Feeding a world with a skyrocketing population has been a problem for decades. This is a challenge many have tackled, while others don’t believe. I’ve talked with people who look around their own community and see lots of uninhabited land. They believe that if there that much open space, over population can not be a real issue. Meanwhile, scientists are developing methods to feed more people with the limit resources available.
This thought came to me as I was watching Jurassic World. They scientists created locusts that only ate some not crops and not others. Well, that’s not so far off from the truth. A certain company has created crops that are resistant to pests, but won’t allow farmers to get the seed from anyone but them year after year. The company sets the price for this seed and sues any farmers that might accidentally have this seed grow on their land. Sometimes, wind or water may cause the seed to transfer to a nearby field without the farmer even knowing.
Another big key word that became a part of cancel culture because of this was GMO. Since this company created, or genetically modified, the crops to take advantage of farmers and possibly create food that wasn’t as healthy, all GMOs became bad. Corn is often connected with Native Americans and was used by them. The corn back then didn’t look anything like corn today. It has been genetically modified through natural selection to grow bigger ears of corn. If rice, corn, and wheat weren’t genetically modified, there wouldn’t be enough to feed the world. This is true of livestock as well. The recent egg shortage showed how much we rely on food to magically show up in the store. But when film makers document the living conditions of the chickens, people get angry at how inhumane it is. If you want enough chicken and eggs to feed the demand, then something has to give. Either they need more land and people to care for them, meat grown in laboratories without a chicken, or inhumane conditions to produce more faster.
We have become disconnected to were our food comes from. How much land does it take to keep just one person in the US feed for an entire year? Then consider how many millions of people live here. Cows, chickens, pigs, corn, rice, wheat. It all requires land. Lots of land. And it matter to us what season it is. We want to eat our foods year round. That means we need to modify food so it can be produced, in abundance, at all times. Unless, of course, you have a better idea.
