AN ACRE A MEAL? - MEAT: A Benign Extravagance - page 22

are more efficient because they are cold-blooded). Unfortunately no figures are provided
for dairy. 15
I chose them, first because they include the standard 10:1 figure for beef which appears
to be correct in the UK; second, because the figures given for other animals are around a
broadly acceptable median of all the figures available; and third, because the figures were
referenced in the CIWF report as coming from a document called Contribution of Anim-
al Agriculture to Meeting Global Human Food Demand , from the Council for Agricultur-
al Science and Technology (CAST), published in 1999. CAST represents a large sector of
the United States food industry, including organizations with an interest in meat produc-
tion such as the American Meat Science Association, the American Forage and Grassland
Council and the American College of Poultry Veterinarians - and hence at the opposite end
of the ideological spectrum from CIWF. These are therefore figures that are accepted by
authoritative writers on both sides of the vegan/ carnivore divide.
Or so I thought. However, I was unable to get hold of the CAST document in Britain,
either through the library system or through CIWF. After some delay, I contacted CAST,
who informed me that a document of that name didn't exist, at least not published by them;
but they had published another report in the same year with a similar title: Animal Agricul-
ture and Global Food Supply . 16 Assuming this to be the same document under a revised
title, I ordered a copy, fully expecting the CIWF chart to be in it. It wasn't. After further en-
quiries, to CAST and to CIWF, I am still unable to establish where the figures come from.
CIWF have told me that they cannot work out where they got them from. I know the feel-
ing!
The CAST document provides a slightly different and more detailed set of figures (see
table 1 ) for six different countries, including the USA. These relate to levels of nutrients in
feed and meat (whereas the CIWF table doesn't tell us how much protein or energy there
is in the feed, or in the meat); and, surprisingly perhaps, they show meat production to be
slightly more inefficient than CIWF alleges. The mean figure for beef of 13.4:1 reflects a
US beef industry which per-forms less well than the UK husbandry examined in Nix's ag-
ricultural handbook.
Table 1: Conversion Ratios of Animal Feed to Human Edible Food in the USA