>humans can't survive on what is currently being grown. In other words, we can't just stop feeding all of that corn and soybeans to animals and give it to humans instead. We can't live off of a diet that is 75% field corn and industrial soybeans.
Both feed corn and industrial soybeans yield their deliciousness to the power of the chemical engineers. Both are processed into food you and I eat every day. I bet you a dollar that your last piece of chocolate had lecithin in it, and you have to go pretty far out of your way to get lecithin that isn't from soy. And corn syrup. I'd bet a fair number of dollars that you've consumed some corn sugar product today, and that can be made from feed corn.
TVP is a common ingredient in meat substitutes, and it is a pretty heavily processed food made from what's left over after you extract the soybean oil from the industrial soybeans.
My favorite preparation is the "Morningstar farms" "Grillers Prime" vegieburgers... but you can also buy tvp bits at the health-food store, and I know people who use 1/3rd ground beef, 2/3rds TVP bits in their spaghetti sauce, and it pretty much tastes like your regular beefy spaghetti sauce. My mom used to make TVP sloppy joes that were sloppy joe sauce with TVP instead of meat. (I personally think meat greatly improves that recipe... but you can add a lot of TVP in with that meat without ruining the flavor, if you ask me.)
(To be clear, I'm not actually arguing that TVP is as delicious as actual meat. It's... usually not. But it can be quite palatable, and it is unquestionably nourishing, and it is made from the soybeans you grow for oil; stuff that would otherwise be used in cattle feed.)
Yes, but that's part of my point. You don't eat straight lecithin. Or high fructose corn syrup. You need a lot of other ingredients and a lot of processingto turn that corn into edible food products. That's one reason why it would be very challenging to double the number of calories we take in from corn — you would also need to double your production of all of that other stuff. I don't know all of the specifics, so I won't speculate on whether we could do that quickly, but if we were contemplating it we would need to make sure we had the infrastructure necessary to do all of that extra processing, and access to twice as many ingredients as we currently use.
> You don't eat straight lecithin. Or high fructose corn syrup. You need a lot of other ingredients and a lot of processingto turn that corn into edible food products. That's one reason why it would be very challenging to double the number of calories we take in from corn — you would also need to double your production of all of that other stuff.
I don't, but I would, if I were hungry enough. Most of the stuff we mix corn syrup with we mix in to make it taste better. If you've ever had straight corn syrup on your pancakes, (It's commonly sold under the brand Karo for this) you'd know it's fine. It's not maple syrup, but it's certainly something you could eat just fine, if you were hungry.
I think that's true of most of these things. If you are hungry enough, you'll take your macro-nutrients as they are.
I don't personally know how to make soy protein isolate, but I do know how to make tofu. If you gave me my 3000 calories a day in buckets of dry soybeans, I wouldn't be happy about it, but I wouldn't starve.
Both feed corn and industrial soybeans yield their deliciousness to the power of the chemical engineers. Both are processed into food you and I eat every day. I bet you a dollar that your last piece of chocolate had lecithin in it, and you have to go pretty far out of your way to get lecithin that isn't from soy. And corn syrup. I'd bet a fair number of dollars that you've consumed some corn sugar product today, and that can be made from feed corn.
TVP is a common ingredient in meat substitutes, and it is a pretty heavily processed food made from what's left over after you extract the soybean oil from the industrial soybeans.
My favorite preparation is the "Morningstar farms" "Grillers Prime" vegieburgers... but you can also buy tvp bits at the health-food store, and I know people who use 1/3rd ground beef, 2/3rds TVP bits in their spaghetti sauce, and it pretty much tastes like your regular beefy spaghetti sauce. My mom used to make TVP sloppy joes that were sloppy joe sauce with TVP instead of meat. (I personally think meat greatly improves that recipe... but you can add a lot of TVP in with that meat without ruining the flavor, if you ask me.)
(To be clear, I'm not actually arguing that TVP is as delicious as actual meat. It's... usually not. But it can be quite palatable, and it is unquestionably nourishing, and it is made from the soybeans you grow for oil; stuff that would otherwise be used in cattle feed.)