Comments Saltation has made

Corn is economic cattle "optimisation"

The best tasting animal flesh comes from active animals living their (evolved) normal lifestyles. The best tasting beef is wide-ranging beef on dry-ish grasslands -- cattle that have to move long distances to eat. This is why Argentinian and Australian beef tastes so much better than most other countries' beef, and, due to the extra nutrients in the meat (similar to game), why you feel so much fuller so much more quickly eating these countries' beef.

Corn makes cattle fat, fast. Size, not quality. It's useful for force-farmers for the same reason hormones and antibiotics are useful -- they get a much bigger animal much more quickly.

Corn is not fed to cattle because it's surplus. Corn is grown in the current quantities because it meets a demand.

Interestingly, corn has about the same effect on humans as eating the same weight of sugar. Sugar has the same effect on human palates as high-nutrition foods.  Tellingly, corn syrup (tastes like sugar) is now endemic in most "modern" commercial food preparations.

From a fuel perspective, even if ALL the corn production of ALL the Americas was devoted to fuel, it would not make much of a dent on even the USA's fuel needs.  Ethanol from corn is not a viable oil replacement.

And the pseudo-vegetarians' argument that cattle take up too much land relative to plants rests absolutely on a false assumption:  that humans can gain the same nutrition from the soil and the plants that herbivores can.  Only in very rich soils can vegetarianism come within a bull's roar (sorry) nutritionally of the effectiveness of inserting a third party pre-digestion step: herbivores. Cattle are typically run on "waste" land -- too poor quality soil for farming plants to be viable.On It's only natural posted 2 years, 9 months ago 32 Responses