Study: Alternative foods are needed to ensure future food security
Siobhan Treacy | May 13, 2021A study from the University of Cambridge argues that alternative food production processes need to be adopted to protect the food supply from climate change threats. Radical changes must be adopted to ensure food security because traditional food production will not be able to keep up with climate-related disturbances.
Current food systems are exposed to many risks, including floods, frosts, droughts, pathogens and parasites. It is dangerous to rely on food production processes like conventional farming and supply chain systems because they are at risk of dangerous factors beyond human control. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted this vulnerability and climate change is worsening already dangerous threats.
State-of-the-art enclosed and modular photo-bioreactors to produce chlorella and spirulina algae.Source: Vaxa, Iceland.
The researchers analyzed around 500 published scientific papers on various future food production systems. The most promising systems would reduce exposure to hazards in the natural environment and include farming in closed and controlled environments, insect breeding greenhouses and micro-algae photo-bioreactors, devices that use light to grow microorganisms.
State-of-the-art, controlled environment systems to produce novel foods should be integrated into today’s food system to reduce the vulnerability to environmental changes, pests and diseases.
According to the study, global malnutrition could be eradicated by farming foods like spirulina, chlorella, the larvae of insects, mycroproteins and microalgaes. These foods are nutritious and are more sustainable derivatives to traditional plant and animal-based foods and can be grown in modular compact systems that are suitable for urban settings and those living in remote areas. This is a polycentric food networks approach where food is produced locally and consistently by the community, reducing reliance on global supply chains.
Sugar kelp, flies, mealworms and single-celled algae could provide healthy and risk resilient diets. These are not traditional food items, so to overcome hesitancy over these foods, the team says that the food production industry could use them as ingredients in other food rather than asking people to eat them whole.
The study was published in Nature Food.
Those 'same' scientists at the University of Cambridge told us back in the '70's that we would all be starving right now due to the population growth. Climate change means that northern Canada and Siberia will become the new 'breadbaskets'. We will adapt. 'Publish or perish' does have its unintended consequences.
https://en.wikipedia
https://www.aei.org/
Humans are not designed to eat at the bottom of the food chain. That's why insect larvae are staples only in the most impoverished subsistence cultures - given a choice, few would continue with that on more than an occasional basis. The processing required to make such foods reasonably edible and palatable would be ecologically inefficient, and the unprocessed nutritional content per unit of some of these is rather low. It makes more sense to expand access to a wider variety of existing foods (dragonfruit anyone?), and find ways to incorporate more carbon into the ecosystem.
Once the food was produced locally in the agrarian past history and there were inefficiencies in the production. The same things these "scientists" advocate as stress factors for large scale agriculture and distribution cause even greater disruptions to the local production. All the stress factors listed were the sources of great famines of past centuries. So they advocate returning to small scale production.
Just look at the countries where this happens now and if it wasn't for the handouts from relief agencies more countries would be in dire straights.
Weren't these "scientists" recently promoting the economy of scale?