THE FAT OF THE LAND - MEAT: A Benign Extravagance - page 70

the 30 kilos of oil crops. It is over three times as big as the area required for growing the
feed crops for 33 kilos of pork.' 7
However, these figures are misleading because, as the authors point out:
The assessment of land requirements for individual food items was often complic-
ated by a joint production dilemma. For soybeans, all of the land required was clas-
sified as being for soya oil, and oil cakes used for livestock products were merely
seen as being a waste product. The consequence of assigning all the land to the main
product is that land requirements for oil products were relatively high, while land re-
quirements for livestock products were low.
It is this 'joint production dilemma' which makes comparisons between livestock based
systems and stockfree systems complicated, and it casts doubt over the extent to which oil-
seed residues can be regarded as 'ecological leftovers' and animals fed on them regarded
as default livestock.
Moreover this is not a marginal matter. Seventy per cent of the feed in the Dutch live-
stock industry is derived from food processing byproducts, and about 60 per cent of these
byproducts come from three commodities: potatoes, sugar and soybean oil. Every year the
average Dutch consumer, from his consumption of these three foodstuffs, generates 18kg
of dried sugar beet pulp, 12kg of molasses, 7kg of potato waste and an impressive 72kg
of soybean pulp. Fed to productive pigs, this is sufficient to produce 81 grams of pork per
person per day, or over 29kg of pork per year. If you add in the 40 per cent of residues de-
rived from other commodities you can produce 135 grams of pork per person per day, the
equivalent of 49kg of pork per year, more than the average Dutch consumer was eating in
1990. 8 (On top of this, if slaughterhouse, catering and domestic food waste were also fed
to pigs, as indeed they were not so long ago, then the quantity of pork produced from waste
would be higher still.)
Many of these food processing residues do not have much value for other purposes.
There is not a lot you can do with potato peelings from the potato crisp industry, sugar
beet pulp or rapeseed residue, other than feed it to animals. However there is one particular
commodity that stands out: 53 grams out of the 135 grams of pork that can be derived from
food processing waste are attributable to high protein soybean residues (soya meal), and
this is in such demand as animal feed that it is manifestly not a waste product; indeed it is
debatable whether it is the oil or the meal that is the main product. There is four times as
much meal as there is oil in a tonne of soybeans, while the oil is worth three and a half to
four times the price of the meal. 9 This means that slightly over half the value of the soya
lies in the meal, rather than in the oil. Nonhebel observes: