The Future of Food

The Billionth Child

On the 31st of October 2011, Danica May Camacho was born in the Philippines at a government run hospital, she was the 7 billionth person on our planet. “Dear kid, welcome to our mess” read one of the reactions to this historic child. 7 billion people are on this planet, all of which need food, water and shelter. Are we overcrowded? Looking at places such as Tokyo, Japan and Shanghai, China this may be an easy assumption to make, but I'd like to think otherwise. I believe, at the moment, we are largely inefficient as a species e.g. 70% of water withdrawal is used for agriculture, 70% of the crops we grow go toward crop feed and livestock, which in turn occupies 30% of the earth's land mass. Further still, it takes 16 pounds of grain to produce 1 pound of meat, so as you can see this whole process is highly inefficient. By 2050 food production must rise by 70%, this will include a 42% rise in cereal and 100% rise in beef production. If we want our billionth child to live the safe, care free life that some of us have been fortunate enough to live, then we must either change our habits or change the way we produce food. If many of us curbed our highly carnivorous diets and ate more vegetables we would not need the predicted 100% increase in beef production, if you are interested in reading more about the benefits of switching your diet, here is an excellent blog http://helixhouse.wordpress.com/. This is fine if you are inclined to cut out meat from your diet but what if you're not, I would not want to be forced to change my carnivorous ways, I like meat, I enjoy a good steak every now and then. Curbing our desire for meat is only going to prolong the inevitable, more importantly we need to change the process in which we produce the food we eat. We have been able to sustain this obsession with meat thus far with selective breeding, creating larger, more productive animals. Scientists have put research into different ways of processing the animals we eat, you may have heard of the “Pink Goop” used by major fast food restaurants such as Mc Donalds. Mechanically separated chicken, soaked in ammonia, then artificially flavoured again to get rid of the bad taste. These methods work on a large scale, they may not be appetizing, but they do help make the food process more efficient. As we grow as a population, that is still fixated with meat, we will have to accept these peculiar practices. Eat your Pink Goop or become vegetarian, that will be the choices our billionth child will have to make in the future. Very few will have access to “real” meat in the sense we know it today, quite simply we will not have enough space, or water to grow the huge amount of crops needed to sustain a meat reliant diet. There are scientists exploring new ways of processing meat, highly controversial but may be absolutely necessary if we are to continue eating meat as we do. These new methods will, in one way or another come from cloning, whether it be from cloned milk or individually created animal body parts. rnIt sounds like something out of Mary Shelleys' Frankenstein, grotesque carcasses growing in laboratories and factories. rnThough expensive at the moment, technology advances and demand will cause the “TestTube” burger to be more commercially viable and abundant than regular meat. We will be living in a world where our food is so modified it would be impossible for it to have come from an animal. Depending on your perspective this could be an extremely beneficial advancement or big food corporations pumping our food with more chemicals. It's an inevitable world, a world which will need a lot of regulations and scrutiny to make sure it is the world we want for our billionth child. Osteopathy Oxford Improve Your Mind