Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
> "Steve" <no@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote...
>> Getting crop yields anywhere NEAR high enough to feed the world
>> population with existing cropland (let alone have leftovers for
>> biofuels!) ABSOLUTELY REQUIRES artificial fertilization, whether by
>> petroleum-derived fertilizers or mined deposits of nitrates (eg bat
>> guano). Anyone who thinks otherwise is delusional.
>
> This is only true if your talking the kinds of foods that people are
used
> to eating (ie: wheat for example) And if your including all the food
that
> needs to be grown to feed cattle to produce beef.
>
> There are other foods that are much higher nutritionally, and require
> much less fertilization. However they are not common on the American
> table. And of course, beef is terrible as far as that goes. Even
buffalo
> meat costs less per-pound to grow than beef does.
>
> If tomorrow all white bread sales were halted and replaced with wheat
bread
> sales, it would probably drop the amount of wheat needed to produce
> the same amount of nutrition obtained from bread by a 3rd.
>
> This is one of these problems that seems to be a technical one but is
> really a political one. I'm not going to give up my burgers and fries
> and Frosted Flakes and go on a veegan diet, unless you get the rest
> of the country to do it. And everyone else in the country has the
> same attitude. Even though if we all did, we would probably all
> not be such lard-asses, would probably be a lot healthier, and it
> would not require nearly as much farmland to feed us.
I have a better idea. Instead of stifling life in America for all this,
let's take the corn which we export to feed the world and use it instead
to produce fuel for our cars. That way we'll put less money into the
sheikdoms and make them pay more for what they need from us. Gives 'em
a taste of their own tactics *and* improves our balance of trade.
--
If John McCain gets the 2008 Republican Presidential nomination,
my vote for President will be a write-in for Jiang Zemin.
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