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[ChairmanPoo]

Depends on the type of chorizo. Prime iberian chorizo is pricey and indeed very tasty but you have all qualitied. Plus the good stuff is made in the south. Basque cuisone does have a few local tasty thinfs (chorizo de pamplona, txistorra, txitxikis...) but as far as cured meat goes, the fine stuff is down south, I have to admit.

Though tbh I've been eating very few cured meats in the last four years. When I left Sligo I brought some as parting gifts (and cecina, which is.. cow ham, actually, and can be more pricey than iberian ham, was appretiated by my muslim junior doctors. But I had very little myself.

I dont think salami is the equivalent of chorizo though. The way it's made, its far more reminiscent of Catalonian fuet.  Hungarians do make sausages that nearly identical to chorizo; eve though the ones I tried weren't the best I assume they have finer stuff back in Hungary

[Bumber]

Recent studies using batch-fermentation suggest that the red macroalgae Asparagopsis taxiformis has the potential to reduce methane (CH4) production from beef cattle by up to ~ 99% when added to Rhodes grass hay; a common feed in the Australian beef industry.

Note this is also relevant for vegetarians (but not vegans) since the methane issue also affects milk production, not just meat production, and people who switch away from meat might actually increase their consumption of milk-based products (cheese, yogurts etc) to try and maintain their protein intake.

Studies show that when humans eat asparagus, you get asparagopiss.

[Reelya]

Really wish food production globally would be based more on what can be produced in harmony with the local environment (where there is certainly a place for cattle at least, since it can have huge positive effects if done right) rather than what the short-term profits dictate, but not likely to happen anytime soon with the current systems in place.

This made me think of those arguments where they get upset that some under-developed area is focusing on "cash crops" such as say coffee or cocoa, rather than food crops, with the implication that they should focus on the traditional back-to-nature food crops.

It's very first-world armchair logic. Yeah, they used to focus on local food crops, but they were doing that for 1000 years in which the economy didn't even grow by 1%. They're focusing on cash crops because then they can end up with things like tools, clothes, running water, electricity, etc, rather than being stuck scrabbling in mud huts. I say it's first-world armchair logic since the people calling for the "natives" to adhere to their subsistence hard-scrabble lives because it's proper and traditional aren't the ones stuck in the huts made of sticks, mud and dung and being stuck using animal dung as their cooking fuel (which kills hundreds of thousands of children each year).

[scriver]

txistorra, txitxikis

God I love Basque.

But surely it should be xorizo de pamplona

[coalboat]

using animal dung as their cooking fuel (which kills hundreds of thousands of children each year).

What is the danger? fire accident, tiny particles, or poisonous chemicals?

[scriver]

POOP IN UR LUNG

LUNG POOP

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[wierd]

I dunno about anyone else, but if I personally were degraded to the point of having to use fecal material as fuel, I would use a heat-radiator type setup.

Basically, the smoldering nasty poop fire heats a metal heat conductor, which is embedded into the wall of the combustion chamber, and sealed against heat loss and gas exchange against the wall with refractory claybody. The heat is transported and radiated into the cooking chamber on the other side, which is kept separate from the combustion chamber; the two never have connected atmosphere.

If possible, the combustion chamber portion would be outdoors, with lots of ventilation, and a tall flue.

[Reelya]

using animal dung as their cooking fuel (which kills hundreds of thousands of children each year).

What is the danger? fire accident, tiny particles, or poisonous chemicals?

Particles.

https://www.thethirdpole.net/2014/07/16/cook-wood-dung/

The World Health Organization Household Air Pollution and Health report released in March this year states that over 50% of premature deaths among children under five are due to pneumonia caused by particulate matter (soot) inhaled from household air pollution. Over 3.8 million premature deaths annually from non-communicable diseases including stroke, ischemic heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and lung cancer are attributed to exposure to household air pollution, adds the report.

India faces a significant challenge in providing access to adequate and affordable energy. Roughly 85% of rural Indian households are dependent on traditional biomass fuels for their cooking energy requirements
...
“Most villagers think that since cow dung is easily available and is for free, why should they spend money on buying LPG (cooking gas) connections or gas stoves,” elaborates Kandath. “Moreover, since cooking and organizing fuel is a woman’s job, the men are far from keen to invest any money in it.”

So this effectively kills more children under 5 worldwide than literally every other cause put together, and a lot of it is in fact cow dung rather than wood since wood has some value whereas the cow dung is abundant and doesn't cost anything.

[hector13]

The argument they tender, ignores the devil in the details.

I just bring the devil out for dinner.

(and, just to note-- the majority of the land use involved in US cattle ranching, is the large tracts of prairie grasses used to grass feed. NOT the corn fields in iowa that supply the feedlots.  In terms of total acres used, the overwhelming majority used for cattle production, is in fact the grassy fields.  To satisfy the argument, all that grass would have to be exterminated.  That is beyond absurd and destructive, and the argument is taken from a dangerous position of ignorance. )

Why would all the grass have to be exterminated?

The argument I’ve heard regarding land use for cattle is about the crops grown solely to feed the cattle, rather than repurposing the land the cattle is using.

To address your argument, you’ve shown that a great deal of cattle production doesn’t use those crops in the US, but (without research because I just got up and can’t be bothered anyway :p so I’m assuming the rest) the remainder use land for the cattle and land to grow crops to feed the cattle. You can get rid of those cattle so you can repurpose the arable farmland used to feed them for human feed, or whatever you want to grow.

Another part of your argument I’m not sure about is that vegans argue the land used by cattle should be used to grow other crops. As mentioned a couple of paragraphs above, I think you might be mistaking the argument over cattle land use, but if not, why does the land have to solely be used to grow crops instead of repurposed for something else? You said that the land would get used for other industrial uses, why not an environmental use instead? Recycling centers or something of that ilk.

[Reelya]

But Wierd's entire point is that since crops only make up a small portion of animal feed, that argument itself is wrong. "but the argument goes XYZ!" isn't actually a rebuttal, if XYZ is shown to be false.

The assumption in that argument is that a significant amount of the feed used could be eaten by humans. Common sense says that they wouldn't do that - i.e. it's a no-brainer that they feed cattle predominantly on things we can't/don't eat, since there's less opportunity costs that way.

Backing up that basic intuition with a quick google shows a UN study that said 86% of what we feed cattle on isn't fit for human consumption, and this isn't US-specific. In fact there's no reason to think that the US is a special case on feeding cattle on grasslands. Everywhere has plenty of marginal land, other places no less than the USA.
http://www.fao.org/ag/againfo/home/en/news_archive/2017_More_Fuel_for_the_Food_Feed.html
https://www.moffittsfarm.com.au/2018/01/19/world-livestock-an-asset-not-a-threat-to-human-food-availability/

So according to that by completely removing all crops edible to humans from the meat chain you'd reduce meat production by something like 14%. Then, there would be real question about what actual effect any attempt to do so would actually have. For example, if you just banned the use of those grains being sold for meat-production then the grains in general would become less economically viable, so that land might just get diverted to other things. Maybe they're cropping corn and the good corn goes to the processors for humans and the funny-looking ears of corn and all the scraps goes to the feedlots. Banning them from selling to feedlots just makes the entire venture more risky and less profitable, since you're taking options away from them, and a significant amount of them might just start cropping things that are now relatively more profitable, not all of which will be food products. Even if they stay in corn production, and all the corn that was going into meat is now competing in the human-consumption market for corn, well now there's a corn glut so all producers are making less money. Which, unless you somehow force them to keep growing the corn, isn't sustainable, and will either force some growers out of business or to divert production.

[scriver]

That's not entirely the whole picture, though. A lot of said unfit feed is unfit because it is too starchy for human stomachs to break down, for example special breeds of maize, potatoe, and beets. But those are grown where one could grow strains of maize, potatoe, and beet that is suitable to human consumption.

You'd have to break it down into how much is stuff like hay that they make out of the non-edible stems and such of plants and how much is fruits(/tubers) grown for the purpose of feeding animals, whether eatable by humans or not.

[Reelya]

Sure, that land could go to growing additional corn or potatoes, but there is in fact other land that could go to that, but doesn't, already. More people could grow more potatoes and absolutely saturate the potato market, but it wouldn't necessarily be sustainable to do that. The amount of potatoes we grow isn't constrained by the amount of land we have, it's constrained by the fact that people need to make a net profit off growing potatoes, so the amount we grow is a set ratio based on how much it costs to grow, process and distribute relative to the amount of demand that exists. Prices will fall and margins will go negative if they over-produce potatoes, and people will be pushed out of the market, meaning production will fall again, which is why that doesn't really happen already. If you want to make foodstuffs from potatoes more abundant, you don't need more land you need to streamline the production so that it's cheaper. higher demand for potato-growing land will follow from that, not the other way around.

If they can't do the feedlot thing so they don't want to grow the stuff you mentioned, there's no reason to expect them to switch to the corn, potatoes etc already unless there's some economic incentive to do that, and you've just massively reduced the value of their land, by definition, since you're preventing them from growing the thing that's the most economically viable out of all their options. The effect of doing so would be like the logic behind tariffs. i.e. bad logic. There's also the problem that really cheap food floods into poor countries as imports and this is in fact a big cause of third-world unemployment and collapse of rural economies, since you cannot really compete with international agribusiness. Just producing more food isn't necessarily a solution, so saying that we could switch those feedlots to producing more potatoes, corn, wheat and what have you isn't necessarily going to be a good thing.

[Rolan7]

That is a true explanation of how things are, but it's addressing profit optimization rather than the original question of food efficiency.