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The problem which we already have the technology to fix is food. What people eat is cultural and is effected by cost and availability. There is much we currentl

by belorn 5y ago

The problem which we already have the technology to fix is food. What people eat is cultural and is effected by cost and availability. There is much we currently discard or do not cultivate because it not what we traditionally see as food and because there is no cost incentive to encourage a change in culture. Changes can however occur given the right triggers, like how large portion of Europe went over to potatoes during the European 19th century population boom. We could see a similar change in food culture towards seaweed if topsoil issues became widespread, and there is plenty of space for technological improvements in aquaculture. Similar, fresh water is primarily a cost issue. Right now the only economical method to provide water at the lowest cost is to take naturally occurring fresh water. There are alternatives. It does not take a lot of solar, wind or nuclear power plants to supply a large city population with fresh water extracted from the ocean. The construction and operational costs would however be need to be taken from something else, reducing welfare and industrial output.

saurik 5y ago
I do not believe that everyone deciding to eat something different is "fixing" the food scarcity problem in the same way that desalinization (ignoring all other issues with it as we assumed technology improved to solve them also) "fixes" water scarcity: if everyone is told tomorrow "all water will safely come from desal" we might breath a collective sigh of relief... "starting tomorrow, all food will be replaced by seaweed" a lot of people are going to be super super pissed, right? Maybe even more basic: making enough potatoes to technically satisfy everyone's calorie requirements (ignoring nutrition) might be a technological problem, but the "similar change in food culture" is kind of begging the question, as if we could just cause that change before all the food was gone maybe we could still enjoy the occasional potato (a luxury in our new era of food molded out of seaweed), and if we could get equivalent cultural shifts in how people use transportation (along with food changes, such as not eating meat) maybe we could stave off climate change without technological fixes: if you are relying on a cultural change it isn't a technological fix, and if the way the cultural change will happen is because no one will have a choice... well, then you didn't fix anything in the first place!
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- simonh 5y ago
  >if you are relying on a cultural change it isn't a technological fix If traditional food sources go away and technology provides an alternative food source, that is what people will eat. Culture will follow technology, if that's what people have to do to survive. EDIT:That mostly applies to the population in the developed world with access to capital, technology and industrial resources that we can use to adapt our food supply. Not everywhere in the world has those resources to fall back on though.
  - coldtea 5y ago
    Yes, but survival is not living. And culture can adapt to everything, including slavery, dystopia, etc.
    - simonh 5y ago
      Indeed, I think those are much more likely outcomes than massive population collapse.
  - Dudeman112 5y ago
    It also mostly assumes that the undeveloped world won't eat the developed world. Societal collapse in for example India or Brazil would make things awkward real fast for a large chunk of the world
    - PeterisP 5y ago
      In general, that would be prevented by the fact that the developed world is militarily stronger than the developing world. If some resources are not enough for India or Brazil, they can't take them from the developed world in the style of the earlier resource wars for e.g. oil.
      - 5y ago
coldtea 5y ago
>The problem which we already have the technology to fix is food. What people eat is cultural and is effected by cost and availability That's not fixing, that's a band aid, and an ugly one at that. "Let's just eat worms, algae, problem fixed".
- evgen 5y ago
  And if we suggested ten years ago that your burgers would be plant-based I am sure you would tell us how much Americans hate tofu and that this was just another ugly band-aid. Food is trivial to fix and is barely a small step below clothing choices when it comes to things that are driven almost entirely by culture and fashion. My children regularly request food like sushi and spring rolls that I was ridiculed for eating the the 1980s in the US midwest. Adding insect or algae-based supplements to processed food is already happening. It's easy. It will happen. The only question is if it will take ten years or twenty.
  - coldtea 5y ago
    >And if we suggested ten years ago that your burgers would be plant-based Ten years ago? I'll still say it now and in 50 years.
    - ksaj 5y ago
      That's all fine if you want a 100% processed food diet. Some of us want to eat less-processed food than that, and save the "treat" foods for treat times. In Toronto there is a decades-long established vegan restaurant called Buddha's Vegetarian Restaurant. They make a lot of mock meat products that are as realistic as the Impossible Burger, by layering and preparing things in such a way that they end up resembling meat fiber. You can easily fool yourself into thinking you are eating pulled pork there, for example. So realistic vegetarian/vegan meat products have actually been around quite a while. Just not in the mainstream.
      - robertlagrant 5y ago
        But are they "not mainstream" or just "not affordable"?
kwhitefoot 5y ago
The Netherlands is a net exporter of food and it does this by producing what people want to eat. See https://aboutthenetherlands.com/why-does-the-netherlands-export-so-much-food/ https://aboutthenetherlands.com/why-does-the-netherlands-exp... Why should we have to change what we eat? Surely taking that choice away takes away part of what we are, reduces our autonomy. Why switch to seaweed when we can already produce what we already know we want?
- belorn 5y ago
  My point is primarily that we are not going to run out of edible food. I have no intention to try force anyone to change their culture. Here in Sweden we eat fermented fish. Other countries eat ferment cabbage, beans, goat stomachs, or other fermented things which in my culture we would be weird to eat. I think fermented seaweed is also a thing somewhere. There are things that could force a culture change, such as famine, war, social status signals, media, and religion to mention a few examples. Humans are social creatures, and culture is a social phenomenon, so the cause for a cultural change would likely be social in nature. I guess a societal collapse could also trigger a change in culture, or a cultural change could prevent a societal collapse. I guess it depend on how one want to perceive it, and what meaning people put into the word "societal collapse".
- tarsinge 5y ago
  I don’t see that convincing, a huge part of what we eat currently is the result of marketing (sugar, meat, dairy…), very anecdotical for defining oneself and the future of human society.
- adolph 5y ago
  "Net exporter" in terms of calories and protein or "net exporter" in terms of currency? The Netherlands ag economy is focused on high value crops. But you can't eat tulips. One-third of the world's exports of chilis, tomatoes, and cucumbers goes through the country. The Netherlands also exports one-fifteenth of the world's apples. Aside from that, a significant portion of Dutch agricultural exports consists of fresh-cut plants, flowers, and flower bulbs, with the Netherlands exporting two-thirds of the world's total. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netherlands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netherlands
harimau777 5y ago
I would like to see more effort towards making alternative foods acceptable to people. For example, I think that there could be a big difference between trying to get people to eat a plate of raw grubs versus a tofu like food produced from grub protein. Perhaps seaweed could be used to produce something equivalent to tortillas or bread?
tarsinge 5y ago
To add to that there is the obvious low hanging fruit of meat as the main source of proteins. Feeding animals perfectly good proteins and using the majority of agricultural land (more than 70% if I remember correctly) and a lot water to finally to eat them after so much waste makes no sense as a main source of feeding a population, it’s not political or philosophical question just a practical one (I’m not vegetarian but eat meat only on rare occasions).
- nine_k 5y ago
  Refine the "impossible burger" technology to the point where it's cost-competitive with beef burgers (or maybe see the beef prices rise a lot), and I suppose many people would switch without noticing much.
- cjohnson318 5y ago
  Normalize pork! It's delicious, it requires much less land, and produces less CO2 per pound than cows.
hoseja 5y ago
Food scarcity IS fixed/ is literally impossible to fix. Human population grew like five times in the living memory and people ignorant of this (willfully or not) are still trying to fix "food scarcity".

by belorn 5y ago

saurik 5y ago

I do not believe that everyone deciding to eat something different is "fixing" the food scarcity problem in the same way that desalinization (ignoring all other issues with it as we assumed technology improved to solve them also) "fixes" water scarcity: if everyone is told tomorrow "all water will safely come from desal" we might breath a collective sigh of relief... "starting tomorrow, all food will be replaced by seaweed" a lot of people are going to be super super pissed, right? Maybe even more basic: making enough potatoes to technically satisfy everyone's calorie requirements (ignoring nutrition) might be a technological problem, but the "similar change in food culture" is kind of begging the question, as if we could just cause that change before all the food was gone maybe we could still enjoy the occasional potato (a luxury in our new era of food molded out of seaweed), and if we could get equivalent cultural shifts in how people use transportation (along with food changes, such as not eating meat) maybe we could stave off climate change without technological fixes: if you are relying on a cultural change it isn't a technological fix, and if the way the cultural change will happen is because no one will have a choice... well, then you didn't fix anything in the first place!

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
simonh 5y ago
>if you are relying on a cultural change it isn't a technological fix If traditional food sources go away and technology provides an alternative food source, that is what people will eat. Culture will follow technology, if that's what people have to do to survive. EDIT:That mostly applies to the population in the developed world with access to capital, technology and industrial resources that we can use to adapt our food supply. Not everywhere in the world has those resources to fall back on though.
- coldtea 5y ago
  Yes, but survival is not living. And culture can adapt to everything, including slavery, dystopia, etc.
  - simonh 5y ago
    Indeed, I think those are much more likely outcomes than massive population collapse.
- Dudeman112 5y ago
  It also mostly assumes that the undeveloped world won't eat the developed world. Societal collapse in for example India or Brazil would make things awkward real fast for a large chunk of the world
  - PeterisP 5y ago
    In general, that would be prevented by the fact that the developed world is militarily stronger than the developing world. If some resources are not enough for India or Brazil, they can't take them from the developed world in the style of the earlier resource wars for e.g. oil.
    - 5y ago

coldtea 5y ago

>The problem which we already have the technology to fix is food. What people eat is cultural and is effected by cost and availability That's not fixing, that's a band aid, and an ugly one at that. "Let's just eat worms, algae, problem fixed".

evgen 5y ago
And if we suggested ten years ago that your burgers would be plant-based I am sure you would tell us how much Americans hate tofu and that this was just another ugly band-aid. Food is trivial to fix and is barely a small step below clothing choices when it comes to things that are driven almost entirely by culture and fashion. My children regularly request food like sushi and spring rolls that I was ridiculed for eating the the 1980s in the US midwest. Adding insect or algae-based supplements to processed food is already happening. It's easy. It will happen. The only question is if it will take ten years or twenty.
- coldtea 5y ago
  >And if we suggested ten years ago that your burgers would be plant-based Ten years ago? I'll still say it now and in 50 years.
  - ksaj 5y ago
    That's all fine if you want a 100% processed food diet. Some of us want to eat less-processed food than that, and save the "treat" foods for treat times. In Toronto there is a decades-long established vegan restaurant called Buddha's Vegetarian Restaurant. They make a lot of mock meat products that are as realistic as the Impossible Burger, by layering and preparing things in such a way that they end up resembling meat fiber. You can easily fool yourself into thinking you are eating pulled pork there, for example. So realistic vegetarian/vegan meat products have actually been around quite a while. Just not in the mainstream.
    - robertlagrant 5y ago
      But are they "not mainstream" or just "not affordable"?

kwhitefoot 5y ago

The Netherlands is a net exporter of food and it does this by producing what people want to eat. See https://aboutthenetherlands.com/why-does-the-netherlands-export-so-much-food/ https://aboutthenetherlands.com/why-does-the-netherlands-exp... Why should we have to change what we eat? Surely taking that choice away takes away part of what we are, reduces our autonomy. Why switch to seaweed when we can already produce what we already know we want?

belorn 5y ago
My point is primarily that we are not going to run out of edible food. I have no intention to try force anyone to change their culture. Here in Sweden we eat fermented fish. Other countries eat ferment cabbage, beans, goat stomachs, or other fermented things which in my culture we would be weird to eat. I think fermented seaweed is also a thing somewhere. There are things that could force a culture change, such as famine, war, social status signals, media, and religion to mention a few examples. Humans are social creatures, and culture is a social phenomenon, so the cause for a cultural change would likely be social in nature. I guess a societal collapse could also trigger a change in culture, or a cultural change could prevent a societal collapse. I guess it depend on how one want to perceive it, and what meaning people put into the word "societal collapse".
tarsinge 5y ago
I don’t see that convincing, a huge part of what we eat currently is the result of marketing (sugar, meat, dairy…), very anecdotical for defining oneself and the future of human society.
adolph 5y ago
"Net exporter" in terms of calories and protein or "net exporter" in terms of currency? The Netherlands ag economy is focused on high value crops. But you can't eat tulips. One-third of the world's exports of chilis, tomatoes, and cucumbers goes through the country. The Netherlands also exports one-fifteenth of the world's apples. Aside from that, a significant portion of Dutch agricultural exports consists of fresh-cut plants, flowers, and flower bulbs, with the Netherlands exporting two-thirds of the world's total. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netherlands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netherlands

harimau777 5y ago

I would like to see more effort towards making alternative foods acceptable to people. For example, I think that there could be a big difference between trying to get people to eat a plate of raw grubs versus a tofu like food produced from grub protein. Perhaps seaweed could be used to produce something equivalent to tortillas or bread?

tarsinge 5y ago

To add to that there is the obvious low hanging fruit of meat as the main source of proteins. Feeding animals perfectly good proteins and using the majority of agricultural land (more than 70% if I remember correctly) and a lot water to finally to eat them after so much waste makes no sense as a main source of feeding a population, it’s not political or philosophical question just a practical one (I’m not vegetarian but eat meat only on rare occasions).

nine_k 5y ago
Refine the "impossible burger" technology to the point where it's cost-competitive with beef burgers (or maybe see the beef prices rise a lot), and I suppose many people would switch without noticing much.
cjohnson318 5y ago
Normalize pork! It's delicious, it requires much less land, and produces less CO2 per pound than cows.

hoseja 5y ago

Food scarcity IS fixed/ is literally impossible to fix. Human population grew like five times in the living memory and people ignorant of this (willfully or not) are still trying to fix "food scarcity".