Last edited Thu Jan 10, 2013, 11:15 PM - Edit history (1)
First off, there was an article today confirming what we already know to be true: up to half of all harvested food is wasted. It is never eaten. It rots, it is eaten by vermin, or it is rejected by supermarkets for superficial blemishes. Capturing even a fraction of that would get us a long way toward feeding the hungry.
2nd - Americas diet, and increasingly that of China, is geared toward monocropping grain for feeding cattle, poultry and swine. That is an inefficient use of resources. The feed:meat conversion ratio for confinement cattle is around 7:1, meaning it takes 7 calories of vegetable protein to gain us one pound of meat. That is extremely wasteful.
3rd - The largest irrigated crop in America is sod. Lawns. It occupies THREE TIMES the area that all the corn in America does. Think on that for a minute. How many gardens could be planted in that space? During WWII, 40% of all household food was grown at home. We can do it again.
4th - Agriculture can go up, not just out. Fruit & nut trees take up little space compared to the food they produce. Cool-season and shade-tolerant plants can be planted in the understory.
5th - Discounting lawns, misused monocropped fields, and verticulte agriculture, there is a large amount of 'wasted' space in road medians, right of ways, etc. Go to Europe or Asia and you see food planted all over the place. This is how China, with 4 times our population and ONE TENTH the arable land has been able to feed itself for millenia.
6th - feed household scraps to egg layers. If every person in America fed their table scraps to a few hens instead of landfilling them, we would not need a single confinement egg factory. Not one.
There are more but that should suffice for now. We can feed the global population without GMOs and without tearing up virgin savannah.
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