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The Coming Food Catastrophe

economist.com

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Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#431

Post by Tao332 »

wyager wrote: post #173
Johnny555 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the effect on supply is the same. well, no, if you're growing for personal use you can make a notable effect on your own supply/food costs. You don't have to solve the global food shortage to benefit from a personal garden and since the global food shortage will drive up prices, the financial benefit is even greater (as long as price increases in things like fertilizer don't eat up your cost savings).

You seem to be thinking about this from a personal finance angle instead of an economy-wide production angle. It doesn't matter if a piece of corn is made in your garden or on a farm. The net effect on the corn supply is identical. It takes orders of magnitude more input to grow a piece of corn in a garden than on a farm. That had better be offset by the personal enjoyment of the gardener.

I will probably burn more calories making corn happen in my yard then I'll get from the corn, and it'll just be shitty empty carbs.

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#432

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

paganel wrote: post #197
UnFleshedOne wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another option for #4 is supplying enough long range anti-ship rockets to sink whole russian fleet in black sea. They can't bring in more ships, because turkey is blocking the entrance.

And then you have Russian aviation attacking and sinking Ukrainian merchant ships, plus a couple of submarines.

for a short while, while said aviation exists

we can play this game all day long, but the past 2 months have clearly shown that russian conventional forces are not even close to a match for NATO combined forces*

* as long as the goal isn't to slaughter as many civilians as possible, which for russia is a strong assumption

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#433

Post by coryrc »

dredmorbius wrote: post #350
ketzo wrote: 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…

We put in more ethanol than necessary to replace MTBE

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#435

Post by Andys »

corrral wrote: post #175
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.

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 keep rice and grains permanently in a chest freezer. It is fairly low power and you can cook directly from frozen, 1 cup at a time.

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#436

Post by Tao332 »

dang wrote: post #153
BigBubbleButt wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if the comment was edited or not, but I hope you're not claiming "vigilante" is a slur. I looked up the definition of slur just to be sure and you are technically correct, but I'd say you're abusing language far more than the person you're responding to.

It said "Karen" and the commenter edited it. Edit: I've added the context back by quoting what the GP originally said. I guess one good passive-aggressive stealth edit deserves another.

Sorry, "passive-aggressive stealth edit"? You got what you wanted. They took out the mean word. Don't get pissy about it and start gaslighting people.

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#437

Post by im3w1l »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #406
leereeves wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Search for "100% grass fed beef". There are many ranches that sell it around the country, even in Califor…

Can it be fixed and meet all the demand for beef today? And without making people poor in the process? Perhaps the solution is a mix of both: eat less meat and only eat sustainably raise meat.

Grass-fed cows use more land and water than grain-fed cows. So no.

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#438

Post by Tao332 »

Johnny555 wrote: post #40
EddieDante wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your local zoning board might object. I live in PA, and one of the neighborhood vigilantes immediately ratted me out to the local government when I started growing corn, squash, and beans in my backyard while raising a couple of chickens for eggs.

Did she object to the chickens or the garden? I suspect just the chickens, rather than your back yard garden.

Obviously regulations vary across counties and municipalities, but when/where I lived in PA, the zoning rules spelled it out pretty clearly that hens were fine but roosters weren't.

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#439

Post by Tao332 »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #87
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.

Quoted post unavailable.

No post body was provided.

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#440

Post by mbg721 »

corrral wrote: post #175
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.

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…

Eek. Ideally, you don't have a bag of rice for months and months at a time, though, you have a bag of rice and once you've used up most of it, you buy a new bag of rice, etc. There is kind of an inherent assumption that the person doing this is fond of eating rice.
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