OK I'm going to elaborate on what these radical opinions about food and agriculture are.

I'm talking out of fields of core expertise here so I expect I'm going to make a right royal ass of myself in this thread, we'll see. https://twitter.com/BeigeShiba/status/1295582151899877377

So, there's a narrative of progress that we had the Green Revolution where we got super good at agricultural technology and as a result gained the ability to feed far more people than we did before.

I increasingly suspect this is just a myth of progress.

What we specifically got good at, is developing techniques for improving our caloric yield per hectare with a bunch of monocultures.

This efficiency gain comes with considerable downsides that we're still in the process of discovering.

So we now have grains and seeds in particular which have far more dense caloric yield than the things which our ancestors ate.

And we have largely shifted our diets to have these as our main sources of energy, because it's what's cheap.

And unless you are preparing your own meals, from scratch then I assure you, you are getting quite a lot of your energy from these sources, because they sneak this stuff to bulk up pretty much any processed food because it's very cheap.

The trouble is that while these things are very effective sources of calories, they're also deficient in a lot of essential nutrient, both of the macro and micro variety.

Our protein, fat and carbohydrate mixes are now very different to what our metabolism is built to handle.

This means that there's a lot of people, even wealthy people, who are chronically malnourished without even realising it.

They've eaten what they think is enough proteins, fats and carbs, except they're the wrong ones and they develop metabolic disorders.

We're just used to people dying of heart attacks and cancer and we don't realise that this is a relatively recent phenomenon.

Those used to be extremely rare forms of death, even for the elderly. People did used to get very old even before modern medical technology.

And back then it was extremely rare for even very old people to die from cancer or heart failure. They'd typically die of a lung infection or something.

Now we're seeing people developing heart disease, diabetes, cancer and all kinds of chronic health conditions at younger and younger ages.

The ability of medical technology to mitigate it is limited because there's only so much drugs can mitigate something caused by malnutrition

To me the inescapable conclusion has become that our progress in agricultural science has become one where we exchanged famines in return for mass malnutrition. We're feeding more people than before and we're feeding them food which makes them sick.

We find ourselves awash in an illusionary abundance of food, which is in fact nothing more than poisonous pseudo-food.

We can eat to our heart's content, yet never be properly nourished regardless of how much we consume.

Now, to address the matter of agricultural techniques, which I know some of the more impatient have already been replying that I need to address (because replying on a thread while I'm writing it is ALWAYS a good idea, amirite?)

Our idea of agricultural "progress" has been to take a natural ecosystem, destroy it utterly and replace it with an area that is one single species and try to kill with poison every single other creature which tries to intrude upon it.

And then we'll rip it all up at harvest time, plough the earth which a bunch of artificial fertilizers and then do the whole thing again and again until eventually we bollock up the local ecology to the point where pretty much nothing can grow there any more for a while.

We've been able to get away with this for a few decades through just brute force use of petrochemical energy supplies which are now showing clear signs of dwindling in terms of how much we can extract every year.

It is becoming increasingly clear that we're going to have to develop alternatives while we still have time, because right now we lack feasible alternatives and our current approach is going to be scaled back within our lifetimes regardless of whether we want to or not.

There are systems of agriculture which are about replacing natural ecosystems with artificial managed ones, which are designed to have a net positive accumulation of energy which we can harvest for our needs.

Things like the biodynamic and permaculture agricultural concepts.

Yes, I am aware those "organic" farming methods are still immature and develop yields far less than current industrialised methods. Regardless, we are going to be using those organic alternatives more and more in coming decades, whether we like it or not.

And the more we get serious about treating agriculture as a form of applied ecology and less as brute force industrial monocrop cultivation, the less painful and violent the transition will be. Since as mentioned, it is coming and is completely inevitable.

"But how are we going to feed so many people with such methods?"

As mentioned, I'm sceptical we're effectively feeding however many billion people we presently have using the methods available.

People are getting sick and dying earlier, due to things caused by malnutrition.

It's entirely possible the "population problem" will end up resolving itself through an elevated death rate due to all these early onset malnutrition induced health issues and most people won't even understand what's going on, they just know a lot of people are dying young.

How do you feel about the possibility that you probably won't see huge famines and wars caused by our poor choices in agricultural infrastructure, yet are also rather unlikely to live to see your 60th birthday?