wageslaveonbike

Actually, it doesn't imply that they only eat more meat. It just says "the standard american diet". In other words, the average american diet.

james Haury

Sure it wastes gas any methane produced floats away on the breeze ,as opposed to being contained within an automobile with the windows closed where it is used efficiently to offend.

bugmenot

Yeah, if anyone is as completely f$cking ******** as you are. What a crock. People should be getting regular aerobic exercise anyway. Are you taking into account how bicycling saves the energy people might otherwise go to the gym and use? Are you taking into account how people getting enough cardio exercise don't consume health care products nearly as much? No. The real way you can tell whether something costs less energywise is generally if it costs less period. And biking for commuting clearly does. Neither you nor the author (if the quotes at the top are really his) take into account anything like reality but yeah, the author can certainly run numbers in theory-land and say whatever the hell you'd like to.

wageslaveonbike

You, my friend are the ******. It clearly says in the article that bicycling is more efficient no matter what you eat. But you are just too ******** dumb to read more than a couple of isolated statements, so the hampster that keeps your pathetic little mind working falls completely off it's wheel. Try actually reading through this thread, every issue, even semi-legitimate, that you brought up has already been discussed.

Man! I'm really trying not to act self rightious or superior, but some people are just freaking stupid! Oh well, next please.

marcm

Lyeinyoureye, as far as I can tell (without devoting too many calories of my brain energy to this thread), you keep comparing the fossil-fuel costs of eating (industrial agriculture/meat) with the fossil-fuel costs of driving. I'm not aware that most people face a choice of "eat or drive". It seems to me most people face a choice of "eat this or eat that" and a choice of "drive a car or ride a bike". Are those choices related meaningfully?

If you can demonstrate that cyclists tend to require (or choose to consume) more meat or more industrially-grown food than motorists, I'll start to pay more attention. Otherwise, your argument is about food and NOT about bicycling. That's ok, but please don't confuse the two.

In other words: we all have to eat, AND we all have to get around. We can eat with more or less fossil-fuel efficiency, and we can get around with more or less fossil-fuel efficiency. But as far as I can tell, those choices are pretty much independent of each other.

If Wageslaveonbike had posted a thread titled "Industrial agriculture and meat wastes gas", I think the only possible criticism might be "off topic", though arguably it would be related to goals of many car-free forum members. But blurring the distinction between what you eat and how you get around, I don't get that, and I think that's what many posters here are objecting to, explicitly or not.

MarkS

Are you sure? Check the fine print? When I was cooking beef, used to notice meat from brazil. Even more so with canned meats.

If your spiritual reservoir is so low that you were only a hamburger away from suicide, you were probably headed that way anyways.

If this is true, then it sounds like we've gone backwards in terms of efficiency. Historically, agriculture produces a little more than one calorie of food for every calorie invested. Perhaps having cheap fuel has allowed efficiencies to retrograde.

Do you have a source for this? Why would the government subsidize to this extent? If this is true, all those impoverished farmers might be better off selling water. Is it just meat that's being subsidized, or the soy/grain production that's fed to the meat? In which case, how much would a soy burger be if subsidies were removed?

It works for the Amish because 90% of them work in agriculture from sun-up to sun-down. A healthy livestyle that includes meat ... but probably not one most of us would choose.

Where do you find it, and in what form? The only form I know of is in a Trader Joe cereal. Its allright, but a little pricey, and when you read the box you realize they were stingy on the actual use of hemp. What else? Eat a rope?

MarkS

+1. Exactly.

If a person driving a 3000 lb car can be more efficient than a cyclist -- no matter what he eats -- then cycling must the most inefficent form of locomotion known to man.

I was about to say that most cyclists carry veggie foods anyways (powerbars, granola bars, etc) when it occurred to me -- does anyone carry pemmican or jerky?

wageslaveonbike

You will typically find hemp in a powder form, maybe whole seeds, oil, nutrition bars. Only bummer is, if you are in the US, its illegal to produce here, so it must be imported from canada. If you have any health food stores in your area besides trader joe's, try there. Or maybe trader joes can start carrying it, ask them. Or just mail order it.

https://www.alissacohen.com/hempprotein.html

https://hghealth.com/prod1.html

wageslaveonbike

Yes, in retrospect, I wish I had titled the post differently. Now at least I know how easily people are confused. So yes, I agree with you. Still, that doesn't excuse how irrationally some people have responded.

Severian

well if you go around telling ANYONE that they are eating petroleum they tend to get a little miffed. Particularly if you don't stop to consider that some of your readers might already be subscribers to the "Eat Locally Eat Sustainably" culture. Like me...

I could bike to get my food... and I have.... from a farm.

wageslaveonbike

I did consider that. My hopes were that some of these people would be open to the concept if they hadn't already become familiar with it.

Mad props to you!

btanner

I am not sure what drugs you are taking but you have taken way to many. yes cattle consume grass but guess what IT GROWS BACK so they can eat more. 1 cow can survive on 1 acre of grass whit no extra feed. and as for farmers there is more that enough corn setting in storage bins though out the U.S. but bush is not about to give up his profit. and we send most of it to people thoug out the world that do not have oil and are dying of hunger. but yes we in the U S are oil dependent because most of our society is full of fat people that do not know how to live of the land. I hate to say it because I am a Texan but americans for the most part are lazy.

wageslaveonbike

You are suggesting that I'm on drugs? Ah, why can't people just think before they post? If you understood anything that you were talking about, you would know that most cattle are not fed grass and that grazing depletes top soil anyway. Why don't you actually do the homework and look at what resources actually go into producing your food. Oh wow! One cow can live on an acre of land?! Guess what! 20,000 pounds of potatoes could live on that same piece of land.

lyeinyoureye

Could be. I'm just clarifying my previous post. I thought one calorie of grain required one calorie of fossil fuel, but it's 10-1 for grain, and probably 100-1 for meat, which means that "cars", i.e. mechanical people carriers are generally as efficient or more efficient than a cyclist at the same speed in terms of fossil fuel use. Unlike the approximate draw that I presented in my long 4$$ post. So by bicycling we're actually using as many or more fossil fuel calories compared to driving at the same speed. Otoh, everything I stated in the last post holds true if the car is going ~50mph and the cyclist ~15mph... Unfortunately I don' think most people can spend 4-6hours a day commuting.

Severian

One important point we're forgetting.

Givens:
One Bicyclist purchases and consumes 3500 callories of "food" from grocery store. 2000 is the approximate standard upkeep for an adult human. 1500 is what the cyclist burns on the commute.

One Car Owner purchases and consumes ONLY 2000 calories from the grocery store. But drives 30 miles in a day.

If we assume that the Car Owner drives 30 miles in a day (not unheard of) and their car (we might assume they have something like a Honda) gets 30 miles to the gallon. Then they've burned (edit: ABOUT) 10,000 more calories driving AND eating than the cyclist does just eating.

This is of course factoring in the fact that there are calories of "food" and "fuel" burned getting that "food" ready for consumption and "fuel" bringing it to the grocery store and "food + fuel" putting it and keeping it on a shelf and selling it.

Well.. you see where I'm going with this.

EVEN if a car owner is responsible and has a relatively fuel efficient vehicle and EVEN if the car owner and the bicyclist purchase the exact same food from the exact same grocery store at the exact same time (not impossible due to today's mass purchasing power) a bicyclist is STILL more fuel efficient.

*licks finger and makes a mark in the air* Tssssssss... score one for my Intro to Logic course.

lyeinyoureye

O.k. lets use your numbers. The cyclist burns about ~50 calories per mile and goes 30 miles, requiring ~1500 calories of food. Let say the cyclist eats ~3,500 calories and the driver ~2,000 calories. Since there are ~31,000 calories in a gallon of gas, the car burns all of these over ~30 miles. The problem lies in the fact that the mass produced food the cyclist eats, assuming the best case of her/him being a vegetarian, requires 35,000 calories of fossil fuels to get that food. Driver requires 2,000 calories of food and 20,000 calories of fossil fuels to get that food, plus ~30,000 calories of fossil fuels in the way of gasoline.

So the cyclist uses 35,000 calories and the driver 50,000 calories of fossil fuels, cyclist appears to be winning by ~15,000 calories. But wait, your logic must have forgotten about speed... The driver may average ~55mph, while the cyclist averages 15mph, and since the energy required to move an object through air quadruples for every doubling of speed, if the driver were to go at ~15mph with the cyclist they would only need ~1/10th of the energy to move the car. We must also consider engine efficiency, which drops with load, so the car wouldn't really get ~300mpg@15mph unless it's an EV or a diesel. But it will get better mileage, lets say ~100mpg.

All of a sudden the driver's only using ~10,000 calories to travel in car for 30 miles. So wait... the average cyclist and the 30mpg driver use about the same amount of fossil fuels traveling at the same speed. As the car gets more efficient, the calories of fossil fuels required drop and the driver starts starts to pull ahead of the cyclist. In terms of the most efficient "conventional" car out there, Volkswagen's 3L Lupo, customer reviews suggest that at ~55mph the vehicle gets ~100mpg. So this vehicle will use about the same amount of fossil fuels a cyclist uses, but travels at over three times the speed. If this vehicle were to idle along with the cyclist at 15mph, the fossil fuel usage of the driver would drop way below that of the cyclist until it hit the lower limit of ~20,000 calories, since the driver still has that baseline of food required.

For every calorie of food tacked on, there are ten calories of fossil fuel. Now if everyone were to drop their car and bike then we would see a ~30% reduction in fossil fuel consumption. Otoh we'd probably see a quadrupling of commute times, which just isn't possible for some, and definitely not desirable for most. Sadly enough, a 2hp engine kit on a bicycle usually results in ~100-150mpg and nearly twice the speed. If a cyclist were to use this and start eating ~2,000 calories per day, they would use fewer fossil fuels, and reach their destination faster, compared to simply cycling. Like I said before, the additional expense of mass produced food is huge. It gets even bigger when meat is tacked on because meat is something like ~100 calories of fossil fuel for 1 calorie of energy. Ultimately, as you get into it it becomes more convoluted because different cars have different efficiencies at different speeds, different diets.... But, the main point is that due to the huge fossil fuel penalty tacked onto food, cycling and eating more may not use fewer fossil fuels compared to eating less and driving.

krazygluon

Lyeinyoureye: nice math, I'll generally agree with it.

So would you say then that this goes to support that the other side of the solution (i.e. instead of getting a 2hp bike engine kit, but trying to find a nutritional answer) would be to eat as-local-as-possible organic farmed with animal power instead of fossil-fueled tractors?

also, does the cyclist have to eat 3500 calories? I imagine if the rest of their life is sufficiently sedentary (as are most americans) and they're interested in maintaining weight without gain or loss, that 2500-3000 would still work fine. I've heard historical accounts that despite the grueling work they did, much of the european peasantry just prior to the french revolution lived on 2k or less per day, though 1200 is the average resting requirement.

lyeinyoureye

Generally speaking, yes. If you grow most of your own fruits and vegetables with water you collect, and have hens for eggs maybe a cow for milk, then aside from a nutritional supplements depending on what you grow you may very well be set, and in that case bicycling has no fossil fuel penalty if used instead of driving and will be superior in terms of fossil fuel consumption. From what I've gathered the cyclist doesn't need to eat an extra 1500 calories to go 30 miles, howstuffworks.com uses ~1000 calories for 30 miles, some may eat more, some less. From personal experience I actually ate the same amount, but couldn't eat "junk" foods when commuting ~15-20 miles a day by bike. Which probably means I overate when driving... It's something that really depends on the specific situation... what you drive, or can drive, where you have to go, what your diet is, etc... The only caution I'd have about organic foods is how organic are they? You would probably want to figure out where/how they were grow/packaged/transported before comparing them to mass produced stuff.

wageslaveonbike

Where are you getting these numbers? Thats way off. It does NOT take 100 cals of fossil fuel to produce 1 cal of meat. Its closer to 10. Biking is way more efficient than driving no matter what you eat or what you drive.

lyeinyoureye

If it takes ~10 calories of fossil fuel to produce 1 calorie of food, since the large majority of our supposed diet (USDA food dealy) is not meat, but grains/vegetables/fruits, then the meat ratio is probably a lor higher than the grain ratio. As a rule of thumb, by the time the human eats the cow that ate the grain, we've lost 90% of the energy that otherwise could've been directly used to feed the human. You know the story, change in trophic level, etc...

The reason I say that we use around 100 calories of fossil fuels per calorie of meat is because if our diet uses ~10:1 for all food, then this means that the ratio is somewhat smaller for foods that aren't meat, and much larger for meat because meat's at a 10:1 level comapred to grains, etc... Specifically, lets say our diet is ~10% meat, and ~90%grains/etc... In order to reach the over all 10:1 ratio, then we have .9(Grains:1)+.1(Meat:1)=(10:1). Roughly speaking, if the Meat ratio is (80:1), then the Grains ratio is ~(2.2:1), and the overall ratio is 10:1. Now this really depends on the specific type of food, etc.

Apparently, this number is also only how much it takes to produce, not transport, stock, or maintain.
(Source)

All in all it's really a crapshoot, which specifically depends on what you eat, where it's from, etc... But if we don't include the fossil fuel cost of transporting and selling it, then I think it's pretty safe to say that the average for each calorie of food will increase. As for the 16:1 I mentioned I think it's the total from production to consumption, and it's spread out depending on type... but I haven't seen much more on the whole deal. And when transporting, the density of meat is advantageous because if you can fit more meat per trailer than grain, the transportation increase will be more on grain than meat. I'd say potatoes are the best bet for minimizing fossil fuels used for mass produced food.

wageslaveonbike

Yeah, but you should know just as well as I that meat is the staple of the standard american diet. Take all the food consumed in the US, (which would largley consist of meat and dairy) and divide it amoung each person in the US. That is where you get the 10 for 1 ratio.

Of course it is higher for pure meat. But we're talking about averages here. I'll try to find a source for how much it takes specifically to produce 1 calorie of wheat.

wageslaveonbike

Found it. Acually it was in the same Harpers article you sourced (but there are other articles saying the same):

Here is another with more detail:

https://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:Q...s&ct=clnk&cd=4

So we see here that vegetation has a positive energy profit ratio where as meat is extremly negative.

lyeinyoureye

I love oatmeal, pototoes are pretty nice too, mashed, scalloped, fried, hmmm... The bigger problem is how much does processing, trucking, and selling even the most energy efficient food cost? And when we start futzing with it, it really goes up. Take cereal from the Harpers article, at four calories of fossil fuel to a calorie of energy, before it's been shipped/stocked, it's not a great example of "whole grain" energy efficiency and may be pretty close to to 10:1 due to it's lack of density and higher cost to transport compared to potatoes. You know what would be nice, a list so we could break down costs...

Roody

You have to eat. You don't have to drive around in cars.

Duh.

wageslaveonbike

You can choose what you eat.