One of the new elements in the Garnaut Review’s final report is an analysis of “Transforming rural land use” in chapter 22. It’s a tour of some of the ways in which agricultural and forestry practices might change to increase the amount of carbon sequestered in our forests, woodlands, and our soil. It’s one of the most positive chapters in the entire report; changing the way Australia uses its land offers some enormous opportunities to absorb carbon at relatively low cost.
There’s a lot of possibilities in there; I’ll just pick one. As our vegetarian friends regularly remind us - Andrew Bartlett has pointed the issue out again - one of Australia’s biggest contributors to our greenhouse emissions is the methane-laden burping of our cattle and sheep. One solution would be to join Bartlett and make a mass switch to vegetarianism, or at the very least eat less meat. Or figure out how to stop ruminants producing methane, which is a nice idea but has proved to be rather difficult in practice (and may well involve genetic engineering). Alternatively, we could switch to pork or chicken, the production of which releases far less CO2. But for the truly committed carnivore, nothing replaces the taste of a nice red steak. So, if we can’t stop cows burping, farting, and poohing methane, what do we do?
Garnaut points to an interesting study by Edwards and Wilson (which, unfortunately, not only is not freely available, my university doesn’t have a full-text subscription) which looks at the idea of turning large parts of Australia back to kangaroo country. Kangaroo, when well prepared, is a rather tasty red meat, and, unlike ruminants, kangaroos don’t burp large amounts of methane every couple of days. So, in a nutshell, the study suggests that if carbon prices rise to the predicted levels, that we could profitably replace much of our beef and lamb production with roo.
But would people eat roo?
Well, Garnaut goes to the standard economist’s toolbox and looks to the power of price signals to change people’s diets. Here’s a chart of the real retail price of a number of different meat types , from 1960 until 2008:
Note that poultry prices have plummeted, pork has dropped a little, beef has stayed roughly steady, and lamb has risen (particularly recently).
If you’re a believer in the power of price signals, you’d expect chicken consumption to rise, and sheep meat consumption to drop, right? Well, here’s the data:
Of course, correlation is not causation, and there are a number of other possibilities you could imagine for the changes in consumption. But the pattern is striking. And, frankly, switching from beef to kangaroo meat isn’t a great gastronomic sacrifice much of the time; roo tacos taste pretty much the same as beef ones, for instance.
There are a lot of barriers to overcome to bring back kangaroos; not least of which is that kangaroos aren’t amenable to traditional Western agricultural practices of small private farms with animals fenced in, selectively bred, trucked from place to place while still alive, and so on. But stranger things have happened. Bring on the roo commons and save the planet.
UPDATE: Here’s the paper. Thanks to the reader who mailed me the link.
yum, i love roo.
time for someone to make ‘the coat of arms’: roo and emu pie
How about protein-charged Roo Smoothies?
We could all be doing the Skippy Skippy Shake Shake.
Amanda, you took the words right out of my mouth!
Robert Merkel wrote:
The northern queensland beef operations don’t look anything like this: think helicopter mustering, wide ranges and seeing your cattle once a year.
Farmers around places like Charleville have been successfully harvesting feral goats for years (especially when sheep don’t thrive during droughts). The real problem is that the rest of the infrastructure required just doesn’t exist - you can’t transport ‘roo without injuring the animals (they aren’t domesticated, duh) so they have to be killed on-site which brings in a whole host of health issues.
Fixing the domesticated animals would be a far better idea - and it’s being actively worked on. These things take time though, and research dollars. Trying to domesticate ‘roos enough so they can be handled by trucks and yards suited to cattle and sheep would be futile.
Amanda & Tim, a couple of skippy cornballs.
They’re great stirfried.
There’s reasonable availability of roo fillets and mince at my local coles - but apart from barbecueing the fillets I don’t know how to treat it. Can I just substitute roo mince for beef mince, in a ragu, for example? Or in rissoles? Any advice, hints, recipes?
I believe you can (as in, mince in ragus, etc.)
But it’s not that simple. the major problem as I see it is an inability to slaughter them humanely. At the moment it’s done by shooting and very hit and miss (literally) with many animals winged and dying slowly. Then there’s the problem of joeys in pouches.
We need an australian Temple Grandin to come up with a genuinely efficient and relatively humane method tailored specifically to the roo and its habits and habitat, then I’d be happy to eat it.
wilful, in my experience ‘roo meat can suffer a lot from Boar Taint (typically described as making the meat “gamey”, like your grandparents favourite mutton cuts).
Some of this can be mitigated by preparing the meat in “povvo” style dishes that use a lot of seasoning to mask the smell/flavour (think southern mediterranean, north african, or any asian cooking typically involving pork) and involve lots of strong tasting vegetables like onions.
The problem is that the meat just isn’t consistent - so you’ve really got to give it the sniff test (if you can) before deciding what exactly you’re going to do with it. Occasionally you’ll get really nice, sweet bit of ‘roo suitable for cooking like a steak, but a really nasty bit doesn’t even make nice sausages. I’d avoid the mince altogether but that’s just me.
“Kangaroo, when well prepared, is a rather tasty red meat, and, unlike ruminants, kangaroos don’t burp large amounts of methane every couple of days.”
Yes, but after you eat roo you are very likely to pass quite a bit of extra methane yourself.
Been there - done that!
Wilful - yes to substituting roo mince, but not where fat is required. Rissoles can be a tad dry.
Contrary to popular belief, roo stew need notbe dry and stringy either. You just need to be ultra-vigilant about keeping the temperature down. My former housemate made a kick-arse rendang, and a kind of biryani with roo and eggplant that I still wake up weeping for since he shacked up with his boyfriend.
Andrew Bartlett repeats the FAO claim that “direct emissions from meat production account for about 18% of the world’s total greenhouse gas emissions”, but maybe it doesn’t. Perhaps there’s one less thing to feel guilty about.
As Helen said, we need to find more humane ways of killing roos. But, of course our ways of slaughtering other animals aren’t very humane either.
Sorry, forgot the link
Another potential drawback.
During my undergraduate days, one of our visiting lecturers proposed the same question. The most troublesome issue was the high level of gut fauna (i.e. tapeworms etc) in wild kangaroos. In fact, he specifically said the composition of the roo’s gut fauna precludes them from use as a food source. Consequently, the costs associated with “eatin’ roos” would have to include those incurred by isolating them from wild populations (i.e. fencing etc).
Still, they’re bloody tasty!
Ute man is squeamish about gamey meat? WTF?
I know what you mean though. There’s a distinctly sulphurous smell to some steaks (though I’ve never noticed it in the proper fillets) that has on occasion forced a re-think of the evening menu chez FDB.
The local Woolies does little rolled roo meat roasts which are fab. They take only 30 mins to roast in a hot oven then 10 mins to rest (very important) and taste pretty much like beef. One roast feeds two adults and costs about $4-$5. Good value and tasty too.
and the problem with that is what, exactly?
Besides, all you have to do is dose the cattle with roo gut fauna. They’ll have upset stomachs for a couple of weeks and then they’ll be fine.
I thought you Australians were squeamish about roo. I say hand me a rifle and let’s go into business.
Let’s hop to it, people!
Helen: do you have some evidence to back that up?
Kangaroo culls by professional shooters are supported by, for instance, the RSPCA.
rpg: I don’t have a problem with GE. Other people do.
On your second point, as I understand it, stopping cows burping methane isn’t nearly as easy as you described.
FDB wrote:
Pathetic isn’t it, but it’s more ute man’s missus and the tin lids who would raise the first objection.
I think a little boar taint can actually be used to advantage in the right meal (see the suggestions) but it has no place in a meat and 3 veg western style dish. If you buy one of those slow cooker things and make something like a Mussaman curry though, you have to have pretty strong flavours to survive all the coconut milk etc., so a gamey and stringy meat is the best choice (beef ends up too sweet I reckon and chicken just basically turns into tasteless glop).
Then again, I still think the biggest objection to trying to make a paradigm shift away from domesticated cattle and sheep are the handling problems, not the flavour, which aren’t going away in a hurry.
Oh, another point I’ve posted here before courtesy of my employer:
Don’t call me Mr Methane
Cows are big and slow and literally covered in meat. Kangaroos aren’t.
David Rubie: one might suggest that if cattle were removed, the kangaroo population might increase.
With a bit of knowledge of production beef farms and abattoirs, I reckon the ‘roos get a better deal of it than the cows. The accuracy and lethality of professional shooters is really extraordinarily good – but I accept that they will inevitably be a bit hit and miss.
People who don’t like kangaroo shooting have this to say about kangaroo meat diseases: http://www.awpc.org.au/kangaroos/book_files/diseases.htm
Sounds like a beat up, not much risk there.
Might try a massaman roo curry.
No doubt the kangaroo population would increase Robert, but the implied logistics of handling and killing 10x the number of animals currently handled might be a tad problematic. They aren’t chickens.
Yeah, but most people eat more meat than they need to anyway. Wouldn’t hurt to cut back as well as switch to alternative sources.
Marinate, my friends (too long listening to McCain), marinate.
You can use milk to get rid of the gamey taste if you have a prob.
I favour a barbeque sauce of some kind.
Cous cous works well underneath the meat.
We eat too much of everything Julie - getting people to cut back on meat is probably a good idea as we approach 60% population obesity (making the Mussaman curry suggestion pretty suspect), however I expect the increasing prices of mitigating global warming will help solve that too
Robert, there’s actually quite a bit of work on this. It’s early days yet, but It might be possible. A quick google led me to this, from which I found the name Athol Klieve. You can search Pubmed with ‘Klieve AV’ to find out more.
But, following on from Andrew Bartlett’s advice, a major cut back in the animal protein in our diets would greatly reduce the amount of meat - cattle, roo or otherwise - required to feed us.
I’ve just been getting through Tim Flannery’s The Future Eaters. Even in 1994, the good doctor was chastising us for not adapting our culture to the limits of what our land could sustainably provide. For the purposes of this discussion, you can read eating habits for culture.
Another advantage in reducing cattle (and sheep for that matter) numbers would be the possibility of increased carbon-sequestering forest.
A mild whiff of boar taint is fine by me for the benefits of reducing cattle numbers.
Taste is similar to venison and similar recipes apply, for rissoles I use half roo mince and half pork for a good balance as roo is very lean.
Centralised processing is unlikely to be viable so that leaves mobile abb’s or the return of small regional ones.
Robert Merkel @ 24: The kangaroo population has actually increased artifically as cattle/sheep production increased, IIRC. All three species favour grasslands and ‘improved pasture’ over the natural cover. Hence the recurrent need for culls in some locations, and the hate-on some farmers have for roos, which they claim compete with the domesticated animals for fodder and water.
If all you’re cooking is tacos, use lentils instead. Can be substituted for anything that uses mince.
Laura: I don’t mind the occasional lentil, but I think meat - even minced meat - tastes nicer, and I don’t think I’m Robinson Crusoe there.
Not saying others don’t have different opinions, of course. Taste is a subjective matter
I freaking adore lentils, but variety, spice, etc.
We use tinned red beans instead of mince in tacos if it’s veggie taco night. Lentils are for dirty hippies or kindergarten “make your own instrument” day (no, not the butt flute).
Longer me: you will have a hard time convincing people (say, me) to go vegetarian on the basis that it won’t adversely affect the pleasure, or at least number of pleasures, they get from eating. Unless you dislike meat, or genuinely can’t tell it from pulses (due to absence from mouth, sinus and throat of all sensation).
<em.If all you’re cooking is tacos, use lentils instead. Can be substituted for anything that uses mince.
rubbish.
David, a good chile needs both meat and beans.
I’ve only had one dud curry out of scores when using roo meat i started with a commercially available Madras curry and have since substituted roo for beef in several red meat curries in the Charmaine Soloman books like the dry meat curry and her red curry.
when making a ragu or a bolognase, i make the tomato base first and mix the meat in this works well with roo. most of my friends fry the meat with onions and what not, and then add the passata etc, this des not work with roo as there is not enough fat.
i have not had a good roo sausage, again not enough fat, bu tthere is a great roo salami available at the south Melboure Markets, or was last time i looked, two years ago.
re steaks and fillets etc, i agree with those above that mention the variability of the product, roo steaks, they must be rare, generally i ask for them still stunned in the headlights, can be great, my fav condiments so far have been hot english mustard and cranberry sause.
Wilful, having now corrupted the thread into a Jamie Oliver style cook-off, I reckon the commercial taco kits are perfectly edible with a big tin of red beans instead of mince as long as you’re generous with the other stuff (capsicum, onions, tomatoes). Sure, beans and mince together are good, but the beans by themselves are fine’n'dandy. The amount of meat vs. beans in actual mexican food seemed pretty low to me when I’ve eaten it (and actual mexican food is delicious).
Lentils, on the other hand, always just taste like somebody snuck in a handful of dirt or did the cooking under the house.
Now, I also reckon that the relatively mild spices of a commercial taco kit will not kill the occasionally irksome flavour of kangaroo - you’d need something stronger.
“If all you’re cooking is tacos, use lentils instead. Can be substituted for anything that uses mince.”
Or frijoles refritos, if we’re talking about tacos, enchiladas, pupusas etc. I think that works with the other flavours better than, say, lentils. Having recently become vegetarian, I don’t really miss the beef or chicken in Mexican/Central American dishes. Although I do miss chicharron in my pupusas a little bit.
David, have you seen how much salt there is in a commercial spice mix? I make my own - lots of cumin, paprika, oregano, bay leaf, some stock powder, ground coriander, you’re there.
Anyway, to steer back towards the basics of the thread, as part of my attempts to reduce my emissions, chez wilful is going to try and remove beef mince from the menu, and substitute kangaroo, even though it’s a fair bit more expensive. I think this is better for our rangelands as well (noting that the IUCN listed species included lots of rangeland ones).
After that, the only two big opportunities for me to reduce emissions are dairy products and flights (though I’m not that bad an offender, we do plan on going to Europe next year).
Wilful wrote:
I honestly have no idea what the food-miles calculation looks like of beef vs. kangaroo, but given that a lot of farmers are actively trying to mitigate their carbon emissions via pasture improvement, the overall difference of carbon footprint of small operators harvesting kangaroo vs. large commercial farming operations might be negligable. It’s a laudable goal though.
Electricity is what makes up a far greater proportion of my families carbon footprint as far as I can tell, not beef or lamb.
“remove beef mince from the menu, and substitute kangaroo, even though it’s a fair bit more expensive”
Where are you shopping? I’m paying $6 or so a kilo at Coles - the only mince cheaper is the cheapest ‘hamburger’ beef mince, which comes in at 30% fat, minimum.
One thing that people might want to consider are the consequences of roo meat switching from a boutique niche product to a mass market staple. Will kangaroos be subjected to the nefarious industrial meat production line? Do we want to go there?
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Vegetarianism is becoming moral in the sense of central to the well-being of the body politic. People will continue to eat meat, but if we’re wise, then we’ll be eating a lot less of it and switching to stuff like roo meat. Chickens kept in line with permaculture techniques provide excellent fertilizer and sources of protein. And chickens are meant to be eaten. Unlike, perhaps, more intelligent animals like pigs who know what’s going on the minute they arrive at the abattoir.
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Still I’ve been eating roo for years: low fat, ran around wild, no antibiotics, no hormones. Soak it in rosemary, red wine and soy sauce for 24 hours. Serve with sweet-potato mash, lots a garlic - Yum!!!
You have not yet discovered the joys of a good dahl baht then, David.
Adrien: as David Rubie has pointed out, one of the biggest barriers to increasing the amount of kangaroo meat is that you can’t farm them conventionally. They don’t take to industrialized, intensive agriculture.
On the upside, this should mean that the potential for unethical practices is limited to the capture and killing, and - as far as I can tell - kangaroos can be shot humanely.
To my mind (admittedly an almost completely ignorant one) there’s a possibility of more and more tender meat if some very simple provisioning happened in lean times too.
“Joy” and “Lentil” do not belong in the same sentence GregM, unless it’s something like “To my joy, lentils were not on the menu”. Sure, Dahl from the local Indian restaurant is tasty. Tasty dirt. To each his own, I suppose.
“On the upside, this should mean that the potential for unethical practices is limited to the capture and killing, and - as far as I can tell - kangaroos can be shot humanely.”
I have a brother in law that is a professional roo shooter. These blokes are subject to strict regulation, do not miss the target and refrigerate immediately.
While I don’t feel it’s imperative that you enjoy lentils, I am sorry you haven’t found a lentil dish that worked for you, DR. I’m a big fan of lentils myself (and was from before I went vegie), although I appreciate they are often poorly prepared, especially by those who are just starting to use them. Once you hit your stride with ‘em, they can be very tasty.
lentils are great, I love ‘em. But a recipe that calls for beef mince cannot successfully have lentils as a substitute.
FDB, Footscray market has beef mince for $4.00 a kilo. but I thought roo was more than that, will have to double check. Cat food roo is more than $6/kilo though I recall.
I’ve given up on trying to cook roo - never been able to get a decent tender dish. Mind you I’ve given up getting decent steak to cook at home too.
I love lentils and chick peas and couscous
Robert - you can’t farm them conventionally. They don’t take to industrialized, intensive agriculture.
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Not now, not as its practiced however innovations could make it possible. Or genetic engineering. Mix a roo with a cow.
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Where’s there’s a
dollarwill there’s a way. Just sayin’..
Klaus - While I don’t feel it’s imperative that you enjoy lentils,
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And you call yourself a pinko.
Well I’ll have you over for dinner, and you won’t even know it’s lentils not ground-up cow in your food.
Adrien, if you think chooks are too stupid to live, I have to wonder if you’ve spent much time with any. They are far more productive of useful things alive than dead, anyhow.
There should be a rule to go with Arthur C. Clarke’s one: any foodstuff sufficiently high in salt and fat is indistinguishable from beef mince.
[In a Ben Lee voice: “and that’s the way I like it”, etc.]
I enjoy the Sanitarium not-mince: with the help of some vegie ‘beef’ stock, I’ve made a decent not-bolognese with it. I’m not going to claim it tastes the same as a bolognese, but I prefer it, taste-wise, to probably 3/4 of the bolognese I had as a meat eater.
Laura - Adrien, if you think chooks are too stupid to live, I have to wonder if you’ve spent much time with any.
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Yes I have spent time ’round ‘em. Unfortunately.
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They’re not too stupid to live. Most organisms, including most of us, are pretty bloody stupid. But you don’t have to be smart to live. In fact it can be positively disadvantageous. A headless chicken can be kept alive and halfway functional for upwards of a month. They’re level of sentience is lower than animals with more smarts, just a fact. Hence they’re less likely to feel pain, be scared blah blah than a pig.
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That doesn’t mean they don’t tho’. They do. I’ve seen them slaughtered and others to boot. I don’t get kicks out of it, but it’s weakness and hypocrisy to shield yourself from the truth of meat. Would you agree?
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Pigs are quite sentient and resemble us in many other ways too. (Obviously). In fact there’s a certain argument that the halal/kosher prohibition against pork etc originated as an humane taboo. When pigs scream they sound human. Sets off our empathy response.
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They are far more productive of useful things alive than dead, anyhow.
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Which goes for just about everything living except pussycats and Big Brother housemates. Cats are aproductive. They could be productive they just choose not to be. Like any aristocracy. BB housemates are a shocking waste of resources. They’re hoarding protoplasm that’d make a perfectly decent virus.
Robert @ 20: Note I’m in favour of eating roo meat, but colour me sceptical about the RSPCA as an arbiter of animal welfare. Some independent Kanga-obudsman (not from PETA) would be an advantage. RSPCA has shown itself all too willing to cave when faced with actual profits, e.g. the egg industry. They were quite good on Jumps racing recently but caved abominably in a local case of horse cruelty which I was following in 2003. So I’m not going to take their word alone in conjunction with the Kangaroo meat industry reps - I’d like an independent arbiter.
As I said, we need our own equivalent of Temple Grandin (who Sophie Cunningham mentioned recently in her AGE article about animals and our relation to them), with lateral thinking.
a local case of horse cruelty
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How can you be cruel to a horse? Horses are beautiful spiritually and physically. Seagulls? Sure.
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They have it coming.
A couple of short observations:
- Kangaroos don’t pay attention to fences.
- Kangaroos love to eat crops.
As a result, no one (least of all George Wilson) is seriously proposing a shift to kangaroos in the farming lands, only in rangeland country. It should be noted that ruminants on rangeland produce disproportionately large quantities of methane per unit of meat, so this is where the bang for the GHG buck is anyway.
And yes, overall kangaroo numbers have gone up in the rangelands since we put in water points; but if we left the water there & took the cattle and sheep out then kangaroo populations would rise further.
The economics of keeping a processing infrastructure going when the underlying resource is subject to boom-and-bust fluctuations might be a show-stopper, though. Just ask the people from Sunrice…
it’s weakness and hypocrisy to shield yourself from the truth of meat. Would you agree?
I think it’s weak to eat meat, actually. Weak as piss.
Perhaps Laura, you’d like to explain exactly how we can replace the protein in meat without a gargantuan explosion in the use of fertiliser? Show your work.
One aspect of cattle production beyond their farting that hasn’t been mentioned so far is the fairly large proportion of feedlot cattle that are fed grain rather than simply grazed on rangelands.
Because of the extra GHGs involved in the production & transport of the grain, its the consumption of these beasts that really tips the co2 scales.
I’m not sure what the proportion of beef produced this way is in Australia. It permits more intensive production, thus its popularity for fast-food producers, so I suspect its rising.
Any figures, anyone?
You’d think feedlot roos would be a bit too much of a stretch…
Further to my previous @ 65, ‘Supermarkets are currently drawing 40-50% of their meat supplies from feedlots’ (full report here) so I guess the overall figure is more like 30% Australia-wide.
I’d reckon pulling back on this method of cattle production might be just as effective a GHG reducer as turning over existing cattle rangeland to roos.
btw, I’m quite happy with joy and lentils in the same sentence, but I’d also put in chick peas, which beat lentils 9 times out of 10 for me….
David, lentils and other pulse crops don’t require nitrogen fertilisers.
Yes they do Laura if you want to grow them in commercial quantities, especially in our poor soil. All the big commercial producers of pulse crops use Nitrogen based fertiliser (read: natural gas) in large quantities to increase the yield. Even the massive numbers of vegetarians in India that rely on lentils for protein have food-mile / carbon footprint problems.
David that is not what I have read. Oh well, you must be correct. Do you work for the meat and livestock association, or did I misunderstand your reference to your employer earlier?
I am sorry if I offended you by suggesting that clinging to meat eating just because it tastes nice is for weak little babies. I didn’t realise.
David R, I think you’ll find that its phosphorus that lentils & legumes require.
Both types of crops will fix atmospheric nitrogen into the soil via a symbiotic relationship with a soil bacteria (Frankia from memory) that anaerobically converts N2 into nitrates. Takes time and requires adequate soil phosphorus levels (of which many Australian soils are rather deficient).
Pshaw to ‘roo meat. It’s vile, as is (ptooie) venison. Give me good old methane producing beef and sheep any old day. He of Questionable Taste in our household likes both, but then he also thinks offal and shellfish make a damn fine feed and Melbourne Bitter’s a grand quaff! I rest my case m’lud.
laura wrote:
Wrong on every level. Getting snarky being caught out wrong, *that’s* for weak little babies.
The link between nitrogen fertiliser and pulses is trivially found via google i.e. here.
Yes it depends a bit on soil type but the basics from that article are 100kg of nitrogen fertiliser per 2 tonnes of lentils. That’s not a trivial amount. It’s definitely not for babies either because it’s expensive.
David , from your source
QED, surely?
If you measure the climate forcing of impact in the way Prof Barry Brook argues, the impact of livestock is actually far greater than the already significant amount that is commonly asserted - around 72 times more potent than CO2, rather than 25 times.
The positive side of that is there are even bigger gains to be made if people do signficantly reduce their consumption of meat dairy and other produtcs from livestock. As methane breaks down much more quickly than CO2, the gains from reducing emissions of it can be realised much sooner, buying us a bit more time while we try to figure out ways to seriously reduce emmissions in other sectors.
Feral Abacus, read the very next sentence, or even better read the whole page. You can expect the yield per hectare to increase from 800kg to 2 tonnes with “the right agronomic package” which includes 100Kg of Nitrogen fertiliser per hectare. The green revolution is currently feeding the world, not ill informed opinions or finger in the wind guesses.
I don’t mean to bash you with a clue stick, but “effectively nodulated” in that context you can read as mature/approaching harvest. Before that, you need fertiliser. After that, more fertiliser doesn’t improve the yield (unlike things like corn).
Andrew what does methane (CH4) break down to? I would have thought that CH4 plus 5xO2 equals CO2 plus 4xH2O. That leaves a lot of CO2 as a residue. And a lot of water, which is a greenhouse gas in its own right.
Sorry, no you don’t nitrogen-rich fertiliser for legumes to be effectively nodulated. ‘Effectively nodulated’ means that the nitrogen-fixing bacteria have created the air-tight nodules on the roots within which they convert atmospheric N2 into plant-available nitrogen-rich compounds.
No difference Feral Abacus - all they are referring to is the timing of the fertiliser, not whether it needs it or not (which it does, absolutely).
Oops got that wrong. CH4 plus 3 x O2 equals CO2 plus 2x H2O. I’m a bit rusty on my valancy tables. Still that’s a lot of carbon dioxide and a lot of water hanging around after the methane has degraded.
David Rubie, rather than pursue a rather pedantic & peripheral debate on this, I’ll leave you to consider how it might be that native legumes manage to nodulate and fix atmospheric nitrogen in the absence of nitrogenous fertilisers.
Gee, I dunno Abacus, maybe available nitrogen in the soil from organic matter? Or it might be a sky pixie, I can’t decide.
Laura, I suggest that even though you advocate vegetarianism, the majority of people are omnivores and that won’t change in the near future. So it still makes a lot of sense to support and promote roo as a more environmentally friendly alternative to beef, even if you personally believe we shouldn’t eat meat at all.
I have a pertinent question about cuts of meat: is it eye fillet or hamburger mince that drives our demand for beef? (I would suspect the latter but I don’t actually know)
Finally, I have been a gastronomically satisfied roo consumer for several years (apart from sausages, which I find a bit too dry) and can’t resist throwing in a cooking suggestion. Marinate your roo steaks in sweet chilli sauce and fresh coriantder, then BBQ or pan fry. Delicious.
What you’re really saying, Alison, is that Laura should cease advocating the alternatives that you feel are unacceptable and knuckle down to make the best of the status quo like everybody else. I have long appreciated her contributions along these lines, so I must respectfully object to you suggesting she remain quiet on the question of vegetarianism. It’s comments like yours that draw me towards evangelising a little for going vegie myself, but I’ll settle for advocating the legitimacy of others doing so.
Kangaroo stew with damper dumplings is the bomb. As I congratulated the chef after first encountering this dish, I mused about what the broth would taste like on its own with just a shot of vodka.
Five minutes later he brought out chilled Kangaroo broth in shotglasses spiked with vodka and a bit of paprika or some such. Rooshots!
FDB [11] …. and David Rubie [9] too:
Ah yes but low-fat kangaroo meat would go very well in that good old South African style sausage. boerwors. It’s fairly dry and needs a slightly different way of cooking …. but great. Flavour depends entirely on how the boerwors [or any other home-style sausage] is made, how it is cooked and with what it is cooked - and if none of that suits you then reach for the sauce bottle.
Nabakov [84]:
Now there’s an idea …..
Graham Bell: boerwors, dry? Have you ever had the real deal? You can see great lumps of fat in it, raw. Cook it under a grill and it sends great exploding geysers of fat spurting into the element, from whence smoke issues to set off the fire alarm.
David & the Feral Abacus appear to be talking at cross purposes because they’re not distinguishing normal growth from intense cultivation. I’m not a farmer, but I know a bit about the energetics of nitrogen fization: no plant would do it unless it had to, and you’d probably get a much better yield if you gave it the choice not to.
nabs, please share the recipe if you have it.
Laura, provided we pay for all the externalities associated with meat (which I agree we currently don’t), and the animals in question are treated humanely (again, not always the case) then why should we not eat meat “just because it tastes nice”?
After all, foods generally taste nice because natural selection has determined that such foods are nutritious - though of course that can backfire in the modern world where many foods are much more readily available. Eating meat for many of us is part of what makes life worth living, and providing we properly pay up-front for all the costs involved (including health costs from eating too much), meat consumption should have a net positive effect on human existence.
Klaus (and Laura)
Actually, I think advocating vegetarianism is very worthy! And of course, if you are a vegetarian because you believe that killing animals to eat them is wrong, I understand and respect not wanting to advocate roo over beef.
But from the environmental viewpoint, I think it can be detrimental to present the issue of eating meat as an either/or dichotomy. A lot of people, when they contemplate the extreme position of going vegetarian, find the change so daunting that they write it off completely and do nothing.
I think a middle ground suggestion of eating less meat, or switching from beef to roo, is more palatable for a lot of people. They think “OK, I can give that a try”, they take an important first step (towards vegetarianism?) of reflecting on what they are consuming, and they make an environmentally positive change to their eating habits.
Vegetarianism is a lifestyle choice - it is not our natural state, whatever arguments you might like to put forward. I have yet to hear of a baby or toddler who refused meat when given it for the first time; most children eat meat in preference to anything else apart from lollies and chips. It’s only when people get older and develop an ideological objection to meat that they stop eating it.
From dentation to digestion, the human body is clearly designed to eat meat and vegies (and fruits/grains/pulses etc). AND YES, MEAT DOES TASTE GOOD - that’s part of the reason people continue to eat it, and always will.
Right, got that off my chest.
I make kangaroo mince lasagne - my children love it and it’s better for them than the normal variety (I also use low fat milk and cheese in the bechamel). They also love kanga bangers, kanga kebabs and kanga roasts.