Hacker News Reader

Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

The US produces several times more food than we need.

A single acre can easily produce enough food for a small family and we have 408 million acres under cultivation. Corn is something of a super star at 8,250 lb. of corn per acre. However, we end up feeding most of this to animals which drastically reduces overall efficiency.

So, sure we are going to spend a lot of effort maximizing food production. But a 50% drop in the food supply over a few years would not be that big of an issue with a small increase in grain prices and a significant bump in meat costs.

View on HN

One area the U.S. could definitely focus on is reducing food waste. Restaurants throw away a lot of food that was perfectly good 4 days prior. The habits of people here regarding food waste is significant, too - I have a friend who will go to Taco John late at night, get six tacos, three potato things, 10 packets of sauce, eat two tacos and a potato thing and leave the rest to waste in his kitchen counter. He sees it as $5, but the costs to society may be more than that. Or my girlfriend's kids, who will fidget and fight about eating a burrito until we throw away half of it. Based on my vague observations, at least half the food produced gets tossed out for some reason (and not even composted!).

For instance, significant resources went into creating meat like this 30-40 lbs I saw wasted in a dumpster outside a restaurant in Denver : http://i.imgur.com/ns4TunE.jpg Beef is one of the most water intensive food products, too.

Most of what you complain about can be reduced by appropriately costing-out the externalities of meat production.

Of course, the problem always comes when big corporate AG can essentially shut down public debate by buying all the seats of any discussion (i.e., corruption).

Indeed, restaurants and individuals waste food because they can afford to. It's a shame if the only way to stop that is for food to become dramatically more expensive. Ending government subsidies on agriculture and food would be a good step to consumers realizing the actual cost of food.

Food waste has been remarkably resilient to reduction.

Where we used to see waste on the farm or in the marketing chain, it's now at the home or restaurant. Which means after a great deal of energy and effort have been put into harvesting, processing, transporting, and storing it.

Late night runs to a place called Taco John? Sounds like a post-alcohol food run. Maybe start there with the food waste issue :).

If it was me, I'd out the tacos in the fridge and eat them the next day. I think he believes next-day tacos are worthless due to flavor and texture changes, or some vague philosophy of only eating the freshest fast food.

My girlfriend's son operates similarly; he often makes a box of macaroni and cheese for dinner, and only eats half of it. He refuses to eat left over macaroni, so regularly at least half the box is wasted. My suggestion would be to splits box in half prior to preparation, but so far that has yet to be impmemented.

Increasing the productivity of farms reduces their impact on the environment, too, so there's a powerful incentive to maximize productivity even if we're overproducing.

That really depends on how you change the productivity, and no, reduced impact doesn't flow from increased productivity by necessity.

Topsoil erosion, salinization, coastal "dead zones", riparian pollution (the Mississippi is among the most polluted waterways in the world), runoff from CAFO operations (including spills from hog farms in the Carolinas poisoning rivers), etc.

Or I could just point you at the Jevons paradox.

In the US, we are now using 40-50% of our corn to produce ethanol. ~40% of corn goes directly to feed livestock.

Some of the by-product of ethanol production (dried distillers' grain) is then also used as livestock feed.

The US absolutely produces enough food, way more than we need, we just aren't using it to actually feed people.

That's a fairly recent development.

For scale: The us produced 1.63 billion gallons in 2000 vs 13.9 billion U.S. liquid gallons (52.6 billion liters) of ethanol fuel in 2011. Almost all of that was from the increase in corn production over that time period (7.5 Billion in 2000/2001 vs ~11 billion in 2012/2013) I think we are ~12-13 billion/year now.

There is a great cart of Corn production http://www.ers.usda.gov/media/521847/cornuse.jpg which shows just how rapid that increase really was.

http://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/corn/background.aspx

PS: Per acre corn yields are up something like 10x over the last 100years that's crazy vs a ~3x population increase.

> PS: Per acre corn yields are up something like 10x over the last 100years that's crazy vs a ~3x population increase.

I agree. The increases in yield are just incredible.

You're right, ethanol production has just exploded in the past several years. Along with that, corn prices have increased along with ag. land prices.

As a result, farmers have done quite well for themselves over the past decade. It will be interesting to see what would happen if ethanol production were to decline substantially. I would argue that as we shift toward an electric powered auto fleet, this is inevitable. I think the only question is will it happen in 10, 20 or 30 years?

So, essentially, meat will get pricier and people will switch to eating more vegetables? Nothing to be cheerful about, but at least it sounds better than scenarios I thought about right after reading the article.

Current meat consumption is unsustainable anyway; it wasn't going to last.

Lab-grown meat should bring costs down (both in raw resource usage and in the market), enough that I expect it to nearly completely replace traditional meat.

I expect in 50 years, the only "real" meat, like from a slaughtered animal, will be eaten on special occasions, or by the wealthy. Sort of like the internal combustion engine "saving the horse."

Lab-grown meat would eventually allow for lower cost with superior nutrition, texture, and taste.

I try to balance my innate pessimism with some hopefulness. There is so much slack in our current production methods that it is absolutely possible to keep pace, provided we make investments in the correct areas of research.

Vegetarian here, for what it's worth. I would probably eat lab-meat regularly in my lifetime if it progresses.

Hope they will be able to do lab grown liver as well as bones with all the cartilage and marrow included. Many people consider these more important to health than the meat. Better yet, more people need to be educated on what it means to provide a farm animal with a naturally healthy and happy life so that a healthy product is harvested. Cows should eat primarily grass and hay, chickens should eat bugs, worms, greens, seeds, and whatever else chickens like.

I suppose that managing the fields with rotational grazing isn't quite as simple as the factory methods that churn out the naturally unhealthy animals that result in the relatively unhealthy animal meat products, but it's probably a whole lot simpler that it will be manufacturing superior-to-natural lab-grown meat.

Good luck with that.

It's ~$1000 for a lab-grown burger, if not more.

The future of protein is in bugs. Lots and lots of bugs.

There are a lot of industrial applications for agricultural products. Loss of arable land will put a pinch on those supply chains and increase costs of non-food manufactured goods.

We produce several times more than we need with the current climate, water and energy inputs. If the climate shifts with long term trends, and water becomes scarce under those trends, and the fossil fuel energy inputs cause long term CO2 release exacerbating/locking in the climate shifts - then it is a risk that the surplus food we generate today will not be as readily available in the future.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com