Food/Intro

Many people believe that as the population is rising, we are facing a global food shortage. 40% of farming land is now depleted , rainforests must be cut down to make room for more farming and as droves of people move from farms into cities, and their appetite for meat is growing^[1], food demand is rising, while the ability to supply it is falling.

What this analysis misses is that it is in no way necessary to produce food in the massively inefficient ways used to paint this dire picture. The food shortage is really a shortage of applying know-how to food production. While certain farming methods do deplete soil, thereby reducing the amount of useful land, other farming methods (like permaculture, discussed below) reliably increase the fertility of the soil.

It is often said that it requires 16 kilos of grain to produce one kilo of beef. For this reason it has been argued that we must all become vegetarian to avoid a food crisis^[2]. This makes the assumption that cows must be fed grain. Cows eat grass. Grass is not edible by humans, so no useful food resources are being wasted, and beef from grass-fed cows has a better nutritional profile than from grain-fed animals^[3]. Similar logic applies to other kinds of meat.

Estimates of how much land is required to grow a person's food vary, but 100m² seems a common estimate from people using organic permaculture techniques. (That means you could grow enough food for 4 people on an area the size of a basketball court.) In cities with high population densities, it would be desirable to reduce this even further.

This planet has 31,800,000km², or 31.8 trillion m², of fertile land . Even taking a pessimistic estimate of 400m² farming land per person, this would grow enough food for 79.5 billion people, well over ten times the current world population. (And this does not even factor in the more efficient controlled-environment methods discussed below.)

Decentralized food production would mean a reduction in transport costs and would preserve the freshness and nutritional value of our food and eliminate the need for preservatives, energy-expensive refrigeration and food storage. Most importantly, it would create ensure wide access to food; no one would starve due to the inefficiency and injustice of the distribution of our food-resources.

Traditional methods of decentralized food production are rather labour-intensive. For many people, growing their own food is a very enjoyable and rewarding sort of labour that they willingly devote their energies to. Others would like the option of avoiding this labour. For those folk, it is now possible to automate food production (see below).