Innovate, learn to cook tofu, or die!

Blog post for the subject Rural Development and Food Justice.

Innovate, learn to cook tofu, or die from starvation – these are the three general options I propose we will have in the 21st century with regards to the way we design our food systems and the way we eat (or don’t eat).

I will start with the most undesirable of the options. Option 1: food shortages, land conflict, famine, malnutrition and death from starvation for potentially billions of people. There is an old Chinese proverb that says “if you do not change direction you may end up where you are heading”. And according to the Oxfam Grow Report, we are heading into the perfect storm scenario for increasing world hunger: massive population growth, natural resource scarcity, environmental destruction and to top it off increasing threats from climate change, which will further undermine our already failing global food system. A food system which, at last estimate, already leaves nearly a billion people facing hunger as a daily reality. The current food system is inherently wasteful and environmentally destructive. Nothing has ravaged the earth’s natural environment (land, water, air) like modern industrial agriculture. For example, it is estimated that across the Latin America region, rainforest is cleared at a rate of 11 acres a minute in order to grow crops, like soy.

However, at the heart of this destructive agriculture drive is not our demand for tofu (soy) but it is our increasing global demand for meat and other animal products. There is a lot of talk about waste in the food distribution system…for example, tomatoes or apples being thrown out either because they have gone bad or because they don’t look pretty enough for supermarket shelves. While this is an important issue to be reconciled, I will argue that this is nothing compared to the scale of systematic misapplication of food resources wasted in the design and culture of our current food system. For example, a staggering 97% of the world’s soy crop is now fed to livestock. In other words, we are clearing our rainforests in Latin America to either graze animals or grow food to feed to animals…not to mention some other alarming facts about livestock productions in terms of air and water resources:

1)Amount of water required to make a hamburger: 2,400 litres

2)Contribution of livestock production to the greenhouse effect of climate change: 18% (transportation sector: 13%)

So on one hand, we have nearly a billion people living in hunger, and on the other hand we are feeding almost half of all the grain produced in the world to livestock? Animals are terribly inefficient converters of plant protein. For example, it takes 16 pounds of grain to produce one pound of beef. During this conversion, not only do we have a net loss of food calories, we also waste our precious land and water resources, and this process contributes more to climate change than all our cars, trucks, boats, trains and planes.

So, if we could continue with this option into the future, it will be a race to the bottom of our natural resources, and it will be those at the bottom who will be hit the hardest. Therefore, how our food is produced is arguably as great of an environmental concern as the type of car we drive.

This bring us to Option 2: significantly decreasing our meat consumption, learning to cook tofu and adopting a mostly plant based diet. What has made humans such a successful species over the course of history is the ability to adapt our diet to our environment in order to survive. If ever there was a time when we needed to adapt our diet for our survival, the time is now. However, there is an old English proverb that says “you can’t teach an old dogs new tricks”. And our eating habits are deeply embedded in our culture and difficult to change. Unfortunately, I am increasingly skeptical about the ability of the current population to voluntarily quit eating meat – over the last 50 years, meat consumption per capita has grown exponentially. Even if the world’s meat consumption per capita stagnated, population growth alone would keep the absolute consumption steadily rising. The only thing that will seemingly stop this devastating trend is involuntary measures as a result of resource depletion. That is, it has been estimated that by 2050, if the world’s population wanted to eat the same amount of meat as the world’s rich countries now consume, using current production methods, we would need 67% more land than the earth has. Surely, we will want to avoid this forced diet change and catastrophic situation where we have destroyed our natural environment for the sake of steak.

To this effect, we now need to to start exploring new methods of meat production and this brings us to Option 3: innovation – meat without the cow and without the environmental impact. What has also made humans such a successful species over the course of history is our ability to innovate through technology in order to break the status quo and resolve our impending challenges. There is an old African proverb that says “when the music changes, so does the dance”. For example, 19th century cities depended on horses for transportation. A growing population and urban development meant more horse. More horses, meant more manure. Moreover, there was also increasing demand for valuable land to stable the horses and also increasing demand for hay to feed the horses, which required more farm land devoted to feeding horses instead of people, which in turn meant more horses coming into the cities to deliver the food and therefore more manure. At the end of the 19th century, it was predicted that by 1950 cities like New York and London were doomed to be buried alive in horse manure. However, thanks to the invention of the automobile, The Great Horse Manure Crisis never happened.

It is therefore our ability to innovate and embrace new technology that I believe will resolve our impending food/meat system crisis. Using the latest in stem-cell technology, scientists in the Netherlands have already grown the world’s first strips of cow muscle tissue, without the cow, with the goal of cooking up the world’s first lab-grown hamburger in the coming years. If this production method becomes commercially viable, what gives me the confidence that consumers will accept it, is the fact that if consumers really cared where their meat products on the supermarket shelves came from, why would we be increasingly consuming meat the way it is currently produced through industrial factory farming?

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