
In the Netherlands, a group of scientists is working on feeding 11 billion - elorant
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/future-of-food-innovation-technology
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Merrill
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](https://www.edx.org/school/wageningenx)

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spraak
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?

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cryptoz
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.

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SomeOldThrow
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.

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wang_li
> completely unplanned and inefficient use of resources from perspective of
> resource use.

People need to get over the idea of efficiency and centrally planned. These
are not necessary qualities in order for humans to prosper.

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noja
> People need to get over the idea of efficiency and centrally planned.

People need to get over the idea that a free market is the solution to
everything?

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AnimalMuppet
For food distribution, historically, a free market beats central planning,
hands down.

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SomeOldThrow
Not at all; free market fails to feed people daily. Even in the heartland of
captialism we had plenty of bread lines during the great depression.

To be clear I’m not advocating _centralized_ planning, or any specific
planning method. I’m simply pointing out the free market has specifically
failed at food distribution. Or at least, you're going to need to contort the
definition of success to get the free market to meet it.

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vfc1
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.

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spraak
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.

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Fnoord
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...](https://www.bol.com/nl/p/het-
insectenkookboek/9200000039719366)

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bryanlarsen
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.

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

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

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dominotw
> the richness is already here

how do we know this?

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jhcl
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?

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royjacobs
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.

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

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godelski
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.

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

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neaden
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.

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Frondo
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition)

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

