But back to meat vs. veg, If you lose a little in each step, the more steps means more is lost. Since raising meat takes the extra "step" of growing feed and then caring for and breeding the animals themselves, that might result in quite an amount of P waste even in a very efficient recycling scheme compared to vegetables which go from field to plate.

The part that bothers me about all of this is simply that phosphorus, if in short supply, is not priced appropriately. Our food, especially meat, should thus be more expensive. Is the market not correctly setting the price due to government subsidies? Or is something else going on? If meat were that much more expensive, people would change their behaviour. Also, the production of food and use of phosphorus would be made more efficient due to the high cost of the fertilizer. The market can help to fix this, but we need to find out who is breaking it where.

The vegetables you so loudly proclaim that would save us from phosphate doom are incredibly LOW in phosphorous, unless you supplement your beans and sprouts and roots with large quantities of fat-laden nuts.

If you are so concerned about sparing phosphate in the human metabolism, the thing you should be railing against is sugar, or more precisely, fructose. In fructose metabolism in the liver, it gobbles up phosphate at an alarming rate, producing little more than fat and waste products, including uric acid and enzymes that inhibit proper insulin metabolism. Fructose metabolism leaves you depleted of energy, gout-ridden, hypertensive, fat, and diabetic. AND it uses up phosphate.

But then, fructose comes from fruit, and fruit is a plant, and you vegetarians can't ever blame a plant for anything BAD, can you? A plant could never produce anything toxic to us, could it?

Why don't you just roll around in this lovely poison ivy for a while and think about it? Here, have a cigarette.

Gregor

Take a look at the future of P