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Why Grain is Important
Do you like meat? Have you ever seen a wide open pasture with cattle and sheep, if not in real life, perhaps on the TV or in a movie? Cows and sheep are raised by allowing them to roam around eating grass, or "graze," on these pastures. This makes good use of land that is otherwise not suitable for growing crops. Grazing animals can be seen mostly in large countries like America or Australia. Maybe you've also seen cages full of pigs, chickens or cows. When farmers don't have large green pastures for animals to graze, they put them in cages. In this way, farmers can produce a large amount of meat like chickens, beef and pork, but they have to give the animals "feed," which is mostly prepared from grain, such as corn. Since there aren't too many more green pastures left on earth, if the amount of meat that people eat grows much more than it is now, there will be no other choice than to keep animals in cages and feed them grain. Then, how much feed do you think is needed to produce one kilogram of beef? The answer is 11 kilograms. To produce a kilogram of pork, you need 7 kilograms of grain, and for a kilogram of chicken, you need 4. As you can see, the amount of grain required to produce one kilogram of meat depends on the animal. If you have a limited amount of grain, it's more effective to produce pork than beef, and likewise, more chicken than pork. While there are many different types of food, some we can measure how much grain it takes to produce it. For example, bread, beef and ice cream all call for wheat either as a recipe ingredient or for feed used to raise the animals that supply the ingredients. In this way, we can use grain as a form of measurement. In the past 50 years, the world's production of meat has multiplied more than five times--from 44 million tons to over 200 million tons. If we divide that amount of meat by the earth's total population, there is twice as much meat for each person as there was 50 years ago. These figures seem to still be rising at an amazing pace. We eat meat and fish to get animal protein, as one form of essential nutrition. (There are also people who don't eat meat or fish, but instead eat grains and beans, which are good non-meat sources of protein.) But as mentioned in the "Water on Our Planet" story, the amount of fish that can be caught in the sea will never increase. If this is the case, does this mean we should eat more meat and farmed fish, instead of fish caught in the ocean? Well, let's think in terms of the amount of grain we need to produce this meat and farmed fish. Grain, like rice, wheat and corn, is also food that we humans eat. The earth's population is increasing with great speed. Today, more than 6.3 billion people live on this planet and that number is said to be increasing by 74 million every year. The more we humans live on earth, the more grain we need. No matter how we use it, directly as our own food (e.g. rice or bread) or by feeding it to the animals whose meat we eat, this does not change the fact that we will need more and more grain to feed everyone in the world. In order to meet this demand, we should be concerned whether or not we can increase grain production, shouldn't we?
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   6. We love food
   
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