machoprogrammer: How about stop breeding instead?

That's already happening, very quickly. But population continues to grow because survival rates are higher. In other words, the problem is increasingly feeding old people, not feeding babies.

highwayrun:
Telling you not to eat meat is perfectly within their rights. You can still buy it, no matter what "they" say.Completely prohibiting eating meat would be curtailing your liberties. I don't think anyone's even advocating that; the message seems to be building your diet around the many, many other things you can eat. So maybe you have a burger once a week, just not a 14 oz. porterhouse every night.

I was aiming that more at the idea that if telling people to breed less is curtailing their liberties, which is touted as a bad thing, then telling people not to eat meat is also a curtailing of their liberties. You can't have it both ways and tell me what I should do to save the planet's resources and then not be prepared to listen to being told what you should do, without being the aforementioned hypocrite. At this point there doesn't appear to be any laws on either topic.

I admit I am a teensy bit touchy on being told what I should or shouldn't eat due to having an ever so slightly batshiat insane mother who had an obsession with diet fads, and any real or imagined health effects food might provide. Thanks to her I know how awful it is to have to justify the merits of every mouthful of food I ever consumed as a child/teenager that wasn't part of her approved foods list. Now the only person who gets to say what I will or will not eat, is me but I do get rather defensive of that. I prefer to make use of common sense, moderation and a philosophy of if I'm hungry and it tastes good, I'll eat it.

No.

CBob:

As long as we have humans, we'll have food.

I've read that human flesh is the one esoteric meat that doesn't taste like chicken.

Seriously though, FTA: "Water scarcity's effect on food production means radical steps will be needed to feed population expected to reach 9bn by 2050." NINE farking billion? And we're already at 7,000,000,000? And they started ringing the alarm bells 40 years ago when the world's population was a measly 3 billion?

Regardless of whether most of us are starving now or not we're screwing up the planet badly in the long term. Y'all do know that those huge factory farms are dependent on chemical fertilizers, chemichal weed killers and chemical insecticides, all made with petrochemicals and carried around with gasoline and diesel? And that the land itself is pretty much exhausted and the bugs and weeds adapt quickly, so they have to keep putting more and more chemicals on the land and its crops every year?

In the long run it would be better to just let the livestock graze down the standing crops, then butcher most of them and leave the land fallow till it recovers. This would probably cause a bit of hardship for quite a few people, but there are too damn many of us anyway: without so many people eating and breeding we wouldn't have to farm so intensively.

Most of the world's people only get enough to eat to stay alive to breed: we have to realize that "the West," the top of the global food chain, is hardly typical. And places where widescale famine has recently become rare are places that use even less sustainable farming practices than we do. Instead of the population crashing it's the Earth itself that crashes: first we'll turn every fertile-looking plot into a population increaser, then we'll drain every available aquifer to water them, then eventually the soil and water will be too exhausted to sustain us and we'll starve en masse. Nine billion people can starve 9 times as hard as 1 billion.

Stock up on canned food, soda pop and bullets.

WhippingBoy:

I'd rather the earth die than let the vegans win.

I would say "We'll just eat the vegans!" but they're all so damn SCRAWNY.

my lip balm addiction: CBob:

As long as we have humans dogs, cats, and horses, we'll have food.

FTFY

Not on your life. I'll share humans with my dogs, cats and ferrets. And the odd opossum or coyote that asks politely. I'll ignore the herbivores till my human prey starts dying off by itself: road kill is one thing, but I can't bring myself to eat something that died of ebola or hepatitis.

As previously noted, there ain't much meat on starving people, so the trick is to start eating people long before they can finish off all the local dogs and cats.

Quadripeds don't annoy me nearly as much as any random human. They only do what's in their nature, while humans every day come up with new and improved ways to fark up themselves, each other and everything else.

bikkurikun: We already produce enough food to feed everyday in the world today, yet people starve since we are not prepared to share. Any politician who will propose massive investment to divert water to a struggling area will lose the election because the other voters will not be willing to pay that bill until they themselves are threatened, and the other party will jump on it and maintain this whole water shortage is just a myth (see global warming debate) until it is too late.

To expand on this, modern societies *waste* huge amounts of food. I've seen estimates that 50% of the food that goes to restaurants and grocery stores end up in the trash - and I'm not talking about the non-edible bits. We are supremely spoiled and sensitive to the slightest imperfection in our food.

Start charging more for water, and farmers will switch to methods that require less. Improved irrigation techniques, desalination, grey & black water reclamation, hydroponics(in house water recycling), etc...

There's lots of ways, it just costs a touch more. In some cases less than 1% more. In some cases it'd save money but there's simply not enough education for those who would profit to know they'd do better doing it the conserving way.

rooftop235: machoprogrammer: How about stop breeding instead?
[www.avert.org image 250x223] 

How much water goes into the production of condoms??? Would it be feasible to have a worldwide sex ed initiative and then get them to stop breeding like rabbits? (By 'them' I mean people like the Duggars and octomom.

octomom didn't actually have sex.

Jon iz teh kewl: rooftop235: machoprogrammer: How about stop breeding instead?
[www.avert.org image 250x223] 

How much water goes into the production of condoms??? Would it be feasible to have a worldwide sex ed initiative and then get them to stop breeding like rabbits? (By 'them' I mean people like the Duggars and octomom.

octomom didn't actually have sex.

Whoa. She reproduced like a paramecium...

ciberido: fluffy2097: Guess I'll have to set up some sort of condenser rig instead to pull water from the air 24/7...

[farm5.static.flickr.com image 500x334]

Just make sure any droids you buy can speak Bocce.

That was just Aunt Beru being a showoff. Owen was the smart one, looking for a droid that understood the binary language of moisture vaporators, although one that understood binary loadlifters would suffice as they are very similar to vaporators in most respects.

AverageAmericanGuy: Jon iz teh kewl: rooftop235: machoprogrammer: How about stop breeding instead?
[www.avert.org image 250x223] 

How much water goes into the production of condoms??? Would it be feasible to have a worldwide sex ed initiative and then get them to stop breeding like rabbits? (By 'them' I mean people like the Duggars and octomom.

octomom didn't actually have sex.

Whoa. She reproduced like a paramecium...

Farking in vitro fertilization, how does it work?

CthulhuCalling: AverageAmericanGuy: Jon iz teh kewl: rooftop235: machoprogrammer: How about stop breeding instead?
[www.avert.org image 250x223] 

How much water goes into the production of condoms??? Would it be feasible to have a worldwide sex ed initiative and then get them to stop breeding like rabbits? (By 'them' I mean people like the Duggars and octomom.

octomom didn't actually have sex.

Whoa. She reproduced like a paramecium...

Farking in vitro fertilization, how does it work?

Does it involve paramecium?

Firethorn: bikkurikun: We already produce enough food to feed everyday in the world today, yet people starve since we are not prepared to share. Any politician who will propose massive investment to divert water to a struggling area will lose the election because the other voters will not be willing to pay that bill until they themselves are threatened, and the other party will jump on it and maintain this whole water shortage is just a myth (see global warming debate) until it is too late.

To expand on this, modern societies *waste* huge amounts of food. I've seen estimates that 50% of the food that goes to restaurants and grocery stores end up in the trash - and I'm not talking about the non-edible bits. We are supremely spoiled and sensitive to the slightest imperfection in our food.

but but but Capitalism! Sarah Palin told me it's better to have all that food go to waste rather than give it to people who can't afford it because that's SOCIALISM!

Seriously, it bugs the the hell out of me that grocery stores and restaurants, especially fast food chains would rather destroy perfectly good food. When I go to the store, I see rows and rows of shelves stuffed with food and I know that not even half of that stuff will end up being eaten. It's absolutely wasteful producing this much, and cruelly inhumane to waste that much while people starve. And yes, I get upset whenever I see water running into the gutters in the streets out here. This is a farking desert, and people insist on being stupid douchebags.

If people in Africa (or Asia) are selfish for reproducing at a greater rate than Americans, aren't Americans selfish for consuming resources at a greater rate than Africans (or, I think still, most Asians)?

That said, get rid of your pets to reduce your ecological footprint.

CthulhuCalling: Seriously, it bugs the the hell out of me that grocery stores and restaurants, especially fast food chains would rather destroy perfectly good food

Well, it's not 'perfectly good' when they destroy it, it's 'slightly imperfect' when the standard is perfection. Double the price of food and you'd see a lot more resources spent conserving it, and perhaps more acceptance of slightly imperfect food - the occasional blemish and whatnot.

One thing I see in my home area(Alaska) is that fresh fruit goes bad *very* quickly. It's also expensive, to the point that I generally prefer frozen. I come from a family that *hates* wasting food, btw. Take what you want, but eat it all. Leftovers go in the fridge to be eaten the next day for lunch or whatever. The roasted turkey eventually ends up turkey&gravy or soup. Etc...

Anyways - I've actually tried to figure out whether I'd be able to raise hydroponic strawberries(love them) cheaper. Pick them fresh, sell in the local area, they'd actually last longer than a day before growing mold(yuck!). Might be able to do something in the margin by saving shipping costs.

Ilmarinen: If people in Africa (or Asia) are selfish for reproducing at a greater rate than Americans, aren't Americans selfish for consuming resources at a greater rate than Africans (or, I think still, most Asians)?

That said, get rid of your pets to reduce your ecological footprint.

Nope, because with less people there are more resources per person. If you only have one fridge full of food it makes sense to not invite a stadium's worth of people over for dinner, it's much better for you to only invite the amount of people you can adequately feed. I don't see the advantage in having less resources per person just so we can have more people on the planet.

Time to make a bacon run. BRB!

rohar: Feed hay to the goats, they're very efficient. Eat the majority of the boy goats, they're kinda worthless and OH SO TASTY. Feed the milk you can't drink (you can only drink so much goat milk) to the pigs. BINGO! Goat milk bacon. Been doing it for 5 years now, you cannot imagine bacon from a pig that's never tasted water.

Heh, a few years back a buddy bought a share in a locally-raised pig.
Well, the guy raising it was also a noob, and fed it on commercial fish pellets, or something.
I like fish, and I like pork in all it's permutations...
Bacon that tastes like fish? DO NOT WANT.

JRoo: AverageAmericanGuy: CthulhuCalling: AverageAmericanGuy: Jon iz teh kewl: rooftop235: machoprogrammer: How about stop breeding instead?
[www.avert.org image 250x223] 

How much water goes into the production of condoms??? Would it be feasible to have a worldwide sex ed initiative and then get them to stop breeding like rabbits? (By 'them' I mean people like the Duggars and octomom.

octomom didn't actually have sex.

Whoa. She reproduced like a paramecium...

Farking in vitro fertilization, how does it work?

Does it involve paramecium?

And it comes with parmesan.

What about sprinkles?

Ilmarinen: If people in Africa (or Asia) are selfish for reproducing at a greater rate than Americans, aren't Americans selfish for consuming resources at a greater rate than Africans (or, I think still, most Asians)?

That said, get rid of your pets to reduce your ecological footprint.

Its not about the number that are born, its about the number that survive and their quality of life down the road.

Western medicine has helped to reduce the infant mortality rate on cultures that still multiply like rabbits to deal with it. The result is a baby boom.
Eventually other factors kick in and it tapers off.
I think the difference is the US had an infrastructure and economy that was able to feed its needs during its last major boom. Where as many third world countries don't. So as you get more adults you get bigger demands on water and food with no way to supply them,

Americans could cut back to a starvation diet and eat all their dogs. It doesn't help other nations because our resources aren't going to be trucked over there.
They need to produce more food and water locally. There isn't anything we can do about that unless they are willing to accept more of our influence.

Hot, like a cheeseburger fresh off the grill.

Diogenes The Cynic: Well, South Africa can be turned back into a bread basket by giving whites equal rights. Canada has incredible potential for growing wheat, cabbage, stuff like that. Russia has a lot of growth potential as well. They have been traditionally terrible farmers. Its from replacing serfs with peasants, and peasants with collective farmers. Years of bureaucracy and mismanagement have yet to fix years of bureaucracy and mismanagement over there. As prices grow for food, places like the UK will be worth farming in again. I'm not an agricultural engineer, but that's off of the top of my head.

Washing away the topsoil? As long as it only goes downhill, we can collect it, and respread it where it came off of. Nitrogen? Do we not have enough in the world to feed 10 billion people like they're Americans? Thats the practical limit of how much we need

Canada doesn't have near the potential you think it does. Most of Onttario and Quebec isn't suited to agriculture due to the glaciers scraping away all the topsoil. On the Canadian Sheild the topsoil is only few inches deep. I suppose if we clear the boreal forestand find a way to drain the muskeg and add lime to reduce its acidity it could be used for agriculture. However, if you recall your original statement was that irrigation would bring tons of farmland into production.

Russia and South Africa have some possible room to expand, but the russians are already workingon it and have been for over a decade. They are importing experts and seed stock from North America and are much closer to western efficiency than you think. There's already farming in the UK, they crop almost all the arable land. Sure, they need subsidies to keep afloat, but its not due to a lack of effiency.

Perhaps we have enough N to feed 10 billion, but for how long? Besides, synthetic nitrogen isn't wholly taken up by plants and a lot of it washes into the water table. Polluting both ground water and the oceans.

/you're arguing ith a farmer about farming, its a losing battle

Where I live (New Zealand), growing meat animals on grasslands is easily the most efficient way to grow calories. No irrigation, little in the way of fertilizers. The majority of the land couldn't support intensive horticulture, but it can grow beef and lamb so easily that NZ lamb exported to the UK ends up lower in carbon footprint than the local product despite the shipping. I myself raise pigs on pasture and they need little else, while if I tried to produce the same amount of calories in veges I'd need significant inputs of fertilizers etc. Not to mention 75% of a pig is edible (and the rest my dog is happy to work with) and can be kept until it is convenient to "harvest" it while a field of veges ripens all at the same time, leading to spoilage issues

quickdraw: Article that explains the "Complete Protein" myth and how it came about.

It isn't a myth. Proteins are collections of amino acids, and there are animo acids the human body cannot synthesize. However, as long as you eat the amino acids throughout the day, you are fine. But if your only source of protein is rice, then you are going to have an amino acid deficiency.

blackflag415: I was a vegetarian for 10 years. I now eat meat all the time (because I live in Japan). If you think you can't get enough flavor from vegetarian cooking you have either never tried or suck at cooking.

/I love when fat people would exclaim "But...but...but how do you get enough protein?" Umm...I think you have a little too much 'bub.'

I know this experience well. I had some friends who moved to Japan the same time I did and their weird eating habits were crushed by the juggernaut of Japanese cuisine and food availability. Vegan? Be prepared to spend more than a yen per calorie per day to get what you want. Atkins diet? Gaijin please. Two slices of white bread with spaghetti noodles between them is a sandwich in Japan.

And yeah, most people don't know how to cook or eat, which explains a lot of their weird notions about nutrition.

CTRL-F for lawn. 1 hit. Estimates vary widely but somewhere between 30% to 50% of the water we consume is wasted on a crop we do not use for any agricultural purpose at all. Worse, we waste petrochemicals to make it grow faster so that we have to use more petroleum products to cut it more often.

When historians of the future write the book on the collapse of the USA, there will an entire chapter dedicated to lawns.

Diogenes The Cynic:
As prices grow for food, places like the UK will be worth farming in again. I'm not an agricultural engineer, but that's off of the top of my head.


Huh? The UK has over 60 million people living an an island about the size of Michigan, with an average population density of over 600 / square mile. What little farm land there is is also largely still farmed, very very little arable land is just sitting there. Add to that allotment gardening and the popularity of fruit and veg gardening, even in tiny gardens in city centers, and UK food production is pretty much maxed out.

Hell - they even have cows grazing on prime waterfront land in some of the most expensive parts of London.

There is no vast untapped reserve of farmland in the UK.

Ambivalence: Yah....no.

Not all meat production is water intensitive. If we went back to feeding cattle grass instead of grain, it would go a long way to not only improving water consumption but decreasing fertilizer use. I've also read about new forms of aquaculture being very water smart.

It's a false logic to say that because most meat production RIGHT NOW is water intensive, that all meat production must be. It's simply not true. People are not going to convert to vegetarianism as a result of water shortages. They're far more likely to develop means to grow meat in a more water conscious manner.

So I assume we're going to stop producing rice and sugar cane, too, right? Because that shiat defines water-intensive.

autopsybeverage: Put something in the water that genetically predispositions one generation, planet-wide, to be gay?

I think we're already making enough tofu.

If meat-production was so water-heavy, why is that the that diet of people in arid lands is principally meat-based? Could it be that animals continue to feature on the menu in lands too dry for agriculture?

AeAe: green lawns look great, but about growing native grasses instead?

I have a fine lawn of clover and garlic mustard...

This text is now purple: If meat-production was so water-heavy, why is that the that diet of people in arid lands is principally meat-based? Could it be that animals continue to feature on the menu in lands too dry for agriculture?

Examples?

AeAe: I think there's so many things we can do as a society and be more smart with water usage EVERYTHING.

ftfy

THIS^

you've got my vote

The Evil That Lies In The Hearts Of Men: This text is now purple: If meat-production was so water-heavy, why is that the that diet of people in arid lands is principally meat-based? Could it be that animals continue to feature on the menu in lands too dry for agriculture?

Examples?

Tundra aboriginals, Mongolia, pretty much any plains population (North American interior plains, African savannah, Argentinian pampas, etc).

Humans in those environments primarily subsist by consuming the animals that can digest whatever meager vegetarian grows in those climes, or in sufficiently cold areas, by eating the fish/aquatic mammals and what eats them.

Ambivalence: minoridiot: There may be a localized shortages of potable water, but the amount of actual water will remain roughly unchanged.

The actual amount of DRINKABLE water will decline as more and more water sources become polluted (Farking fracking) or used for irrigation. A means of desalinizing seawater en masse would help but current desalinization technology is insufficient to that task.

Desalinization is also extremely polluting. Just a horrible idea currently.

Nothing funny to say.

/would support a general price increase for meat, due to less volume (and preferably higher production standards)
//loves bacon & steak
///rarely eats either anyway
////plenty of peoples' pets eat better (& get better health care) than I do
//other animals get eaten, so I guess I come out OK

This text is now purple: The Evil That Lies In The Hearts Of Men: This text is now purple: If meat-production was so water-heavy, why is that the that diet of people in arid lands is principally meat-based? Could it be that animals continue to feature on the menu in lands too dry for agriculture?

Examples?

Tundra aboriginals, Mongolia, pretty much any plains population (North American interior plains, African savannah, Argentinian pampas, etc).

Humans in those environments primarily subsist by consuming the animals that can digest whatever meager vegetarian grows in those climes, or in sufficiently cold areas, by eating the fish/aquatic mammals and what eats them.

So places with very low population density.

The Evil That Lies In The Hearts Of Men: This text is now purple: The Evil That Lies In The Hearts Of Men: This text is now purple: If meat-production was so water-heavy, why is that the that diet of people in arid lands is principally meat-based? Could it be that animals continue to feature on the menu in lands too dry for agriculture?

Examples?

Tundra aboriginals, Mongolia, pretty much any plains population (North American interior plains, African savannah, Argentinian pampas, etc).

Humans in those environments primarily subsist by consuming the animals that can digest whatever meager vegetarian grows in those climes, or in sufficiently cold areas, by eating the fish/aquatic mammals and what eats them.

So places with very low population density.

Animals specialized to live in harsh climates can be eaten by animals that aren't.
Problem is that westerners tend to feed on beef and pig, which aren't very efficient animals. .

...But we've got an absurd abundance of corn and grain. So it doesn't really matter to us.

Quantum Apostrophe: Farker Soze: Quantum Apostrophe: TheBigJerk: Quantum Apostrophe: (threadshiat)

What is with you and threadshiatting?

I'm trying to get people to think, challenge their assumptions and try to extrapolate what they believe. I guess I'm on the wrong site for that.

No, you're just being an asshole.

Wah wah, I poke fun at your fairy tales. Get over yourself.

No, you threadshiat. Go the fark away.

autopsybeverage: You've been reading The Forever War, haven't you?

No, actually, but I thank you for making me aware of it. Is it a good read?

It is, in my opinion, one of the best examples of really hard hard science fiction out there, right next to Niven's Ringworld. It's also someone unusual as science fiction goes in that it doesn't make out the human race as either villainous or heroic. Most sci-fi that has humans interacting with other races seems to go to one extreme or the other.

Which is to say "yes."

fluffy2097: I'm not sure why the idea of vat grown meat disturbs people so much.

Rationally, you're correct, but human nature being irrational, there is a great fear of and mistrust of science. Honestly, it's not 100% irrational. There are things like Thalidomide and Agent Orange and Chernobyl and Nuclear Weapons that give us good reason to be less enthusiastic.

That said, fear of "Frankenfood" is mostly a combination of ignorance and irrationality. A lot of the ignorance comes from the idea that "Science" didn't really start until 1700 or so and artificial selection is something that didn't exist before 1970.


fluffy2097: It's not like most Americans even know that meat comes from animals. It just comes from the grocery store or the refrigerator. ಠ_ಠ

Americans do not WANT to know that meat comes from animals. Americans are very grossed out by things like chickens that still have heads. Think of all the jokes about "crazy Asian food" that involves a chicken being served with a head.

I used to semi-joke that there ought to be a meat license that worked something like a driver's license. You were not allowed to buy meat or order a meat dish at a restaurant unless you showed you "meat license." In order to obtain it, you would have to kill and dress an animal. The few times I told other Americans about this idea, they were offended at the very concept of killing an animal with their own hands. Offended, but not so offended they didn't take another bite of the hamburger they were eating.

way south: The Evil That Lies In The Hearts Of Men: This text is now purple: The Evil That Lies In The Hearts Of Men: This text is now purple: If meat-production was so water-heavy, why is that the that diet of people in arid lands is principally meat-based? Could it be that animals continue to feature on the menu in lands too dry for agriculture?

Examples?

Tundra aboriginals, Mongolia, pretty much any plains population (North American interior plains, African savannah, Argentinian pampas, etc).

Humans in those environments primarily subsist by consuming the animals that can digest whatever meager vegetarian grows in those climes, or in sufficiently cold areas, by eating the fish/aquatic mammals and what eats them.

So places with very low population density.

Animals specialized to live in harsh climates can be eaten by animals that aren't.
Problem is that westerners tend to feed on beef and pig, which aren't very efficient animals. .

...But we've got an absurd abundance of corn and grain. So it doesn't really matter to us.

pigs will eat anything..mmm slop pail fed pigs for the win


plus weeds from the garden and tada! no need to give thepigs the expensive grain

cows? grass only

Ambivalence: Not all meat production is water intensitive. If we went back to feeding cattle grass instead of grain, it would go a long way to not only improving water consumption but decreasing fertilizer use.

No way. One acre of grass farmed in traditional soil consumes so much damned water it's not even funny. 100,000 gallons of water ON AVERAGE.

I've got hydroponics systems that can do that same amount in 1/8 of an acre with only one thousand gallons of water. 99% reduction in water. Nutrient usage? Almost nil.

Your proposed solution only works if people adopt the tech to do so. Sadly, nobody seems interested in the fact that I'm one of the few people with the tech to actually save your butts.

/but you keep on ignoring me. I'll be fat and fed, where are you going to be?

KnowEyeInnTeem: Desalinization is also extremely polluting. Just a horrible idea currently.

Go look up SEA-90.

Desalination is only polluting if you use old tech. We've got nano-filters now that are much more efficient at separating salts from water through both forward and reverse osmosis, and are also cheap to produce, making cost and energy factors much less of an issue.

Oh, and fresh sea-salt, at a concentration of roughly 4g per gallon of water (with a little nitrogen supplementation) is near-perfect for general hydroponics solutions.