New preliminary research suggests that a combination of higher atmospheric CO2 and hotter temperatures contribute to a reduction in nutritional quality in food crops, with serious implications for human health and wellbeing.
It’s not just climate, it’s the crop breeding specialists. The sector demands quantity over quality, like in many other scenarios, and the people who develop new cultivars tend to focus on that quantity. When we have regulations for nutrient density or the consumers demand it, we’ll see that change. Climate is adding to this problem, yes.
Note that it affects all biomass, including the second-hand sources of amino acids, lipids, sugars and other nutrients: animals.
Thank you for beating me to it. I 100% agree with you.
But I have to say, in order to meet the nutrient density requirements, they would have to completely reform the agricultural sector. Which I would love, but we know how this goes with these people.
And the fact that in 2025, we keep stacking people on top of each other to the point that more than half of the world’s population is living like this in cities, which is integrated in a vertical axis, but the energy consumption of the same people is still spreading elsewhere on an horizontal axis… that is foreboding the worst of outcomes in this regard.
The permaculture philosophy and the syntropic method would have to be integrated. And with it, vertical indoor farming in cities as a necessary response. But this would mean the end of monocultures and pesticide use. No more plowing either. Terrible for the microorganisms in the soil, means terrible for everything else. Soil policy would have to be in place as a baseline… it’s a lot.
But I keep saying this… Environmentalism, veganism, sustainability and ethics are all the same thing. The very same thing. It’s trying to insure that our lives as both the individual and the mass population causes the least destruction and suffering as possible. And that we can aspire to be net positive to all biological life on the planet. If the general population understood this, we could be heading somewhere. Unfortunately without understanding entropy and how the trophic balance is achieved, I doubt that one can understand syntropy or what the hell I’m even talking about right now.
But yeah… Syntropy vs Entropy is hard to explain in a small paragraph to the ADHD crowd of our time, I guess.
So… Optimism is just not in the cards. Not for me at least.
Optimism is for fools. Let me add a bit in the other direction: if most of the population became rural, then the work going on would be in rural activity. That sounds great until you realize that it requires a technological level that is similar to the pre-industrial life. And it’s not just machines, complex science goes away and medicine mostly goes away, because you can’t have that many specialists if everyone’s working in agriculture and horticulture. One of the consequences of that would be that all the people who depend on modern technology to live, directly, would have a problem with living: that goes from vision aids to all medical treatments to pharmaceuticals to vaccines to surgeries (start at: no C-Section) to managing all disabilities (that we can manage now).
I’m not entirely clear as if you just meant that as a thought experiment… Because I wasn’t suggesting anything in that direction, actually. I was merely stating that the ratio of space required to grow food for the population in cities should match the vertical design of cities themselves. And even include these vertical farming structures within cities themselves. It all needs to match the design of efficiency in housing. Otherwise, it’s just a race to the bottom in how to run out of surface land and resources the fastest way.
Also, I want to mention that this idea that the entire lives of people would have to be dedicated entirely to farming has always been greatly exaggerated as to scare off people from procuring sovereignty for themselves and their communities. My girlfriend and I grow some of our food. I would say even if I took the task alone with the intention of feeding us both entirely all year round, it would take me about less then 2 months worth of work spread out across two seasons. That out of an entire year leaves a lot of time to spare. Not to mention, that I could use the same time to grow more for more people. After you put what you need in the ground, setting an automatic irrigation system, the maintenance work is not that much of a hassle, especially using the syntropic method within a permaculture design. The early stages of setting this up are laborious indeed, but after that, not really, not really at all.
This all to say that this is another one of those myths that capitalism has ingrained falsely in people as to keep the labour of the masses retained to the benefit of the few who gain the most from it. It’s about insuring the conditions where the elite can keep manufacturing the consent in others to exploit them. And insuring dependency is always the way to do it.
Farming wise, and regarding our current food systems, I think that people in general should learn more about syntropy if we are to communicate better as to what needs to be achieved. As it will mean different approaches depending on geography. Not to mention Urban vs rural settings would also require different approaches as well.
Then it would also be easier to gather support for innovations such as Precision Fermentation. Because using bacterial and microbial life to grow our sustenance is ingenious. The lower the trophic level we consume from, the lesser the destruction. And it would also be faster. Always.
If we truly insure true efficiency, we truly minimise destruction. And maximise the potential for prosperity for all, including non-human animals, plants and all other organisms.
Unfortunately the only efficiency that our current systems are designed for is to maximise profit. Which requires continuous growth, which is unsustainable and will ultimately lead to its own inevitable collapse. 6 of the 9 established planetary boundaries have already been breached. It’s only a matter of time now. As to how much time that will take and how much of the world will be taken with it, that is all tied to massive amounts of data for us to even fathom to process.
And AI is currently accelerating all this race to depletion in all fronts.
So, yeah, optimism right now, would be indeed for fools as you say.
Most people don’t work on anything that technology and medicine depend on. There are so many jobs that only exist because capitalism is inefficient and gives rich people the right to get other people to do useless things.
Imagine how many people would be unemployed (freed up for rural living) if we got rid of the meat industry, replaced cars with public transit and bicycles, replaces airplanes with high speed rail and ships and not going, had built cities to be walkable from the start, gave people a comfortable life regardless of whether they worked, banned advertisements, made clothes and other products designed to last a lifetime, had a library economy to vastly reduce the number of tools necessary, got rid of intellectual property law so people didn’t need to design new drugs to repatent things and corporate megaprojects would collapse, redistributed wealth so people wouldn’t buy useless toys or mansions, and put everyone in comfortable rural spaces with lots of greenery and spaces where they could hang out for free so mental health is better and people get plenty of exercise.
Most people could work in agriculture without decreasing the amount that work on maintaining and improving our level of technology.
I would much prefer smaller, better-tasting, more nutritionally beneficial crops. My bf and I want to start growing our own at some point.
Of course. I’m sure that you understand that less quantity also means that you eat less… or you plant more.
this just the plot of Outer Worlds
