The Vegetarianism Story

Staying at a place where there are more names for meat than letters in the average length Deutsch word can be slightly discomforting at first. In situations where you're the only abstemious chap in a group of about twenty, sitting at the same table as the rest of the crowd and watching them munch down what used to be the femoral section of some ill-fated well-disposed little pig at a barn a few miles away can make you queasy- if you're the queasy type.

I'm not.

However, alien situations such as this do make you reconsider your reasons for not participating in a grander version of the food chain. But first, a few qualifiers:

1. Vegetarians can survive, flourish, and grow obscenely fat in Germany.

2. Rice, wheat, pulses, vegetables, spices, fruits and vegetables, and their derivatives are all easily available in Germany. They're expensive, yes- but I get paid, and everything is expensive here.

3. Cook. If you can't, learn.

Getting back to the issue at hand, societal factors are no longer an issue when it comes to consuming meat- its the rule. (Its the same with beer, but that's for later.)
Which makes you wonder why you're going through the trouble of getting someone to read out the ingredients list on packets at the supermarket before you buy them.

I thought of it once, and realized that I'm doing it so I can leave the well-disposed little pigs alone.
That's all there is to it.

Getting to the real issue at hand, though, this post intends to attempt to dissect an innocent comment made by one of the guests at the twenty strong femur chomping table the other day when I was singled out as the only vegetarian.

"Imagine what would happen if everyone turned vegetarian. The food chain would collapse! "

I chose to keep quiet at the time, partly because I was not sure of what would indeed happen, and partly because my mouth was full of cauliflower cheese soup. But this dispatched a train of thought that went on to a mathematical model- a problem in which I'm now stuck because of insufficient data.

To put up the model here would require LaTeX formatting, and besides, I don't expect to understand a bit of it myself some time later; but the idea was this:

The food chain is very inefficient. At every step where energy/mass transfer occurs along the food chain, you lose plenty. If what I hear is to be believed, you gain in taste what you lose in exergy, but that's hardly the point. A statistic ripped off the net (will link to source later) claims that the food needed to raise one unit of cattle for beef can feed three times as many people as the cattle can. (Soil wise- not that we would want to eat hay.)

Sure, it makes intuitive sense, but after accommodating for the credibility of the fishy sounding statistic, there still are questions remaining- such as- What of the animals?

Taking a cue from the discrete predator prey models of the Chaos era, I chose variables representing the number of plants, animals and us, with Lotka-Volterra relations between the plants and the animals, and a linear relation between the animals/plants and us. (Constant consumption / unit time, with different slopes for plant-human and animal-human curves - the dynamics of human population is neglected.)

What came out, was err... nonsense.
In any event, I'd like to know if it actually makes sense for the world to go veggie, purely as a matter of feasibility. Suggestions/links/references are welcome. I will update this post after I look this up on science-direct.

You eat what you want, of course.