"Fixing the global food system. The damage this system wreaks is shocking."
If we could only invent a teleportation device...
Also, shipping massive amounts of free grain around the world wreaks havoc in local markets, driving small farmers out of business in poor countries.
We need efficient supply chains, efficient market pricing and efficient crops, such as golden rice.
Instead, we get governments interfering in market prices, blocking food supply chain companies in the name of "tradition" and blocking GMO development and usage in the name of religion and bogus science.
Over the last few years I've seen many comments on Hacker News that are pro-GMO. The thing is... I don't understand how any respectable developer could support programming DNA with current technologies.
You know how they code new organisms? They rip out code from one organism and then they randomly insert it somewhere in the DNA code of another organism. They do this thousands of times... 99.999% of the time the cell dies. So they keep trying to compile random variations of code and it keeps crashing. But let's say they get lucky one time and the code compiles. The cell lives, and then they use that cell to create a new organism. If that organism has the one property they wanted to port over from the new DNA code, they call it a success. They don't do any unit testing, they can't possibly test every scenario this new organism would be used in production, and yet no one cares.
Would any software developer use a process like this in a production environment? No - it's obvious this way of coding would would cause drastic unintended consequences. With GMOs you get malformed proteins, new chemicals/toxins, and interbreeding with other plants that could cause even more unintended consequences.
Usually I'm all for technological progress. But until we understand DNA inside and out and can precisely edit just the code we want, GMOs seem very dangerous.
Nice scare analogy for GMOs. The problem is that if you do the same thing to traditional breeding, its even worse: rather than ripping out code that you know performs the function you are looking for and inserting it into another code base, randomly or not, traditional breeding (and especially the modern, accelerated forms) is a variety of different combinations of randomly mixing code from codebases that each have some of the features you want and inducing random bit flips throughout the code base, testing for the features you want, throwing out code that doesn't have them, and hoping you don't have unnoticed unintended consequences. (And natural breeding is pretty much the same as traditional breeding, but without the selection for traits desired by humans.)
That's not to say traditional breeding or natural breeding is bad, but it is to say that if we reason at the level of your scare analogy, we just would avoid food entirely, rather than avoiding GMO-food specifically; you don't really provide any reason to think that GMO food is worse than the alternatives.
I can, because that's exactly what the software development analogy is: a scare tactic that relies on ignorance of how the alternatives would work if looked at the same way.
There is no method available for crop development that is analogous, in the manner that things were framed upthread, to good software development. (And there won't ever be, unless, through experience with the use of the gene editing tools we have now, we develop much better tools.)
> but with GMOs we're doing things that would be impossible to try with traditional methods.
With "traditional" (which mostly means non-GMO -- the methods that fall under that label now are often as new, or newer, than the GMO methods) methods we are also doing things which would be impossible with the traditional methods available before the time when we started doing GMO.
That's not really surprising, the advance of technology usually involves doing things impossible with earlier technology.
"Nature" doesn't disallow anything. Viruses and bacteria can exchange DNA with pretty much almost any living thing. We actually have descendants of bacteria with their own DNA living inside each of our cells.
We've been modifying plants through cruder means for thousands of years, killing the ones we don't like and planting the ones we do. It's a vastly slower process, relying on natural mutations, but it's the same principle.
The real problem with GMOs involves patents and copyright--not necessarily anything to do with the plants themselves.
Doesn't that fact argument work against GMOs? Cross-breeding has been done for thousands of years, so it's a very well understood technique, whereas doing it in a lab is has not even had half a century of experience behind it.
"Would any software developer use a process like this in a production environment?"
Would any engineer use software development techniques in building a bridge? Absolutely not. Hold on, I'll build a mock bridge, run a test truck on top to see if it holds. If it doesn't, I'll just build a new one.
Don't compare disciplines which have enormously different requirements. With all dues respect, the world isn't just software engineering.
> I still think the analogy holds because DNA is so much like source code.
DNA isn't much like source code at all.
A better, though still far from precise, analogy would be base-four data which can, in some environments, configurations, and contexts, be interpreted as machine code.
Golden rice is basically useless except as a PR tool to clear the way for more profitable GMOs. Its only benefit is that it might provide an alternative to vitamin A supplementation if countries were allowed to grow it. Unfortunately, it's covered by a thicket of patents from about 30 companies, and the free patent licence is a PR stunt - almost all the countries it includes can't actually grow rice. The only country that's both permitted to grow it by the patent license and has the right climate to do so is the Philippines, which is why so much of the attention on golden rice is focused there (and even they're reliant on rice imports to feed their population). Sadly for golden rice's proponents, while they were still getting it to work the government there quietly dealt with the vitamin A deficiency problem through a more low-tech and effective technique: vitamen supplements.
I'm pretty sure this is by design, by the way. The criteria for being licensed to grow golden rice is that the country grows less calories of food than it takes to support their population. Rice is so calorific that it's hard for a rice-growing country to meet this criteria, which is also why it's a popular staple food in developing countries and why rice was chosen in the first place.
"the government there quietly dealt with the vitamin A deficiency problem through a more low-tech and effective technique: vitamen supplements"
Really? 250,000–500,000 children in developing countries become blind each year owing to VAD, with the highest prevalence in Southeast Asia and Africa. I guess in your world that qualifies as effective. Even if they did solve it with supplements, wouldn't it be better to solve it already in the food, instead of spending millions a year on supplements?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_A_deficiency
"The criteria for being licensed to grow golden rice is that the country grows less calories of food than it takes to support their population."
Do you have any sources for this or are you just making it up?
"Golden rice is basically useless except as a PR tool to clear the way for more profitable GMOs"
A classic anti GMO talking point with no basis in fact. Just because corporations use genetic engineering doesn't mean it can't be used for altruistic purposes. Have you considered the possibility that people are actually trying to solve a problem that kills tens of thousands and blinds countless more every year? I guess its easier to believe in conspiracy theories.
"Do you have any sources for this or are you just making it up?"
My source for this is the page you linked: "Humanitarian use" means "Use in developing countries (low-income, food-deficit countries as defined by FAO)". The FAO's definition of a low-income, food deficit country is that they're forced to import food because they don't grow enough calories to feed their population, and their income must also be below a threshold. See http://www.fao.org/countryprofiles/lifdc/en/
Though my information is slightly outdated in one area: the Phillipines are no longer on the FAO list as of this year because they're too wealthy.
"Really? 250,000–500,000 children in developing countries become blind each year owing to VAD, with the highest prevalence in Southeast Asia and Africa. I guess in your world that qualifies as effective"
Golden rice cannot help them under the current licensing regime, because most or all of those countries can't grow rice and even if the humanitarian use license did include any that could, it forbids exporting golden rice - it's strictly for internal consumption only. The page you linked makes this restriction very clear.
I emailed Adrian Dubock (via the contact email on the website) and his reply was that the philippines will still be included.
My guess is that when they started the philippines and other rice producint countries where on that list (couldn't find for previous years), but from what he said, its a "project of need and goodwill". Take away what you want from this, but I think its a case of the inventors not foreseeing these countries would not be part of that list back in the early 2000s. Syngenta have the rights to the distributions (the original inventors have the actual patents), so it might not be much of an issue to change those terms.
"if the humanitarian use license did include any that could, it forbids exporting golden rice - it's strictly for internal consumption only. The page you linked makes this restriction very clear."
So you're going from the premise that those countries dealt effectively with VAD with supplements with the one that says that Golden rice is bad because they can't export? How does a restriction on export mean that you can't enjoy the benefits of Golden Rice? The point is that poor farmers grow a rice that is a source of vitamin A, without having to grow/buy vegetables or get vitamin supplements. They don't need to export to get the benefits, they just need to eat rice with added Vitamin A. Your argument doesn't make any sense.
"While the target level of beta-carotene in the grain was attained, average yield was unfortunately lower than that from comparable local varieties already preferred by farmers."
The first problem they mention is that we waste 30% of our food. A recent study found that for seafood in the U.S. it's even worse, we waste almost 50%....but that waste is mostly at the consumer level. I don't see how that's fixable. You're not going to stop people from throwing out leftovers.
I wonder how restaurants factor into that, especially fast food. Any place that preemptively prepares food is very likely to waste a lot of it. Having worked at an am/pm for my first job, I was blown away by how much food is thrown out after 3 hrs from when it was cooked.
"They require fewer animal proteins and more plant-based foods."
It's very hard to get the general public to reduce animal product consumption. I tried as a bachelor, but I just couldn't figure out how to make a tasty meal without a big hunk of meat.
When I met my wife, who is vegan, it suddenly became easy to lower my animal product consumption. This was because I had a good example to follow.
It's a very strange challenge, because meat is so damn tasty.
> It's very hard to get the general public to reduce animal product consumption.
That's because animal proteins and animal fats are vital nutrients the body needs. It's also the most efficient method of transport for these nutrients; industrially grown crops cause far more damage than pastured livestock.
I've been to quite a few vegan restaurants (exploring vegan restaurants in new cities is one of my hobbies), some were bad, but many were amazing. I've even seen vegan chefs win competitions. The taste problem has been solved; it just needs mass market adoption. So for me the problem is convenience (tasty meat-based food is easier to find), not taste.
Unfortunately, the economic infrastructure created around meat consumption is too big to change, it will probably take decades.
I'll start by saying that I'm at a healthy weight for my height (5'9, 160lb) and in reasonably good shape (I won't win any marathons, but running 7-8 miles isn't a big deal). My partner isn't vegan or vegetarian, but she does prefer to eat mostly plants. I try to accomodate that preference when I cook for the two of us.
The biggest challenge I have is how much plant-based food I have to eat to feel satiated and mentally sharp. Meat with veggies, for me, seems to work quite well. If I eat a pure veggie meal, even high protein veggies with some kind of added fat (oil or butter), I feel ferociously hungry an hour later. I really like cooking large meals so that we have leftovers, but unless there's meat in it, it seems like ridiculously large meals disappear very quickly.
It's interesting the author points out the effects on the environment and economies, but completely omits how much violent conflicts are direct drivers of poverty.
This year’s World Development Report, published a couple of weeks ago, emphasises the fact that one of the biggest drivers of poverty in the developing world is violent conflict. One of the biggest risks for developing countries, it argues, is that of being caught in a conflict trap – a vicious circle whereby poverty stokes conflict, and conflict in turn increases poverty.
Not sure how eating less meat is going to compete with social and religious conflicts which cause and sustain far more poverty.
Can anyone get us to give up meat? Or at least drastically reduce our consumption?
I still enjoy a good burger once in a while and a side of bacon with Sunday breakfast is a slice of bliss. But I find myself the exception; most people I know expect to have meat with at least one, if not two, meals a day. Animal based food products are not as easy to scale up as vegetable based proteins.
Interesting work has been going into lighting systems whose spectrum is optimized for photosynthesis and is being used to grow lettuce in great quantities indoors[0]. We can make this happen for hybrid plants with the specific nutrient and protein properties we need.
We can even grow bugs at scale and harvest the meal...
but beef? pork? chicken? Seems to be an intractable problem.
I love meat, but I did go accidentally vegan while just eating Soylent. The other approach is to use meat as a garnish. Consider the classic BLT does not take a lot of bacon to really change the taste, but doubling up does not make a huge difference. I think most people could generally limit themselves to 2oz of meat a meal and not really notice.
PS: I also think tasteless mass market fruits and vegies have a lot to do with meat consumption. Meat is simply one of the few things left that really has flavor. A good orange works as desert, but most supermarket oranges taste like vaguely orange flavored pulp.
In the modern world, fruits and vegetables are mostly about low cost of production, and robustness for transportation, and finally consistent appearance.
Local, seasonal, "heirloom" vegetables are a whole different ballgame. But they're seasonal, they're not always pretty, they don't travel, and they aren't cheap.
You can grow arbitrary veggies locally in a greenhouse for year round consumption. It's not as cheap, but compared to unsubsidized meat prices it's less costly than you might think.
Sure, if you don't mind gardening and have space. But at commercial scale? Much harder.
Our CSA farm has commercial greenhouses for their tomatoes and cucumbers, so they can have a good supply of those even when weather becomes a problem. They seem to build a new greenhouse every years. But scale? That's a handful, a little ten acre farm selling directly to consumers.
- "Meat is simply one of the few things left that really have flavor"
That's an odd statement, considering the fact that most foods (including meat) are seasoned with herbs and spices. Meat without any seasoning has a pretty weak taste.
What gives bacon its taste is the sweet/salty seasoning and the smoked fat, which has been reproduced remarkably well in some plant-based commercial foods. As far as I'm concerned, the taste problem has already been solved (it will keep improving, of course), but it will just take time to change, due to the sheer size and influence of the animal industry.
> 'Meat without any seasoning has a pretty weak taste.'
I think depending on how well raised the animal was, alongside the level of sensitivity of the taster's tongue (have they been used to a super-stimulation diet with yeast-extract/msg intensity[1]?) meat can taste quite sweet on its own.
The problem isn't meat - it's factory farming. For traditional small, diverse farms, meat is an essential part of the biocycle. Animals consume parts of the plants that are inedible by humans, create fertilizer, even manage treelines. But when food is raised in a factory environment, isolated from the rest of the cycle, distortions can happen.
That's true. However, you have to take into account quantity too. A small single farmer Saskatchewan farm can grow enough wheat to feed 10,000 people. Or it can grow barley instead to feed to pigs and feed 1,000 people. Or it can grow the wheat to feed 10,000 people and also raise a few cows, pigs and chickens in a complementary fashion as you described. That would provide enough calories to feed another 100 people or so.
The quantity thing isn't about famine-level food, though - it's about industrial scale cost. The cost of food relative to income has plummeted worldwide for over a century. With it, the labor requirements of farming plummeted.
In today's world, anyone going hungry is a political problem, not a supply problem. So the answer of growing yet more food, using yet more industrialization, is absolutely the wrong solution. We need to get less efficient, closer to the food again.
Less efficient means more expensive. And as the article noted, more expensive food triggered wars which killed tens of thousands of people.
But that small mixed farm is more efficient than the large factory farm in many ways. They're wasting less food, they're using fewer resources, they're more sustainable in the long term.
But they lose in terms of "economies of scale", which translates into labour and capital. And since those are by far the greatest expenses on a farm, they're not as "efficient".
The solution? Proper pricing of externalities, eliminating distorting subsidies, and further technological development.
Monocultures are a technological problem -- they're much less efficient land usage, but they allow the use of large machines. What if we could replace those expensive large machines with lots of cheap small robots that could harvest all the corn in a field without harming the squash, to give an example of a traditional biculture.
Right. Industrialized, capital-intensive farming isn't necessarily more agriculturally efficient, and and it has a lot of cost externalization that is causing global suffering. But it's more powerful financially. And our subsidy system is built to strengthen industrial farming at the expense of integrated family farming. Not surprising, considering one of the benefits of capital-centric economics is the ability to exercise concentrated political influence.
So how do we encourage a return to family farming (and the food cost increase that comes with it) at a national, or global scale? I think the first step is admitting we have a problem, and the solution is NOT more industrialization and more efficiency.
Third world countries with starving children aren't going to turn down mostly vegetarian food. It's actually a good opportunity to create a larger market for vegetarian food options.
First World countries are another matter though. Meat is often a staple. I'm not sure how to fix that one.
And one should think twice about engaging in a war, cultural or other, with the people who supply your food. There are many ugly ways that could end very poorly.
> First World countries are another matter though. Meat is often a staple.
Heck, some consider it a God given right rather than just a staple!
Meat in some places is considered a status symbol: being able to afford the biggest and/or the best quality steak being a sign of wealth and therefore success. This is one of the reasons why meat consumption in some eastern countries which previously had a much more veg/fruit/carb optimised diet is shooting up: partly because the overall price of meat is falling relative to their earnings so they can afford more of it more often, and partly because of certain western influences spreading the status symbol thing making people want it more than they otherwise might.
I eat quite a lot of meat (mainly chicken as it a relatively lean and inexpensive protein source) for four reasons:
1. I like it.
2. I'm told that we process most animal-sourced protein (including eggs and the whey that comes from milk production and ends up in the bars I have to refuel after a a long run or gym session) more effectively than that which comes to us in vegetable matter.
3. Many of the non-animal protein sources, if I eat them in larger quantities, go straight through me like a dose of salts which limits their use as a source of nutrition.
4. I really like it, particularly the varieties that come from pigs.
You're mixing moral intentions (we should reduce our consumption of meat) with pure market forces (it's hard to scale, so it will become more expensive).
It seems to me that the former is unnecessary - it will just go away if we make sure that any environmental damage from meat farming is properly factored into taxation.
Your solutions are really interesting though, couple that with something like Impossible Foods or Soylent and I can viably see the price of a reasonable meal dropping even as population increases.
But I see 'artificial meat' articles every month on HN. Surely we're only a year or two away from a major change here. Its nowhere near an intractable problem.
What? Animals do not require much land area if you don't count the space needed to grow their food. They'll scale just as well as your indoor lettuce (that is not at all). You seem to be trying to solve the wrong problem.
But you can't discount the space needed to grow animals' food -- that's a major reason that raising animals as food is so inefficient compared to eating the plants directly. It's a bit like saying that coal isn't all that bad for the environment if you don't count all the pollutants that are released in burning it.
The problem with strengthening government and institutional influence over the food supply is that the when it comes to nutrition, the big US institutions are loudly proclaiming that up is down and black is white, particularly with regard to salt and fat. If we succeed in importing our dietary advice to poorer countries, we'll cause them to have obesity epidemics, too, without solving their hunger and malnutrition problems.
But the evidence shows salt and fat have been demonized. I know, it'll take a generation (current convinced people grow old and die) before we can kill those old ideas.
There are some problem inherent to coordinating anything on a multi-billion person scale that are monumental. You could even narrate a history of people on earth using ability to coordinate at greater scale as your x axis.
I've heard an interesting theory about homo sapien "victory" over neanderthals and other archaic humans. In some versions it's upper paleolithic culture over lower paleolithic culture of which neanderthals, early sapiens and all the grey arrears around those groups.
In any case, the theory/hypothesis/narrative is that the difference between anatomically modern humans and their close cousins and homo sapiens sapiens was their ability to coordinate on larger scales than the biologically determined "band" size. Chimps, Gorillas and presumably earlier hominids live socially in groups that vary in size within a range determined by their biology. There are no chimp kings, tribes or limited liability companies, just troops and bands. Their bonding and cooperation mechanisms are based on biologically determined behavior. Environment and even culture play a role, but 250 chimps controlling a territory that would otherwise be controlled by more smaller troops is not in their repertoire.
Imagine a population of archaic humans who, by use of language, religion, symbolism, abstract concepts of some unknown kind, oral history or some other means were able to coordinate 500 individuals, with 200 fighters. In a lot of contexts (the most obvious being war), that group would be at a huge advantage. These are our ancestors. It also suggests a gnarly explanation to the genetic bottleneck question.
This process continues through history. Mega bands become clans and tribes and super tribes and nations and all sorts of affiliations. They get bigger and more effectively coordinated. Economic and political dynamics emerge. We get ideologies and organized religions, feudalism, socialism, slavery, capitalism, monarchy, nation states, empires, manchester united and political party nomination betting odds (BTW, Trump is at 3-1).
Anyway.. food.
Based on current grain prices, the daily caloric requirements of a person costs cents, ¢10-¢50, depending on what you plug into your back-of-the-envelope calculator.
I'm not bringing this up as proof that caloric deficit is easily solvable, I mean the opposite. The fact that it persists in the face of this fact means that it is simply very difficult to do anything on a entire species scale. "We" here is a very tricky concept. There is no real "we" yet in the practical sense of an actor with agency.
"Fixing" things on global scale with expectation people won't exercise their legal rights against the "fix" without any external threat (I'd say influence, but threat brings more results) is a fairy tale, utopia to be precise.
Glad to see that we jump straight to the incredible hyperbole right with the first sentence.