Vegetarian Diets: Energy Efficient Eating

http://www.oilempire.us/peak-grain.html
The fastest way that agribusiness could reduce oil consumption would be to decrease factory farm production of meat. This shift would probably be more controversial than relocalization or organic standards.
Adopting a largely plant based diet in the rich parts of the world is not an issue of animal rights or nutrition - but it is needed survival in the era of Peak Oil and climate change.
Humans did evolve to be omnivorous, but the fast food diet of meat at every meal is a new, toxic innovation. The traditional Chinese style diet of a small amount of meat to flavor the rest of the meal is probably compatible with our vegetarian oriented digestive tract, but our factory farmed meat-three-times-a-day diet is unsustainable under any circumstances.
Most estimates of the amount of fossil energy and other inputs needed to produce food assume a meat oriented diet, ignoring the fact that much less oil, fertilizer and water is needed to feed vegetarians. Even rice requires much less water than hamburgers!
Raising chickens on a small farm or suburban backyard for eggs (and the occasional meal of meat) is not as energy consumptive as overcrowded factory farms, but these sensible practices are unlikely to satisfy current rates of meat consumption. Grass fed beef is healthier for the land and the eater than grain fed beef, but free range cows cannot substitute completely for feed lots. A sane food system would produce less beef.
“It is actually quite astounding how much energy is wasted by the standard American diet-style. Even driving many gas-guzzling luxury cars can conserve energy over walking -- that is, when the calories you burn come from the standard American diet!â€
-- John Robbins, “Diet for a New America†Stillpoint Publishing (1987)

Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-Maryland) on vegetarian diets:
“in a former life, one of the things I did was to be a farmer. I would caution that we need to be careful how optimistic we are about how much liquid fuels we're going to get from agriculture ... a fifth of the world will go to bed hungry ...
If we lived lower on the food chain we would have some energy to invest [in biofuels] ...
if you were to eat the corn and soybeans rather than the pig and chicken that ate the corn and soybeans, you would have about 10 times more to eat ...
it takes three pounds of corn to produce one pound of pig but that's three pounds of largely dry corn to produce one pound of really wet pig... you don't eat the bones so the actual conversion ratio if you're lucky is ten to one, for the steer it's probably twenty to oneâ€

- Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, May 8, 2006
,
“Peak Oil and the Environment†conference in Washington, D.C.
“American feed (for livestock) takes so much energy to grow that it might as well be a petroleum byproduct.â€â€¨
-- “The Price of Beef,†WorldWatch, 
July/Aug 1994