Alexa’s Reviews > How the World Really Works: A Scientist’s Guide to Our Past, Present and Future > Status Update

In well-off societies, a better way to reduce agriculture’s dependence on fossil fuel subsidies is to make appeals for adopting healthy and satisfactory alternatives to today’s excessively rich and meaty diets - the easiest choices being moderate meat consumption, and favoriting meat that can be grown with lower environmental impact. The quest for mass-scale veganism is doomed to fail.

… our food supply - be it staple grains, clucking birds, favorite vegetables, or seafood praised for its nutritious quality - has become increasingly dependent on fossil fuels.

This means that when bought in a Scandinavian supermarket, tomatoes from Almeria’s heated plastic greenhouses have a stunningly high embedded production and transportation energy cost. It’s total is equivalent to about 650 mL/kg…

Producing chicken requires energy whose total is several times higher than the energy of the edible meat.

the economic system is essentially a system for extracting, processing and transforming energy as resources into energy embodied in products and services