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Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

nytimes.com

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Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#161

Post by ryacko »

wrycoder wrote: post #118
hinkley wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are missing a bit of humility. Just because an apple can be gotten in February doesn't mean you should. It stretches, complicates, and reduces the efficiency of the supply chain immensely. I heard some advice years ago that one of the better things you can do as an environmentalist is teach your kids about the seasonality of foods. Make a big deal about it being orange or pear or cherry season, cut back on buying…

By March in 18th century New Hampshire, the pickings were getting pretty lean. You might be able to go down into the cellar and get a soft apple or a potato out of a barrel, and you would have wheat, oats, and barley. Maybe there was still some kale under the snow in the garden. Beyond that, you killed a chicken or went out to hunt some game. So when the raspberries came into season, it was indeed a treat.

By the 19th century, canning allowed for a greater variety of perhaps less nutritious food.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#162

Post by fouc »

This is called Permaculture, it maximizes yield using natural methods (i.e. avoid tiling the soil, herbicides, etc) and results in an "edible forest"

From the wikipedia: 4 Common practices 4.1 Agroforestry 4.2 Hügelkultur 4.3 Natural building 4.4 Rainwater harvesting 4.5 Sheet mulching 4.6 Intensive rotational grazing 4.7 Keyline design 4.8 Fruit tree management

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#163

Post by fouc »

dghughes wrote: post #73

It's slightly terrifying to see the data about the loss of nutrients in plants around the world due to climate change. On YouTube there was an interesting Veritasim story about plants and their mineral levels. It seems plants have fewer minerals now compared to 100 years ago. Farmers have fertilizer and the plants grow but they don't have the same levels of nutrition even with all that help. Samples of weeds from the…

Conventional farming tends to disrupt the soil for short term gains, that's likely part of the reason why quality in nutrition dropped.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#164

Post by aaronblohowiak »

brownbat wrote: post #154
LonelyContext wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s all way easier than this. Eating vegan prevents all of this as it’s basic food-web biology that as you go up the food chain you lose energy by a factor of 10. Yeah an artificial leaf is technically more efficient than a plant at making energy from sunlight but plants already operate at 1-2% so unless you plan on making a synthetic system better than 10-20% at making biomass (hint: you don’t) then just cutting me…

> just cutting meat farm subsidies Most farm subsidies do not go directly to meat. In fact, current subsidies probably shift some land away from pastures and grazing to oversupplied field crops: https://www.downsizinggovernment.org/agriculture/subsidies You can absolutely be both against the farm bill and simultaneously in favor of reducing American meat consumption... But you're probably looking at corn and soy subs…

Where do you think most of that corn goes?

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#165

Post by slededit »

strainer wrote: post #141
NickM wrote: post #120

Let's try to break this problem down to first principles: - Humans need food to live because it provides energy and nutrients. - From a fundamental standpoint of physics and available materials, nutrients are relatively easy to get; as far as I know, most vitamins and minerals are pretty cheap to either come by naturally or manufacture, and you don't need that much of any of them to keep a person healthy, so let's as…

> From a fundamental standpoint of physics and available materials, nutrients are relatively easy to get; as far as I know, most vitamins and minerals are pretty cheap to either come by naturally or manufacture, and you don't need that much of any of them to keep a person healthy, so let's assume food energy is the real limiting factor here. Food is more complicated than this picture. So much that nutritionists have…

> There have been many, perhaps endless attempts to synthesize a wholesome food product - it would be worth a fortune. I am aware of zero successes to date and this shouldn't be the case if its not very difficult. We don't even synthesize sugar for consumption - maybe start there, but it is not even clear if/how much it causes diabetes or other diseases.

There are lots of synthetic foods. The main problem is marketing. How are you going to sell your lab food when "processed" is bad and "natural" is good? The organic movement has taught people to distrust science in food, and its not something that is going to easily be reversed. The fact that most synthetic advances are used for cost reduction - not health doesn't help here either.

The only place where this has seen any adoption is synthetic meats. But I expect vegetable replacements to be many decades off - if ever.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#166

Post by jessriedel »

strainer wrote: post #152
jessriedel wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Any transition to synthetic foods would be gradual. 2. People have already subsisted on fully synthetic diets (aka elemental diets) in the past as part of things like space-travel research and treatments for gastrointestinal disorders. They do fine. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1410941/?page=1

These claims are not easily substantiated - that curious 45 year old report notwithstanding. The short wikipedia article on Elemental diets, summarizes a handfull from more recent years: > Many patients are unable to tolerate the taste, even if the diet is flavoured, and choose to receive it through intragastric administration.[2] Possible nausea and diarrhea can result from the high sugar content which can also comp…

The question wasn't whether a synthetic diet has side effects compared to a natural one, the question was whether we could accidentally "wipe out the human population".

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#167

Post by barry-cotter »

saalweachter wrote: post #116
beat wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that exactly what we're doing, though? The essence of cheap junk calories is grain (flour), soybean oil (another plant with similar growing needs), sugar (largely from grain in the US - high fructose corn syrup - but sugarcane is also easy to grow at scale), and meat from grain-fed chickens and cows. All this stuff is shipped to factories, where it is broken down into refined materials for other factories, that…

Well, yeah. I'm just saying we should keep doing it. People whine about high fructose corn syrup, but it's not like it's a plot or something; people really like sweet things, and HFCS is a really efficient way to produce sweet stuff. If you restricted the sale of sweet stuff to help combat obesity, it might have an impact on the corn market, but corn would still be an amazing, important, huge part of out food supply.…

> HFCS is a really efficient way to produce sweet stuff.

Nowhere near as efficient as sugarcane. HFCS would not be produced, sold or consumed at anything approaching current levels without tariffs preventing the import of sugarcane.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#168

Post by AdrianB1 »

mac01021 wrote: post #57
AdrianB1 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is the wrong mindset, trying to fix the effect and not the cause.

What cause? The guy wants people to eat less meat. He's not saying that people eating meat is an effect of some other problem that he wants to solve.

People eating meat is not a problem. Having meat for all the people is.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#169

Post by mirimir »

alacombe wrote: post #37
ghaff wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Continuing to improve artificial meat (e.g. Impossible Burgers) to get to the point where it's better than the real thing. You don't change people's minds by taking things away from them. You give them a better substitute.

Artificial food will always lack the bio-availabilities of real food our bodies evolved to process. For example, vitamin C artificially synthesized from glucose is more difficult to assimilate by the guts than "natural" vitamin C, especially when consumed with carbs.

Huh? Vitamin C is L-ascorbic acid.

It's a simple compound, comprising just 20 atoms: six carbon, six oxygen and eight hydrogen. It's related to glucose (and manufactured commercially from it). Also, it's water soluble, and I don't believe that there's an associated carrier.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#170

Post by barry-cotter »

ip26 wrote: post #128
dilap wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a mirror-image question: What will it take to convince vegetarians that a meat-based diet is actually the healthiest way to eat, and that meat can be raised in humane, environmentally-friendly ways? :-) Edit: This a serious question. Down voting is hardly a productive form of dialog.

Disprove the studies that show red meat increases cancer risk. Figure out how to get a cow's feed conversion efficiency below 2. Make the meat industry default humane instead of default The Jungle. Reverse global deforestation for grazing cattle, and switch to bison where appropriate in North America. If I have to spend weeks of effort to identify a quality supplier, pay ten times market rate, and do all my own butch…

Red meat may increase cancer risk. Cured meat does increases cancer risk.

Carcinogenicity of consumption of red and processed meat

> On the basis of the large amount of data and the consistent associations of colorectal cancer with consumption of processed meat across studies in different populations, which make chance, bias, and confounding unlikely as explanations, the majority of the Working Group concluded that there is sufficient evidence in human beings for the carcinogenicity of the consumption of processed meat. Chance, bias, and confounding could not be ruled out with the same degree of confidence for the data on red meat consumption, since no clear association was seen in several of the high quality studies and residual confounding from other diet and lifestyle risk is difficult to exclude. The Working Group concluded that there is limited evidence in human beings for the carcinogenicity of the consumption of red meat.

Bouvard, V., Loomis, D., Guyton, K.Z., Grosse, Y., El Ghissassi, F., Benbrahim-Tallaa, L., Guha, N., Mattock, H. and Straif, K., 2015. Carcinogenicity of consumption of red and processed meat. The Lancet Oncology, 16(16), pp.1599-1600.

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