[QUOTE=Atabey]


But the question put forth is about feeding an extra 2-3 billion new mouths by the end of this century.



[/QUOTE]


[QUOTE]Who’s Afraid of 7 Billion? The Anti-Human Left, That’s Who

by Matt Patterson on October 28, 2011 ·

According to an estimate by the United Nations’ population division, Earth’s seven billionth human will be born on or about Halloween 2011, most likely in South Asia.

To put that number in perspective, consider this: It took 250,000 years, from the birth of our species until the beginning of the 19th century, for the human population to reach 1 billion (I guess it’s true what they say; the first billion’s the hardest). After that it took just a little over a century to hit the 2 billion mark in 1927. By 1999 the world’s six billionth person was born (identified as Adnan Nevic from Sarajevo, Bosnia). And now here we are, only 12 years later, and number 7 billion is upon us.

It’s quite a milestone. And on the face of it, would seem to indicate homo sapiens is a stunningly successful species with a deep and healthy breeding population, portending perpetuation of our kind for a long time to come. That’s good news, right?

Well, not if you are a self-loathing homo sapien, a curious creature whose natural habitat is restricted to the jungles of academia, Hollywood, and The View. For these lefties, we are the problem — the more we, the bigger the problem. As Paul Wilson put it for NewsBusters:

For many people, this milestone is a cause for celebration and a human triumph. But for environmentalists on the radical left, the ever-growing legion of consuming humans is a harbinger of impending doom.

The left frets that people are essentially parasites of Mother Gaia, and Wilson quotes an impressive (if revolting) number of examples:

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman titled his July 7 column “The Earth is Full.” The Los Angeles Times Editorial Board titled a May 15 op-ed “Defusing the Population Bomb.” The Los Angeles Times also published a July 21 op-ed coauthored by Mary Ellen Harte and Anne Ehrlich (wife of Paul Ehrlich), which argued that “Perpetual [human population] growth is the creed of a cancer cell, not a sustainable human society.”

Wilson notes that CNN especially has been on the vanguard of the hyperventilation nation:

In 2009, CNN’s Jack Cafferty warned of an “unsustainable” population of 9 billion and declared that ‘at some point there’s not going to be enough stuff for everybody.” Another 2009 CNN report highlighted two studies claiming that “money spent on contraception is about five times more efficient [in protecting the environment] than money spent on clean-energy technologies.”

But as Wilson notes, predictions from various gurus of doom that humanity will grow beyond available resources have proven wrong again and again and again. Thomas Malthus was worrying about such things as far back as the 18th century. In more recent times Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb “…warned of mass starvation and environmental catastrophe due to overpopulation.” But as William McGurn notes in the Wall Street Journal of Ehrlich’s tome:

The book was wildly popular, and the assertions large. India was so hopeless he advocated a policy of “triage” that would just let them die. In fact, the mass starvation he predicted never materialized, and the Indians whom he thought could never feed themselves are now eating better than ever despite a population more than twice the size it was when “The Population Bomb” appeared.

Nonetheless, leftists have suggested the only solution they know to this alleged problem – government control. Special taxes have been suggested for overly-fertile parents to compensate for their brood’s burgeoning carbon footprint, and so on. Like global warming, fears about overpopulation have been used to gin up support for more state control over our lives, and indeed, in a very real sense, our very existence.

So why haven’t the dire predictions come true? Simple – humans are both consumers and producers, both exploiters and innovators. As McGurn writes, the view of humanity common to environmentalists is:

…one that grossly underestimates the power of an individual to improve life for millions. Perhaps the best example of that power is Norman Borlaug, whose scientific work introduced high-yield varieties of wheat and rice that helped farmers greatly increase their food production. In so doing, the ‘father of the Green Revolution’ helped poor nations feed their people, and give the lie to all those predictions of hopelessness and starvation from Mr. Ehrlich and Co.

So even though it’s Halloween, I’m not afraid of 7 billion (though Virginia Woolf terrifies me). I say, to whoever that lucky number 7 is, welcome to Planet Earth. Maybe one day you will invent something that improves all our lives, and if so, we can all be thankful we ignored the ravings of Ehrlich and his ilk.[/QUOTE]

Don't mess with mother nature otherwise we will end up with another Frankenstein.

Guille,

They have and it's coming to a store near you



Test Tube Burger To be Unveiled in October

The $330,000 project would mark an important step in effort to develop synthetic meat.

By Daniel Politi | Posted Monday, Feb. 20, 2012, at 2:36 PM ET


14

Strip of muscle produced in a test tube at Maastricht University

Photo by MARK POST/Maastricht University
The first hamburger grown entirely in a lab could become a reality by October thanks to a $330,000 project currently underway in a university in the Netherlands. At a conference in Canada, Mark Post, the chairman of physiology at Maastricht University, says his team has already created several small strips of muscle tissue made entirely from a cow's stem cells, explains the Los Angeles Times.

The strips are less than an inch long and around 0.4 inches wide, and they “are off-white and resemble strips of calamari,” explains the BBC. Once Post manages to make a few thousand more they will be all mashed together with blood and artificial fat in order to produce one expensive burger.

The Guardian says Post wants famous English chef Heston Blumenthal to cook the burger for a celebrity taster. Despite reports that Blumenthal has already signed on, a spokesman tells the Los Angeles Times the owner of the Fat Duck has no plans to cook the lab burger.

Many scientists have warned that current food production is unsustainable in the long-run. Post says demand for meat will double over the next 40 years “and right now we are using 70 percent of all our agricultural capacity to grow meat through livestock.” Post has focused on beef because he says cows are one of the least efficient animals. He estimates mass production could begin in around a decade or two, although there are still concerns about the key issue of how this lab meat will taste.

“In the beginning it will taste bland,” Post said. “I think we will need to work on the flavor separately by trying to figure out which components of the meat actually produce the taste and analyze what the composition of the strip is and whether we can change that.”

THE PALEOFUTURIST| 22 February 2012

Food pills: A sci-fi staple
Matt Novak


Meal in a pill

For decades, the idea of a future where meals were condensed into tablets was so popular that it became cliché. So why are we not eating them now?

Related

IN BBC NEWS:

Printed Christmas dinner anyone?

Christmas dinner traditionally centres on the turkey or goose. But if US scientists have their way, everyone may soon be sat around a printer.

It is a constant theme of early science fiction, and one you are almost certainly familiar with: the man or woman of the future pops a pill on to their tongue, knocks it back and is almost immediately satisfied. For inside the little white capsule was a full three course meal, designed to mimic the meals of the past in a single convenient, portable dose.

Take the 1930 science fiction musical Just Imagine, which tells the story of a man who is woken from a fifty year coma to find himself in 1980s New York. As he tours a dystopian city – where people are only known by number – he is taken to a “café”, where his new friends order him up a meal of clam chowder, roast beef, beets, asparagus, pie and coffee. With a little cajoling, he eventually swallows the pill, before declaring that “the roast beef was a little bit tough” and lamenting “the good old days”.

But if you look back to these “good old days”, the roots of the meal-in-a-pill stem not from the fertile minds of science fiction writers, but from the politics of the day.

This tiny, white vision of the future had its roots in late 19th Century feminism. In the lead up to the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, the American Press Association asked writers from a number of fields to promote the event by writing essays on what they thought the world of 1993 might look like. Their work was published in small town newspapers across the country. American suffragette Mary Elizabeth Lease predicted that by 1993, humans would only eat synthetic food, liberating women from the drudgery of the kitchen. People would “take, in condensed form from the rich loam of the earth, the life force or germs now found in the heart of the corn, in the kernel of wheat, and in the luscious juices of the fruits. A small phial of this life from the fertile bosom of Mother Earth will furnish men with substance for days. And thus the problems of cooks and cooking will be solved.”

Patriarchal pill pastiches

Anti-feminist fiction of the time lampooned this fascination with the meal pill. Satirical books like The Republic of the Future (1887), by social conservative Anna Dodd, mocked the concept of women who did not wish to spend the majority of their day in the kitchen. Set in New York in the year 2050, the narrator of the novel facetiously announces that, “When the last pie was made into the first pellet, women’s true freedom began.”

The turn of the century also brought a fear that the planet simply could not provide enough food for its people, given the then-current rate of population growth. In the 1920s and 30s the meal pill showed up in popular media as something inevitable, with a touch of the scary. Satire often tried to soften the blow.

In 1926 a newspaper in Utah ran a series of cartoons poking fun at the idea. In one, a construction worker on a ledge digs through his pockets to realise that he has left his meal pill at home; a grocer plonks six turkey dinner meal pills on to the counter for a lady buying thanksgiving supplies; the ladies of the house reflect on the “antique” dirty dishes, a relic thanks to the meal pill.

They were fanciful ideas, made even more so by the fact that the fashion failed to keep up with food technology, meaning that diners still wore white tie. However, the ideas were plausible to many living through post-war years that had seen science and technology create tools that had helped tear the world apart, yet also offered hope of rebuilding it. In this world, man was merely a smaller part of a bigger industrial machine.

This was typified by the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair with its motto: “Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms.” It suggested that man must submit to the great advances of the day, including the meal-in-a-pill . Rather than derive pleasure from food, it was instead something to be controlled and reduced to its component parts. It was not nourishment for the soul, but sustenance for life and man must simply swallow the pill as the future of food came barrelling towards him.

It is the kind of technocratic, dysfunctional view loved by science fiction and is one that has repeatedly reared its head when talking about food pills. For example, in his 2006 book Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food, Warren Belasco writes: “While most people vow and hope that they will never rely on pills for food, they presume future generations will conform to whatever ‘science finds’ – pills, algae or other dystopian horrors.”

Tablets gain ground

But this submissive attitude disappeared in the 1960s, to be replaced by one of techno-utopianism, driven by the glamour and excitement of the space race. In the age of space travel, meal pills were seen as the next logical step in the evolution of food – the ultimate in efficiency and a triumph of man over nature.

High above the planet, food was sucked out of silver pouches by astronauts strapped into experimental capsules that had escaped the confines of Earth. These space powders – that could be rehydrated into gels and were unlikely to spill out into the delicate capsules – aimed to provide nutritionally complete meals that could be eaten through straws. And back on Earth, children and adults alike wanted to be part of the action. Foil-wrapped bars and powdered drinks such as Tang enjoyed a surge in status and popularity, whilst the emergence of dehydrated and condensed foods mean that food pills were once again back on the menu for future-gazers.

Combined with the arrival of TV dinners and Cold War fears over food security, depictions of future food also enjoyed a revival. For example, the Sunday comic strip Our New Age ran in over 110 newspapers around the world from 1958 until 1975. A 1965 edition of the strip touted the synthetic food of the future as an answer to the world’s food crisis. The four panel colour comic charted the changes in the evolution of food. The first panel explained how 9,000 years ago, humans were hunting wild beasts and gathering wild plants for food. The next panel declares that synthetic food is just the next step in modern agriculture, allowing science to feed a swelling population that is no match for old-fashioned methods of agriculture. Triumphantly, the last panel of the comic declares that chemists could now set up efficient factories “to meet all the food shortages anywhere in the world”.

Just as US President Herbert Hoover had won the election in 1928 on a promise of “a chicken in every pot”, the promise of the 1960s seemed to be “a meal pill in every pocket”.

As with so many visions of the future, however, the meal-in-a-pill turned from an object of fascination to one of ridicule. In the 60s and 70s, cartoon series like The Jetsons and films like Sleeper poured cold water on the idea, lampooning the dreamers of yesterday.

The trouble, of course, is that it is just not possible. Military programmes have came up with ever-compressed rations and pills that could help stave off hunger, but the idea of a three course meal remains as remote as the depiction of New York in Just Imagine.

But perhaps we have always known that. In 1936 the Jefferson City Post-Tribune ran an article recounting the views of a Dr Milton A Bridges of Columbia University. In it, he declared: "Human beings are never going to eat pills for meals… pills can never be made to contain sufficient caloric volume."

"It is perfectly plausible to supply all the vitamins and minerals needed for a meal in pill form. But you can't get calories except by eating food.”

It seems that humans were seduced by the idea of a meal-in-a-pill, whilst the reality was harder to swallow.

This was certainly the case for the women’s club in Missouri which held a “Year 2000” dinner event in 1944. A variety of meal pills were served: tutti-frutti pills, a brown pill for the meat course and a miniature chocolate pellet for dessert. The ladies in attendance were no doubt content to “play future”, until reality came back to bite them. Records show that after the pills they all sat down to coffee and plates of sandwiches.