What is the most stable food production method?
What is the most stable food production method?
Crops can blight, animals can get diseases. I don't know much about hydroponics but I know that bacteria are a concern. What food source is the most reliable, the least likely to produce less food than expected?
You're viewing a single thread.
Every form of production will have defects. The goal of perfecting production is one to be sought, but never achieved. We should always try to make food production more efficient with less loss, but there will always be loss, and always be waste.
Even new means of production like lab grown beef can have waste and loss in batches that don’t “grow” properly because they didn’t mix hormones correctly or whatever. I actually don’t know how the science behind that works, but I do know it’s a process. And where there’s a process there’s room for error. That’s where we get loss from.
We’ll never make something fool proof. Perhaps lab grown meats will be the most efficient form of product in that they have the lowest loss and production can be tweaked fairly quickly so there’s not a lot of loss and ramped up for shipments to areas with food shortages. Honestly, lab grown in my opinion has the best chances of being a major breakthrough but it’s still too early to be sure.
There’s no way that lab grown meat would be more efficient than just growing vegetables,
Vegetables tend to have a lot of "extra" plant that isn't actually the edible part, and that uses resources to grow. A lab-based food, be it plant, animal, or other, could theoretically get near 100% efficiency in terms of edible product from input. I figure maybe a bacteria or algae would be more likely than lab grown meat to be successful, though
The "extra" plant matter should be composted, and used to replenish the nutrients back into the soil, and more importantly. The resources used to grow that plant is then restored to the source and more importantly feeds the ecosystem better. Remember the inputs into growing in soil are mostly from the sun, rain and carbon dioxide. They are a completely natural source of solar power and carbon capture.