Harold Ancell wrote:
A nice story---just one tiny problem that you might want to ignore: If
the world is facing famine, one of the first things we'd do is cull
our livestock herds, since animals are a rather inefficient way of
producing food. Kill off all the domesticated animals in the US, and
we'd be swimming in grain. Our food would be relatively boring, but
plentiful.
There a few details with regards to "essential" amino acids (a
handful are rare in plants), but fermentation technology could take
care of that handily.
Well, you know, I did a little web surfing on this subject. Opinions
were as varied on this point as they are on "When does life begin?".
People pointing out that one pound of meat does not equal one pound of
grain, and that cattle is more than just meat, we use lots of other
parts of it, yadda, yadda yadda.
Frankly, I wanted to skip the whole argument; it would be like trying to
bring abortion issues into a fanfic.
I rationalized it thus: even if he had tons o' grain, we wouldn't have
the facilities to turn it into something useful to consume - the same
argument I used with the fish thing. And we couldn't exactly strap the
ol' feedbag on the US population and expect them to chow down.
Also, killin' off the ol' animal herd wastes the millions of tons of
grain already used to bring them to the state they are; that's gotta
hurt.
So, if you're willing to suspend you disbelief enough on this one point,
does it work for you?