The grass family contains over 9,000 species distributed throughout the world. Of that, 35 have been cultivated as cereals. Of these, the following are important today: Barley, Corn, Goat grass, Millet, Oats, Rice, Sorghum, and Wheat.<p>Of the important grains and/or cereals listed above, only corn (maize) is a New World native. Corn is an important member of the grass family.<p>Corn (Zea mays) was domesticated from a wild plant called teosinte (Zea mexicana) about 7000 years ago. This species was considered sacred and was central to Mayan creation myths. Famous Mayan images show an earth god sprouting from the corn stalk.<p>Corn is the most efficient of the modern cereal grains in converting water and carbon dioxide into carbohydrates. Maize formed the basis for the Mayan, Aztec, and Inca civilizations in the New World.<p>Corn, beans, and squash were planted together by early native Americans in companion planting to benefit all three species.
There is no wild plant or evidence of one that resembles corn with giant husked ears; besides the ears, teosinte and corn look very similar.<p>Columbus took corn to Europe on the first voyage but it did not gain wide attention.<p>Native Americans had over 100 uses for the corn plant and its fruits.
<a href="https://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/ethnobotany/food/grains.shtml" rel="nofollow">https://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/ethnobotany/food/grains.sh...</a>
A staggering amount of California's water is used for alfalfa, which gets shipped to China to feed cows. In essence, we are allowing certain farmers to sell CA's water to China.
In 70 something years we went from 60% forest coverage of earth's land mass to 30%. I can't help but wonder how it would be without any animal agriculture.
Most of the world's grain is eaten by humans' food.<p>We're really really good at efficiently producing grain -- especially field corn (which is not super desirable as human food without significant processing), and we grow lots of animals of all sorts. Naturally, when we can, we feed those animals on field corn -- they don't complain, and it's the cheapest food we can produce for them.<p>In the US we also subsidize corn pretty heavily, which has biased us towards maximizing efficiency on this crop rather than on some other grain. It's unclear to me whether we would have become more efficient with some other grain (in terms of food calories out per unit of resources/land in) had we produced as durable of an economic incentive to do so -- but regardless, it would still be a grain of some sort that ended up being the caloric efficiency maximum product, and therefore what animal feed would end up being.
Which is a very good thing indeed, because it makes our food system robust by operating at a large caloric surplus.<p>When crop failures lead to rising grain prices, ranchers respond by not buying as much grain for their animals. The result is less Prime-grade beef and a whole lot more grain available.
> <i>"... a Russian naval blockade has prevented past harvests from reaching their destinations. The loss of this output has caused already high grain prices to surge. The World Food Programme warns that 47m people are at risk of hunger as a result."</i><p>I understand that the point of the article is about reallocating and tightening up the belts of consumption, so to speak. However, how about exerting more pressure onto the aggressor which russia openly is?<p>The world needs to recognize russia's actions as deliberate and premeditated steps to cause the collapses in food supply chains. This is not opportunistic, but rather a calculated policy, just as it is with gas and oil supply.<p>It's not about the cattle, it's about the "humans" in charge of the kremlin!
Why is this a problem, exactly?<p>1. We already produce way more food than the entire world can eat, even if it were distributed equally<p>2. When population begins butting up against the limits of food production, demand for cheaper plant based food will rise. Most will be unable to afford meat, making the meat market naturally shrink itself for economic reasons. Likewise if meat becomes too expensive due to resource constraints.<p>3. At the point where population exceeds food supply, there will be at worst 1 generation of starvation, and then population will stabilize to have enough food<p>3a. Infinite growth of the population is not sustainable or desirable. Even if meat were banned, this same story will eventually happen again with any vegetable that is less calorie efficient to grow. Do we want 30 billion people eating literally one food, or 25 billion eating a varied, though less land efficient diet? At some point, the world will have to accept that there isn't enough food to have 3 children. At that point, when the 2 child policy is global, what kind of diet should be possible? We can stretch it so that we're all eating literally one crop and there's absolutely nothing more we can do to feed the world, but hopefully we stop breeding a bit earlier than that, to end with one where people can still enjoy meat.
I've started eating barley a couple of times a week, which is used primarily as an animal grain. I've found it makes a great alternative to rice or quinoa.<p>From Wikipedia:<p>> Globally 70% of barley production is used as animal fodder,[4] while 30% as a source of fermentable material for beer and certain distilled beverages, and as a component of various foods. It is used in soups and stews, and in barley bread of various cultures. Barley grains are commonly made into malt in a traditional and ancient method of preparation.
The charts in the article are PNG images. Yet the text in the charts is separate and is superimposed on the chart in precise position.<p>How is this done? Is the journalist manually CSS-positioning the text? Is there a library? An internal Economist tool?
Seems we need to reduce world population by 1/2 or more. Aren’t we at least contracting in developed countries? Anyway to ask India/China to stop growing so fast?
> Some grain by-products, such as maize husks, are unsuitable for human food. And feeding grain to animals does generate food for people indirectly, in the form of milk, meat and eggs. However, this process is highly wasteful. For every 100 calories of grain fed to a cow, just three emerge as beef. Along with other feed crops and pasture, rearing animals also uses land that could produce human food.<p>But we don't only need calories. In fact we already produce and eat many more calories than we need (but we distribute them unevenly so that a third of the world eats too many and 2/3s not enough). The reason we feed all this grain to animals is so that they turn it into nutrient-dense meat, dairy and eggs. Those are rich in micronutrients (vitamins and minerals) that we can't get as well from grains (or not at all like B12 vitamin).<p>So maybe farming looks "inefficient" if you consider only calories, but when you consider nutrients in general, meat (including seafood), dairy and eggs are actually the most efficient source of those we need to stay healthy and thrive.<p>But even if we only count calories, the amount of cropland that we would free for rewilding if we stopped farming meat completely and produced no meat from ruminants, no pork or poultry, no dairy, and no eggs, is miniscule:<p><a href="https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets#more-plant-based-diets-tend-to-need-less-cropland" rel="nofollow">https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets#more-plant-based-d...</a><p>In short, we'd go from 1.17 billion ha of cropland for farming animals and growing crops, to using 1 billion ha of cropland.<p>That's a tiny change and it would most likely quickly need to grow as the global population increases. And it's such a tiny change because most of the land used to farm animals, or grow grains for animal feed, is not cropland, but <i>pasture</i>, which is for the most part not suitable for growing crops.
But if we eat the animals that eat the grain arnt we kinda eating the grain... like indirectly? If I grind the grain into a kinda dust and then let tiny organisms eat the dust and then cook those organisms am I eating grain?