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The Coming Food Catastrophe

economist.com

381–390 of 634 posts

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3. If you can figure out how to eat grass, you'll be rich.

Surely, we must know how to do this. I mean, we know how grass-eating ruminants break down the cellulose to obtain energy with various enzymes and whatnot. We could probably invent some kind of exo-stomach to pre-digest grass into an edible state. :)

Starch and cellulose are both glucose polymers. The only difference is the way in which the glucose units are attached to one another. Existing enzymes can only cleave one or the other. Ruminants don't actually have the necessary enzyme, but instead rely on bacteria in their stomach to do this for them.

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#382
post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'd take a lot of trucks and train cars to move one ship's worth of grain. Consider that highways, train lines, and ports don't necessarily have a ton of extra capacity available, for reasons of economy, that upgrading those takes time, and can be hard to finance if the situation is perceived to be temporary (so, may take significant government intervention to make it happen). Plus, you go to all the effort and expe…

Russia has already struck the Zatoka bridge south/west of Odessa, the best/shortest route from Odessa to Danube river and Black Sea ports in Romania. Most of the trains in Ukraine is electric-pulled. Russia has already struck most of the railway power transforming stations. Ukraine has very limited number of diesel trains. It can't use European ones because of different wheelbase. (correction thanks to the commenter…

> It can't use European ones because of different wheelbase.

Just a quick point of clarification for anyone trying to look this up. The correct term is "gauge" (distance between the rails) instead of "wheelbase" (distance between front and rear wheels). Most European countries use tracks with a gauge of 1,435mm but Ukraine uses 1,520mm.

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What is "the west" exactly? Japan? New Zealand? Finland? Tunisia? A better term would be liberal democracies, but that wouldn't have quite the same "both sides are the same" ring to it, would it? Russia isn't waging an economic war against anyone. A dictator tried to invade his democratic neighbour, he failed, and now the other democraties are cutting him out of their club

The West ~= the "Liberal International Order"

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is "the west" exactly? Japan? New Zealand? Finland? Tunisia? A better term would be liberal democracies, but that wouldn't have quite the same "both sides are the same" ring to it, would it? Russia isn't waging an economic war against anyone. A dictator tried to invade his democratic neighbour, he failed, and now the other democraties are cutting him out of their club

I agree Putin is some kind of dictator, but are you really calling Ukraine democracy? Then you can also call North Korea democracy.

Uhm, yes? They elected a comedian with no political experience or ties for f's sake. But I suppose that was some sort of rigged election or he's just a figurehead or something?

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#385
post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think GP means more calls outside this article, particularly in the U.S. where 1) rising food prices are a hot topic 2) we grow a LOT of corn.

Fair point. Though my understanding is that ethanol as a fuel additive is largely an anti-knock lead substitute. Alcohol was the originally-proposed solution, before the creation and adoption of tetraethyl lead. Apparent cost advantages drove the adoption of the latter. True costs proved somewhat greater. My read is that the "biofuel" branding of fuel ethanol is actually a misdirection, though I don't have a good sou…

I think it can be used for that, but it is also used to cut gasoline and therefore make a single barrel of oil go further. Normally ethanol is less than 10 percent, but I think it can be as high as 15 or 20 percent at the pump right now. Modern engines can handle it just fine, but it does slightly reduce fuel economy.

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#386

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…

The third solution doesn’t make much sense since livestock consumption is mostly made up of inedible foods that we can’t eat like husks, stems, leaves, etc. of plants. Livestock is effective for up-cycling foods we can’t digest and turning it into foods that we can such as meat and dairy. Also there is a lot of food waste in the US. Good food that is suitable for livestock…

Soooooooo "Roughage Products" which is fiber, that humans also need to eat BTW, is usually something like 25% of pelleted food. The main ingredient in pelleted food is usually digestible by humans and between 6% to 15% protein, it's like 25% to 30% depending on the pelleted food. Pound by pound going by the estimates that "eat cow advocates" use you need 12 pounds of food per pound of beef produced, if half of that is grass and half is balanced (which is about what you get for very fancy "grass fed" meat, because it's rated on % of life in grass at like 75%, but the cow eats way more when it's big), you are using around 1.5 pounds of grain per pound of beef. 12 pounds is the lowest estimate, it can go up to 20 or 22 pounds. Yeah corn and soy are less nutritious, but the reason those get planted industrially is that cows eat it. Other stuff like chickpea, rice, beans, hemp, could be grown instead of subsidized crop for cows and just feed cows grass and forage, which is better for the cows too.

In San Francisco right now there's no "entire life on farm" meat on the market. If I want to eat your "ideal cow" that eats _mostly_ inedible foods I have to buy land and raise it myself or get it alive from a farm. It's not a product one buys for human consumption. Cows in the US eat mostly human edible foods.

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#387
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/

If you're going for shelf life I've eaten canned chili that was more than 15 years old and it was fine. Most things seem to change texture in unpleasant ways sitting in a can that long but chili doesn't. Not that it's viable to live off of in terms of calories and storage space, just an interesting observation about shelf life.

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#388
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.

Rice will be full of pest insect eggs. They'll hatch after a while (smallish count of months, likely). You've got to freeze it (to kill the eggs) and then seal it (to keep more pests from getting in) and/or add stuff that'll kill anything that hatches very fast (IIRC diatomaceous earth is popular for this) Other grains have similar pest problems, plus if it's wheat or similar and ground into flour (not e.g. whole whe…

I have seen rice stay without any problems for more than a year. It was dried under hot sun for hours before storing. Most likely, the extreme heat took care of the weevils and the lack of moisture had a protective effect on the rice.

They take the rice out and soak it (as in soaking, not washing) like beans before cooking. Probably for re-hydrating it.

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#389
post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because at some point the West will have to sit at the negotiating table with Russia. Do they? What does Russia have that will force them to the negotiating table? The damage to this years harvest is already done and the supply chains will likely have figured themselves out by next year

If the US accrues enough "Oh, we don't talk to _those people_, we only sanction them" world states, they will encompass enough of the world's population to make it unreasonable for third parties to obey US sanctions, which they currently tend to (because the US sanctions transitively); and enough of the world's population to do things like replace SWIFT and/or drop the USD as their main reserve currency. (Also, there…

I mean yea, but arguing that the US has hit that point is different than arguing that Russia in particular will have to be negotiated with. The US could always lower sanctions on other nations than Russian

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Triggering world war 3 would also help reduce the population which could reduce co2 emissions and food requirements. Killing a few birds with one stone.

I‘d rather die trying, than live in a non-free world. And fyi, whatever arrangement of characters your reply to this statement will consist of, it will not change my stance, so do not bother.

I’ll drink to that!
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