Suggestion | reboot10 – 6 comments
free food
what if everyone on earth could go to bed fed
Can't seem to figure this out, but it just seems like a wonderful idea that food should be available to everyone on earth. How many liters of milk would you drink everyday if it was free? How much caviar? Would it be possible to think of an economic system where supply and demand could take full stomachs into consideration.
At Davos this year there was talk of a new more philantropic kind of capitalism. Bill Gates called it creative capitalism. This idea would certainly need a lot of creativity to prevent it from being rejected at first glance. As you can tell I don't know much about economy. Or reality :-) Any creative economists coming to reboot?
6 comments
How to make something free
I do think everybody on Earth should have a right to get enough to eat to not starve. I mean, what kind of mofos are we if we knowingly let little kids starve.
However, that in itself provides no path to implementing it, other than somebody writing some large checks every year.
What I think is more interesting about the dimensions of "free" is the possibility of moving a certain subject matter permanently over into the free category. I mean, by putting the system in place that continuously creates an abundance of it, as opposed to just paying for a one-time pile of it. Teaching to fish, rather than handing out fish.
E.g. a one-time investment to create a huge solar farm that covers all the electricity needs on the planet.
So, in terms of food, if we really wanted to set up a system that would continue to provide basic free nourishment abundantly for anybody who wants it, how would that look? Automatic hydroponic greenhouses, rapidly growing algae, edible grass, nanotech matter converters, digestive enzymes that can digest anything?
Isn't abundance already there, but logistics faulty?
I've often been told that the actual food production world-wide is already abundant enough to feed all of us. But that production and demand/shortage aren't in the same places. So do we need to make food 'free', or remove the logistics bottle-neck. Is logistics the scarce thing here that we need to make abundant?
Old idea: Replacing conventional, large-scale agribusiness with community-scale agriculture and food production
"Experts on food and the environment gathered at the University of California, Berkeley, to address whether organic, community-scale agriculture and food production can replace conventional, large-scale agribusiness, and the likely costs of such a dramatic shift.
Speakers include food heavyweights Alice Waters, Eric Schlosser, Michael Pollan, Mark Hertsgaard, Corby Kummer, and moderator Orville Schell."
Meg Caldwell
Meg Caldwell
"Her scholarship has focused on the environmental effects of local land use decisions, the use of science in environmental and marine resource policy development and implementation, and developing private and public incentives for natural resource conservation.
www.law.stanford.edu/news/details/1381/New%20Center%20to%20Focus%20on%20Solving%20Ocean%20Problems/
"The oceans have largely been ignored," said Meg Caldwell, a Stanford law professor who will run the Center for Ocean Solutions until a permanent director is found. Caldwell said she was encouraged by international efforts to address climate change, but added: "That's only half the story. The other half is the critical role that oceans play in sustaining the human population."
Rosamond L. Naylor
"Her research focuses on the environmental and equity dimensions of intensive food production. She has been involved in a number of field-level research projects throughout the world concerning issues of aquaculture production, high-input agricultural development, biotechnology, climate-induced yield variability, and food security."
Food for though (sry)
Yes, what kind of food should it be? If the society provided only nutritional, healthy, organic and viable food to everyone, we could move on to more important things, like creativity.
As it is today, people are allowed to "kill" themselves in the name of personal freedom.
In short:
Live long(er) and prosper
ps. The utopian world form for instance Star Trek is so annoying in it's political correctness. You can only be served food of nutritional value, meaning that you can't have REAL chocolate icecream with whipped cream.