I think Pollan's argument in Omnivore's Dilemma was that USDA policy has sought to move the "mountain of corn" by "passing as much of it as possible through the digestive tracks of food animals who can convert it into protein" (-Pollan).
Why go through that wasteful step at all if humans can just eat the corn directly?



Art provided courtesy of my 11 yo.

No matter what we eat, there is a limit to how many people this planet can support. Forcing malnutrition on people who need a meat-based diet for good health won't solve that problem.

Family A has two kids, feeds them well and spends lots of money on things they don't necessarily need like new cars, a house in a new subdivision, name-brand clothes and dinner regularly at those expensive fast-food places. Family B feeds has twelve kids (or family C, mine, with 8), and feeds and cares for them well by driving a little older cars, purchasing a used home in a still-decent neighborhood, shopping at sales and discount stores and providing their children with some nice things but teaching them money isn't everything and they don't need all the latest new goodies to be happy (and eat at home, not the golden arches and burger/dairy royalty). Everything works out fine and all the kids in all these families are well cared for and happy. Having a big family does not automatically mean poverty or neglect. Also a thought on contraception programs. These will only result in smaller family sizes if parents acutally want less children and were failing to achieve their goal. Except of course for places like China with poor human rights records and things forced upon people by the government.

Wow Karen,

I think you have a future political cartoonist on your hands!

How much acreage is wasted on low calorie-yield vegetables?
How come noone complains about all the house pets? The food we feed to all the dogs and cats in the world, well, I don't know how much that is, but I imagine it could put quite a dent in human hunger. (I posted something on a similar thread today about eating cats and dogs. I want to assure everyone that I have had several cats and dogs in my life as pets, and that I loved them dearly and did not in fact eat them.)

Here's what's gonna happen. Farmers in parts of the world that haven't been stricken by drought, who haven't been growing as much grain as they possibly could, are gonna increase production. And just when they get up to peak production, the droughts in other parts of the world are gonna ease up, and eventually we'll be seeing telethons for poor beleagured farmers wounded by the falling grain prices and in danger of losing their farms because of the loans the banks were happy to give them because of the previously high grain prices.

My favourite kind of prediction is "this is not the end of the world." Not like there'd be anyone around then to tell me if I was wrong.

If we would ever get some of that global warming they promised me, we would get significantly more rain in the equatorial deserts and better crop yeilds in the Northern plains of Canada and Eurasia. Along with the increased CO2 caused by the extra warmth and the longer growing seasons all around, this would take care of the grain shortage problem.

So everyone? Burn some styrofoam for World Hunger!

Bingo.



She's good. Gets her cartoons on the "Principals Board" all the time.

"family C, mine, with 8"

Zei, I have no argument with responsible people who want to and really can support large families. In modern developed countries they are balanced out by people who decide to have 1 child or none.

I made it quite clear that this is about people (whole countries in fact) who reproduce irresponsibly and then expect help from people (again, whole countries) who reproduce responsibly.

But even with your enthusiasm for children, you must see that there is a limit to how many people the world can support.

As for China - so what? Where did I suggest any type of enforced population control? My point is this: people and countries who reproduce responsibly should not be expected to pay for those that reproduce irresponsibly. And if Family A (or nation A) wants to use the spare land to grow healthy grass-fed meat and grow forests and generally have more space, that seems fine to me.

Maybe living in lovely green New Zealand with plenty of space and affordable grass-fed meat has skewed my perspective.

Simon-Erlich wager on resource scarcity

It's actually a false dilemma, but will all these fallacies packed together who can keep track anyway?

Well, it is based on a false dilemma, and it really seems to have a little bit of both, but the argument (at least in some cases) isn't so much that one must choose between those two positions, but that the second position exists at all.

That second position, that some person doesn't want a clean planet, is put forward because one can more easily argue against it - instead of trying to prove that any one event was caused by any certain policy. It assumes the dilemma, then moves beyond it.

It actually has a little tinge of ad hominem to it as well. "Bob just wants to destroy the planet because he is a stupid racist homophobe warmonger"

I guess some would say it either is a false dilemma or it isn't.

There are a few articles on why veganism wouldn't fix world hunger, and would, in fact, wreck the planet.
http://www.second-opinions.co.uk/vegetarian.html
http://www.westonaprice.org/mythstr...etarianism.html

One thing that confuses me is the focus on volume of food produced (ie: less grains to cattle = more grains to humans) rather than the nutritional quality of the food produced and its benefit, or lack thereof, to those who eat it. (And of course this argument assumes that grains are a good food for humans, and for cows etc as well)

Wheat, for example, contains all the essential amino acids - it's just that you'd have to eat a helluva lot more of it to get the amount you needed, compared to what you'd get from meat. That's providing, of course, that the anti-nutrients, etc in the wheat itself don't cause other health problems, as they do in a large percentage of people.

I wish there would be more focus on farming, esp. in poorer countries. One thing I like about the aid program I deal with (I sponsor a family in Zambia) is that they devote funds to creating sustainable farming opportunities in the communities they work with. They vary according to area, of course, but they have helped set up chicken farms, beekeeping facilities, and help families purchase goats and other animals both for their personal use (meat and milk) and as a source of income.

Of course this doesn't change the fact that there are just too many of us to feed, and that providing space and opportunity for us to once again take part in the process of food production is a challenge. I doubt that my city will knock down some condos to create a grazing pasture for cows anytime soon (though we have a lot of community food gardens) and I don't know many ppl here who hunt or fish, though we have a crapload of deer ripe for the picking, thanks to all the folks who decided that wolves were bad and needed killin'.

This was a big concern in the 70's....the population bomb and all that. Of course, dire predictions were wrong then and they are wrong now. The starvation you see in countries in Africa are not due to the inability of the land to support crops, it is the inability of people to grow crops when there is a civil war and people keep lopping off the farmer's heads with machetes.

Here are some links with a bit of perspective...

"THIS year is the 40th anniversary of Paul Ehrlich's influential The Population Bomb, a book that predicted an apocalyptic overpopulation crisis in the 1970s and '80s.

Ehrlich's book provides a lesson we still haven't learnt. His prophecy that the starvation of millions of people in the developed world was imminent was spectacularly wrong — humanity survived without any of the forced sterilisation that Ehrlich believed was necessary.

It's easy to predict environmental collapse, but it never actually seems to happen.

The anniversary of The Population Bomb should put contemporary apocalyptic predictions in their proper context. If anything, our world — and the environment — just keeps getting better.

Ehrlich was at the forefront of a wave of pessimistic doomsayers in the late 1960s and early '70s. And these doomsayers weren't just cranks — or, if they were cranks, they were cranks with university tenure.

Despite what should be a humiliating failure for his theory of overpopulation, Ehrlich is still employed as a professor of population studies by Stanford University. Similarly, when George Wald predicted in a 1970 speech that civilisation was likely to end within 15 or 30 years, his audience was reminded that he was a Nobel Prize-winning biologist."
http://www.theage.com.au/news/opini...1157736917.html

"In the late 1960s and early '70s a plethora of terrible books about the future were published. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich published the neo-Malthusian classic The Population Bomb (Ballantine). "The battle to feed all of humanity is over," he notoriously declared. "In the 1970s the world will undergo famines - hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now." Ehrlich was far from alone. In 1967, the Paddock brothers, William and Paul, asserted in Famine 1975! (Little, Brown) that "the famines which are now approaching...are for a surety, inevitable....In fifteen years the famines will be catastrophic." In 1972, the Club of Rome's The Limits to Growth (Universe Books) suggested that at exponential growth rates, the world would run out of gold by 1981, mercury by 1985, tin by 1987, zinc by 1990, petroleum by 1992, and copper, lead, and natural gas by 1993. The end was nigh. The modern heirs to this strain of doomsaying include Lester Brown at the Worldwatch Institute and Vice President Al Gore.

But the silliness was not confined to the environmentalist front. Take a look at John Kenneth Galbraith's 1967 paean to planning, The New Industrial State (Houghton Mifflin), in which he asserted: "High technology and heavy capital use cannot be subordinate to the ebb and flow of market demand. They require planning and it is the essence of planning that public behavior be made predictable - that is be subject to control."

Galbraith, too, has heirs - most notably, Robert Reich and Lester Thurow. In his 1980 book The Zero-Sum Society (Basic Books) Thurow suggested that "solving our energy and growth problems demand [sic] that government gets more heavily involved in the economy's major investment decisions....Major investment decisions have become too important to be left to the private market alone." Thurow ended with this revealing claim: "As we head into the 1980s, it is well to remember that there is really only one important question in political economy. If elected, whose income do you and your party plan to cut in the process of solving the economic problems facing us?"

Ultimately, the neo-Malthusians and the zero-summers are pushing the same egalitarian agenda: Stop growth and then divvy up the static pie."
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/...i_53260537/pg_2

I hate to admit this, but in the 70's I did an award winning paper on the effects of CFCs on the ozone layer of our atmosphere. Using replenishment values of just two segments of refrigeration industries, and dispersion data from NASA, I conclusively demonstrated that we had already lost enough Freon into the air that there was no hope of life continuing on the exposed face of the earth past 1990.

Of course, at the time I was a pot smoking teenaged hippy with more brains than sense, so I can excuse my sophomoric pretensions... after all, I was a HS Sophomore. It was the State School administrators and civic minded adults who spurred me on, and got me published. They should have known better.

Luckily, my prediction of the end of the Earth was fatally flawed, in that Freon is much heavier than air and quickly sinks into the ground where it is disassembled.

"But we know the world didn't end, 'cause... check it out." - Oz