Go vegitarian.. reduce AGW.. save the planet

The backyard eggs are smaller for a number of reasons:

1) The hens are young. Literally 'spring chickens'.
2) The breed of chickens was selected for other characteristics than egg size.
3) The eggs we selected were the small ones of all the ones she had. There was in fact one egg which was too large to fit in a jumbo egg carton.

 

Backyard eggs are also way, way fresher.

Your typical supermarket egg in a carton is pushing a month old by the time it is put out there for sale. The whites are runny due to age.

One way to tell if your egg is fresh. Boil it. Does it peel easily? then it is OLD! in a fresh egg, the membrane inside clings to the shell tightly. If chunks of egg refuse to let go, and your peeled boiled egg looks like it lost a serious fight, that's a fresh egg.

 

I'd like to praise the previous two posters for their knowledge of egg (and chicken) biology! A hen has got to get some years before she can build a 'jumbo'.

Years ago I learned from a Puerto Rican "jibaro" how to get the young ladies to start laying eggs. Put plastic easter eggs in the coop. Later I had the chance to test it with some friends that were starting some hens. It works! wow. took 2 or 3 weeks, and once the hens switch on, they go according to the food supply.

Yesterday was National Day in China and I got invited to a Buddhist temple for a big vegetarian banquet. Mighty tasty. If I could cook like that I might be drawn over to the other side.

On the other hand, Beef Wellington with wild-mushroom duxelles? Man-oh-man.

 

And then there's pork belly. :hungry:

(Had some yesterday evening at a restaurant. I wanted more than the appetizer on the menu and asked about the possibility of an entree. The waitress suggested a double but I wanted more of an entree meal, so she spoke to the kitchen and I ended up with 2 pieces of belly (she underestimated the size of each piece or I'd have had a single), mash, shitake mushrooms and asparagus with a wine reduction. :thumb

My vegetarian problem would be twofold: I'm not a big fan of pulses; my wife does all the cooking. Vegan, forget it.

 

I've been studying energy use in the food industry, and as part of that I plugged 1 day's worth of food into a spreadsheet that analyzes the energy needed to raise, process, package, and transport different kinds of food.

The surprising result was that in a single 1700-calorie day, where I made my only large meal at home from simple non-processed ingredients, I used up the energy equivalent of 16 gallons of gasoline to stay fed. 16 gallons!

The culprit was the 4 ounces of ground lamb (about 500 calories) in my dinner. Lamb, it turns out, is ludicrously energy-inefficient to produce. It takes 83 times as much energy to raise lamb as you get from eating it. That's worse than pork, beef, chicken... anything but shrimp, really.

 

I am astounded. What were the major factors in that? My farmers grow sheep, and they have never mentioned any particular reason why they were particularly energy intensive.

I would love to see all your data actually...

 

That's a really insightful effort. Smart move. Quite worthy of independent verification. (As previously noted, if the inefficiency factor is 83, doesn't that mean sheep farms are losing money at an astonishing rate?)

 

1 Calorie ~ 4BTU, so
4 oz lamb = 2,000 BTU
1lb Lamb = 8,000 BTU (that's reasonable for a mix of protein and fat)

If it takes 83 times as much energy to produce that lamb as it contains
it takes 83x8,000 BTU=664,000 BTU to produce 1 lb of lamb.

Gasoline contains about 115,000 BTU/Gallon so the claim is that it takes the 100% of the energy in 664,000/115,000 = 5.77 gallons of gasoline to produce 1 lb of lamb. I realize that gasoline isn't the only form of energy, I just ran those numbers to put the energy claim in perspective.

Something doesn't look right. How do they arrive at 83 times?

 

Look at it as how many pounds of food you have to feed to an animal to have it gain 1 pound. Some animals like chickens and channel catfish are really good at turning food into muscle mass. Lambs are terrible at it. You have to keep feeding and feeding to get them to put on any muscle.

I don't have a good published reference for the 83 (it was just part of the class assignment) but here's a table from a study published in 2003 (Sustainability of meat-based and plant-based diets and the environment):

Sustainability of meat-based and plant-based diets and the environment


TABLE 2 Animal production in the United States and the fossil energy required to produce 1 kcal of animal protein
Livestock and animal products Production volume1 Ratio of energy input to protein output
2x106 kcal
Lamb 7 57:1
Beef cattle 74 40:1
Eggs 77000 39:1
Swine 60 14:1
Dairy (milk) 13 14:1
Turkeys 273 10:1
Broiler Chickens 8000 4:1
1Data from US Department of Agriculture (11). 2Data from Pimentel (9).

Sorry that it's not lining up right. I haven't figured out how to post a table in a comment. The first number on each line is a US production volume and the 2nd number is energy input (feed + required care) to calorie output.

 

Lamb is an inefficient animal, and if it comes from NZ it has those transportation costs, but the amount of fossil fuel burned is drastically over estimated in this thread.

 

It's the total energy input (feed calories + the energy it takes to run your livestock-raising operation) compared to the energy (calories) stored in the final product.

I didn't mean to confuse anyone by mentioning "16 gallons of gas" earlier. I'm using gallons of gas just as a unit of energy. I could have said calories, or BTUs, or Joules. I like using gasoline equivalents because they're easier to imagine (try to picture a Joule in your head, I dare you!).

 

I was just saying you seem to be overestimating a great deal, as xs650 has calculated with your 83x, comes out to 6 gallons of gasoline energy for a lb, which is an order of magnitude lower than your 16 gallons for 1/4 lb. I'm not sure what the real figures are, but the price of lamb is simply too low for your figures to be correct.

The bulk of wasted resources for meat versus plants are land use. It takes a great deal more land to produce the feed to raise the animals, than if humans simply ate the produce. Water is also a scarce resource in some areas for production. Most of the energy is solar energy and energy in fertilizer. In this drought year in texas there will be a great deal of livestock slaughtered because of price of feed. This will reduce the cost of meat this year, bur raise it in future years. From this land use/energy point of view simply reducing meat consumption, and moving to more efficient animals makes sense. Vegetarians often are vegetarians for moral or ethical reasons which have little to do with these resource issues.

 

Is there any data available comparing meat substitutes to meat? Say for example, Boca burger versus Turkey burger versus Angus burger found in the frozen compartment at Costco. I suspect that all the processing involved in meat analogs closes the gap in energy consumption between meat and plant food.

 

What I said was that it took 16 gallons' worth of energy to feed me for a day. The lamb was just the largest contributor. There was also a bunch of vegetables, some coffee, a big fruit smoothie, and all the packaging/shipping costs for everything.

 

I'm saying you have a large error in your calculation. It is an admirable goal, but I don't want people led astray into false assumptions.

I did try to look up a study of ghg equivalance on sheep production.
NZ lamb produces hefty 'footprint' - National - NZ Herald News
Which came up with 1900 gm CO2 per 100 grams of lamb, including transport, sheep flatulence, packaging, cooking, and waste disposal. This comes to about 1/4 gallon of gasoline's ghg for your 4 ounce serving of lamb. You can add the content of solar energy in the pasture and get closer to your figure, but the question is how you would harvest it?

I assume your other calculations have similar errors, but I do not know for sure. Certainly you can choose food to get 50 gallons of gasoline a day. You can fly in chefs, cook over a huge fire, etc. You also may need 83 acres of pastureland to produce the same amount of food as 1 acre of vegetarian food. The land use is one of the main problems with eating as high a percentage of meet as americans do, if the world population continues to grow. This forces factory farms and large amounts of grains diverted for livestock feed.

 

just for grins because it seems to go with the thread

What's the carbon footprint of ... a cup of tea or coffee? | Environment | guardian.co.uk

Which makes me think some people have way to much concern for ghg, but there you go.

Carbon With That Latte? - Forbes.com

I am a coffee junky, but don't drink lattes and go local when I know the town, but go to Starbucks in foreign places.

Civil Eats » Blog Archive » A Vegan Reassesses Soy: A Health and Environmental Perspective

 

One of the epiphanies that we had prior to going vegetarian (technically pescotarian since we eat fish maybe once a month) was the fact that unless you spend some decent money, the meat you get is largely crap "American style", which translates to Ag-chem. Fast food? Forget it. Its crap and you get tired of burgers too when you really think about it, so the idea that you would get tired of non-meat items or would be "missing out" on meat isn't necessarily going to be the case. Humans are adapters. We adapted by making the decision and reducing our intake first, and then the selection of meats we ate until we were down to fish and eggs. Now we are down to fish. Do we miss meat anymore? No. The same could be said about sugar. When you start looking around, it is pretty obvious that the state of the nations' food consumption (among other things) is not only unsustainable, but diminishes the quality of life. I can honestly say that life has been markedly better since cutting back the otherwise "normal" amount of sugar and meat.

 

....and not the caffeine? (humor...I hope.)

 

My wife often eats a soft-boiled egg as part of breakfast, and it has been bugging me since we use coal-based electricity to run our stove range. Back of the envelope calcs -- the cooking CO2 footprint is equal to 0.5 miles of Prius driving!

Problem solved by using the microwave to heat up water in my mug, letting placing the egg to cook there, and finally, using the hot water for my breakfast tea. I estimate the microwave is ~ 3x as efficient as the range for water heating, and the egg is cooked 'for free.'

I know this sounds silly, but opportunities for conservation are plentiful and in total make a big difference. For those wondering, I hear the egg is just as tasty.