It's a well-established phenomenon. Basically, whenever energy is converted between different forms (think sun>plants>herbovore>carnivore) some is lost in the process. Raising livestock loses a lot of energy, and so is less efficient than eating the food ourselves. Even through a slaughtered cow might feed a bunch of people for a day, remember that you have to feed the cow for 1.5 to 2 years... and cows eat a lot.
This can be useful if they're eating something that we can't, but it's a problem if we're feeding them, say, corn that we could eat ourselves.
It's why there are always so man more prey animals than there are predators.
Bleugh! I hate pie! It's messy and usually not that tasty! :P
Hence why we usually DON'T feed them corn but instead feed them hay or leave them in a pasture... :P
While the land could, in theory, be used for something else, the effort and cost required for irrigating crops may or may not be greater than the effort and cost for raising cattle.
You need to eat a good pot pie. Mmmm meat... Why yes, I AM a member of "People Eating Tasty Animals" :P
What I don't quite know if animals produce forms of proteins or whatever that we don't form ourselvese, and are easier to take if we eat the meat then try to find the plant that would give us the same thing.
I believe that today,we can have vegetarians (maybe even vegan?) diets that would not have this problem, but this was definitely not always the case.
IIIRC, a lot of "vegetarian" animals really need to spend a lot of their time eating. This could also have been a historical problem (especially since there is stuff we can't process but some animals can. For example, a cow or horse can eat grass, but we can't live off it.)
As we learned to grow crops more efficiently and created crops that are richer in nutrients than the original plant, a lot of this problems may have gone away.
In that context, meat may be similar to something else in Star Trek: Anti-Matter.
Anti-Matter, according to the technical manual, can and is created artificially, with a very efficient process. But not perfectly efficient. Tons better than what we can do, but there is still a net energy loss. But it's done anyway, as anti-matter can give us the stored energy very fast, where as the source of energy for the anti-matter would not. Say, 1 fusion reactor the size of the enterprise warp core working a year produces enough anti-matter to fly at Warp 9 for a week. You can't install 52 fusion reactors of this size in your ship for the same effect, so you produce the energy elsewhere for later use, even if you throw away 2 fusion reactors worth of energy.
For the same reason, you may accept throwing away so much grain to get an animal that can give you only a low percentage back. But this may be obsolete with modern agriculture and chemistry.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
True, but... what percentage of your last hamburger's diet was feed? Ranchers usually use feed as a dietary supplement with the bulk of the diet being grass. Like this. It's less expensive than trying to feed them grain as the bulk of their diet.
EDIT*reads articles* the BBC article needs a tinfoil hat.... so does the Cornell paper. It's also worth noting the Cornell paper you linked was published in 1997. I give far more credence to the Forbes paper. Some places use "Feed lots" to raise cattle, but that's the expensive way to do it. And those are the only places that need to use a lot of grain.
That's mainly a function of knowledge, rather than the food itself. You can live off an entirely vegetarian diet, but earlier civilizations may not have known how to.
But would earlier civilizations have been able to do so? I'm not sure they would have been able to survive on a vegetarian diet, where there would have been no dietary/vitamin supplements available, plus the rigors of a survival-lifestyle... I can see why history said that people often died in their 40s-50s in such times...
It might be valuable to point out here that civilization as we know it was possible through advances in agriculture. At first, being a farming culture sucked because, as you hint at, they were nutritionally more poor than hunter-gatherers, but gradually they actually began producing more food than they needed, allowing the rise of classes of people who didn't have to grow food.
That's certainly true... Whether that would have been possible in irradiated soil, however, I find dubious...
This requires a certain amount of handwavium--the writers were making things up as they went along, and weren't logically consistent. In real life, the Vulcans might never have been able to develop a technological civilization at all on their desert planet.
I think the important point is that by the time the Vulcans nuked themselves, they'd (somewhat obvious, I know) already reached a technological state. Their civilisation at that point would have been more like in Defiance, than rather than having been a people developing from a solely 'primitive village' state... :cool:
I am vegan myself so I won't even attempt to eat any replicated meat. I do make in the real world here Mock (Mimic) Meat which is based on veggies/fruit. So if I was on the Star Ship I would programmed the Replicator to make Burgers or Hot Dogs without Meat in them. It can be done. I do myself. They come out so good my GSD (German Shepard Dog) enjoys them.
You make burgers and hot dogs from mock meat, but would not eat a replicated meat which has not actually come from an animal? If you object to meats on ethics, that I can understand, but if you object to meat on taste (so wouldn't want a replicated meat) why use the mock meat for burgers and hot dogs?
I'm no trying to be argumentative, I genuinely don't understand...
This requires a certain amount of handwavium--the writers were making things up as they went along, and weren't logically consistent. In real life, the Vulcans might never have been able to develop a technological civilization at all on their desert planet.
Since the Time of the Awakening involved nuclear detonations, it's pretty likely that the Vulcans were up to at least WW2 equivalent technology in several areas. In fact, the departure of "Those Who Marched Beneath the Raptor's Wings" (the proto-Romulans) pretty much implies WW3 level tech, at least in aerospace (i.e. late pre-warp or Warp One flight, allowing crude starflight). Their agricultural and water/soil management technology was probably at least on a par with ours today.
The way I view it, Vulcan was always drier than Earth, but it was the world wars leading up to the Awakening that ruined a good fraction of the soil. The primitive early Vulcans thus had more usable land than modern Vulcans despite their less sophisticated agriculture. 22nd century Vulcan was apparently able to sustain a couple billion people even though this was before transporter-based Replicator technology.
"According to Michael Okuda in the book Ships of the Line (p. 22), the planet was devastated during the Time of the Awakening. The ShirKahr highlands were once green with meadows and soaring coniferous trees. During the Time of the Awakening, the highlands were destroyed by nuclear warfare, and the meadows changed into deserts. This process of destruction was repeated all over the planet, resulting in global climate change. Okuda detailed similar accounts of nuclear devastation in the text commentary for ENT: "The Forge" and in the book Star Trek: The Original Series 365 (p. 176). "
Comments
While the land could, in theory, be used for something else, the effort and cost required for irrigating crops may or may not be greater than the effort and cost for raising cattle.
You need to eat a good pot pie. Mmmm meat...
My character Tsin'xing
Time will only tell!
I believe that today,we can have vegetarians (maybe even vegan?) diets that would not have this problem, but this was definitely not always the case.
IIIRC, a lot of "vegetarian" animals really need to spend a lot of their time eating. This could also have been a historical problem (especially since there is stuff we can't process but some animals can. For example, a cow or horse can eat grass, but we can't live off it.)
As we learned to grow crops more efficiently and created crops that are richer in nutrients than the original plant, a lot of this problems may have gone away.
In that context, meat may be similar to something else in Star Trek: Anti-Matter.
Anti-Matter, according to the technical manual, can and is created artificially, with a very efficient process. But not perfectly efficient. Tons better than what we can do, but there is still a net energy loss. But it's done anyway, as anti-matter can give us the stored energy very fast, where as the source of energy for the anti-matter would not. Say, 1 fusion reactor the size of the enterprise warp core working a year produces enough anti-matter to fly at Warp 9 for a week. You can't install 52 fusion reactors of this size in your ship for the same effect, so you produce the energy elsewhere for later use, even if you throw away 2 fusion reactors worth of energy.
For the same reason, you may accept throwing away so much grain to get an animal that can give you only a low percentage back. But this may be obsolete with modern agriculture and chemistry.
Of course, Forbes makes the claim that it doesn't have to take that much grain, but I don't have a good handle on Forbes' reliability.
EDIT*reads articles* the BBC article needs a tinfoil hat.... so does the Cornell paper. It's also worth noting the Cornell paper you linked was published in 1997. I give far more credence to the Forbes paper. Some places use "Feed lots" to raise cattle, but that's the expensive way to do it. And those are the only places that need to use a lot of grain.
My character Tsin'xing
That's certainly true... Whether that would have been possible in irradiated soil, however, I find dubious...
I think the important point is that by the time the Vulcans nuked themselves, they'd (somewhat obvious, I know) already reached a technological state. Their civilisation at that point would have been more like in Defiance, than rather than having been a people developing from a solely 'primitive village' state... :cool:
You make burgers and hot dogs from mock meat, but would not eat a replicated meat which has not actually come from an animal? If you object to meats on ethics, that I can understand, but if you object to meat on taste (so wouldn't want a replicated meat) why use the mock meat for burgers and hot dogs?
I'm no trying to be argumentative, I genuinely don't understand...
Since the Time of the Awakening involved nuclear detonations, it's pretty likely that the Vulcans were up to at least WW2 equivalent technology in several areas. In fact, the departure of "Those Who Marched Beneath the Raptor's Wings" (the proto-Romulans) pretty much implies WW3 level tech, at least in aerospace (i.e. late pre-warp or Warp One flight, allowing crude starflight). Their agricultural and water/soil management technology was probably at least on a par with ours today.
The way I view it, Vulcan was always drier than Earth, but it was the world wars leading up to the Awakening that ruined a good fraction of the soil. The primitive early Vulcans thus had more usable land than modern Vulcans despite their less sophisticated agriculture. 22nd century Vulcan was apparently able to sustain a couple billion people even though this was before transporter-based Replicator technology.
"According to Michael Okuda in the book Ships of the Line (p. 22), the planet was devastated during the Time of the Awakening. The ShirKahr highlands were once green with meadows and soaring coniferous trees. During the Time of the Awakening, the highlands were destroyed by nuclear warfare, and the meadows changed into deserts. This process of destruction was repeated all over the planet, resulting in global climate change. Okuda detailed similar accounts of nuclear devastation in the text commentary for ENT: "The Forge" and in the book Star Trek: The Original Series 365 (p. 176). "
from http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Vulcan_%28planet%29