Eating Lower on the Food Chain

Many vegans and vegetarians site the energetic gain of eating lower on the food chain as evidence of the ecological value of their choices. They may bring up feed conversion ratios as a basis for avoiding meat, explaining that it takes more energy to produce meat from livestock who eat crops than to just eat the crops directly. That’s logical. Eating lower on the food change conserves energy, right?

Not always. There is a critical piece missing in argument. Humans don’t eat the same plants/crops that animals eat, in the same form that animals eat them. In other words, humans don’t eat livestock feed. Humans don’t go and buy bags of chicken feed from the local farm store, bring that bag home, and dig in with a spoon to eat it raw. Humans may eat the same plants/crops as animals (i.e. soy, corn), but we don’t eat it in the same form (i.e. as livestock feed from a mill). And there is a lot of energy involved in transforming the plants/crops that livestock eat (corn, soy) into food that humans would eat (chips, veggie burgers).

When I was raising chickens, I fed the chickens corn that a neighbor grew and ground on his property, which was less than a mile from where my chickens lived. I would go to the farm, get the farmer, and he would turn on his grinder and grind the corn fresh into sacks that we re-used. (I had to bring back the sack to get more corn). The corn in question was Dent #2, which is very different than the sweet corn humans eat on the cob. Dent #2 is not at all palatable by itself; a fact I learned first-hand when I mistook a cob of dent #2 corn for sweet corn and tried to eat fresh off the stalk.

For humans to eat dent #2 corn or soy, it usually has to be used as an ingredient in processed foods like tofu, chips, or canned soups. The process of manufacturing and transporting these processed foods (along with their packaging) is energy intensive. I think that the energy lost in feed conversion (transforming chicken feed into chicken meat) is small by comparison, if we’re talking about backyard chickens or locally-raised chickens who are processed on-site (meaning, butchered by the end consumer).  In this case, the chickens never have to leave their home, never have to get packaged or labeled, and never have to be transported/distributed to grocery stores across the country.

My point is: it is not always more ecologically efficient to eat lower on the food chain, because humans don’t tend to eat plants/crops in the same form that animals do. If you saw humans eating chicken feed straight out of the bag, or eating weeds and grasses and twigs directly from their backyard, then would you have a fair basis of comparison.