North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[hans brinkmann <hans-brinkmann@t-online.de>]

Hallo Mark,
I have been busy the last days...
Thank you very much for your detailed and very friendly answers!

In my imagination it is no place for e.g. Uruguay, Argentinian or US 
American farmers who do not eat good meat!
But I am sure the mentioned farmers will not like at all the packed meat 
from German supermarkets...
You know, I do not take it as a strict rule for me:
If I would be your guest, I would eat your produced meat and definitely, 
I would enjoy it very much!

Concerning the real water consumption, I can not say much, because you 
are the professional.
After I googled I found one source and the page of "Virtual Water":
http://www.worldwatercouncil.org/index.php?id=866
It was established at Canada and is working now worldwide.
The name is explaining it already: It is not only the direct drinking 
water and I think it has just a symbolic value.
And it are rough average figures which are used worldwide to compare a 
car-production with a tomato (greenhouse?).
Definitely it is not close to the American outdoor  meat production, 
which we usually do not have at Germany.

You are also very right with transportation: Even at the third world, 
starvation problems are usually only transportation problems!

And your sugar sentence at the end is also very interesting.
Many years ago I have had the feeling, much American supermarket food is 
much sweeter than European food.
Also if it was called: Original German or French this or that... 
Probably now-a-days, we have the same sweet taste (young people) at 
Europe too.

ciao
Hans         Germany




Mark & Helen Angermayer schrieb:

> Hallo Hans,
>
> I appreciate your personal decision to become a vegetarian and want to be
> sensitive to that.  It must have, at least at some point, involved some
> sacrifice.
>
> However, I would disagree with the statistics you quote off the Website.  To
> wit:
>
> " For each hamburger passed up, as much water is saved as taking 40
> showers with a low-flow nozzle. In other words, save massive amounts of
> water - 3000 to 5000 gallons (about 11,350-19,000 liters) of water for
> every pound of beef you avoid;"
>
> As my background is in hog production, I will mainly speak to that.  I know
> it takes roughly 2 gallons of water to produce a pound of pork, 3 gallons at
> the very most.    This includes drinking water, wash water, water wasted,
> etc.  It would be less for chicken because there is no wash water used in
> chickens, and they waste less.  Cattle drink more per pound of gain than
> hogs or chickens, but they don't take much wash water, so I would think they
> would fall somewhere between hogs and chickens.  What I don't know is how
> much water is used for slaughter and further processing, but I think a
> reasonable estimate would be 1 gallon per pound.  So we're up to 4 gallons.
> Taking the midpoint of the estimate off the Website (4000 gallons) that
> would leave 3996 gallons of water to grow the few pounds of grain that goes
> into a pound of pork.  Perhaps they are exaggerating a little.  Regardless
> of how much water it takes to grow a few pounds of grain, there are a few
> observations worth noting.  First, by far most of the water used to grow
> grain is rain water that would be wasted if not used for grain.  When
> supplemental irrigation is used (most grain farmers don't irrigate), it's
> almost always from personal water wells or farm ponds and not from a public
> water source.  The same thing applies to livestock farms.  The farm I used
> to own in Higginsville MO got it's water from our own wells, and I can
> assure you no one in town had to forego a shower because of our farm,
> although we had to take extra showers :-)  Lastly, the amount of water it
> takes to grow grain is really a mute point, because if we didn't eat the
> meat, we would presumably have to eat the grain anyway.  What really matters
> is how much grain it takes to convert it to a pound of meat, and as I said
> before, it takes very little.
>
> The other quote:
> "If each American reduced his or her meat consumption by only 5%,
> roughly equivalent to eating one less dish of meat each weak, 7.5
> million tons of grain would be saved, enough to feed 25 million
> people-roughly the number estimated to go hungry in the United States
> each day."
>
> It's not that simple.  I would posit if Americans reduced their meat
> consumption to zero, it would have no effect on the 25 million Americans
> that go hungry every day.  Why?  Because grain is so plentiful and cheap
> already.  The price of corn at the elevator averages about $3.00 per bushel.
> A bushel weighs 56 pounds, which will feed a person for a while.  True, a
> person still has to get to the elevator and buy a pickup load and have a
> place to store it, but this is a function of other problems not because
> grain is scarce, being fed to all the animals.  Even buying processed grain
> in the store is cheap.  We buy 5lbs. of flour for about a dollar.  Again
> it's not because grain is to costly that people go hungry here in the U.S.,
> it's because they don't have cooking facilities, transportation, etc.
>
> Secondly, agriculture is driven by cost of production.  What I mean is this:
> Let's assume the average cost of production to produce a bushel of corn is
> $2.50 (I don't know what it actually is, so this is a guess).  If everyone
> quit eating meat, there would initially be a huge surplus of corn (in fact
> it would go unharvested, left in the field).  But in the long run production
> would be reduced until the equilibrium price of corn was back to it's cost
> of production ($2.50 per bushel).  It would take a lot of land out of
> production, but it would have no effect on the 25 million Americans that go
> hungry, because people that can't afford $3.00 corn aren't going to be able
> to buy it for $2.50 either.
>
> Again I appreciate your stance, and I'm not trying to be a self-appointed
> promoter of Americans eating more meat (I agree Americans eat too much meat,
> as well as sugar, coffee, etc.-here I plead guilty to some of this) but I
> disagree with the implicit assumption that eating a hamburger or steak
> causes someone else to go hungry.  I also disagree meat production is an
> enormous waste of resources.  On the contrary, U.S. (or modern) meat
> production is very efficient, and getting more so all the time.
>
> ciao,
> Mark
> Kansas
>
>
>
>
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