they do! As such, being “tetchy” whenever people say that cooking is a valued skill is madness. Should I be “tetchy” if you say that driving is a valued skill? Or reading at a certain level? Or keeping the living area clean and free of varmin? Society prevents poor people from being able to do any of these things, by various means, even when there are good reasons to believe that all of these skills are skills people really need! Nobody is talking about everyone needing to learn how to make a patisserie, or even flapjacks from scratch. Just basic stuff on how to make edible hot food you’d want to eat!

Oops, last post crossed with JQ’s last. Feel free to delete.

As an ordinary person who has cooked nutritious meals for my family for 30 years while working full time, I find it astonishing.

That astonishment (from afar) seems much more reasonable than Substance’s comment credited, which I’m only mentioning because I’m hoping to pun on ‘Substance abuse’ as often as possible in what follows. (I heart you, McG, but I heart puns more.)

There is something very different in the general food culture in the US, no doubt.

Drug culture, perhaps. I think the core problem is, industrial food product is a cocktail drug masquerading as something that’s masquerading as nourishment. Industrial food product is a concentrated drug of sugar and salt and lipids, in various proportions, with lots of different packaging. It doesn’t even have much to do with pleasant taste, it’s designed to elicit various physiological responses with its core ingredients. The meager nutrition provided by the product is almost incidental, except that it enables the grand McMasquerade.

For all the social problems that alcohol exacerbates, at least alcohol isn’t sold under the guise of thirst-quenchers, so we can talk about its effects directly. With industrial food product it’s more complicated. Industrial food is sold and advertised under the guise of hunger-quenchers. Hunger-quenching is not quite the same thing as nourishing. But one is easily mistaken for the other in the midst of advertisement. Conflating this tripartite distinction — food as drug, as hunger-quencher, and as nutrition source — enables the food-as-drug providers market their drug as a quencher, which allows marketers to ignore the question of nutrition entirely if they so choose (there are no Golden Buffet ads advertising healthy choices).

And since the feeling of quenching hunger is deceptively similar to the feeling of intaking a drug hit — so deceptive that people regularly eat themselves into gastrointestinal distress, enjoying the rush — it’s pretty much guaranteed that this line of advertising will be effective and will result in repeat customers, who get the physiological experience of drug intake and the psychological reassurance that they just did something fairly sensible, i.e., they quenched their hunger.

So really let me say this: I am worried because we are a nation with a large plurality of food-as-drug users and the vast industry concoting those drugs has perfected their marketing strategies and that industry is expanding faster than population growth, and is extending itself aggressively into the developing world in order to sustain that growth trajectory. (FWIW, I have a parallel fear about tobacco products.)

The key problem is distribution, not production.

I don’t know precisely how what I’m describing relates to the OP, but it does; hopefully in the follow-up comments it’s reasonable and ok to move on to discussing distribution, including the principal commercial actors and their mechanisms for obtaining some measure of control over food distribution and policy.

So, okay, the largest and most capable organizations for food distribution in our world today are peddlers of hyped-up druggy crap. They’re in command of vast resources and in need of more customers. And they have achieved, at least in the US, an extraordinarily strong influence in two legislative arenas: agricultural subsidies, and the public school program.

For the latter, there’s the blatant aggression of installing food-drug markets in schools for lunch programs, sure, but equally disturbing is the influence these producers have in developing national standards for health classes that emphasize the role of individual choice. There’s a reason it’s legal in the first place for Pizza Hut to even have a chance to install themselves in a public school building, and there’s a reason Pizza Hut is considered a legitimate nourishment option to market to schoolkids — because it’s an option! Kids have the right and the opportunity to buy other food instead of Pizza Hut drugs (not that the food alternatives are especially shining examples of nutrition, but actually, Pizza Hut uses that to make the case that their product is not much worse). As with most industries, the moment you grant an industrial food provider the chance to bill their product as a legitimate (food) choice rather than as a drug in food-camouflage, they’ve won. “Our products are intended to be just one part of a balanced diet including {whatever blah blah}.”

And control over the school programme is where it’s at. If cooking is an element of self-care — and I’m with Emma 100% on this — why isn’t cooking a part of mandatory health class? Why isn’t it represented in standardized tests? (‘Follow a recipe, obtain the desired result’ is low enough on Bloom’s taxonomy to be a perfect candidate for mass testing.)

I think it’s because various industries profits from the learned helplessness. They certainly don’t benefit from any attempt to discredit their product as a drug. They only need to be a less healthy food option among food options, so that their users are shouldered with the moral responsibility of each transaction.

That’s the food culture which Emma speaks of. It’s real and it’s pernicious. Any attempt to investigate the future of food distribution will, eventually, have to address the systemic problem of this institutionally reinforced learned helplessness. It’s not easily reversible. JanieM is deeply right here — something is being lost that will be very hard to recover, because the traditional family mechanisms for passing the knowledge along are failing.

It is a very reliable flashpoint. Usually with some self-appointed spokesperson for the downtrodden masses…

Banking somewhat off this ” self-appointed spokesperson for the downtrodden masses” thing — learned helplessness problems always disproportionately impact the less well-off, because resource constraints always aggravate learned helplessness.

To head off another objection I’ve gotten before, let me clarify: I am not proposing there is “fast food addiction” — the distinction between learned helplessness and addiction is absolutely crucial here. Both do disproportionately impact the less-well-off, sure. But learned helplessness is generally not understood to be a disease, the way addiction can be. On a literal level the distinctions are obvious. But also, the emotional configuration, how we feel about the person and their relationship to their habit, is very different. Learned helplessness is, in its severest states, essentially a behavioral disorder, whereas addiction is physiological and more concrete.

Anyway, as for the spokesperson thing. FWIW, I do not want to defend a drug industry on the grounds that they have been successful in encouraging the use of their product among working-class American populations. Non-starter. But I think we should also refuse to discuss the issue in a framework that discounts or neglects the principal reason so many people buy so much industrial food product so often. If we’re going to assign the weight of choice responsibility to the individuals who consume industrial food product, I at least want to advocate that we identify the choice alternatives as including marijuana / caffeine / etc, rather than as including good ol’ home cookin’ / varieties of peasant cuisine.

It’s not a question of the latter being illegitimate, it’s more of a tactical question: letting the industrial food product industry bill itself as a nourishment option is giving away half the game, even if it’s self-evidently the least nourishing nourishment option. If we argue against fast food on the (accurate) grounds that it is non-nutritious, the industry will respond by mucking about and reconfiguring the ingredients enough to confuse the issue, or they’ll put some nonsense salad option on the menu and parade around declaring they’ve solved the problem. Example, McDonalds loses a ton of money on their salads, due to low demand and product expiration. They’re a vanity publicity item, mostly unordered because they aren’t even trying to be a quality drug alternative. But it’s certainly evidence that McDonalds is making an attempt to offer people choices! Some of those choices are more nutritious than others!

They’re offering people choices of drugs. We need to call them on their shit.

Are you familiar with the concept of division of labour?

This is exactly what I’m talking about. This is a problem. A “division of labor” in which we let drug sellers claim a dominant role in the provision of nutrition is about as dangerous to the future of human health and welfare as it’s possible for a food distribution network to be. (I think that’s at least part of what engels is invoking.)

Self-care is important. Autonomy is important. The learned helplessness of food preparation dependence is a public epidemic problem for which we shouldn’t be promoting private solutions. The market is the problem: given the choice, of course there will be plenty of people who choose to buy drugs rather than food, especially if the drugs really are hunger-quenching, and can be marketed freely as such without social sanction.

And of course, a hell of a lot more people will choose to buy drugs for food when it’s the cheapest and most widely available drug. So why is the US government heavily subsidizing the sugar-salt-fat industry? (Rhetorical question.) We don’t subsidize cigarettes or alcohol. Alcoholic energy drinks got banhammered within months of their advent. But we Americans subsidize industrial food product.

Oh and hai world. The companies we’ve helped flourish are now aggressively pushing their way into developing-world markets. It’s obscene. The drug market should be subjected to the widespread derision and disgust that the drug abusers get dumped on them for being fat and diabetic.

It’s completely natural to feel a sense of astonishment when witnessing learned helplessness, but that helplessness can only be cultivated in an environment of co-dependence — and when an entire industry profits off aggressively maximizing the breadth and depth of that co-dependence, it’s probably time to shift one’s moral outrage from the users to the dealers.

Coming back around to what I said earlier, let me go ahead and admit, it really isn’t hard to learn to prepare and provide palatable and affordable nutrition to oneself and one’s family.

It’s actually also not that hard to learn to make food-drugs — it’s just that the industrial stuff is so readily available. You can’t bake a cake in your car, but Dairy Queen can put a cake there any time you want. Fried chicken is somewhat of a pain to make, but KFC has the bucket ready for you any time you want.

Dealers on every street corner, selling an overwhelming variety of finely tuned and carefully tested product.

Learned helplessness does inculcate a sense of how staggeringly monumental even the most basic cooking tasks presumably must be.

I think what was missing from my original comment is: we can’t expect people mired in this state of learned helplessness to be receptive to initiatives designed to goad them into changing their habits.

Basically, you can’t expect them to learn to cook well enough to make the food-drugs they use in their kitchen. It’s not trivially easy to make fried chicken at all; making fried chicken that your KFC-inflected palate identifies as a superior drug to KFC is possible, but requires some effort and trial and error.

Creating and regularly producing home-brew replacements for all the drugs you like on the market, McD and Taco Bell and Wendy’s and whatever else, is basically impossible unless you study to become a cook as if it’s a career. Those restaurants hire full-time cooks to fine-tune their drugs, and expecting an individual amateur to compete against them is unfair, if not irrational. We can’t expect people to train their way out of learned dependence on drug-foods.

But we can, and should, put intense effort into making sure our public school students don’t suffer the same fate. They’re not training for a career yet. They have time, and can be given incentives they will be receptive to. They can even be taught about how the body reacts to sugar and salt and such, so that they understand why they feel so strongly attached to various sugary and salty foods. They can be taught about the diseases and pains that these drugs can cause or exacerbate, and about how to acquire, prepare, and subsist on sources of nutrition that are not drug-laden. Put it in their goddamn D.A.R.E. anti-drugs class, right alongside the graphic warnings about lung and mouth cancer from tobacco use. Then maybe we’re making some progress — against what really should be one of the most troubling corporate expansions of our time.

I have no idea how in the hell we stand any chance of defending the developing world against the advancements of American drug lords, or how we can make any progress against their entrenchment and hegemony, but I think it has to start with acknowledging that there are American drug lords whose advancements into the developing world ought to be obstructed, and that we have imperative reasons to push back against their entrenchment and hegemony back at home.

But Holland is full of cows (- mostly for making milk) – and they still need to be fed. JQ – you forgot the cheese!

a big reason why people do not like to cook, is the clean-up of
pots and pans and dirty dishes. That’s
inherently part of the deal

Sounds like you’ve been very lucky in the flat-mates you’ve had!

The totals here are all premised on “agriculture as we know it,” at the dawn of the cellulose revolution. Long before we make progress on the distributional inequities, the increasing demand for meat among the world’s second (think Russia) and third (Egypt) billion is going to meet assisted cellulose breakdown on a planetary scale, at somewhat higher efficiency than the 1890s trick of pumping ammonia into haystacks under tarps. A marginal acre of grassland — which is basically the best underutilized land/water/sun resource we have left — will do the work of two prime acres of corn and one of soybeans, more or less.

The balance of all grassland crops is low in protein, or to put it another way, turning them into high-yield feedlot inputs leaves enormous amounts of “surplus” cellulose. To some extent, that excess can be wasted as methane and solids, but both of these are global problems even at the present scale of beef production. To produce two or three times as much beef, solely on the now-available land, we need to get much farther away from the romance of the rangeland (in both Americas, Australia and elsewhere) and squeeze losses out of the cattle production system.

So right now, ethanol production is making higher-protein feed from maize as a fringe benefit (by turning the surplus starch into transport subsidy money); by mid-century, we are going to have to do something clever with perhaps six times as much (cellulosic) carbohydrate as the beef industry currently consumes, without adding any more net acres to the footprint. We can burn it as ethanol, or we can call it worthless and let the cows fart it (and consume more soy, which costs prime land we don’t have).

Against this, the whole scheme is consuming so much nitrogen that, even if we get there, it may be an energy wash — marginal rangeland becomes fertilized high-yield grassland, protein goes to feedlots, sugar goes to ethanol and right back into the Haber process to keep the grassland fertilized, with little or nothing left for cars (and more runoff for the Gulf of Mexico, and where do the phosphates come from?).

When we’re ten billion and only moderately poor, there won’t be a lot of slack. All the choices are hard.

I would like to propose insects as a vastly superior mechanism for improving the world’s protein intake in an environmentally (and sentient-ally) friendly way.

I thought that perhaps I should explain my note @81 more. JQ picks on the diet of Holland and just subtracts the amount of beef and substitutes pork or poultry. But he has forgotten dairy and eggs – that also come from beef and poultry. It is the alive animals that consume grain, not the dead ones. I suspect a lot of the meat is a side product of supplying eggs and dairy – male animals don’t lay eggs or supply milk. Sure we could have technological advances so that only females are gestated. But he still has to look at the picture including dairy cattle and egg laying poultry to get the whole picture.

“Intensification of food production often leads to famine, (in fact, you can damn near say that intensification of food production is the ONLY cause of famine) because only Big Capital or Government has the means to effect an intensive production scheme.”

Oh come off it – that is (especially historically) ridiculous.