One thing that is not mentioned in the article is the massive amount of soy beans that China imports each year (approximately 90 mmt in 2019) to produce feedstock for their hog herds and acquacultures. Most of the soy beans are imported from the US (pre trade war), Brazil and Argentina.
How is China able to provide enough food to feed over 1B people?
291–300 of 356 posts
Re: How is China able to provide enough food to feed over 1B people?
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does everyone have a job, no homelessness, etc?
You don't see visible homelessness nearly as much as in US big cities. Chinese friends I've discussed this with attribute it to familial piety acting as a much stronger safety net; people will make big sacrifices to save their relatives from total failure. It's expected, and a stark contrast to the American notion of extreme individualism. There's also no opiod epidemic.
Homelessness in China is visible and universal, but you have to know where to look. There's a lot of shame associated with it, just like disability (I'm sure you've probably noticed you don't see many disabled people in China either). https://aeon.co/essays/what-is-life-like-for-disabled-people...
I fundamentally reject that filial piety is the reason for this (filial piety causes all sorts of other social problems, too).
People in Confucian cultures hide things they see as shameful to protect their 面子.
If anything, I think this indicates there are far darker unseen truths in Chinese society that we are insulated from through the 'face' system.
Re: How is China able to provide enough food to feed over 1B people?
#293Another perspective on how China is able to provide enough food: - In Shanghai 96% white-collar workers have at least one disease of the "food triad" (diabetes, fatty liver, hypertension), up from ~80% in 00's. - In Beijing 26% of the whole population is overweight or obese, up from 11% in 00's. - China has the largest percentage of obese children in the World, only competing with Mexico. So there is enough food, but…
Obesity and many of those issues don’t really have much to do with food quality. A lot of it is due to nothing more than overeating.
Going to China and eating with Chinese people, it’s a very easy thing to do. Chinese food portions can sometimes make American food portions look downright tiny—and a lot of it is colossal chunks of meat with vegetables.
Re: How is China able to provide enough food to feed over 1B people?
#294The author's answer to the question 'How do mainland Chinese feel about the protests in Hong Kong on the extradition law amendment?': https://www.quora.com/How-do-mainland-Chinese-feel-about-the...
Well. He did give a pretty good answer, didn't he?
Not often you see someone with this level of writing representing the mainland China view of things.
Re: How is China able to provide enough food to feed over 1B people?
#295Another perspective on how China is able to provide enough food: - In Shanghai 96% white-collar workers have at least one disease of the "food triad" (diabetes, fatty liver, hypertension), up from ~80% in 00's. - In Beijing 26% of the whole population is overweight or obese, up from 11% in 00's. - China has the largest percentage of obese children in the World, only competing with Mexico. So there is enough food, but…
I cannot believe 96% number do you have citation for this?
Re: How is China able to provide enough food to feed over 1B people?
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
> China's violations are certainly serious, but it's just not comparable to the sheer extent of the West's. Within recent history this just isn't true. In fact I'm not even sure it's true over history going back to the creation of the colonies: Decades spent under communism - millions dead, freedom totally unknown and nothing to show for it. I don't know to assign magnitude to anything like that, but to say they aren…
India never had a famine before the British landed on its shores, when all was said and done, they stole over $45 trillion dollars worth of value from that single nation... I imagine Africa's stolen loot was many times larger (just the gold export records from South Africa are staggering), not even counting the rest of the world. China would have to maliciously work for decades (maybe centuries) to do the same kind o…
How many people do you estimate died unnecessarily under Mao?
Re: How is China able to provide enough food to feed over 1B people?
#297China leads world in production of:
- Rice - Wheat - Lettuce - Cabbage - Cauliflowers - Eggplant - Potato - Spinach - Carrots - Cucumber - Pumpkin - Sweet potato - Grapes - Peach - Apple - Plum - Strawberry - Tomato - Tea - Beer - Pork meat - Sheep meat - Peanut - Egg - Honey
https://twitter.com/spectatorindex/status/106956943987883622...
Re: How is China able to provide enough food to feed over 1B people?
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh my. That post is drooling of authotarianism and disgust for individuality and freedom, and it has an alarming amount of nationalism and militarism. If this is how the Chinese government is thinking and working, then we are in for a bad time.
Just a typical middle class Chinese.
Can confirm.
Re: How is China able to provide enough food to feed over 1B people?
#299The country I don't understand how they do it is Bangladesh. A country the size of New York State with 164 million people. (50% of the US population). As I understand it, they generate 90% of the food they require.
The subcontinent, and especially India and Bangladesh, have ridiculous amounts of arable land. India has more than any other country in the world.
But the dependence on monsoon balances it out, even makes it lopsided, except may be in some northern parts that rely on snow fed rivers.
Re: How is China able to provide enough food to feed over 1B people?
#300Yeah sorry - that answer is the sort that glosses over a huge amount of facts to present a clean a-b-c dependency tree along side a decent heap of sino philia. So in particular the point on fish farms- fish farms are hard , the fish need many different things to be happy and not sick or affected by parasites. This means medicines, treatment and more - further this is only viable if you have transportation, refrigerat…
> fish farms are hard Yes and no. Some fishes are really, really hard to culture. Other are very forgiving and easy if you know what to do. Aquaculture shaped China since thousands of years. They have a lot of population in part because they have carps. Is a very efficient way to recycle waste in food.
They even bred fish to jump over nets..