On Wed, 28 Aug 1996, Richard Lawson wrote:

Harold Ancell wrote:

A nice story---just one tiny problem that you might want to ignore: If
the world is facing famine, one of the first things we'd do is cull
our livestock herds, since animals are a rather inefficient way of
producing food.  Kill off all the domesticated animals in the US, and
we'd be swimming in grain.  Our food would be relatively boring, but
plentiful.

[snip]

People pointing out that one pound of meat does not equal one pound of
grain, and that cattle is more than just meat, we use lots of other
parts of it, yadda, yadda yadda.  

I rationalized it thus:  even if he had tons o' grain, we wouldn't have
the facilities to turn it into something useful to consume - the same
argument I used with the fish thing.  And we couldn't exactly strap the
ol' feedbag on the US population and expect them to chow down.

[snip]

Well perhaps if one does suspend his disbelief, then the story otherwise
works fine.  Unfortunately, for myself, the famine thing sticks out
like a sore thumb...  Firstly, the United States produces something 
like 3-4 times what it consumes.  Even if you killed all the livestock
in the country, nobody would be in danger of starving.  We'd just have
to modify our diets to eat more bread, salad, and rice :).
Some people might think that we'd be better off health wise :).

We'd have no problem turning grain into useful food products at all.

My suggestion would be to remove the 'famine' references, and tone 
it down to just people being deprived of meat products -- that would
kill two birds with one stone.  By avoiding an explanation of the 
famine, we wouldn't have to suspend our disbelief.  And saving
the world's meat supply would make everyone happy enough to give out
the kind of medals and awards you described.