Cómo sacar la partitura de cualquier canción

 1 The Problem I MAGINE THE FAST-FOOD restaurant of the future. With environmental pressures mounting, a growing population to feed, and China calling in its mountain of American debt, farm subsidies have dwindled. Restaurants of the future have to find ways to offset the rising cost of food. Today, you’ve wandered into a joint with a unique approach to this problem. It’s called McImpacts. Its prices are still rock bottom, but there’s a catch—you have to cart off all the by-products of the meal you consume. Let’s give it a whirl, shall we? You stride up to the futuristic counter of this ultratransparent restaurant and order a burger called Trucker’s Delight for reasons that aren’t quite clear. “Coming right up,” says the cashier, manipulating a floating, translucent touchscreen. In less than a minute, your burger is on the counter—but behind it, the servers are unpacking the rest of your order: four heaping pounds of steaming cow manure, one thousand sloshing gallons of contaminated water, and a disgusting black sludge that you recognize as the carbon released by a gallon of gasoline. You hear the beeping of a heavy-duty vehicle backing up and look out the window as a huge Mack Truck pulls into view. “What’s that for?” you ask. “That’s the two hundred cubic feet of the CAFO [concentrated animal feeding operation] lot used to make your burger. It won’t be good for anything else for at least a few years,” says the employee. “Would you like it to go?” You shake your head in disbelief, suddenly grasping the burger’s weird name. “Is that everything?” you ask. The employees look at one another, sigh, and put on their gas masks. The cashier pushes a button. There is an earth-shaking burp, and the air is so saturated with the smell of rotten eggs that you gag. “That’s your methane,” says the cashier, her voice muffled by the gas mask. “Twenty times more potent than carbon dioxide.” You double over and retch, croaking that you’d like to change your order. “Certainly,” says the cashier cheerfully, taking off her mask. “What would you like?” You order the McRib. Anything has to be better than this. Out comes your sandwich, along with six hundred gallons of contaminated water. This time, there’s just two and a half pounds of pig shit and a marginally smaller cloud of methane. Still gagging, you switch to the McNuggets. These turn out to be not as bad—with a ten-piece box, you get a pound of chicken feces, 150 gallons of the foulest water you’ve ever seen, and just a little less methane. But it’s a lot to carry. Curious, you move away from terrestrial beings altogether and try the Filet-O-Fish. You begin to feel hopeful, seeing the pound of fish poop, the handful of parasites, and just ten gallons of dirty water. You could almost feel okay about ordering this—plus, you’re getting hungry. As you reach for your meal, the cashier whips out a cleaver and chops the sandwich practically in half, throwing the smaller portion into the trash can. “Forty-four percent of fish is thrown away by retailers and consumers,” she says, and shrugs. Your shoulders slump; you give up. You order some fries and shuffle away. If we were faced with the immediate consequences of our eating decisions on a daily basis, we’d quickly start asking whether they were worth it. Is eating a burger worth all this carbon, all this fouled water, all this… well, all this cow shit? As the human population grows, we will be directly faced with more and more of these consequences—we may never have to cart our food’s by products home from the store with us, but it can’t be too much longer before we see it pile up in our backyards. When that happens, people are sure to start looking for a better option. If farm animals are such resource hogs, why can’t we all just become vegetarians? Certainly we can stand to cut out the middleman—the animals that concentrate the nutrients of plant matter in their tissues. However, many researchers suggest that concentrated animal protein is key to humans functioning at their highest level and getting the most out of life. Evolutionary biology has shown that huge jumps in human brain size coincided with increased animal protein in the diet of our evolutionary forbears. By concentrating huge amounts of energy into a tiny package, animal protein provides fuel for surprisingly calorie-intensive activities like language, critical thinking, and a rich emotional life. Furthermore, only animal protein provides the whole spectrum of amino acids essential to human biology. Despite the vegetarian fantasy of humans subsisting solely on plant matter, not every place in the world is conducive to growing crops. Many of the places facing the worst hunger simply do not have the right kind of land or weather, or enough water for agriculture. What are they supposed to do, wait for us to ship them our excess food? This “solution” is fraught with problems. In fact, there is a better option—a much better option. If our fast-food restaurant of the future offered a McMealburger or maybe Cricket McNuggets, your side order would be a lot more palatable: about a half pound of castings nearly indistinguishable from fresh soil, * ten gallons of slightly cloudy water, no methane. A tiny smear of carbon—the energy that kept the cold-blooded insects warm. Since most bugs don’t require deboning, there are also big savings in energy and water on the processing end, and because they require far less space to raise and can thus be farmed in an urban area, the fossil fuel required to transport them is minimal. The entire impact of this meal would arrive in a tidy, reasonably sized box. In other words, if you had to personally deal with the impact, this would be the meal you would really want to eat. As David Gracer says of the animal protein industry, “Cows and pigs are the SUVs; insects are the bicycles.” Here’s what the numbers look like: 1 pound of beef = 10 pounds of feed, † 1,000 gallons of water, 200 square feet of pasture (2 acres per cow) 1 pound of pork = 5 pounds of feed, 600 gallons of water, 175 square feet of pasture (⅔ acre per pig) 1 pound of chicken = 2.5 pounds of feed, 150 gallons of water, 75 square feet of pasture (100 square feet per chicken) 1 pound of fish = 1.5 pounds of fish meal, variable amounts of water, considering spawning 1 pound of insects = 2 pounds of feed, 1 gallon of water, 2 cubic feet of land space It may seem inhumane to think of animals as meat machines, but that’s how we’re already using them, so we might as well be honest about it. Each of these meat machines is different. Just as a steam engine is not a combustion engine is not a wind turbine, a cow is not a pig is not a fish. And as you might have noticed, we don’t use a whole lot of steam engines these days. An animal’s efficiency at turning food, like grass or grain or fish meal, into the meat that we buy is called its food conversion ratio (FCR). If it takes two pounds of food to make one pound of meat, the FCR is 2:1. For a steer, the ratio is approximately 10:1; for chickens, it’s around 2:1. The wide gulf in FCRs occurs because each of these animals is working with a different physical apparatus as well as fuel sources. Cattle take in mainly grass (or grain, in a feedlot environment); pigs and chickens are omnivorous like we are, eating a diet of corn, other grains, and processed animal protein; fish are generally obligate carnivores, eating mainly other fish. Why does it take so much plant material to make so little beef? What makes filet mignon the blood diamond of the livestock industry? There are a variety of factors, and it’s not as simple as cows requiring more input and releasing more exhaust. More important, it has to do with their basic biology, which is vastly different from that of pigs, chickens, fish, or insects. One thing cows can do that none of the other main livestock breeds can do is turn otherwise inedible grass into meat. Cows can do this because they are ruminants: Their digestive systems are designed to break down plant cellulose, ideally that from grass, and turn it into protein. Humans, pigs, chickens, and fish do not have this ability at the level that cows do. For instance, a cow’s tongue—that big muscle as thick as your forearm that you might see at a butcher shop—was designed to act like a little arm, wrapping around a hunk of grass, pulling it in line with the cow’s big front incisors, and then moving it to the back of the cow’s mouth, so its wide molars can wrench it from side to side before sending it to the first chamber of the animal’s four stomachs. When told a cow has four stomachs, you might imagine a row of human-sized stomachs. A cow’s stomach is more like one big bag, about the volume of a fifty-gallon trash can. By comparison, a human stomach holds around a half gallon. In a cow, this large stomach cavity is divided into four compartments. The main and largest compartment is the rumen, one of the most microbially dense habitats in the world. Each gram of rumen fluid contains 10 50 billion bacteria. Within this huge chamber, one of the biggest parts of the animal, trillions of bacteria ferment the plants’ cellulose or fiber—the part of plants that humans can’t digest. In a human, this fiber serves as “roughage,” which then gets excreted and helps push other material out in the process. *In a cow, the bacteria in the rumen use an enzyme called cellulase to break the cellulose down, eat it, and in turn excrete protein from it, which the cow then absorbs and turns into hamburger. Yes, you read that right: A cow’s body ultimately makes meat out of bacteria poop. I’m not trying to turn you off meat, but when it comes to judging which kinds of meat are good and which are gross, it’s pretty much all equally gross. This bacterial maneuver is a pretty impressive biological process considering the fact that outside of cows and sheep, no other livestock animal can turn grass, which humans can’t eat, into meat, which we can. But turning grass into meat is also resource-intensive, and expends a lot of by-product in the form of manure and gas. The reason cows produce so much gas is precisely because of their ability to process inedible cellulose. Even cows can’t directly “eat” the cellulose in grass—they require the bacteria in their rumen to do this for them. As the bacteria break down the plant fiber, methane is produced as a by-product, and the cows burp it out. *A cow burps up to 240 pounds of methane per year; as a group, cattle burp up close to 80 million metric tons of methane annually. Since methane is twenty times more potent at trapping radiation than CO2, this amounts to 1.6 billion tons of CO2 a year, or 30 percent more than cars produce. In terms of greenhouse gases (GHGs) that contribute to global warming, this is clearly a significant source. In order to survive on “cheap” fuel like grass and leaves, an animal makes an evolutionary trade-off, generally one of size and metabolism. You know how a Prius doesn’t go as fast as a Porsche, yet is a far more efficient vehicle? It’s kind of like that. On the nutrient spectrum, grass and other plants are cheap, but you have to eat more of them and cart around the right processing equipment to utilize them. Meat, even that from insects, is more expensive, given that it took an initial investment of something cheap like grass to make it. But a digestive system, assuming it’s the right kind, can also get more mileage out of more “expensive” food. Now, cows were designed to graze pasture, and in the right balance, they are great at this. Their particular way of eating grass, by shearing it off above the roots, actually encourages new growth. Their manure, in turn, fertilizes the soil. Done right, and in balance, pasturing cows can support and benefit a grassland ecosystem. However, when their numbers are too large, they not only overgraze the land so that it can’t bounce back, but their hooves tramp down the soil, impacting it to such a degree that nothing can grow. This leads to desertification, an infertile wasteland that in many cases cannot be saved—a dire example of what our future can and will be if we don’t change something, and soon. Pigs make meat in a way very similar to humans, with digestive systems that are so much like ours that they are frequently dissected in biology classes. Pigs are monogastric, meaning they have one stomach, and omnivorous like humans, which is why they’ve traditionally been fed “slop”—leftovers and waste from human meals (e.g., plate scrapings and potato peelings). On modern farms, they are fed a range of carefully combined foods including corn, oats, and soy; fish, bone, and meat meal; and milk by-products (sounds good, huh?). Pigs’ FCR is about 4:1; but then again, their food is of a closer quality to that of humans. Pigs, not being ruminants, aren’t a direct significant source of methane like cows are, but their manure certainly is. Chickens, also monogastric, have even simpler digestive systems. They, too, are omnivores, eating everything from grains and grasses to insects and even small rodents, and have an FCR of 2:1. For animals that lack teeth, they have a remarkably efficient digestive system. Their gizzards do all the “chewing,” grinding food particles with bits of sand and gravel. Fibrous bits are sent to ferment in the cecum, which is kind of like a mini-rumen. Because they don’t have the big fermenting chamber of a ruminant, chickens don’t break down cellulose nearly as effectively as cows do. Chickens, like pigs, also are not big producers of methane, and, like pigs, their manure is. That FCR of 2:1 sounds great, right? It is great; chickens are great. But what you need to factor into this number—and here’s where it gets a bit complicated—is what the chicken is eating in order to get that low FCR. Chickens, despite popular pastoral imagery, do not live on sprinkled handfuls of corn alone. They are usually fed some form of by-product mash that is generally made up of corn; ground soybean hulls from plant processing; various waste from vegetable oil production; and bits of slaughtered animals for protein and minerals, like fish meal, meat meal, bone meal, blood meal, feather meal, and “poultry by-product meal,” which is ground-up chicken carcass, essentially. This latter bit is not necessarily as inhumane as it seems, since hungry chickens have been known to eat each other. In fact, chicken cannibalism may be responsible for the origin of the term “rose-colored glasses.” Farmed chickens, aroused by the sight of blood on one of their coop-mates, have been known to peck that chicken to death; the losses were significant enough that tiny, red lensed chicken glasses were sold to farmers in the early twentieth century. The glasses, attached to the beak via a bar through the nostrils, made it so the chickens couldn’t see blood but could still see grain. They have since been banned on animal cruelty grounds; meanwhile, beak trimming via a heated blade remains today’s answer to the problem. The animal protein in chicken mash substitutes for the myriad insects the chickens would naturally be pecking from their environment if they were strutting around a sunny field as chickens were meant to do, using their sharp beaks to spear caterpillars, slugs, and all sorts of buggy goodness. The fish-farming industry boasts that farmed salmon, one of the most popular species of farmed fish, has the lowest FCR of all, clocking in on a good day at about 1.2:1. However, farmed salmon, being carnivorous, are fed mainly fish meal and fish oil (i.e., ground up smaller fish caught from already-diminishing wild populations and of species less popular among human consumers, like anchovies, sardines, and mackerel, all of which are high in fish oil). Essentially, farmed fish consume wild flesh protein and fat, and turn it into domesticated flesh protein and fat, meaning that their FCR can’t really be fairly compared to that of grass-chewing cows. You’ll pardon me if I’m not too impressed by their purported “efficiency.” Taking one kind of animal protein and turning it into another is far less dramatic than transforming inedible landscape into hamburger. The FCR of wild salmon is closer to that of cattle, around 10:1, largely because of the energy they spend catching all those smaller fish, none of which agreed to the deal. Salmon are true carnivores, which means they cannot process carbohydrates from plants like the other animals mentioned can. Instead, they make their energy from fats like those in fish oil. That omega-3 we’re all supposed to be getting more of in our diets? Salmon basically live off it. Like us, they can’t make it themselves. Wild salmon get it from the smaller fish they eat, who get it either from krill or from microalgae. Farmed salmon get it by consuming 50 * percent of the world’s fish oil production. And finally, we get to bugs. Crickets, like chickens, are omnivorous. They’ll basically eat anything they can get their palpi on. Cornmeal, compost, cat food— all are fair fare for the cricket. They have a digestive system somewhat like a tiny chicken: Instead of a gizzard, they have a crop with hardened parts that act like teeth, grinding up their food. They also have a tiny cecum for fermentation. But the special thing that crickets, along with many other invertebrates (like termites, of course), produce is cellulase—that same enzyme the bacteria in a cow’s rumen use to break down the fiber in plants. Until quite recently, it was thought that the production of cellulase was limited to plants, bacteria, and fungi, but many insect species have been found to carry it as well, both in their mouths and guts. For some evolutionary reason, only invertebrates produce this enzyme directly, but it certainly helps with their digestion of plants. It’s no surprise then that crickets have one of the lowest FCRs of the potential livestock kingdom, coming in somewhere between farmed fish and chickens, at about 1.5:1. This FCR comes from a highly vegetal diet. Crickets really can live, grow, and produce offspring on a mostly corn diet. Precious little of a cricket, or a mealworm, or grasshopper, is wasted. Unlike the processing fish, chickens, pigs, and cows must undergo before their meat reaches the market, which vastly decreases their overall output volume, insects require little to no deboning, gutting, plucking, or butchering. Insects, like oysters, are generally eaten whole. They also devote less food energy toward building things like bones, hooves, fur, and feathers, which we don’t eat. While the throwaway portion of other animals can be up to 75 percent of their total weight, this is the same percentage of most insects that can be eaten. Another reason crickets have such efficient FCRs is that unlike the majority of the other livestock animals, crickets, like all insects, are cold-blooded. This means that the food energy cows and pigs and chickens burn to keep their blood warm, crickets turn directly into body mass or offspring. It also means that crickets require a certain ambient temperature in order to reproduce quickly. Despite the fact that insects either need to be grown in warm climates or have a climate made artificially warm for them, energy sources like the sun for solar heating are far more sustainable and abundant than the use of land to grow massive amounts of food for warm * blooded livestock. Energy from the sun is infinite ; finite. land space is Factors such as land space, water usage, and inhumane treatment are the real costs of raising animals like cows that—as your trip to McImpacts showed you—aren’t always directly reflected in measurements like FCR or the commercial sticker price you see in the supermarket. One cow requires anywhere from two to thirty acres. At the global level, raising cattle uses nearly a third of Earth’s terrestrial surface not covered by ice, a fraction that’s already huge and is constantly growing. Picture a giant cow taking big bites out of the rain forest: 70 percent of formerly forested land in the Amazon is now used as pasture, while much of the rest is used for feed crops. In addition to the methane they produce by breaking down plant cellulose, the combination of cattle grazing and grain agriculture to feed cattle also destroys one of the main ways our planet handles excess CO2: forests, which inhale CO2 and exhale oxygen, the necessary opposite of what human lungs do. As forests are cut down to make room for not just cattle, but for the acres and acres of soy and corn to feed the cattle as well, Earth’s lung capacity is steadily diminished. If you’ve ever seen an antismoking ad about emphysema, you know this is not a good thing. The expansion of the cattle industry means that with one hand, we are destroying Earth’s ability to process greenhouse gas–causing emissions, and with the other, we are adding even more GHGs to the mix. My favorite comedian, Maria Bamford, jokes, “Jesus turned the other cheek just to grab another can of whoop-ass.” We’re opening double cans of whoop-ass on our environment’s capacity to balance our impact. Add in the emissions of cars and industry, and we might as well just smother it with a pillow. And this is to say nothing of the incredible loss of biodiversity that goes along with the destruction of forest. Given how consistently researchers discover powerful new pharmaceutical compounds in exotic rain forest plants, we may have already sacrificed a cure for cancer for the sake of our Big Macs. Are our appetites worth life itself? Are we eating to live, or killing… everything? As if that weren’t enough to convince you to give eating insects a try, here are a few more factors in favor of bugs: A cow gives birth to one calf per year. In that same time, a pig can produce twenty-five to thirty piglets, and a chicken lays three hundred eggs. Salmon reproductivity can be highly variable, even in captivity, so let’s stick to land animals for now. In comparison to these warm-blooded livestock, a cricket lays around a hundred eggs in her three-month lifespan. Assuming half are male, that makes 50 female crickets, each laying a hundred eggs. After three months, we have 2,500 laying female crickets; in a year, 312,500,000. If 1,000 crickets weigh a pound, that’s 312,500 pounds of cricket in a year, a weight equivalent to 312 cows. Even if only a tenth of the crickets survived, that’s still equivalent to more than 30 cows. Most farmable insects don’t need the space that cows, pigs, chickens, or even fish do. Whereas cows need space to graze, chickens and pigs need room to forage, and fish need either roped off sections of the ocean (with the risk of escape and potential contamination of wild populations) or pools of constantly purified water, insects like crickets and mealworms do just fine in small boxes. Crickets, though they have wings, rarely use them to fly and prefer to spend the majority of their energy walking around eating and mating. Just as most of us would rather live in a city and drive to the supermarket than run down a deer in the woods, crickets do not show signs of ill effects when living in close quarters with their food and brethren. If you’ve ever opened an old bag of flour and found mealworms wriggling around, you know that they are also perfectly happy to reside in small, dark, enclosed spaces. As Dana Goodyear wrote in her 2011 New Yorker article “Grub: Eating Bugs to Save the Planet”: “[I]nsect husbandry is humane: bugs like teeming, and thrive in filthy, crowded conditions.” I’m going to suggest her word “filthy” could mean the more biologically accurate “fecund.” Raising insects on a large scale is possible in almost any human environment, from farmland to urban buildings. Unlike many of the other forms of livestock, insects can be farmed vertically and within city limits, reducing travel time and gas usage. On a smaller scale, they can even be raised within the home. Talk about eating local. We wouldn’t need to discuss skyscraper bug farms if the situation on Earth had not become so dire. We can’t all see it yet, but we are essentially huddled on a shrinking iceberg, which grows smaller with every lap of an acid tide. The United Nations expects the world human population to exceed 9 billion people by 2050, thirty-six years from now. In order to keep up with this explosion of mouths to feed, more food will have to be produced over the next few decades than has been produced in the past ten thousand years combined. We’re going to have to figure out how to produce 70 percent more food than we are currently, while simultaneously maintaining enough forestland to keep Earth on life support. Every twelve years or so, for the last several decades, we’ve been adding approximately a billion new people to our planet. Currently, around 1 billion of the people on the planet are hungry. Since the 7 billionth person was just born, that means that 1 in 7 people do not get the bare minimum of calories they need to function properly, let alone thrive, grow, or progress economically. Taking on another 2 billion people will not shift the numbers any closer to balance; rather, it is likely that close to 3 out of 9 people, or roughly one-third of the globe, will experience the devastating effects of hunger. In the ’60s and ’70s, when food shortages first reared their frightening heads, the agriculture industry in the developed world responded with the “Green Revolution,” which vastly increased global food production through better farming practices, increased fertilization, and improved pest control. However, these strategies may have reached their limit. Chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and heavy irrigation have taken major environmental tolls. Our soil is tapped out, and our oceans and freshwater systems are polluted. Algal blooms, feeding on fertilizer runoff, stretch their arms across reefs, lakes, and riverbeds, blocking out the sun and sucking up the oxygen, suffocating native species. Farmed soil is drained of nutrients, which are replaced by industrial, often petroleum-derived supplements. Livestock waste ferments in carefully sealed pools; one leak and the local drinking water is toast. Rain forests are felled to make room for cattle grazing, or soybeans, which are industrially fertilized and fed to said cows to fatten them for market. The bronchioles of Earth’s lungs are soldered off, the blood clogged with the saturated fat of civilization, the flesh sucked dry by 7 billion voracious vampires. Despite the high ideals of movements like “slow food” and locavorism, the only currently known way to efficiently produce enough protein to feed Earth’s growing population is to further intensify industrial farming practices. This means doubling down on the factory farming of animals, packing more bodies into smaller areas. This is not good news for cows, pigs, or other animals that need things like space and fresh air. It is, however, just fine for many species of insects. Bring on the cramped conditions, the darkness, the teeming populace. We are running out of options and have exhausted our alternatives. We need an idea with legs. Insects have six of them. * Cricket and mealworm manure is sold at a premium as plant fertilizer. † Yes, I agree—we shouldn’t be feeding cows grain, since they evolved to eat grass. * A.k.a. Metamucil. *Termites also break down cellulose when they eat wood and are, in fact, the source of 11 percent of natural (as in, not man-made) methane production worldwide. However, the important ecological role they play by breaking down rotting wood is their so-called carbon offset. * According to the FAO website, 87 percent of the world’s fish oil goes to aquaculture in general. * Relatively speaking.