18 June 2008

NPR's Marketplace: "Food Crisis Solution"

"We grow enough food for everyone, but livestock are devouring our food supply. Commentator and bioethicist Peter Singer says unless we change, the dinner plate of the future will look far different."
Singer's commentary notes that biofuels are contributing to a food crisis, however, he tells us:
"But most corn isn't eaten by humans; it's eaten by animals and that's the biggest part of the problem. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, 756 million tons of grain plus most of the world's soybean crop are fed to animals.... When we use animals to convert grain and soy into food we can eat, they use most of the feed to keep warm and develop bones and other parts we can't eat. So we're wasting most of the food value of the crops we feed them. In the case of cattle, at least nine-tenths of the grain they eat is squandered."