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The Coming Food Catastrophe

economist.com

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Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#241

Post by toolz »

gcheong wrote: post #108
EddieDante wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She griped about both, the zoning board demanded I get rid of the chickens. I was tempted to leave their corpses on her doorstep and egg the municipal building as a petty sort of revenge, but that would have been too obvious. Those chickens were good eating, though, especially with some homegrown corn on the cob and baked beans. The squash didn't work out so well, unfortunately.

What was she griping about with the garden? Chickens I can understand if there are smell complaints. In San Francisco you are allowed to keep them but there are rules about the number you can have and the minimum distance their enclosure can be to any neighbors window, etc. But squash? That’s really an odd thing to complain about.

backyard chickens don't have a smell, that's only once you start mass producing them in a factory. The same way yours or your neighbors dogs, that produce substantially more feces than a chicken, don't cause neighborhood wide odor.

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#242

Post by daenz »

InitialLastName wrote: post #69
daenz wrote: post #6

The sky is falling and we're all going to die! Get to the end of the story Subscribe today for just $19.90 $10/first month. Cancel at any time

Don't forget: "We're all going to die" is the default state of reality. What matters is "when" and "how".

And "how much money can I make off of telling others about it"

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#243

Post by qpqpqpq »

jtbayly wrote: post #213
dang wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> one of the neighborhood Karens Please keep that sort of slur off HN. We don't need it here, and you don't need it to make your substantive points.

Dear dang, A Karen is no more an inappropriate slur than many other useful words and phrases that are negative, such as goody-two-shoes, busybody, bully, crank, etc. I don’t see how it helps to ban negative words.

It's a misogynistic slur, used in place of calling a women the b-word or a c-word.

Dang is totally in the right to scold people for saying this.

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#244

Post by mmarq »

paganel wrote: post #162
bryanlarsen wrote: post #144

The article actually has four solutions at the bottom. Compared to the severity of the problem, all four solutions are surprisingly simple. Not necessarily easy, but simple and straightforward. 1. Stop using so much corn to make ethanol. 2. Stop using so much seed oil to make biodiesel. 3. Stop feeding so much food to livestock. Bonus: reducing the livestock population provides short term calories! 4. Break the Black…

Re 4., that's doable if the West renounces some of its existing economic sanctions against Russia, the Russians themselves have said as much recently. It probably won't happen because the West doesn't like to see itself as being involved in the war (in a way similar to what Russia thinks about itself) and will try to resort to "Russia should unlock the blockade purely on humanitarian grounds!", which, of course, is t…

The Russian government has demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that it is not a good faith interlocutor. Nobody should take anything they say seriously.

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#245

Post by otikik »

wyager wrote: post #86
closedloop129 wrote: post #42

Haven't ethanol fuels been introduced to have a buffer for this situation? If we don't turn grain and corn into petrol then there should be some reserves. Additionally, if we stop rising live-stock, where roughly 10 units of plant create one unit of meat, there should be even more calories available.

> where roughly 10 units of plant create one unit of meat Those units are not remotely fungible. Protein quality of plant protein (as measured by PER or other metrics not explicitly designed to favor soy) is horrendous compared to beef. Much of the plant material fed to cows is also not even slightly edible to humans, like soy meal. I would rather have 1lb beef than 10lb nominally edible soy extractives (or wheat, or…

> I would rather have 1lb beef than 10lb nominally edible soy extractives

The argument is not "eat soy extractives instead of meat".

It's more like "lunch on veggies 2 or 3 days per week instead of having meat on every meal, including breakfast".

It obviously includes repurposing some of the land used to raise cattle into other things more suitable for direct human consumption. No one is talking about making you eat grass.

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#246

Post by wott »

sbf501 wrote: post #103
bell-cot wrote: post #28

Tip from an old geezer: Plant Your Victory Garden Now! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_garden

This is really hard, I had four 8x4 raised beds (all I could fit) for 5 years. The amount of space and time it takes to produce enough food to replace actual meals for more than just a few times in the summer is absolutely astonishing (unless you like squash all the time). I grew tomatoes, kale, squash, onions, lettuce and peppers. It tasted great, and got some salads and side dishes out of it, but that was about it.…

You don't need a community effort or astonishingly vast land to grow potatoes :-) What I mean by that is that the choice of stuff you grow matters. Lettuce, peppers (and one might add tomatoes) won't feed you much indeed. They are however indeed interesting in small spaces when you don't expect them to feed you but to provide you nice, fresh extras.

I mean, I produce about 800 lbs of vegetables by spending 20 mn a day on it (average on 365 days, which means more at times and nothing at other times). Surely it requires more space that you had. But no motorised tool involved, no fertiliser but a tiny bit of manure (no fancy permaculture tricks either, just traditional beds), no pesticide except in case of emergency like once a year on 10% of the garden, no watering except in case of emergency again, no search of any optimisation (time, space, yield, ...). It isn't a bid deal to get a partial yet significant autonomy; it just gets harder and harder as you want to get close to 100%.

There are stuff you can keep across winter in storage without transformation, like potatoes or cereals (onions, shallot don't do bad either); and stuff that can be kept where they lie, in the ground, like parsnip, sunchoke, and a few other root vegetables; cabbage can stay too, leeks as well. (Of course, it depends on the geographical location.)

Yeah, a base of potatoes + cabbages + onions get you a long way; and they are quite versatile as far as cooking is concerned.

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#247

Post by nosianu »

mbg721 wrote: post #91

If you're in the West, it doesn't hurt to buy a couple big bags of rice from the local Indian market, and have some dried or canned beans handy, and cycle through them as you cook. A pallet of bottled water and a bag of charcoal don't hurt either. A dumb power outage or a downed wire or a tornado or something is much more likely than Red Dawn, but you'll still be happy to have all that.

Buy some MREs. They are made to last and to have everything essential for survival.

Shelf life is about 5 years, depending on how it's stored: https://www.mreinfo.com/mres/mre-shelf-life/

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#248

Post by corrral »

sva_ wrote: post #227
corrral wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct—it's doable, it just takes more material and planning than "buy bag of rice, stick bag in dry place in basement". Do that, you'll be sad when you try to use it in a year or three. The alternative is maintaining a stock but constantly drawing it down & replenishing it, but it gets difficult to maintain a substantial reserve that way, unless you already eat your "apocalypse" diet most of the time, so go through…

Maybe I'm ignorant of this, but it was my impression that vacuum-sealed white rice should pretty much last indefinitely?

I'd expect a couple years at least. A quick Google gives common wisdom that you still want anti-weevil measures (bay leaves in the bag, the aforementioned diatomaceous earth) with that method.

My point with that part was just that you have to do the vacuum sealing (unless you're buying a product with all this taken care of, which I'd assume is expensive) and such, at least, which means more equipment and material than simply buying sealed (but not vacuum sealed) bags at the store and putting them on a shelf. Getting grains ready for long-term storage means more than just keeping mice and bugs and water out—you've gotta worry about oxygen, and about insect eggs already present in the grain, too. Just stuff one might not think of if one were to make the wrong assumptions.

[EDIT] Incidentally, trying to store all one's calories, at least more than enough for a week or two, might not be the right idea anyway, short of a truly horrible catastrophe like nuclear war—my great-grandparents and grandparents, who lived through the depression and World War II, respectively, didn't seem to be all that in to storing lots of grain. What they were into, big time, was canning vegetables, and gardening (to grow stuff to put in the cans). Man, were they ever into canning vegetables. I'd guess that's the result of some hard lessons about how to make it through hard times—plus, just, times before modern shipping and refrigeration when food availability dropped a whole bunch in Winter.

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#249

Post by waiseristy »

paganel wrote: post #192
jakewins wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hypothetically, if the west actually wanted to give up sanctions in return for clearing the blockade.. why, in what universe, could they possibly expect Russia to stand by its word? Russia said for six months they were simply conducting exercises and had no intention of invading whatsoever. Why should anyone believe they would clear the blockade if sanctions lift?

If they don't stand by their word then they can re-impose the sanctions, it's as simple as that. > Why should anyone believe they would clear the blockade if sanctions lift Because at some point the West will have to sit at the negotiating table with Russia.

> If they don't stand by their word then they can re-impose the sanctions, it's as simple as that.

That does not work with the current Russian regime. The only thing removing sanctions will do is allow them time to come up with solutions to mitigate future sanctions. They are not good-faith actors, and only use good-faith solutions to improve their leverage in future deals

For everyone who wants to downvote, go and look how well the sanctions after the 2014 invasion worked. The primary reason why the invasion of 2022 went forward was due to their confidence that they could mitigate the same style of sanctions that went into effect then

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#250

Post by TaylorAlexander »

Scoundreller wrote: post #130
mbg721 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have the setup where you've got that connected and make it work, that's a great idea. The neighbors next to my building have some on their roof--it's not too different from having batteries for your radio.

A lot of the grid tied systems don’t even support off-line use, but you could always bodge something together during prolonged outages.

I was just researching this and the new Enphase IQ8 microinverters will run without grid power. You are correct though it is common for microinverters to require grid power to operate, which seems pretty surprising!
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