In a new book titled Feeding Everyone No Matter What, risk researchers have imagined eight scenarios where some calamity destroyed our ability to grow crops.
The authors of the book, Joshua Pearce at Michigan Technological University and David Denkenberger at the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute, were tired of people imagining apocalyptic scenarios without offering solutions for how we might plausibly feed ourselves after global devastation.
A five-year supply of food would take up an enormous amount of space and cost about $US12,000 for a family of four, according to the researchers.
“We came up with two primary classes of solutions,” Pearce said in a release. “We can convert existing fossil fuels to food by growing bacteria on top of it — then either eat the bacterial slime or feed it to rats and bugs and then eat them.”
Rats and bugs can also consume wood products, which would likely be plentiful in a disaster scenario. The researchers also included ideas about creating tea out of pine needles, which they insist would “provide a surprising amount of nutrition.”
“We could extract sugar from the bacterial slime and carbonate it for soda pop,” Pearce said. “We’d still have food scientists, too, who could make almost anything taste like bacon or tofurkey. It wouldn’t be so bad.”
The researchers insist that it’s technically feasible to feed everyone alive on the planet today, even without conventional agriculture.
“We can feed everyone if we cooperate and do a little thinking ahead of time — not in the dark when everyone is screaming. Life could continue to go on normally. Just a little dimmer.”
Perhaps we could even put some of that cooperative effort and thinking into the food problems of today. Given the dire conditions so many people live in today, aliens visiting Earth would no doubt believe that some catastrophe had already hit.
Topic: What to Eat After The Apocalypse (Read 1540 times)
