= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Metus comments on Open thread, Dec. 15 - Dec. 21, 2014 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (309)
Reduced consumption of animal products, more specifically meat should help my health and both my purse and the global poor through reduced food prices. For reducing meat consumption in general it seems easy to just replace meat in a lot of dishes with cheese or substitute meaty dishes with some scrambled eggs. What can I do for variety? I am especially looking for cheap, fast and/or convenient methods to put together a meal. I am very willing to trade off fast for the other two as I can listen to audiobooks or similar while preparing food.
Chickens produce more meat than eggs in a given time-period. I originally encountered this when reading about animal cruelty, but I would expect the same would apply to saving money and lowering the demand for food. If anything, you should be replacing eggs with meat.
And I read the opposite statistic in the same literature.
Interesting. Here's my source. Do you still have yours?
I tried to check whether chicken or eggs is more expensive. I found something giving the average price of both, but it measured chicken by weight and eggs by the dozen, and it didn't give the weight of the eggs. They seem to be similar though.
First of all, I think that chart contains a programming error. Surely column 4 is supposed to be column 2 divided by column 3? That would be 23.9 for eggs, not 27.7. That's still 4% higher for eggs than for chicken, but that's a small number (nor is 20% a big number).
Second, kilograms of food is a silly metric. Maybe it's OK as a first pass when comparing meat to meat, but eggs and milk are not meat (and if you care about a 20% difference, a first pass is not sufficient). We should be measuring calories or perhaps protein. I believe that chicken loses half its weight in cooking, while eggs do not, so if we substituted cooked weight for raw weight, that would dramatically favor eggs (but still be silly).
I tried to convert weight to calories using one site for both chicken and egg. It claims 1 calorie per gram of raw chicken breast and 2 C/g for cooked breast and 2.5 for cooked thigh, confirming 50% water loss. It claims 1.5 C/g for egg, both via the 100g option and the large egg option, which many sources (including yours) claim has a 50g weight uncooked. If it were all breast meat, the eggs would have 50% more calories per raw weight. If it were all thigh, it would only be 20% more. I think that there is some bone involved, which I assume cancels with the thigh, so I'll stick with the 50% number.
I'm not going to dig up my source, but I think it claimed equal protein per day for chicken or eggs. This analysis using your source suggests less for eggs.
I ran through the whole equation and I got 63.2, which is worse than what the table has. It's 37% worse for eggs. I am surprised by the discrepancy though. The guy who wrote that is on LessWrong, so I'll PM him about it.
It might not be enough to conclude that eggs are worse than meat, but it's enough to show that substituting eggs for meat isn't going to do a whole lot to help.
Using those numbers, along with recalculating the rows on the table, I got chicken as being 10% worse.
What "whole equation"? Meaning taking into account the claims about the relative suffering of eggs and chicken? It seems like it should be possible for people to agree on the relative suffering of different chickens, but after looking at the other numbers, I am utterly uninterested in what Brian has to say about it.
Sure, but you are moving the goalposts. You should have brought that up at the very beginning, rather than claiming that a 20% difference was cause for action.
Meaning taking into account the claims about the relative suffering of egg-laying chickens and meat chickens.
What I originally said was:
I was saying that replacing meat with eggs would not work, and doing the reverse would be slightly helpful. Apparently, replacing meat with eggs would be slightly helpful, but it still won't do much.
My goal was to keep Metus from wasting effort on doing something pointless. I most likely succeeded. My goal of the continued conversation was to correct any misconceptions I had, to which I also seem to have succeeded.
Actually, about 30% unless you like your chicken extra extra dry.
Thanks for the second source, but that doesn't convince me that it's "actually" correct.
How about this, will that convince you?
Probably not. It's important not just to have authoritative sources, but also to explain the existence of false sources. Your failure to even notice that I had a source is disturbing. It makes me skeptical of your reading comprehension and unlikely to read sources you suggest.
Probably the cause of the discrepancy is the injection of water. I don't know how that interacts with the other sources of data.
Moreover, I don't care. I thought that would be obvious from the structure of my calculation.
There's a lot of false information on all subjects on the internet.
It's unusual to find on LW people who refuse to update on multiple pieces of evidence without contesting them, but hey, it's your mind and you, as you said, don't care.
Speaking of reading comprehension, your linked source says that there are 55 calories in 1 oz of boneless chicken breast, cooked, and that 1 oz of raw boneless chicken breast yields 35 calories. Now it seems to me that 35 is not one half of 55, even if you squint really hard.
Stirfries can be cheap, fast, convenient, and healthy. Dahl (lentil stew) is slow to make, but cheap and convenient.
I'm a big fan of those. Basically stir fry and ayurvedic diets are fast, easy and very healthy.