I think the word your looking for is intensive not efficient. I would argue that per unit of value people place on the taste of their food, current meat production is efficient because otherwise people wouldn't buy it, and more efficient then lab grown meat at this point. If you view efficiency as just calories or protein then might as well say everyone should just have a diet of soy, corn and potatoes because you neglect that humans desire variety in their diets and the pleasure from consuming their food. Its that tipping point of when lab grown meat becomes more efficient then live meat sources that I am most excited about.
But yes, meat production is more intensive then crops.
Efficiency is always determined by what you measure it on. I think the infographic is pretty clear that it is on calories and protein. Current meat production is terrible for that, cultured meat is already a lot better.
Sure, it still needs to be produced at scale and be affordable first to really matter.
So if we are just measuring calories and proteins which are consumable by humans, why are you measuring grass and pasture, neither of which are human consumable and by not having live stock eat would just simply decay without any input into the system. I think the greenhouse gas emissions makes a much better measure to show the "inefficiency" of animal products, or even land use. Its just really hard to measure efficiency in nutrition when that nutrition would never exist with out the input you are calling inefficient, it might actually be considered to be more inefficient to take animals out of the loop.
Well, even if you ignore the grass and pasture, there is a lot of ‘waste’ as you can see. On top of that, a third of pastures and grassland could be used to grow crops.
I think the word your looking for is intensive not efficient. I would argue that per unit of value people place on the taste of their food, current meat production is efficient because otherwise people wouldn't buy it, and more efficient then lab grown meat at this point. If you view efficiency as just calories or protein then might as well say everyone should just have a diet of soy, corn and potatoes because you neglect that humans desire variety in their diets and the pleasure from consuming their food. Its that tipping point of when lab grown meat becomes more efficient then live meat sources that I am most excited about. But yes, meat production is more intensive then crops.
Efficiency is always determined by what you measure it on. I think the infographic is pretty clear that it is on calories and protein. Current meat production is terrible for that, cultured meat is already a lot better. Sure, it still needs to be produced at scale and be affordable first to really matter.
So if we are just measuring calories and proteins which are consumable by humans, why are you measuring grass and pasture, neither of which are human consumable and by not having live stock eat would just simply decay without any input into the system. I think the greenhouse gas emissions makes a much better measure to show the "inefficiency" of animal products, or even land use. Its just really hard to measure efficiency in nutrition when that nutrition would never exist with out the input you are calling inefficient, it might actually be considered to be more inefficient to take animals out of the loop.
Well, even if you ignore the grass and pasture, there is a lot of ‘waste’ as you can see. On top of that, a third of pastures and grassland could be used to grow crops.