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The hypocrisy in this thread is ridiculous. Okay fine, we can increase the shelf life of fruits and vegetables. That does no good to people in India that are forced to use GMO crops that aren't indigenous to that part of the world.
Organic crops will never be enough for the current population. The problem to most of the world troubles stems from population, and those that have families, yet they can't afford to feed themselves, let alone 5-6 family members.
The famous engineer and futurist Buckminster Fuller, who invented the geodesic dome, said in many ways that we grow enough food to feed everyone in the world, if we could just get it to people to eat before it rots or gets spoiled by insects and rodents. In other words, he saw world hunger primarily as a logistical issue.
Keep in mind that most modern agriculture is oil-based and we literally eat oil in the form of fertilizer. This has made the world seem more abundant and "small" (transport wise) than it really is.
With the peaking of global oil supplies and permanently rising costs, food will have to get more local, as it should. The world is hugely overpopulated in terms of sustainable carrying-capacity but oil has fooled people into thinking otherwise.
And there's a lot more to it than just feeding people. Nature is being destroyed daily to "meet the growing needs" of people. To me, that's the biggest ecological crime. Even renewable energy is part of the problem, with major disruption of landscapes from wind turbines and solar farms.
I think this invention has the potential of creating another food revolution similar to the one caused by the advent of refrigerated transport. Being able to distribute and store fresh produce without refrigeration is a big energy saver, and the concurrent reduction in waste allows food to be grown less expensively and distributed farther than it is now, and that's obviously a good thing. Obvious to all except the few who are just interested in causing conflict and tearing down whatever doesn't fit their world view.
I think another "food revolution" would just be another excuse to ignore the blight of human overpopulation on nature. Petroleum made the original Green Revolution possible, more than anything. Food grown naturally will end up impacting nature less. Too much land is already being grabbed to support people at the expense of other species. Those who pare down the world's problems to human hunger are missing major context. We are still behaving like a plague species.
Birth control should be a top priority vs. turning every livable part of the world into a commodities warehouse for one species.
We can move armies across the globe and sustain them for years, even longer than a decade. The logistics of moving materiel already exists and is proven. The food producing countries already have the means to put food where the paying demands exist.
The problem is money. There is no money in feeding people who can't pay for it.
You can get food to last for years, we can already do that. What good does it do anyone if the people who need to eat the food can't get it because of other problems? The transport and distribution of food really isn't a big problem compared to the reasons food isn't available to those that don't have any.
Hungry people think about eating and not much else. It becomes central to everything they do. When they have enough to eat, they start thinking about other things. Those other things are what gives pause to those that control food.
Go visit a country where many of the people are hungry or live day to day when it comes to food. They spend their entire days figuring out where to get food. Once they get food and are assured they will have more tomorrow, they start thinking about improving the rest of their existence. For certain interests, that is very scary.
The problem isn't money, it's human overpopulation and the blind "economic growth" mantra. Physical resources make life possible. Money is just a labor compensation medium, often perpetuating resource depletion with shortsighted cost/benefit analysis.
Money has enabled people to wipe out major forests and a huge percentage of marine life. It's naive to assume that 9+ billion people can continue to be fed while so many are starving already. Hunger groups have been milking that storyline for decades while promoting the attitude that the human population needn't stop growing. A given region's local food production is the biggest determinate of natural carrying capacity, but these schemes try to override that. Constantly trying to exceed nature's limits destabilizes future prospects (we need slack in the system vs. just-in-time frenzy). Man is clever but arrogant and too numerous.
A lot of these food schemes ignore a critical point: We should stop acting like nature owes billions more people a high quality of life. People are like any species that exceeds its carrying capacity. Technology can help but not cure fundamental issues of supply and demand. Same goes for energy. Stop acting like a huge human population must be sustained at any cost.
The role of (formerly) cheap oil in agriculture and food transport is taken for granted as eternal, but geology says otherwise. Any food scheme based on the notion of endlessly cheap transport will fail eventually. Ships, trains and trucks are unlikely to be powered by solar or batteries, and more food should be grown in the region where it's consumed.
Yup, the problem isn't figuring out ways to feed more people or preserve food from spoiling to do it either.
Not more food to feed more people, fewer people to feed is the answer.
Renewable energy doesn't help with that problem either because its being marketed as a panacea, look, free energy. The use of energy in and of itself means using more resources, not fewer. Heat a swimming pool? No problem, use solar power to do it. How does that help in drought areas and should the end of a drought mean going back to the old resource intensive lifestyles that caused much of the problem in the first place.
Already vast lands are being deforested to make way for crops like coffee and being shipped all over the world. It gets there in plenty of time to be consumed before spoiling but that doesn't reduce the over farming going on.
The one big thing often forgotten when it comes to consuming resources is that we have only so much land and water available.
Even if we recycled nearly all of the waste that doesn't do one thing to reduce consumption, there are more people everyday, it is unsustainable.
In times past, more people spent a larger portion of their time growing the food they ate. Instead of running around to get the newest phone or car, they put human energy to work instead of energy that depleted natural resources.
What happens to those 400 million people in the impoverished parts of India if they all have low costs electric from solar or other "renewable" resources? They will have electricity and that means having something to plug in to use it. It's the equivalent of another USA coming on line with the same wants and needs of this country. Where are all the raw materials going to come from and where is the food going to come from because instead of growing food they will become little more than consumers.
Simply providing more of something doesn't solve the problems is using it in the first place. No matter how far you inject renewable energy, the availability of electric drives the want for a smartphone. It has be made somewhere and even if the energy used to operate the manufacturing is renewable, the raw materials eventually come from the planet and there is only so much available.
The longer we keep going down the road of thinking renewable energy will solve most problems the worst things will get.
Non-spoiling food isn't much of an answer either, it is a shortsighted view of problem solving. Like the person who is constantly thirsty, another cup of water is going to help them live if the problem they have is bleeding to death.
The problem isn't money, it's human overpopulation and the blind "economic growth" mantra. Physical resources make life possible. Money is just a labor compensation medium, often perpetuating resource depletion with shortsighted cost/benefit analysis.
Money has enabled people to wipe out major forests and a huge percentage of marine life. It's naive to assume that 9+ billion people can continue to be fed while so many are starving already. Hunger groups have been milking that storyline for decades while promoting the attitude that the human population needn't stop growing. A given region's local food production is the biggest determinate of natural carrying capacity, but these schemes try to override that. Constantly trying to exceed nature's limits destabilizes future prospects. Man is clever but arrogant and too numerous.
A lot of these food schemes ignore a critical point: We should stop acting like nature owes billions more people a high quality of life. People are like any species that exceeds its carrying capacity. Technology can help but not cure fundamental issues of supply and demand. Same goes for energy. Stop acting like a huge human population must be sustained at any cost.
The role of (formerly) cheap oil in agriculture and food transport is taken for granted as eternal, but geology says otherwise. Any food scheme based on the notion of endlessly cheap transport will fail eventually. Ships, trains and trucks are unlikely to be powered by solar or batteries, and more food should be grown in the region where it's consumed.
I was referring to money as the reason food is equitably distributed now. We pay large farming concerns not to grow food. We grow food only to let it sit in fields. We allow companies like Nestle to drill water wells in arid locations yet the people living on the land don;t have clean water to drink.
Money is not the final root cause of the problem but money is the reason so many people are hungry in the here and now.
If money isn't part of the here and now problem, then why do the wealthy the world over not go hungry? Simple, they have the money to make sure their stomachs are full every night.
True, the global problem of population exceeding resources needs to be addressed but before that can take place we can either start dealing with existing hunger problem or watch as those who need food decide to take it upon themselves the solve the problem their way.
In South America people were hungry. They saw the way to solve the problem not in reducing their populations but increasing their wealth and that is exactly what they did. They deforested their land to grow crops, not to feed themselves but to increase their wealth. The with more wealth they bought food and created other demands. That started the cycle of exponential consumption. Rather than burn oil, some of those countries embarked on huge renewable energy consumption efforts. That did absolutely nothing to stop the razing of their land. Renewable energy only made it possible for them to run their cars on "renewable" fuels as if that was going to cure anything.
South America is rapidly on its way to becoming a desert. Oh, they'll have lots of renewable energy so they can drive cars across barren lands that once used to contribute to the planets ability to sustain itself.
So far, the answer has been: who cares so long as we can drive an electric car, charge a smartphone or heat the pool with solar energy and you can't eat any of it and each one requires vast amounts of raw materials that are not renewable.
The hypocrisy in this thread is ridiculous. Okay fine, we can increase the shelf life of fruits and vegetables. That does no good to people in India that are forced to use GMO crops that aren't indigenous to that part of the world.
What a bizarre comment. Nobody is being forced to plant anything anywhere. And there is no GMO food being grown at present in India.
Farmers who grow GMO cotton in India do so eagerly because they get double the yield of conventional cotton.
That idea is amazing and simple I hope to be able to buy the product or create it myself. Simple ideas work best in life most of the time ,but what about dehydration? Doesn't that make food last for many years?
From the article (mostly which is just a say so and proves nothing):
"More produce means more food to feed hungry people"
Prove it. Having more food available hasn't been proved to reduce hunger.
Then this:
“You could walk from one end of India to the other over a period of 10 weeks, and the vegetables and fruit you carry will still be fresh for the entire time.”
No one is carrying fresh fruits and vegetables across India by foot and then sitting down to eat those fruits and vegetables they carried across the country. That is a figment of imagination.
First of all, with the invention of flying machines and fast shipping, it doesn't take 10 weeks to get food anywhere unless there are other reason for it and it isn't logistics or any capabilities to transport food quickly.
There are already well proven means of transporting foods prior to it spoiling.
You can order fresh fruit and get it to your door in a few days anytime you want it and in any season. It isn't spoiled and not even close to being so.
Ask anyone who has ever used a root cellar about keeping things for a long time without spoiling, this is a nifty idea that someone came up with to make money.
Read the article, everything is "he said...", there are no citations to any other sources that prove anything this infomercial article contains.
Lets not forget this:
"In 1976, he reported that there was now enough resources on Earth to feed, clothe and house everyone at a higher standard of living than anyone in all recorded history has ever known."
Well, if in 1976 there was enough food to feed everyone on Earth then why are there still hungry people, because all the food spoils? Food isn't spoiling because it can't get to where it needs to be, it spoils because it sits unconsumed. You want proof? There already exists the capabilities to transport food anywhere on this planet before it spoils. If the food exists, why isn't it being transported to where people need it?
Money. It takes money to transport food and money to pay for it once it gets to where it will be consumed. How will non-spoiling food solve the problem that people can't buy it when it arrives? Somehow, the food just sitting there, not spoiling is going to make it easier for people to buy it? They can't pay for it now!
That is what this is, an infotainment article with no sources other than the author relaying what the self identified inventor claims.
And then this contradiction which casts doubt on the entire premise of the OP:
"More produce means more food to feed hungry people"
"In 1976, he reported that there was now enough resources on Earth to feed, clothe and house everyone at a higher standard of living than anyone in all recorded history has ever known."
That is from the OP and article cited.
So which is it? Either there is enough food to feed everyone on the planet or more food (available through less spoilage) is needed.
Which one is it?
The idea that with enough food to feed everyone on the planet but people going hungry because the food needed to feed them is spoiling is ridiculous on the face of it. You can live in Maine and get fresh fruit and vegetables from South America, Australia in a few days if you want to pay for it. Now, there it is, the paying for it.
The population issue just piggybacks on a longer term problem but is pertinent because the planets ability to sustain food production is highly questionable in the longer term given the increases in population. Even then, spoilage won't be the problem, availability will.
So where are the facts here? So far we have only what someone said and who was introduced as someone famous. Talk about stacking the deck.
If he was so famous, did anyone here other than the OP know about him before? Maybe?
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Physical resources matter more than money
