I think that this article is missing one key point. We also need equitable distribution of food. We could possibly have enough food, but it's only being supplied and utilized in certain regions of the world. For example, during the potato famine in Ireland, Ireland was still a net exporter of potatoes. There were potatoes that manage to escape being inflicted with disease, but these potatoes were sent to England, leaving people in Ireland with nothing.
I didn't become a vegetarian to save the environment, but I do think more vegetarians would positively impact the world by conserving fossil fuels, conserving water, preserving rain forests, soil conservation.
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“Lord, we ain’t what we want to be; we ain’t what we ought to be; we ain’t what we gonna be, but, thank God, we ain’t what we was.” - MLK 1959
I think that this article is missing one key point. We also need equitable distribution of food. We could possibly have enough food, but it's only being supplied and utilized in certain regions of the world. For example, during the potato famine in Ireland, Ireland was still a net exporter of potatoes. There were potatoes that manage to escape being inflicted with disease, but these potatoes were sent to England, leaving people in Ireland with nothing.
I didn't become a vegetarian to save the environment, but I do think more vegetarians would positively impact the world by conserving fossil fuels, conserving water, preserving rain forests, soil conservation.
Also, during the Holodomor, there were bumper crops of grain being exported out of the Ukraine.
Nine billion people will be no problem. There's a lot of underutilized space out there.
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Did anyone else see the interview where they asked him about the chances he would come back to the Twins? He said "for real? VERY slim." He held his fingers together to show the chances. Then when asked what it would take to keep him he said "PAY ME!" -- Brian "estrepe1" Bluhm on Torii Hunter, April 16, 2007, 3:10 a.m.
Also, during the Holodomor, there were bumper crops of grain being exported out of the Ukraine.
Nine billion people will be no problem. There's a lot of underutilized space out there.
I think its very possible that much like there's an invisible hand in capitalism, there's an invisible hand in population control.
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“Lord, we ain’t what we want to be; we ain’t what we ought to be; we ain’t what we gonna be, but, thank God, we ain’t what we was.” - MLK 1959
Nine billion people will be no problem. There's a lot of underutilized space out there.
I think I'd prefer "Nine billion is manageable" rather than no problem. Although given that we're kinda struggling with 6.5 in some places at some times then I'm, perhaps, a little less optimistic.
Nine billion people will be no problem. There's a lot of underutilized space out there.
And there are a lot of underutilized people that potentially could be working to grow that food.
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Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard.-Alan Greenspan 1966
I made the mistake once of reading Ehrlich's The Population Bomb. There were several times I really wanted to throw that book against the wall after reading the most infuriating passages. It's sad, because some of his work in ecology, particularly in the area of integrated pest management was quite good and this book pretty much made him look like a quack.
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"Dripping water can even fill a pitcher, drop by drop; one who is wise is filled with good, even if one accumulates it little by little."
2010 AAT: Will Rhymes
The biggest problem is distribution. If you look at the amount of food that grocery stores and restaurants throw out every day.
We need more groups like Forgotten Harvest and Feed America.
It disgusts me how much food the cafeteria at my school throws away every night when their are homeless people standing right outside the door freezing their butts off. Luckily, the students are challenging the administration to do something about it.
It disgusts me how much food the cafeteria at my school throws away every night when their are homeless people standing right outside the door freezing their butts off. Luckily, the students are challenging the administration to do something about it.
I agree. What's the plus side of throwing this food away.
Maybe some students could volunteer to pack it up and deliver it to local shelters/food kitchens.
edit: I am NOT sure of the legal ramifications, or what the logistics of doing something like this would be. I just wish that logically we could make use of the food, and the volunteered time of students/citizens.
The Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act converts Title IV of the National and Community Service Act of 1990, known as the Model Good Samaritan Food Donation Act, into permanent law, within the Child Nutrition Act of 1966. Congress passed the legislation in late September, 1996 and President Clinton signed the bill into law on October 1, 1996. The Act is designed to encourage the donation of food and grocery products to nonprofit organizations such as homeless shelters, soup kitchens, and churches for distribution to needy individuals. (The full text of the Act as well as the portions of the National and Community Service Act that it amends are presented in Appendix C.)
The Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act promotes food recovery by limiting the liability of donors to instances of gross negligence or intentional misconduct. The Act further states that, absent gross negligence or intentional misconduct, persons, gleaners, and nonprofit organizations shall not be subject to civil or criminal liability arising from the nature, age, packaging, or condition of apparently wholesome food or apparently fit grocery products received as donations.
It also establishes basic nationwide uniform definitions pertaining to donation and distribution of nutritious foods and will help assure that donated foods meet all quality and labeling standards of Federal, State, and local laws and regulations.
But, yes some stores do tend to give crap some of the time. Most of the ones participating with Forgotten Harvest, Gleaners and other food collection agencies attemp to to good.
Forgotten Harvest is always looking for volunteers. Spend a day riding with one the drivers, you would be surprised how much waste there is.
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"Progressives make mistakes. Conservatives prevent the mistakes from being corrected." (Chesterton)
Fewer hamburgers: Can't imagine this one will go over well, but the authors do suggest that people will probably have to reduce their meat consumption slightly to feed nine billion people. This doesn't mean going vegetarian. A recent study from Germany's Potsdam Institute found that if everyone had a diet equivalent to eating meat three times a week, it'd be perfectly doable to feed nine billion people and rein in some of the gruesome excesses of factory farming. But if the whole world adopted a Western meat diet, we'd need to start razing forests for additional land—three million square kilometers all told, an area about two-thirds the size of the current Amazon rain forest. (Or, who knows? Maybe by 2050 we'll all resort to in vitro meat instead.)
This is the big one from what I have read. If the Earth has trouble sustaining its population from lack of food, and its denizens decide that letting them starve isn't acceptable, meat will have to give way because it is a less efficient use of resources than fruits, vegetables, grains, etc.
The main result of these past policy and institutional failures is the considerable undercapitalization
of African agriculture. Barely 7% of the arable and permanent cropland is irrigated,
compare to about 40% in Asia. In addition to negligible use of selected/improved seeds, fertilizer use
per hectare of arable land in Africa stands at only 8% and 15% of the levels reached respectively in
Latin America and Asia. The number of tractors per thousand hectares of arable land is nearly 3 times
greater in Asia and 8 times greater in Latin America. Likewise, road density is more than 2.5 times
higher in Latin America and 6 times higher in Asia than in Africa. On the human capital side, African
institutions of agricultural higher education, research, and extension are, in general, poorly staffed, ill
equipped, and under-funded to provide the scientific and technological foundations of a structural and
sustainable transformation of the food and agriculture systems.
Because of this under-capitalization, average productivity of agricultural land in Africa was
estimated at only 42% of that in Asia and 50% of that in Latin America during the last decade.
Similarly, the productivity of labor in agriculture in Africa stood at less than 60% of that in Asia and
Latin America.
It disgusts me how much food the cafeteria at my school throws away every night when their are homeless people standing right outside the door freezing their butts off. Luckily, the students are challenging the administration to do something about it.
I know what you mean. One of my first jobs as a kid was washing dishes in the NBD Bank cafeteria downtown. Back then my family was poor as hell, and we often didn't have much to eat at home. It broke my heart to have to dump perfectly good chicken, ribs, hamburgers, etc. down the garbage disposal. Since it was a bank, there was no way to sneak anything out, because if you took a package out the guard would check it.
I understand that there are litigation issues with giving food away, but maybe hungry people could sign a waiver or something, agreeing to hold the giver of food harmless. Or at the very, very least, someone should give the food to stray dogs. But it just seemed so damned wasteful to throw perfectly good food down the drain.
Feeding America landfilled 3 million lbs of food last year in West Michigan. That's in an area with a population of about 600,000. Imagine how much food is thrown out in a big metropolitan area. Like somebody said earlier in the thread, distribution is the problem. We need more non profit groups that are willing to organize volunteers and get the food out. You'd be surprised how cheap food for 200 families actually is in a program like this.
And, I hope, the alternative views - and those in between?
Still a jolly interesting read after all these years mind. The boy Malthus could write, for sure.
yup, most definitely
I think its a thought provoking essay
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“Lord, we ain’t what we want to be; we ain’t what we ought to be; we ain’t what we gonna be, but, thank God, we ain’t what we was.” - MLK 1959
There are religious and disaster jokes to be mined here that would be ridiculed and protested by many so instead I will just simply allude to them.
no - I don't think natural disasters happen because of sin of the place where they hit - but it seems reasonable to suspect that they happen as a larger unknown system of population control. Same with disease and war. In the case of disease and war, those effected are clearly the one's who aren't rich - unrelated to sin.
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“Lord, we ain’t what we want to be; we ain’t what we ought to be; we ain’t what we gonna be, but, thank God, we ain’t what we was.” - MLK 1959
Feeding America landfilled 3 million lbs of food last year in West Michigan. That's in an area with a population of about 600,000. Imagine how much food is thrown out in a big metropolitan area. Like somebody said earlier in the thread, distribution is the problem. We need more non profit groups that are willing to organize volunteers and get the food out. You'd be surprised how cheap food for 200 families actually is in a program like this.
Maybe what we need is just the opposite. We need to find a way to make it profitable for someone to distribute this food. Then we will have new businesses lining up to help.
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Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard.-Alan Greenspan 1966
Maybe what we need is just the opposite. We need to find a way to make it profitable for someone to distribute this food. Then we will have new businesses lining up to help.
How can it be profitable to donate groceries to 200 families?
The organization I work with pays around $600 for 10,000 lbs of food that can feed 200 families. We have a bought and paid for semi truck and get churches, corporations, groups, clubs, etc. to help distribute it for free.
Imagine how much it would cost if the government had it's hand in that process. I know I work roughly 15 hours a week when I organize one of these giveaways and we need about 30 volunteers the day of the food giveaway. How can you make that process profitable when you are donating the product? We don't have enough groups that are willing to pay for one of these trucks as it is, if the price was raised so it's profitable, we would have even fewer IMO.
I think raising awareness is a much better way to address need. From my experience, when companies, churches, groups, etc, see how many people are in need in their communities, they are much more likely to help pay for one of these trucks or one in the future.
The problem with giving food away is that once you take it out of the kitchen it goes bad very quickly. In fact the food that's being thrown away could be just hours away from "expiring" by itself. Now perhaps someone could organize something to make it possible so the food doesn't spoil until a few days later but that would involve a lot of things. At minimum you'd need a refrigerated trailer, someone to drive it, someone to pay for the gas/power to keep it running, you'd need all the proper food containers to keep the product from spoiling, you'd need a refrigerated warehouse to store it all in, a distribution network....
You'd also need volunteers to drive to all these fast food places and diners at closing time to pick it all up.
I'm sure some of that is going on right now in a small way. that's probably all you can hope for. If people want it to happen then they have to take the initiative. Don't rely on the store owner or manager, they got enough problems to deal with.
The problem with giving food away is that once you take it out of the kitchen it goes bad very quickly. In fact the food that's being thrown away could be just hours away from "expiring" by itself. Now perhaps someone could organize something to make it possible so the food doesn't spoil until a few days later but that would involve a lot of things. At minimum you'd need a refrigerated trailer, someone to drive it, someone to pay for the gas/power to keep it running, you'd need all the proper food containers to keep the product from spoiling, you'd need a refrigerated warehouse to store it all in, a distribution network....
You'd also need volunteers to drive to all these fast food places and diners at closing time to pick it all up.
I'm sure some of that is going on right now in a small way. that's probably all you can hope for. If people want it to happen then they have to take the initiative. Don't rely on the store owner or manager, they got enough problems to deal with.
That is a lot of what Forgotten Harvest is doing. Taking produce, frozen meat, dairy products, bread, etc. directly from the stores/restaurants to agencies/churches, food kitchens, etc. The trucks are refridgerated, the drivers are paid, occassionally they have a ride along volunteer to help load the trucks (the drivers load the trucks at the stores themselves, the agencies usually have volunteers to help unload their share of the truck).
Last year they rescued over 12 million tons of food. It is a non-profit, but operated fairly efficiently.
There are some very good store managers out there Kroger, Meijer, Busch, Costco, Sam's Club. Corporate support is fantasitc, sometimes it takes a little convincing on the local department manager level.
Yes they are busy, but how hard is it for a meat manager set aside dated frozen meat as opposed to haveing someone carry it out to the dumpster and pour bleach on it to keep the divers away.
Its also a bit more profitable for the companies since they get to write off a large portion of what they give as donation rather than a waste loss.
(End of Commercial, anyone want to know about THAW?)
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"Progressives make mistakes. Conservatives prevent the mistakes from being corrected." (Chesterton)
I know what you mean. One of my first jobs as a kid was washing dishes in the NBD Bank cafeteria downtown. Back then my family was poor as hell, and we often didn't have much to eat at home. It broke my heart to have to dump perfectly good chicken, ribs, hamburgers, etc. down the garbage disposal. Since it was a bank, there was no way to sneak anything out, because if you took a package out the guard would check it.
I understand that there are litigation issues with giving food away, but maybe hungry people could sign a waiver or something, agreeing to hold the giver of food harmless. Or at the very, very least, someone should give the food to stray dogs. But it just seemed so damned wasteful to throw perfectly good food down the drain.
Restaurants and other commercial eateries routinely throw away enough food to feed some small cities. Somehow, someway, that food should be utilized.
__________________ 2010 Adopt-A-Tiger, The GREAT Ernie Harwell
The problem with giving food away is that once you take it out of the kitchen it goes bad very quickly. In fact the food that's being thrown away could be just hours away from "expiring" by itself. Now perhaps someone could organize something to make it possible so the food doesn't spoil until a few days later but that would involve a lot of things. At minimum you'd need a refrigerated trailer, someone to drive it, someone to pay for the gas/power to keep it running, you'd need all the proper food containers to keep the product from spoiling, you'd need a refrigerated warehouse to store it all in, a distribution network....
You'd also need volunteers to drive to all these fast food places and diners at closing time to pick it all up.
I'm sure some of that is going on right now in a small way. that's probably all you can hope for. If people want it to happen then they have to take the initiative. Don't rely on the store owner or manager, they got enough problems to deal with.
I can't speak for any other situations but at the bank I worked for, it would have been a simple matter of getting a couple volunteers each night to package up the leftover food, set up a table outside the place and pass it out to people. We could've put the word out that each night at 7 p.m. people would be passing out nice hot meals of good food. I can about guarantee there would've been a long line there every night. I'd have the recipients sign a waiver that they won't sue the bank if they somehow choke on a chicken bone or whatever. I dont' think it would been too difficult to pull off.
Would permits have been required to set up a table outside the place? Was it inside of an office building? Would the landlords or owners of the building have been ok with it? Where are they going to eat? Are there tables or at least chairs? Are there restrooms around or places where they can wash their hands after eating? What about trash? Who is going to handle that? What's the procedure for getting the garbage out to the dumpster? Who pays to get it picked up?
Who would have been the volunteers? They'd do it every night? That's a big commitment.
Restaurants and other commercial eateries routinely throw away enough food to feed some small cities. Somehow, someway, that food should be utilized.
I worked at a Gatoraid plant in Fremont about 20 years ago.
When caps on the bottles were misaligned onto the bottles the machines had to be stopped and a group of a half dozen of us temp workers were sent to the drain in the middle of the plant to dispose of the liquid so we could recycle the bottle.
I opened so many bottles of Gatorade to dump down the drain that my fingers were raw and bleeding. It was all good though as I drank as much Gatorade as I could while dumping it down the drain.
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"Clete Thomas always has a crazy look on his face. His eyes are just huge. He looks like at any minute he could snap and kill a guy..... or hit a baseball 422 feet" ...ScrubBeaterUpper
Is There Enough Food for Nine Billion People?
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