Sustainable Paleo Diet

[Esote]

Looking for some good information about this question :

How could it be possible to feed 7 billion people more or less, with a high fat - low carb diet ?

Raising cattle on grass for so many people seems to be a quite demanding task, for instance.

Any studies in this area that you know of and would be kind enough to share ?

 

[mcb]

Low-carb diets didn't create this population problem, or the inequities that result in many not having enough to eat. I don't think you can feed everybody well without addressing quite a number of issues, not the least of which is pathological or pathologically-inspired leadership.

You can only feed what the arable land will support, and I for one certainly don't know what those limits are. When you go over that, something has to give somewhere. The whole system is badly built from the ground up, if you look at it from a human point of view. If you think about something else feeding upon us, maybe it is just fine from their point of view.

 

[Peam]

As well as cattle, there's fish chickens and pigs etc. which can be eaten.

Pigs will eat anything, fruit and veg, roots, earthworms. If fruit and veg were grown naturally without all the chemicals, most of it could be fed to pigs, and a massive breeding program undertaken to produce many piglets. Maybe enough bacon for everyone.

 

[mcb]

If people had been eating the right kinds of foods along, there wouldn't BE this many people. It makes it kind of hard to answer the question.

 

[Laura]

Not to worry, I expect the universe to take care of the over-population problem rather soon.

 

[LQB]

Looking for some good information about this question :

How could it be possible to feed 7 billion people more or less, with a high fat - low carb diet ?

Raising cattle on grass for so many people seems to be a quite demanding task, for instance.

Any studies in this area that you know of and would be kind enough to share ?

Joel Salatin of Polyface farms has addressed this many times. Basically his argument revolves around local farms supporting the local areas and making best use of the land in ways that improve it and extend production capacity. For this to work in the context of your question would require significant changes in demographics (my opinion). His website is polyfacefarms.com and you might check out some youtube videos.

 

[mcb]

Joel Salatin of Polyface farms has addressed this many times. Basically his argument revolves around local farms supporting the local areas and making best use of the land in ways that improve it and extend production capacity. For this to work in the context of your question would require significant changes in demographics (my opinion). His website is polyfacefarms.com and you might check out some youtube videos.

Right now you might have to convert part of the oceans to pasture. Maybe adding a nice big chunk of comet or asteroid would help. If it didn't increase land then at least it would reduce population. The answer is out there somewhere.

Joel Salatin probably doesn't take into account that WE are food, and this is no organic ranch. I have seen some of the pros and cons of his ideas and I really don't know if they even could work, given the actual circumstances under which we live and the complexities of the problem (if you want to feed THAT many people). If they could work, I don't think they would be permitted to work.

 

[LQB]

Joel Salatin of Polyface farms has addressed this many times. Basically his argument revolves around local farms supporting the local areas and making best use of the land in ways that improve it and extend production capacity. For this to work in the context of your question would require significant changes in demographics (my opinion). His website is polyfacefarms.com and you might check out some youtube videos.

Right now you might have to convert part of the oceans to pasture. Maybe adding a nice big chunk of comet or asteroid would help. If it didn't increase land then at least it would reduce population. The answer is out there somewhere.

Joel Salatin probably doesn't take into account that WE are food, and this is no organic ranch. I have seen some of the pros and cons of his ideas and I really don't know if they even could work, given the actual circumstances under which we live and the complexities of the problem (if you want to feed THAT many people). If they could work, I don't think they would be permitted to work.

I agree but he is correct - that it is possible to generate far more nutritious healthy food than we do now AND heal the land making it capable of producing even more. The methods are sound and it involves raising the animals and the land together. Would this ever be allowed? Not over a dead PTB body, I'm sure.

 

[Gimpy]

Not to worry, I expect the universe to take care of the over-population problem rather soon.

Well....that's creepy and a relief by turns. ;)

 

[bngenoh]

If you're on the Paleo diet you can extrapolate and see that one cow can feed many people for a good long while. That being said:

Joel Salatin of Polyface farms has addressed this many times. Basically his argument revolves around local farms supporting the local areas and making best use of the land in ways that improve it and extend production capacity. For this to work in the context of your question would require significant changes in demographics (my opinion). His website is polyfacefarms.com and you might check out some youtube videos.

Right now you might have to convert part of the oceans to pasture. Maybe adding a nice big chunk of comet or asteroid would help. If it didn't increase land then at least it would reduce population. The answer is out there somewhere.

Not to worry, I expect the universe to take care of the over-population problem rather soon.

Since it doesn't look like the masses are going to change their ways without a swift kick in the head, it looks like the universe is going to give humanity what it is asking for. No it won't be fun, but hey growing up isn't all fun and games. Grow up we must or die.

 

[lwu02eb]

Totally with Laura on this one. There can be no such thing as 7 billion people on a paleo diet and therefore it simply will not be. This should not come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the true history of agriculture.

 

[LQB]

Totally with Laura on this one. There can be no such thing as 7 billion people on a paleo diet and therefore it simply will not be. This should not come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the true history of agriculture.

True, I think, - there is no reasonable path to getting there from here. So, eoste, it doesn't make sense to make diet choices based on what is "sustainable" in this screwy world. But it is good to know what is actually possible through creative stewardship of the land and animals.

 

[Esote]

Thanks to all for your feedback.
It seems that there is no answer to this question in the world as it is nowadays.
Comets, earthquakes, wars, disease, radioactivity... might play a big role in the coming years, but hunger, famines may reach a prominent place in the changes to come.
The world has never been so low in terms of food supplies in the modern times (45 days of food in stock in the most "advanced" countries, when it were six months of supplies twenty years ago, which was then considered as the minimum to be safe).
China already doesn't have enough agricultural land for its own people...

It does make sense :

... to know what is actually possible through creative stewardship of the land and animals.

I don't think you can feed everybody well without addressing quite a number of issues, not the least of which is pathological or pathologically-inspired leadership.

 

[Laura]

Fact is, as archaeologists know, it was agriculture that both needed and permitted/encouraged massive population growth. Agriculture has/is in process of, destroying humankind. Richard Firestone et al. write in The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes:

"When people use the term extinction, they mean that many living species vanished. This is just part of the equation, however. Another side is that some species survived. In all past major extinctions, with ecosystems out of balance, many of the surviving species experienced explosive growth. This is what happened 13,000 years ago, when an unusual mix of conditions created favorable conditions for the human species.

First, there were new genes. Spurred by genetic mutations that produced a burst of creativity and technological resourcefulness.... The warmer climate, coupled with humans' newfound resourcefulness, fostered the invention of agriculture, freeing humans from a nomadic lifestyle. The development of better housing, clothing, and weapons all allowed human populations to increase.

Third, increasing populations led more people to live together in villages and towns, where the division of labor allowed a larger pool of skilled talent to develop. This fueled an almost constant technological boom in many fields, producing, among other things, pottery making, metalworking, and writing.

All that may seem positive, except that the burgeoning population, initially fostered by the extinction Event, contained the seeds of many of our current troubles. When overpopulation occurs in any species - whether it is rabbits, locusts, lemmings, or people - a host of problems comes along with it, including epidemics, starvation, extreme aggression, ecosystem destruction, and scarce resources, every one of which is a major pressing problem in our society today.

An extinction sequence comprises the following stages:

1) A major catastrophe leads to the disappearance of some species.
2) These disappearances lead to the overpopulation of some surviving species.
3) Overpopulation leads to devastating depopulation.

This equation has held true for every past extinction event. In the current sequence, we have passed through the first two stages as a species but not the last stage, depopulation..." (Richard Firestone, Allen West, Simon Warwick-Smith, The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes, Bear & Co., 2006.)

According to the mainstream scientific view, the Neolithic Revolution - the switch to agriculture - was one of the steps that led us to where we are today. This event involved the development of a system for the production and storage of food. Apparently, a human society already highly diversified and in the process of changing over to growing and storing food was already  - according to Gellner and others  - a 'ritually restrained society'.

"But it [agriculture] was also a tremendous trap. The main consequence of the adoption of food production and storage was the pervasiveness of political domination. A saying is attributed to the prophet Muhammad which affirms that subjection enters the house with the plough. This is profoundly true. The moment there is a surplus and storage, coercion becomes socially inevitable, having previously been optional. A surplus has to be defended. It also has to be divided. No principle of division is either self-justifying or self-enforcing: it has to be enforced by some means and by someone.

This consideration, jointly with the simple principle of pre-emptive violence, which asserts that you should be the first to do unto them that which they will do unto you if they get the chance, inescapably turns people into rivals. Though violence and coercion were not absent from pre-agrarian society, they were contingent. They were not, so to speak, necessarily built into it. But they are necessarily built into agrarian society...

The need for production and defense also impels agrarian society to value offspring, which means that, for familiar Malthusian reasons, their populations frequently come close to the danger point... The members of agrarian societies know the conditions they are in, and they do not wait for disaster to strike. They organize in such a way as to protect themselves, if possible, from being at the end of the queue.

So, by and large, agrarian society is authoritarian and strongly prone to domination. It is made up of a system of protected, defended storehouses, with differential and protected access. Discipline is imposed, not so much by constant direct violence, but by enforced differential access to the storehouses. Coercion does not only underwrite the place in the queue; the threat of demotion, the hope of promotion in the queue also underwrites discipline. Hence coercion can generally be indirect. The naked sword is only used against those who defy the queue-masters altogether...

... the overwhelming majority of agrarian societies are really systems of violently enforced surplus storage and surplus protection... Political centralization generally, though not universally, follows surplus production and storage. ... A formalized machinery of enforcement supplements or partly replaces ritual." (Gellner, op. cit.)

The next step is, of course, writing because writing is necessary to keep track of what is stored, who is in the queue in what rank, and so on. Writing then leads to something else interesting: the codification of meanings and the storage of these codifications, generally dogmatic ideas. This means that ideas can be shared across time and space. If the doctrine is centralized and endowed with a single apex/origin, i.e., an exclusive and jealous god, this can have very bad consequences across time and space. This then leads back to coercive semantic techniques with a kick: it is widespread and centralized with a very small ruling elite. There are the specialists - priests  - who legitimate the beliefs, and the specialists of violence that enforce it. Their pre-eminence testifies to the fact that the maintenance of social discipline is a problem and is seldom attainable without them.

Society constituted on the principles of the agrarian surplus and storage way of life cannot manage without the help of the elite and once they have acquired an elite, it is very, very hard to resist their growing demands, and even harder to get rid of them. Moreover, an agrarian society based on accumulating, storing, and dispensing material goods is easily converted to an industrial society, and so it is. Anthropologically and sociologically, that's the short version of how it happened.

 

[lwu02eb]

An excellent summary, and we are potentially beginning to see the signs of the final stage now.