The System Change we need...Reboot Food

[MiHale]

https://www.rebootfood.org/

We are standing on the cusp of a revolution, a food revolution, one unprecedented since the dawn of farming 10,000 years ago.

Agriculture today is the largest single cause of biodiversity loss and emits more greenhouse gases than all our cars, planes and ships put together. Most of the damage is caused by livestock farming, which on its own covers 28% of the Earth's surface, more than all the world's forests combined.

The non-human living world is squeezed to the margins, and wild species have been decimated. By weight, just 4% of the world’s mammals are wild, 36% are humans and 60% are our livestock.
But it no longer has to be this way. Game-changing innovations in precision fermentation and biotech now make a different future possible, one where we no longer have to cruelly exploit animals for food, and where the majority of the land currently used for livestock can be returned to nature, even as the world's population climbs towards 10 billion and the Global South emerges from poverty.

https://www.rebootfood.org/

[orthoclad]

1. And replace lawns with gardens

[MiHale]

2. Replace feed stock animals...

Precision fermentation is a refined form of brewing, a means of multiplying microbes to create specific products. It has been used for many years to produce drugs and food additives. But now, in several labs and a few factories, scientists are developing what could be a new generation of staple foods.

The developments I find most interesting use no agricultural feedstocks. The microbes they breed feed on hydrogen or methanol – which can be made with renewable electricity – combined with water, carbon dioxide and a very small amount of fertiliser. They produce a flour that contains roughly 60% protein, a much higher concentration than any major crop can achieve (soy beans contain 37%, chick peas, 20%). When they are bred to produce specific proteins and fats, they can create much better replacements than plant products for meat, fish, milk and eggs. And they have the potential to do two astonishing things.

The first is to shrink to a remarkable degree the footprint of food production. One paper estimates that precision fermentation using methanol needs 1,700 times less land than the most efficient agricultural means of producing protein: soy grown in the US. This suggests it might use, respectively, 138,000 and 157,000 times less land than the least efficient means: beef and lamb production. Depending on the electricity source and recycling rates, it can also enable radical reductions in water use and greenhouse gas emissions. Because the process is contained, it avoids the spillover of waste and chemicals into the wider world caused by farming.

If livestock production is replaced by this technology, it creates what could be the last major opportunity to prevent Earth systems collapse, namely ecological restoration on a massive scale. By rewilding the vast tracts now occupied by livestock (by far the greatest of all human land uses) or by the crops used to feed them – as well as the seas being trawled or gill-netted to destruction – and restoring forests, wetlands, savannahs, wild grasslands, mangroves, reefs and sea floors, we could both stop the sixth great extinction and draw down much of the carbon we have released into the atmosphere.

[jeffreyi]

4. That sounds seriously good.

The extinctions and land and sea degradations happening now are...awful.

[hunter]

5. It won't have the desired effect unless we limit our population.

If we can't do that then more food will support more people and the environmental impacts of humanity will only get worse.

[usonian]

3. Opinion: Nobody really knows what's in food these days. Ingredient lists seem 100 lines long.

Won't be long before the animal bits disappear (especially if substitutes are cheaper for producers and consumers?).

Taste? KMOP

Ketchup, mustard, onions and pickles to the rescue.