Alex Renton

'The simple reality that the current food system produces enough for 10 to 12 billion people is not widely recognised. Nor is the fact that industrially reared animals eat 3 billion peoples’ cereal, plus a whole pile of soya and 30% of the world’s fish.’

'Our two steaks had been brought to us by using 60 morning showers’ worth of water. Enough grain to make 20 large loaves of bread. The energy to drive our car 35 miles. And the unpleasant outputs – just the faeces and carbon dioxide – entailed in the rearing of our 500g of steak weighed as much as my eight-year-old daughter . (These calculations are all based on 500g of beef, grown in the UK and fed on a normal mix of forage and imported feed.)'

'But feeding and rearing the world’s 1.65bn cattle takes up 60% of the world’s available land, though their products provide only 2% of our calories.'

'...the most efficient dairy cows convert between 55% and 67% of their gross feed energy into milk food energy.'

'Imagine, if you will, 40 party balloons rising into the air, each filled with farts. That’s the quantity of methane that an efficient milking cow produces every day.'

• 100 calories of crops fed to livestock = 30 calories of meat & fish (70% loss of calories)
• Livestock consumes 50% of the planet's drinking water
• '...farming and consumption of animals and fish causes more environmental damage than all the production and use of fossil fuels and plastics put together.'
• '3kg of an edible wild fish – sardines are used for the Chilean farms – to produce 1kg of farmed salmon.'
• '...the Chinese have recently been rejecting imported American processed foods on health grounds, particularly over chemical additives).'

Meat and other animal products deliver more energy to primates like us the more they are cooked: only 65% of an uncooked egg is digested, compared with 90% if it has been boiled. Many animals will opt for cooked food before they go for raw.

'Maillard worked out that at 125C the molecules inside carbohydrate and protein chains would start to be released and so interact, forming and breaking bonds and releasing all sorts of compounds responsible for smell and taste. One of these is of course glutamate (glutamic acid is as much as 25% of all proteins). This is why meat heated to these levels is tasty, while meat that has merely been boiled at 100 ° C is not. A bonus of Maillard is that, at 155 ° C, the sugars released start to caramelise, releasing more flavour and odour. The conversion of glutamic acid under Maillard is also what turns meat golden brown – a colour we’re now conditioned to associate with flavour.'

'The drop in the use of chemical fertiliser and the demand for feed crops would of course lower massively the oil price, and so food prices would follow.'