Eighty percent of the grain the United States produces goes to livestock. Seventy-eight percent of all of our beef comes from feed lots, where the cattle eat grain, mostly corn and wheat. So do most of our hogs and chickens. The cattle spend their adult lives packed shoulder to shoulder in a space not much bigger than their bodies, up to their knees in ****, being stuffed with grain and a constant stream of antibiotics to prevent the disease this sort of confinement invariably engenders

It takes thirty-five calories of fossil fuel to make a calorie of beef this way; sixty-eight to make one calorie of pork.

Among plant foods, oats are the most energy efficient. For every calorie of fossil fuel used to grow oats in the United States, 2.5 calories of food are yielded. Similarly, potatoes yield just over 2 calories of food per calorie of fossil fuel input, and for wheat and soybeans the number is 1.5. On the other hand, the most energy efficient meat produced, range-land beef, produces only one-third of a calorie of food per calorie of fossil fuel expended. Feedlot beef, the most inefficient meat, produces one calorie of food every 33 calories of fossil fuel consumed! The numbers for poultry, lamb, eggs, and milk production each fall somewhere between the numbers for range-land and feedlot. In general, this means that growing crops is at least five times more energy-efficient than grazing cattle, 20 times more efficient than raising chickens, and over 50 times more efficient than raising feedlot cattle!