How do you gather 600,000 chickens with less labor and less injury?
How do you pen and milk 50 goats at a time?
How do you raise 50,000 broilers at a time and keep their pens wast-free?
How do we satisfy our need for billions of eggs a year while reducing disease and chicken mortality and avoiding egg breakage?
How do we break a billion eggs a year (and economically separate yolks from whites) for commercial cooking?
How do we wash, sterilize, and package billions of eggs a year for the supermarket?
How do we process hundreds of thousands of pig carcasses a week for bacon, ham, ribs, and sausage?
How do we process hundreds of thousands of cow carcasses a week for steaks, hamburger, roasts, and hotdogs?
How do we sort it, inspect it, smoke it, dry it, and package it for market?
And WHY do we do it this way?
Simple: Too many people.
World population, which took 1 million years to reach 1 billion people by 1830, doubled to 2 billion by 1930, rose to 3 billion by 1960, 4 billion by 1975, 5 billion by 1986, and 6 billion by 1999.
Today, world population is 7.8 billion and will be about 9.8 billion by 2050.
We simply do not have the luxury of providing healthy, antiseptic, and affordable food (any food) to a massive human population using the inefficient, slovenly, and expensive production techniques used in 1830, 1930, 1960, or 1975.
3 comments:
One of the reasons I've chosen to be child free. The world does not need more humans.
"Overpopulation" is a red herring, Patrick. With judicious use of modern technology and some changes in the way business is carried out, it is quite possible to produce all the food, housing, transportation, consumer goods, and all the rest that any good society needs in a humane and sustainable manner even if we were to add billions more people to the equation. The problem is that we are blocked from doing so by the ruling class who, as I'm quite sure you're aware, control global politics and regulations or lack thereof, supply chains, and means of production. They would lose profit, and that is unacceptable.
Of course the CEO of Tyson, who has a net worth of $2 billion, could afford to lose a dime on every broiler in order to give the bird a kinder life - and to pay the farmers, plant workers, and drivers he mooches from a living wage - but why would he when no one is making him? And his lobbying arm makes well certain that no one ever will. As the planet collapses under unending exploitation by the elite, the "overpopulation" narrative makes a very convenient scapegoat of the behavior of the poor, working and middle classes, as well.
https://theconversation.com/why-we-should-be-wary-of-blaming-overpopulation-for-the-climate-crisis-130709
https://medium.com/@jacob.levich/bill-gates-and-the-myth-of-overpopulation-ca3b1d89680
https://isreview.org/issue/68/are-there-too-many-people
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/01/family-planning-environment-capitalism/
I was born and raised in Africa, have a Master's degree in demographics, and used to run the population and habitat program for one on the world's largest green groups. I did not just read a blog post about a guy with a theory who has never run a life table and does not know how to calculate a TFR or know the natural log of 2. You think humans are the only metric? Mistake One. You think you know what I think about population? Mistake Two. I've got probably a 100 posts on here about population from Malthus to Julian Simon; go ahead have fun reading a few. My general observation is that no demographer ever thinks this stuff is as simple as non-demographers do.
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