In the Netherlands, a group of scientists is working on feeding 11 billion

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/future-of-food-innovation-technology

by elorant • 7 years ago

64 63 7 years ago

wired.co.uk

buboard3• 7 years ago

One-child policies could solve the problem and it's as taboo as bug-eating, yet it receives barely any coverage

ben_w• 7 years ago

That solves one problem and creates another, as our current economy assumes at least as many new young people to support the elderly as now.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying the problem is insurmountable, but it does actually need to be dealt with somehow rather than just hoping tech will save us when we need it — that approach works fine right up until it fails catastrophically.

ricree• 7 years ago

One child policies where? Most of the developed world has stagnant population growth.

Do you suggest imposing those restrictions elsewhere? Via what means, and how do you intend to enforce this within those countries?

AndrewGaspar4• 7 years ago

They're taboo because they're abhorrent. I don't suppose you've spent a lick of time thinking of the implications of enforcing such a ban?

vasco• 7 years ago

Why is it abhorrent to not have your own kids? There's plenty of them already that need families if you want to scratch that itch.

Plus you can solve climate change AND road traffic!

papreclip• 7 years ago

Agreed. Why is our vision of the future 50 billion people crowded nuts to butts, eating beans and bugs, riding rusty bicycles to work? We need to control the population.

bargl• 7 years ago

What predictions? If you believe in scientific modeling at ALL. AKA you think global climate change is scientifically sound, then you should probably look at the population growth predictions.

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

pizza• 7 years ago

I find it hard to believe we would reach 50 billion people within the next millennium without new and incredible resource extraction technologies that would make current food shortage problems look like a piece of cake.

fyfy18• 7 years ago

There's plenty of places where you can live pretty much on your own, even in the US. Crowded cities isn't caused by too many people on earth.

neaden• 7 years ago

Did you know that Iran of all places was able to drastically lower their birth rate by providing free birth control and education? No forced abortion/sterilizations like China, just providing options to people.

yorwba2• 7 years ago

Indeed, the fast drop in fertility rates is strikingly similar: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?contextu...

Frondo• 7 years ago

That drop in birth rate isn't unique to Iran. It's one of the most well-studied phenomena in sociology. It has a name, too, the demographic transition. As you pointed out, educating women is considered a key part of ushering in the demographic transition.

The Wikipedia page is pretty good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition

(Not a sociologist, but used to be married to one.)

avocado4• 7 years ago

China ruined their future for the next few decades through 1 child policy. It's a demographic time bomb.

tdb78932• 7 years ago

In most developed countries birth rates are dropping on their own. I would try decent sex education and access to free contraception before this route

jhcl• 7 years ago

Personally I like the insect idea, just processed so that they don't look like insects. Sorry, save that for a next, more open minded generation. I don't get the meat lookalikes. Is a plate of food without a piece of meat so abhorrent?

royjacobs• 7 years ago

No, but you can either spend a ton of effort trying to convince meat eaters that "this other thing is also delicious", but they'll just ignore it. Instead, just replace their burgers/nuggets with something else that also looks like burgers/nuggets yet pretty much tastes the same, and you don't need to convince them.

PeterStuer4• 7 years ago

It has been done before, only with true garbage instead of bugs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObcsswhO83I

tdb78932• 7 years ago

There's a lot of cultural inertia behind meat and it's incredibly difficult to get people to change their diet that drastically (they can't eat their favorite foods, they need to learn entirely new recipes) it's much much easier to just work with them and make good substitutes.

I just went vegan and without it being a strong personal conviction I wouldn't have been able to do it.

bryanlarsen• 7 years ago

Feeding 11 billion people where a large portion of those people can only afford to spend $2/day on food? Very difficult.

Feeding 11 billion people where everybody can spend $100/day on food? Very simple. If necessary (and it's not), we could build vast quantities of greenhouses and get orders of magnitude improvements in calories per acre.

The environmental consequences of such high-intensity farming is another issue, of course.

AndrewGaspar4• 7 years ago

This is kind of a tail wagging the dog argument. If only everybody was rich then there wouldn't be any resource scarcity!

nategri• 7 years ago

To badly paraphrase Willian Gibson: the richness is already here, it's just not evenly distributed yet.

jnurmine• 7 years ago

It's not only the greenhouses, it's the logistics of getting the food from the greenhouse to the mouth.

cryptoz5• 7 years ago

The environmental consequences of such high-intensity farming is another issue, of course.

It's not another issue, it's the same issue. We're in this mess in the first place because nobody cares to price in the costs of the equation over time. We all want to eat for like a century, right? So why make price estimates that only work for ~10-20 years of unsustainable-climate-change-driving industry and then collapse when the climate changes and farming has to change too?

Pricing the costs into the equation from the start makes your "very simple" point become still, "quite complex".

The environment changing is a key fact in the pricing of things, and ignore-the-environment-in-first-estimates trope is a major flaw in how we think about problems.

PeterStuer4• 7 years ago

Now if only there was a way to create $1.000.000.000.000.000 at the push of a single button ... Understanding the true meaning and implications of a fiduciary currency should be a mandatory part of education, but I guess then we would have a revolution on our hands.

raphaelj• 7 years ago

Creating a such amount of money will just create inflation. You'll end up with exactly as much purchasing power, is not less.

vfc1• 7 years ago

Just throw a bunch of veggies in the microwave, add beans and some sauce, and done no need to eat processed insects.

This idea that eating whole food plant based is hard and time consuming is a myth. Almost every veggie cooks unattended in the microwave in about 10 minutes, potatoes included.

spraak2• 7 years ago

Small bit of anecdata - the times when I've been most poor has been when I've eaten the most whole foods (and plant based, as I'm vegan). At those times I would nearly every day put rice and a type of bean (or variety of lentil) into the pressure cooker as my staple throughout the day. Alongside that I would have fresh fruits and steam some frozen or fresh vegetables. The biggest upfront investment was a B12 supplement, but spread over time it's cheaper than most foods.

Since I didn't have the budget for highly processed things, I inadvertently ate super clean.

So this has me thinking, there are already complex distribution channels for medicine for places in need; to that could be added a few key supplements like B12. As long as they are getting otherwise the main macronutrients met, it becomes easier for more people to eat WFPB, which in fact like me in times of poverty many people already do.

spodek• 7 years ago

Even faster and more delicious in a pressure cooker.

jillesvangurp• 7 years ago

People eating lots of meat is a fairly recent thing. In many cultures meat used to be at most a once or twice a week kind of thing as opposed to a big part of one or more meals you have every day these days. E.g. traditional Italian or Indian diets do not actually include a lot of meat. It's their popularized modern variations that tend to have a lot of meat.

Insects are popular in places where meat is still relatively scarce/expensive. I'm sure it's a great source of protein if you are in need of protein and there's nothing else around. However, I prefer to eat things because they are delicious. I could probably feed myself on a shoe string budget by giving up most of the things I enjoy eating/drinking. But why would I want to?

The trick is going to be feeding 11 Billion people in a way that is actually enjoyable. Insects are going to be a hard sell to someone who can afford a steak. On the other hand, shrimps, lobsters, etc. are just under water insects (or at least closely related). I don't particularly enjoy them but for lots of people they are kind of a delicacy and a completely normal part of their diet. A lot of these kind of things are learned behavior.

Science giving us options is a good thing. But I'd say they need to focus more on the eating experience than on just the protein content/nutritional value. Things like texture, juiciness, umami, maillard reaction etc. All the reasons people like steaks basically. The kind of things that get foodies excited.

spraak2• 7 years ago

I was under the impression that there already exists enough food in the world to feed everyone, and that it is actually a distribution (inequalities and economic) problem?

cryptoz5• 7 years ago

The title indicates ~4B more people than are alive today.

Also, there is not enough food in the world to sustainably feed everyone. Current average diets for wealthy countries are driving climate change that is reducing the ability of less-developed countries to reasonably plan for crops and build their own sustainable food sources.

It's not necessarily more food that's the problem so much as sustainable and low-cost food.

SomeOldThrow4• 7 years ago

There is enough food—iirc we have enough now for 9 billion people—it’s just a completely unplanned and inefficient use of resources from perspective of resource use. A large part of this is 100% western diet but I’d be skittish to finger it as a primary cause—I don’t think that’s useful.

Also, not all food problems can be blamed on western climate change that we will always need to account for, like literal deserts in North Africa.

Merrill2• 7 years ago

The production of food by farmers, ranchers and fishermen is only a small part of the food system. There are all the agribusinesses that provide inputs to the farmers, such as farm machinery, fuel, pesticides, herbicides, etc. After the food is produced there is a system of buyer and wholesalers that acquire the raw materials, processors that fabricate food products, and distributors, wholesalers, retailers, restaurants, etc. that deliver the food to consumers.

Only about 5% of the total cost goes to the farmers, and they are probably only about 5% of the sustainability issue.

seamyb88• 7 years ago

You were under the correct impression. In "wealthy" countries, we throw enough food out to feed the world many times over. In not even trying to feed those we have just cast aside, we have still produced enough food. But we're not going to just give people food, that would be left wing extremism and that's wrong.

godelski• 7 years ago

I was under the impression that generic engineering (GMOs) were the way. That these are the industrial fertilizer of the 21st century.

I'm not opposed to eating bugs, but we do have other options. Like there's also lab grown meat. All three sound like a good way to move forward.

Merrill2• 7 years ago

Wageningen has a large number of relevant courses available on edX.com. A while ago, I audited the three courses "Nutrition and Health: Food Risks", "Nutrition and Health: Macronutrients", and "Nutrition and Health: Micronutrients". They were excellent courses.

Since then, they have added many courses on sustainable agriculture and sustainable development. https://www.edx.org/school/wageningenx

Fnoord• 7 years ago

I went to Wageningen University open day in ~1999, with school (4 VWO). After a speech by a professor, it was lunch-time. I didn't take lunch with me, assuming I could buy some there, but I barely had money with me as well. Well, they were serving two things for free as some kind of pilot or demo. It was grasshoppers with Italian spices and vegetables, and mealworms in white sauce. My co-students were laughing at me, but I tried both and actually liked both. After I went a second time, they no longer had grasshoppers, so I only got a portion of maelworms (I'm not a fan of white sauce). They had a good taste, kind of a nutty flavor. Only issue with the grasshoppers is that parts of them get stuck in your pockets.

Fast forward, in this decade I ate insect burgers by a Belgian company called Damhert. Again, nutty flavor, and tasted well. In Africa, insects already get eaten as they're a cheap and reliable source of protein. Unfortunately, it isn't quite clear if insects suffer from pain. At the very least they don't have a CNS, like mammals do. There is even a Dutch "insect cookbook" [1]

Maastricht University is also busy feeding 11 billion, with the in vitro burger (meat based on stem cells). Don't have a link at hand. While not strictly vegan (the stem cells are taken from a live animal), it is vegan in spirit as it reduces animal harm substantially.

[1] https://www.bol.com/nl/p/het-insectenkookboek/92000000397193...

In the Netherlands, a group of scientists is working on feeding 11 billion

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