BigMac 🎧🤓Between Projects @RobMcInnes

"Livestock use 83% of the world's farmland and give back just 18% of our calories." There it is. The killer stat, lifted off the infographic, courtesy of Poore and Nemecek's enormous 2018 study in Science: nearly 38,700 farms across 119 countries. Damning. Wildly inefficient. Somebody fetch the cow a P45. One small question before sentencing. Where is that 83% of land? It's grass. Worldwide, around two-thirds of all farmland isn't cropland at all; it's pasture and rough grazing. Fell, moor, steppe, marsh, scrub. Marginal land, to use the term of art. Too steep, thin, wet, or cold to grow a single thing a human can chew. In Britain, about 65% of farmland is good for grass and little else. You are welcome to plant lentils on a Cumbrian hillside. You will then watch them sit there, baffled, and die. What that land does grow is cellulose, the most abundant biomass on Earth and a substance your gut regards as scaffolding. You cannot eat it. Nor can any pig, chicken, or vegan. A ruminant can. That is the entire trick. She walks across the inedible two-thirds of the world's farmland and turns it into milk and meat. So the cow isn't squatting on prime arable while the nation starves; she's working the land that grows precisely one crop, grass, which she eats, which is the whole point of her. Calling that inefficient is like calling a fishing boat inefficient for its poor performance on the motorway. Then there's the calorie sleight of hand, which is somehow the dafter half. Yes, beef is a modest share of calories. So is a glass of cooking oil. You can get calories from a spoon of sugar. Calories are the easy part. The hard part is everything else the steak is carrying. On DIAAS, the actual measure of protein quality, beef scores about 1.0 to 1.1, with milk and eggs a shade higher. Wheat limps in around 0.45. Almonds manage 0.40. The FAO won't let a protein scoring under 0.75 make a quality claim at all, which quietly disqualifies most of the plant kingdom. Then there's B12, of which plants contain essentially none, plus heme iron and zinc in a form your body can actually be bothered to absorb. Ranking food by raw calories and declaring the steak a failure is like ranking a library by how well the books burn. By that measure, petrol is the finest meal in Britain.

@Murk441 Mum

@Kristinartz Me

@Isaac2003_v2 8 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

@otokyo Let the plug out...

@LifeOfBoch It's terrible?

@otokyo Don't buy him a car, simple.

@Keemah_00 And City

@_onlyscott Michael Owen Jon Woodgate Steve McManaman Jude Bellingham

@Monica55dzrh

😁

🇨🇭🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿InLucysHead🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇨🇭© @InsideLucysHead

3 weeks ago

Retiring from the British Army can be complicated... Lt. Colonel Robert Maclaren retired from the British Army in 2001 after a long fulfilling career. On the day that he retired he received a letter from the Personnel Department of the Ministry of Defence setting out details of

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@Norwayrach Crikey, I am so sorry this happened to you. Take comfort that they are together and so proud they bought you up so well and living a great life... Love hurts but always cherish memories 💔🙏🏻

Here is a huge positive to modern life that gets no press. I have an old 2009 Toyota, and the AUX port crapped out about a year ago. Went to YouTube. Young, enthusiastic guy explains how to fix it. It is not obvious - involves taking the dashboard apart in a counter-intuitive way, but once you see it, it's a 15 minute fix. There are actually dozens of videos showing how to do this, and they collectively have well over 200k views. Had this happened in 1995, I would have just lived with it. But the combo of the replacement AUX jack available from Amazon and the video of the simple (but not obvious) fix, I fixed it. I HAVE DONE THIS DOZENS OF TIMES. Replaced the control panel of my dishwasher. Replaced the ice maker in the fridge. Fixed a wonky sanding head on my drill press. Mastered a bandsaw technique that I use for my sculpture. On and on and on... I think it is likely no exaggeration to say billions of fixes and skill upgrades have been performed worldwide that would not have been performed if it were not for the instruction freely given peer-to-peer on YouTube. Take a moment to be happy about this. The busted item keeps performing, rather than going to the landfill. The person learning and doing the fix gains a sense of mastery and saves money. It's an unmixed blessing. Stop doomscrolling. Think of what is busted in your house, find the YouTube video on how to fix it, and fix it.

Tears For Fears were the best British band of the 80s. Much better than The Smiths. Their first 3 albums are almost flawless. They were huge in America too. They don't get the credit they deserve.

@Babywwir Easy 20

@fesshole

@Anna_xb2 Amidala

Myth: "I only wear vegan fabrics. Better for the animals, better for the planet." Let's check in on Doris's annual contribution. Once a year, in late spring, Doris is sheared. The procedure takes approximately three minutes. Doris does not enjoy it. Doris does not, by any visible measure, suffer from it. Doris is, immediately afterwards, a noticeably more comfortable animal in the British summer. The fleece weighs approximately 3 kilograms. It is sold to the British Wool Marketing Board for, depending on the year, between £0.40 and £2.50 per kilogram. The shearing costs more than the wool fetches. Brian is shearing Doris at a loss. The wool is then: - Naturally flame-retardant - Naturally antibacterial - Moisture-wicking - Biodegradable - Renewable, annually - Carbon-storing while in use The replacement, in performance fabrics: - Polyester - Polyamide - Acrylic - Polypropylene - All petroleum-derived - All shedding microplastics on every wash - All requiring fossil fuel inputs to produce - All non-biodegradable, with a typical landfill lifespan of 200-500 years A single wash of a polyester fleece can release up to 700,000 microplastic fibres into the water system. These fibres are now in: every tested water source on earth, every tested human placenta, every tested rainfall sample, the deep ocean, the Arctic ice, and the lungs of marine mammals. A single wash of a wool jumper releases: nothing. The wool, when eventually disposed of, returns to soil within a few years. The fabric being marketed as the "ethical" alternative to wool is plastic. The plastic is "ethical" because nobody has been asked to slaughter the polymer. The polymer also has not been asked. Doris, by being a sheep on a fell, is producing the most thoroughly sustainable performance fabric humans have ever made. Brian is selling it at a loss. The fashion industry, meanwhile, is selling petroleum at a profit and calling it ethical. Reject plastic. Wear wool. Doris is, this morning, growing next year's batch.

As I enter my 30th year of being very happily married to a woman way out of my league, I have a message to young men: there is a secret to a successful relationship, it's being best friends with another couple where the man is a useless buffoon

@GunnerPuls Ahhh Paolo Maldini, the Prince 👑