What?

Our diet is largely controlled by industrially processed food. The cause of this is mainly the rapid growth of the world population. A growth that cannot be matched by farmers. We expect this trend to continue, with a few strange effects.

Meat is a luxury product, because it is an inefficient way of feeding on protein; an animal eats much more protein than it produces in the form of meat. This results in hungry regions in the world, which would not have to exist if we would greatly reduce our meat intake.

The diseases that regularly appear in the food industry also demonstrate that the meat processing industry works on too grand a scale, and that improvements are needed. A few alternative, and probably more sustainable ways of producing our food are perhaps going to be a required ingredient of our future diet.

Research is being conducted for meat that is grown in a petri-dish, by applying currents to a starter piece of meat. A bit like fitness in a lab, in fact. We expect the industry to make its normal mistake of using a sinlge race of meat to produce vast amounts, causing it to be susceptible to an attack by a single strand of bacteria that takes this whole production method offline (the same problem that is causing cotton farmers grave headaches).

Another way of getting to animal protein would be through insects. Asian people have the habit of eating deep fried locusts, and worms are also said to be quite nice to eat. The advantage of insects as food is that they are used to living in large colonies, surrounded by darkness. This is different from pigs, who would not consent to living in pigs flats. Insects also have a protein efficiency of about 90%, much better than our normal meat supply chain. If nobody is willing to buy insects as the snacks that they are in Asia, it is likely that insects will be processed into some form of product.

Another possibility is nutritional yeast. This product, which resembles the yeast used for beer, is healthy and nutrious, and is produced by mixing a suitable form of food with the desired strand of yeast. This processes resembles the ones for cheese, beer and yoghurt. Nutritional yeast is generally appreciated (nutty, cheezy, creamy) and can be produced in quantity without the problems faced by the food industry. In addition, there is no assault on the standards of living of any creature; the yeast is treated to a festive meal and it lives to process it into nutritional yeast!

In addition, it is probable that we will have to revert our gardens to being places where we grow food; the same applies to our balconies and roofs, and perhaps even indoors. The reason for this is that transport takes energy, a resource that will be in much shorter supply than in the present situation. The more local your food is grown, the less "food miles" it will have on it. Also, growing food manually is much more efficient use of land than growing it en masse on fields filled with a single crop.

Why?

The world population is growing rapidly, and expects an ever-increasing norm for its food. If we multiply the number of people on Earth with the area needed to support them (the so-called mondial footprint), we end up with an area larger than that of our planet.

Most economies, and certainly Western-styled ones, require constant growth to survive; a constant increase in young people is needed to supply a population that grows to be much older. In addition to this, economic growth (of which the growth of the population is one factor) is needed to cause inflation. Inflation is needed to reduce the burden of a state's debt.

Since there is no political pressure to reduce the world population, we are subjected to the creativity of the food industry. We will have to accept that we will be increasingly unable to afford "real" food, simply because there is less and less space available for growing smoe. Project developers are highly appreciated by politicians, and their double role as destroyers of the environment and coutryside is usually only attacked by a minority. The sound of dollars is ringing in the ears of most decision makers.

How?

It is advisable to seriously consider the results of a growing world population, and bring it under the attention of all who surround us. Calculate your own footprint and discover how heavily we weight on the Earth's resources with our everyday lives.

A useful course of action is to help keep the average number of children per couple under 2. Nobody profits if we see a sudden drop in the number of world citizens, but a gradual decay is a good goal to set.

Where?

• Read how fast the world population grows.
• Calculate your Global Footprint with one of the many online tools, and read the backgrounds.
• Read our article Meat could be luxury food.
• Nutritional yeast described on WikiPedia.
• Food Insects is about edible insects and their importance to humanity.