DISCUSSION 
satisfactory, most certainly for children and other vulnerable 
groups within the population. I cannot, therefore, accept the 
contention that animal proteins are now virtually shown to be 
of no greater value than plant proteins. 
Moreover, the emphasis placed by myself and my colleagues 
in FAO on increasing the consumption of animal products is 
more widely based than on a mere consideration of the value 
of animal protein per se, important as this may be. 
In the first place, the passage of plant food through the animal 
not only results in an improved quality in the food constituents, 
which resemble more closely in pattern those constituting the 
human tissues, but these constituents are present both in far 
higher concentrations and in more readily available form than 
in plants. For example, the protein content of dried grass varies 
between 10 and 20 per cent, whereas the protein contents of the 
solids of milk, cheese and eggs lie between 30 and 50 per cent. 
As regards fat, the dry matter of plant tissue seldom exceeds 
5 per cent; indeed in most cereals it is about half this figure. 
In the solids of milk on the other hand it is 30 per cent, in eggs 
40 per cent, in cheese over 50 per cent, in meat sometimes more 
than 60 per cent. ‘The increases in the concentration of nutrients 
apply equally to vitamins and minerals. 
In the second place—and here I am speaking as an agricul- 
turist—animals do not in general compete with man for the 
same portions of the plant. In the United Kingdom, for 
example, grass provides 60 per cent of all nutrients for livestock. 
In India, to take another extreme example, dry and green 
fodder crops provide 95 per cent of the whole of the animal 
nutrients. In Africa there are many semi-arid zones where one 
can only adopt nomadic grazing. In deserts there are places 
where man, in the absence of available water, has in fact to rely 
on his sheep and goats, grazing nomadically, to provide him 
with the necessary water in his milk. 
As regards the extent to which other crops are consumed by 
animals, livestock eat, on the whole, the straw, the milling 
offals, the by-products of the oil-seed crushing industry, the 
tops of the pulp of sugar beet, and slaughterhouse offals—all of 
60 
