BK 76 (Nov 12, 2024): The Fate of Food: What We'll Eat in a Bigger, Hotter, Smarter World

We will have our Nov meeting on the 12th due to Election Day being the first Tues of the month. We will be discussing the book The Fate of Food: What We'll Eat in a Bigger, Hotter, Smarter World by Amanda Little (Jan 14, 2019). With 352 reading pages it is approximately 9 pages a day.  (We have 36 days to read!)

Check out the Bio, links and videos below:

"WINNER OF THE 2019 NAUTILUS BOOK AWARD 

In the fascinating story of the sustainable food revolution, an environmental journalist and professor asks the question: Is the future of food looking bleak—or better than ever?
 
“In The Fate of Food, Amanda Little takes us on a tour of the future. The journey is scary, exciting, and, ultimately, encouraging.”—Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sixth Extinction

Climate models show that global crop production will decline every decade for the rest of this century due to drought, heat, and flooding. Water supplies are in jeopardy. Meanwhile, the world’s population is expected to grow another 30 percent by midcentury. So how, really, will we feed nine billion people sustainably in the coming decades?

Amanda Little, a professor at Vanderbilt University and an award-winning journalist, spent three years traveling through a dozen countries and as many U.S. states in search of answers to this question. Her journey took her from an apple orchard in Wisconsin to a remote control organic farm in Shanghai, from Norwegian fish farms to famine-stricken regions of Ethiopia.
 
The race to reinvent the global food system is on, and the challenge is twofold: We must solve the existing problems of industrial agriculture while also preparing for the pressures ahead. Through her interviews and adventures with farmers, scientists, activists, and engineers, Little tells the fascinating story of human innovation and explores new and old approaches to food production while charting the growth of a movement that could redefine sustainable food on a grand scale. She meets small permaculture farmers and “Big Food” executives, botanists studying ancient superfoods and Kenyan farmers growing the country's first GMO corn. She travels to places that might seem irrelevant to the future of food yet surprisingly play a critical role—a California sewage plant, a U.S. Army research lab, even the inside of a monsoon cloud above Mumbai. Little asks tough questions: Can GMOs actually be good for the environment—and for us? Are we facing the end of animal meat? What will it take to eliminate harmful chemicals from farming? How can a clean, climate-resilient food supply become accessible to all?

Throughout her journey, Little finds and shares a deeper understanding of the threats of climate change and encounters a sense of awe and optimism about the lessons of our past and the scope of human ingenuity."

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This is what we discussed at the meeting...

* General impressions of the book

* Wise

* Obesity/Overweight in US

* Kroger Foods

* How many Men vs Women buying Freeze Dried Food and reason

* Farm production vs chronic hunger, Jeff Bridges No Kid Hungry & 1950s budget for food vs today.

* IPCC stats on crops and food prices.

* Soylent

* 3D printing of food

* Soldiers wearing sensors to detect nutrients needed and food getting to them

* Canning nutrients vs Freeze Dried

* Past Food meant Power

* Green Revolution

* Maltodextrin & other food additives

* Cows weight vs meat produced

* 70% fresh water flows to farms. 

* Calories per person increase but not all people

* 1/3 of food rots in transit or is thrown out

* Food production 1/5 of total greenhouse gas emissions/yr

* Sugar consumption and weight increase 20% in 3 decades & Diabetes increased 700%

* Beef carbon footprint is 4x great than chicken, and chicken 3x that of Lentils

* DDT kills birds but also 4x increase breast cancer

* Saccharin & Aspartame approved but found carcinogenic. Look at Dr. Susan Swithers research Podcast to start!

* Margarine Trans Fats

* MSG

* RoundUp & Food Coloring linked to ADHD

* Salmon Farming (fatten with corn feed)

* Genetic Engineering of crops fallen short

* Apples sold year round, cold storage 6-12 months, studies on nutrient decline

* WI production of cheese/butter/milk

* Farmer Andy "climate change...beyond my frame of reference...I'm not a scientist"

* Spring beginning sooner...Valentine's Day Peach Massacre on East Coast...peaches

* WI loss of apples, MI loss of cherries

* Green Bud stage from Apr 5th to Mar 26th

* 10 freeze events prior to 1940 and now 20

* Rainfall levels 10% increase in volume of spring since 1945, downpours and workable days decreased 3-5 days from 1980-2010

* New Dust Bowl TX drought

* CA drought and decline in snowpack that feeds reservoirs

* Fruits & nuts in CA

* Chipotle and Guac off menu

* 2050 coffee cut in half

* Winemakers heating grapes in past...movie A Walk in the Clouds (about 34 min in) 

* Only 7/54 countries allow GMOs, mostly cotton

* GMOs can get their traits from different organisms.

* No less than 90% corn grown in America is GM with Bt

* Monsanto donating breeding tech to WEMA royalty free and volunteered to train scientists to breed and produce but eventually they will benefit

* 100 groups in Kenya restrict GMOs

* 2 Decades of GMO in system since mid 19909s unwillingly. Largest uncontrolled experiment in modern history 

* Pamela Davis of Univ. CA Davis 20 yrs of 1000s independent studies safe...??? Monsanto did many of their own

* Insulin derived from GMOs

* GMOs to have fruits and vegetables brown less quickly

* NonGMO increased 8B in 2015 to 26B in 2018

* Ronald "Awesome power to be able to decode and reorder genes" !!!

* Tego Maize

* Atrazine effects

* Lettucebot

* Pigweed problems

* 1/3 soil lost to chemicals

* 1B lbs of pesticides are used in US/yr

* High levels of glyphosate linked to ADHD and Alzheimer's

* AI Farming (Bots) & Hackers

* Chinese foods, fertilizers, pesticides and heavy metals and their effects

* Zhang

* Chinese investors in Smithfield Foods etc.

* Chinese websites deliverable foods

* Aerofarms (Newark, NJ) & other vertical farms, PodPonics (Atlanta), FarmedHere (Chicago), Square Roots (Brooklyn), Plenty (Bezos)

* History of Tiberius

* History of Greenhouses

* Geothermal systems

* Chinese investment in 33 countries for food security, US in 25

* Aarskog Marine Harvest

* Salmon Stocks & other fish & the concerns

*  Incentives for electric cars and not for plant-based diet

* Climate Change effect on food

* Flash freezing and shipping carbon footprint vs local

* Greenwave (MA) Kelp

* Benefits Microalgae

* Feed usage per animal

* Memphis Meats (Berkeley CA)

* Benefits of Cultured meats

* Tyson & Cultured meats

* Beyond Meat

* HEME

* Impossible Meats

* % of food rots in fields or fridges or dumped in trash

* Georgann Parker (Kroger) Zero Hunger, Zero Waste

* Darby Hooper (NRDC) Waste ReFed

* Investors' involvement in waste

* Selina Juul (Stop Wasting Food) Wefood, 

* Adam Smith Real Junk Food Project

* Olio

* Too Good to Go

* Food Ambulances

* NonGMO and CRISPR-edited foods

* Imperfect Produce

* Milk dates problems

* WISErg

* Harvest Power

* Israel history water

* Palestinians food insecurity & Gaza Strip

* Water pipe network problems

* Carlsbad

* Weather modification Cloud Seeding

* Kassa Ethiopia 

* Moringa Seeds

* NorQuin

* Kernza

* Spirulina

* Chirps Chips

* Prevalence of Diabetes

* Harvest Plus

* History of Milk fortified with Vitamin D

* 3D printing food & Soldiers

* Soldiers Nutrients sent by drones

* Soldiers bone density

* Soylent

* Author's views on GMOs

* Author & husbands views on farming

** If there is anything I have missed, please let me know!