Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
no. of gallons of water needed
11 gallons
1 cup of whole grain
oat cereal
396 gallons
1 hamburger patty
2,912 gallons
1 lamp chop
1 roasted chicken
17,476 gallons
hunger, even though world food output per person has grown by a
fifth since 1980.
In this following-my-nose research, it soon hit me that humans
were actively squandering nature's abundance. In the post-World
War II era, one-third of the world's grain, along with over 90 per-
cent of soybeans, is going not to humans but is being fed—in a
completely new historic twist—to animals in feedlots. And in re-
cent decades, we've even turned a third of our fish catch into
feed. Now, roughly one-third of U.S. corn is also transformed into
ethanol to feed cars—yet another “perfect solution” for a world in
which a billion people are too poor to translate their body's hunger
into “market demand” for adequate food.
In
Diet,
I call the cattle feedlot system a “protein factory in re-
verse.” Ruminants, such as cattle, had long served humans by
