Vaclav Smil Quotes

Few people sufficiently appreciate the colossal task of feeding a world of billions of omnivores who demand meat with their potatoes.

Meat is undoubtedly an environmentally expensive food. Large animals have inherently low efficiency of converting feed to muscle, and only modern broilers can be produced with less than two units of feed per unit of meat.

The job of uncovering the global food waste scandal started for me when I was 15 years old. I bought some pigs. I was living in Sussex. And I started to feed them in the most traditional and environmentally friendly way. I went to my school kitchen, and I said, 'Give me the scraps that my school friends have turned their noses up at.'

Every time we consume meat, eggs or dairy foods, we contribute to ecological devastation and the wasteful misuse of resources on a global scale.

I think as individuals, people overrate the virtues of local food. Most of the energy consumption in our food system is not caused by transportation. Sometimes local food is more energy efficient. But often it's not. The strongest case for locavorism is to eat less that's flown on planes, and not to worry about boats.

Meat is an inefficient way to eat. An acre of land can yield 20,000 pounds of potatoes, but that same acre would only graze enough cows to get 165 pounds of meat.

In many places in the developed world, we eat or waste probably twice as many food calories as we really need. We're wasteful of food. We ship all over the world. We're now realizing that generating the energy to ship the food around the world is also ruining our climate.

At the Global Crop Diversity Trust, we work to conserve the diversity that will allow the adaptation and evolution of our agricultural crops in the context of climate change and other challenges.

Life solves its problems with well-adapted designs, life-friendly chemistry and smart material and energy use.

Grain that is used to feed animals that end up on our tables as turkeys and hams could have gone to feed starving people.

According to the 'food waste pyramid,' ensuring that food is eaten by people is the top priority. Failing that, the next best thing is to feed it to farm animals.

Buying from a local farmer can mean that he makes a two-hour extra truck drive, which can damage the environment more than a bunch of bananas on a boat.

Animals that we eat are raised for food in the most economical way possible, and the serious food producers do it in the most humane way possible. I think anyone who is a carnivore needs to understand that meat does not originally come in these neat little packages.

I don't want any vegetables, thank you. I paid for the cow to eat them for me.

As human pastoralists discovered 8,000 years ago, raising animals can be an efficient way of harnessing otherwise unusable resources such as grass.

Our cattlemen have given us the safest, most abundant, most affordable beef supply in the world and I trust their judgment. And if you look at consumer confidence in this country, so does the American public.

I've learned so much about what you can do to help animals, the environmental issues around meat production.

We all buy our meat wrapped in plastic because we don't like to think about the animal that died.

Buy local fruits and veggies at the grocery store. You will support local businesses and cut down on all the fuel that is used to truck produce around from state to state.

We need to ban all air-freighted food. Carrots from Holland. Potatoes from Egypt. It's got to stop.

Meat consumption is a part of our evolutionary heritage; meat production has been a major component of modern food systems. Carnivory should remain, within limits, an important component of a civilization that finally must learn how to maintain the integrity of its only biosphere.

Meat is undoubtedly an environmentally expensive food.

The short, unhappy life of a corn-fed feedlot steer represents the ultimate triumph of industrial thinking over the logic of evolution.

If we want to sum up the theory of evolution by natural selection in two words, which have great relevance for all societies and businesses, we should simply remember: diversity works.

No. I'm simply saying that life, uh, finds a way.