> although we're doing a terrible job of distributing it to the world

Are we? Starvation and malnutrition used to be common and is now rare.

https://ourworldindata.org/famines

Slowly but surely, the main problem with food is changing from "starvation" to "obesity".

Which is arguably just a different form of malnutrition, somewhat less deadly, but more of a chronic burden on the patient and the society.

This is true, but it's also true that the world produces enough food such that no ones needs to starve, and yet people still starve. A quarter of food produced ends up in landfills (Europe estimates 20% food waste, as high as 30-40% in US).

I love how this comment thread perfectly echoes what the article is talking about.

From a sibling comment by imtrigued:

> Almost a billion are still going hungry.

"The world is awful"

And then from your parent comment:

> Are we? Starvation and malnutrition used to be common and is now rare

"The world is better"

And finally your comment:

> it's also true that the world produces enough food such that no ones needs to starve

"The world can be much better"

These three are all true, and I suspect each person already knew all three. It's just that each person chose to focus on a separate aspect.

It seems to me that the first two are statements, and the final one is a conclusion, which is the only one that's productive to focus on.

I think they all achieve different purposes.

"The world is awful" highlights a problem that needs solving, a concrete goal

"The world is better" tells you that something is working, which you can build on top of or improve

"The world can be better" gives a proposal for a course of action

While the 3rd might seem like the most useful, the 1st is extremely important too, because if the proposal fails then you need to fall back to thinking about the problem. The 2nd is important for both motivation, and also for promoting incremental progress

It's a nice narrative but the accuracy of it is questionable, there isn't really some grand historical march away from famine. We've just had a great run from 1980-2020. https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2018/03/Famine-victims-si...

The situation in 2022 is not good, it will take time to see exactly how bad.

Famine correlates very closely with war -- if our recent period of relative global peace comes to an end it will probably return with a vengeance.

Some food should be wasted. If 100% of food were consumed, that would mean that any slight disruption would result in not enough food, or that we were already in a state where there is not enough food. Wasting some food is better than having food shortages. Much better.

We've built a society that's so litigious that companies are incentivized to recommend throwing away food even if there's less than a 0.01% chance of food-borne illness. Our waste is in part out of fear of getting sued or sick, but I'm not convinced the waste is the lesser of two evils. Food poisoning sucks, but it's survivable. Unlike starvation.

A good example of this caution is eggs and refrigeration, for which American's and European's have opposite ways of handling things.

I think the point missing is that food that get wasted could not arrive where it is needed before getting rot. Letting aside the expenses to do that. The problem is not that we waste food, as it would not solve starvation, the problem is that in those places where people has no food, there is no production.

In 2017 when that article was last updated, yeah sure. Not sure you can make that declaration in 2022. The combination of record poverty caused by Covid lockdowns and food supply chain disruptions caused by the war in Ukraine has put millions of people worldwide in famine conditions: https://www.reuters.com/world/world-faces-unprecedented-glob...

Exactly how bad it will get remains to be seen. But the causes of famine are generally political and in terms of total body counts the worst ones are basically "big country X really screws up" (e.g. China and the Soviet Union in the 20th century) and/or wars and I don't think we have any guarantee that those things won't happen again.

FWIW, China has a very long history of famines. Twentieth century wasn't an outlier - although in the West it's been heavily publicised for propaganda reasons.

My impression from[0] is most places have long histories of fammines, without practical contraceptives, we're all moties and one or two bad harvesta from a Having a Bad Time.

[0]https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they...

It was the worst famine - and, arguably, period - in the history of the world:

- tens of millions died due to starvation from central planning issues (variously causing: a plague of locusts; Mao wanting to save face so refused foreign aid and maintained being a net exporter of food while people were starving; diverting people away from agriculture to metal production to meet the five year plan)

- millions died from government beatings/torturings to death, and suicide due to hopelessness and government destruction of cultural traditions in the name of centrally planned progress

Now one might say that there may have been even more harmful centrally planned economies, i.e. the USSR and Nazi Germany, but at best any of the candidates is competing to be only the third worst disaster in the history of the world.

It was the worst, but some of the ones before it weren't far behind - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines_in_China.

Also I find it curious that among the possible causes you forgot to mention World War 2. What would you say if someone omitted that when explaining fifties in Europe?

I would think that's normal, because WW2 was 1939-1945, and even though it was waged there it didn't include events that would be considered a direct cause of millions starving in Europe. Which is why they didn't.

If you think WW2 was a major contributor to the Great Leap Forward deaths then just explain, rather than making oblique comments about how it's strange I didn't mention the thing that you're thinking of (but not mentioning).

Almost a billion are still going hungry.

There is more nutritious food than before, and there is more toxic/unhealthy/processed food than before.

What's changed is the ratio between the two, but the absolute level per capita of both is higher, which is great for anyone who is discerning and self-controlled enough to avoid the toxic stuff.

> We can now travel distances in a time that was unimaginable before, but we breathe the poison as a direct result of it.

A city full of horse manure wasn't all that healthy, either.

> We can now grow enough food to feed the world

We grow food on topsoil.

Topsoil is soil with microorganisms, worms and insects in it. You cannot grow food on sterile soil.

Topsoil takes a long time to form, and very short time to be consumed.

We are using topsoil at a higher rate than it is replenished. The rate at which we use topsoil increases over time.

We are very wasteful with our use of topsoil. We discard ugly vegetables, or vegetables outside certain arbitrary parameters despite them being perfectly edible, or simply to keep prices down.

The reality is: over time, that statement is false. Topsoil is dying, and so are we.

We're learning to grow food in ways that increases the amount and fertility of topsoil, so it's not a foregone conclusion. E.g. Permaculture, Syntropic and Regenerative agriculture, etc. Check out the transformation of the Loess Plateau in China. It was rendered into a wasteland by bad farming practices and then re-vegetated and revitalized: http://eempc.org/lessons-of-the-loess-plateau/

Not to mention things like the seawater rice: https://www.bloombergquint.com/china/chinese-scientists-disc...

At scale? Can this be implemented globally in a few decades? What about making it work in places going dry?

Desalination plants and wastewater treatment plants have existed for decades, but are expensive. Today, many people don't have access to clean water because of this.

Rifles and ammunition are cheaper than new water infrastructure so war over water will take place everywhere before water conservation technology is deployed.

> At scale?

Yes, of course, all lifeforms reproduce exponentially.

Literally the biosphere would (re-)vivify the Earth automatically if we just stop destroying it. It's been doing it for four billion years.

> Can this be implemented globally in a few decades?

That I cannot say, but I believe the limiting factors are social/political rather than biological or physical. In other words, yes, if we have the will we could probably turn things around, go from destruction to regeneration, within three decades. It would be unprecedented but I don't see any intrinsic physical reasons that we couldn't do it.

The revitalization of the Loess Plateau took less than three decades, and as a side-effect it now produces all the material needed to repeat the process in a new place.

> What about making it work in places going dry?

Yes. Not only can we do this in places going dry, we can convert desert to (productive food) forest where ever we need it. E.g. "Greening the Desert" https://www.greeningthedesertproject.org/ project in Jordan. People are using ecological principles all over the world to regenerate large areas.

> Desalination plants and wastewater treatment plants have existed for decades, but are expensive. Today, many people don't have access to clean water because of this.

It's a huge problem, it's true. But progress is being made. E.g. check out the projects described in "India's Water Revolution" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8nqnOcoLqE

We can transform the deserts into paradise. The rains will fall. (I'm going to stop now before I start quoting passages from "Dune") ;)

> Rifles and ammunition are cheaper than new water infrastructure so war over water will take place everywhere before water conservation technology is deployed.

Water projects are far cheaper and easier than making bullets. Check out the video I linked above.

Well, that won't do. You are not thinking at scale.

It requires training people that do not have the resources to acquire training.

Could you elaborate a little?

I mean education is also a (potentially) exponential process, in the sense that e.g. one literate person can teach many others to read, who can then teach even more people.

Certainly some people will need resources as well as training to get started in their area, but we can afford to do that.

We have like 50 years to come up with a scalable solution to the problem of how to grow enough food for a growing population on dying topsoil[1] while having less fresh water[2], and while overfishing most species to extinction.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJhpoYwAqFA

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjsThobgq7Q

That is not considering worse scenarios like arctic frozen methane melting and releasing a lethal load of methane into the atmosphere.

Each time you mention the subject, people talk about some obscure, prototype program somewhere that requires Ivy League engineers and millions of dollars to run. Dude, wake up, billions of people do not even have toilets and you think in less than 50 years they will be doing futuristic shit on a zero dollar budget?

That's not going to happen. But what is going to happen is the same people picking up guns and fighting each other to death over topsoil and water.

We're on the same side you and I, you're "preaching to the choir." But I'm telling you, things are not as dark as they seem! We're learning and applying that learning.

I know about topsoil degradation and erosion, but it's something we're learning to prevent. E.g. Gabe Brown's "Treating the Farm as an Ecosystem with Gabe Brown Part 1, The 5 Tenets of Soil Health" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A He increases his topsoil volume and fertility year-on-year, and his farm is more profitable!

Population growth seems like it's leveling off all on it's own, mostly as women get more education and wealth and have fewer children per capita. Japan has already started contracting in population, eh?

Water is going to be a problem in many areas, but again, people are learning and applying ecological principles to regenerate wastelands. Did you check out the Greening the Desert project?

> That is not considering worse scenarios like arctic frozen methane melting and releasing a lethal load of methane into the atmosphere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis#Curre...

The clathrate gun hypothesis is scary, I know, it's kept me up at night. But since there's nothing to do about it beyond just fixing things anyway, the solution to that is the same as the solution to everything else: learn to live in harmony with nature. And it seems like the danger might not be a great as we originally feared. I hope so!

> Each time you mention the subject, people talk about some obscure, prototype program somewhere that requires Ivy League engineers and millions of dollars to run.

Well, you're mentioning it to me and I'm not doing that.

Permaculture (just to talk about something I have some experience with) is easy to learn, easy to teach, fun and profitable to practice, and doesn't require "Ivy League engineers and millions of dollars to run."

> billions of people do not even have toilets

All they need is Eisenia fetida. They eat poop and poop soil. It's that simple.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenia_fetida

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermicompost

> you think in less than 50 years they will be doing futuristic shit on a zero dollar budget?

Well I didn't say that did I? What I said, and I believe it, is that we have all the information and technology we need already to fix our environmental problems, and that the limiting factor is social (getting the word out) rather than technological (we don't have to e.g. invent fusion first.)

That's my thesis.

I'm not talking about "futuristic shit", except that ecology could be considered futuristic? It's a young science anyway. What I'm talking about is applying ecological principles to solve our basic human needs (the lower levels of Maslow's Hierarchy, eh?)

It will probably take more than a "zero dollar budget" (where did you get that from?) But again, ecological regeneration is the default condition of life. It literally is solar-powered self-improving nanotechnology, eh?

You can start anywhere, with next to nothing, and increase biomass and diversity and fertility. I took some sandy soil, added some wood chips that some chickens had pooped in and a few potatoes, and now there's a lively potato patch where before there was a bit of bare dirt. Zero initial budget.

But yeah, if we "lean into it" with money and resources and people then we can accelerate the healing.

Come, let's grow a beautiful future together for all humankind. I truly believe it's possible, and that the only thing holding us back is that we haven't fully realized it yet.

Cheers!

Well, this is clearly not the way corporations see it.

The way corporation executives see it is: "I am going to get a nice bonus this quarter by boosting profits and whatever happens next is the next guy's problem. By the time anything becomes a problem I'll be partying in my superyacht."

And this is the way many problems are treated as well.

That's (part of) the social "limiting factor" I'm talking about. It's starting to change though, and younger folks especially are taking the lead.

In re: corporations, I noticed that the first video you linked to is from CNBC and the second is from USA TODAY, both large corporations.