Waste from Cargill's massive meat processing facility at High River, Alberta, will be used to fuel a waste-to-energy plant that will boost the proportion of renewable energy used by the site to around 80 per cent.

my comment. (posted on the Cargil blog.

Some years ago we published an interesting calculation. Modern intensive beef production results in a 50% lean and 30% fat per carcass. In terms of energy that means and equivalent of 40 for protein and 270 for fat. That is 6.75 times the amount of energy vested in fat production rather than protein production.

Just over a century ago beef fat was prized for its use as saddle soap, leather and shoe polish and especially candles as apart from scarce oil, this was the way people lit their houses at night. Come electricity the candles were no longer needed apart for trendy dinner parties and religious applications. None the less the high energy feeds and progressive denial of exercise with growth promoters for added weight gain, greatly enhanced the amount of fat in the carcass and indeed resulted in marbling a euphemism for fat infiltration into wasting muscle: (much prized in many quarters but considered pathological in others!).

Our genome is only 1.5% different from chimpanzees, hence our physiology is adapted to wild foods. If one uses wild beef as a comparator then the modern, intensive beef produces fat energy that is >9 times the protein energy compared to the wild. So with the bulk of that fat now going into food in one form or another, is it surprising that we have an obesity epidemic with a rising toll from diabetes and mental ill health. The calculation we did showed that if instead of putting the fat into food we returned it to making candles the whole of the UK could throw away all our light bulbs.

The problem today is that we eat the tallow candles. So if the Cargill's massive meat processing facility at High River, Alberta was to aggressively harvest the beef fat all would benefit.

However, it would probably be better to return to exclusive pasture and browse feeding with its inherent component of exercise to build muscle (protein and micronutrients). The only problem with that is that the genetic selection for fast weight gain there may be a problem. Putting on fat is the easiest and usual way to gain weight! That may mean the animals have accidentally been selected for fat i.e. for obesity and it could be tricky undoing that. We may have to start again with wild stock.