AN ACRE A MEAL? - MEAT: A Benign Extravagance - page 18

agronomist, states that 'the cereals to meat conversion ratio in intensive animal husbandry
is 6 to 1 for red meat'. 7
On the other hand Frances Moore Lappé, author of Diet for a Small Planet, reports: 'For
every 16 pounds of grain and soy fed to beef cattle in the United States, we only get one
pound back in meat on our plates … 16 pounds of grain has 21 times more calories and
eight times more protein - but only three times more fat - than a pound of hamburger.' 8 So
her protein conversion ratio for beef is 8:1 while her energy ratio is 21:1. Jeremy Rifkin,
author of Beyond Beef , considers that 'Cattle have a feed protein efficiency of only 6 per
cent [more than 16:1].' 9 And the Canadian expert on nitrogen fertilizers, Vaclav Smil, is
vague about the efficiency of beef: 'Protein conversion efficiencies [for beef] are just 5 to
8 per cent …' which is between 12.5:1 and 20:1. In an accompanying visual chart, more
noticeable than the sentence in the text, he classifies beef at the top figure of 20:1. 10
The average of all these deviants is still around 10:1, and there is no doubt that this figure
acts as a strange attractor for commentators seeking a convenient rule of thumb; and, more
importantly, it has been lodged in the mind of members of the public, from Shelley on-
wards, who take an interest in these matters. It is not surprising that the easiest and most
memorable number should slip into common public usage. What is less clear is why the
weight for weight figure for grain-fed meat should vary from 6:1 (Steen) and 9: 1 (Rifkin)
to 16:1 (Moore Lappé), while the protein ratio for beef ranges from 4: 1 (Harris) and 8:1
(Moore Lappé) to 20:1 (Smil).
TEN TO ONE - A STRANGE ATTRACTOR
Below are some examples of the 10:1 ratio, as it appears in available literature.
The first demonstrates the use of a 10:1 protein ratio in a highly charged vegan polem-
ic.
The key to this extraordinary industry is the inefficiency of meat production - about 10 kg of prime
vegetable protein to produce just 1kg of meat protein. Times that by the 45 billion animals barbarically
slaughtered last year and the equation begins to take on an obscene dimension. 1
Here is a figure provided by a website page entitled 'How to Win an Argument
with a Meateater':
Percentage of protein wasted by cycling grain through livestock: 90. 2
Michael Pollan gives a similar ratio for meat-eating, but focussed on calories:
It's true that prodigious amounts of food energy are wasted every time an animal eats another animal
- nine calories for every one we consume. 3
This is British permaculturist Patrick Whitefield, who refers to land use:
Typically only 10 per cent of the food consumed by farm animals is available as edible meat when they
are killed. The ratios for milk and eggs are somewhat better, but similar. This is obviously inefficient. A
hectare of land can support ten times as many people on a vegan diet than on a purely carnivorous one. 4