<story><title>Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/05/climate/agriculture-food-global-warming.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>NickM</author><text>Let&amp;#x27;s try to break this problem down to first principles:&lt;p&gt;- Humans need food to live because it provides energy and nutrients.&lt;p&gt;- From a fundamental standpoint of physics and available materials, nutrients are relatively easy to get; as far as I know, most vitamins and minerals are pretty cheap to either come by naturally or manufacture, and you don&amp;#x27;t need that much of any of them to keep a person healthy, so let&amp;#x27;s assume food energy is the real limiting factor here.&lt;p&gt;- The energy in most food comes from photosynthesis (either directly, in the case of eating plants, or indirectly, in the case of feeding plants to animals for growing meat).&lt;p&gt;- Photosynthesis is an &lt;i&gt;extremely&lt;/i&gt; inefficient way to turn solar radiation into chemical energy. Only about 3 to 6 percent of incoming solar energy is used by plants to create biomass, and not all of that biomass necessarily equates to calories we can digest and absorb.&lt;p&gt;So, while this isn&amp;#x27;t a particularly appetizing future to imagine living in, I don&amp;#x27;t know of any fundamental reason why artificially producing edible calories via solar electricity and chemical processes couldn&amp;#x27;t vastly exceed the efficiency of natural-grown food. It might be tricky getting to the point where fake food like this is healthy and tastes good...but if it saves the world from starving and stops civilization from collapsing then hey, it&amp;#x27;s not a bad fallback plan.&lt;p&gt;Besides being a big jump in efficiency, this type of tech could also enable the use of non-arable land for food production, since presumably you could set up the necessary manufacturing facilities anywhere you want.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>strainer</author><text>&amp;gt; From a fundamental standpoint of physics and available materials, nutrients are relatively easy to get; as far as I know, most vitamins and minerals are pretty cheap to either come by naturally or manufacture, and you don&amp;#x27;t need that much of any of them to keep a person healthy, so let&amp;#x27;s assume food energy is the real limiting factor here.&lt;p&gt;Food is more complicated than this picture. So much that nutritionists have major differences over which basic materials are beneficial in bulk and which cause health problems. Vitamins, minerals and medicines are not automatically absorbed well by our digestive system. The many biological foibles of human metabolism and our symbiotic gut flora, still confounds expectations about what food can be and can do to health.&lt;p&gt;There have been many, perhaps endless attempts to synthesize a wholesome food product - it would be worth a fortune. I am aware of zero successes to date and this shouldn&amp;#x27;t be the case if its not very difficult. We don&amp;#x27;t even synthesize sugar for consumption - maybe start there, but it is not even clear if&amp;#x2F;how much it causes diabetes or other diseases.&lt;p&gt;We might be stuck for a while longer with reliance on foods that needs to live for bit (plant or animal) before we can sustain our own lives with them - seems to be a very old system requirement of multicellular life, and one that has not been cracked yet.</text></comment>
<story><title>Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/05/climate/agriculture-food-global-warming.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>NickM</author><text>Let&amp;#x27;s try to break this problem down to first principles:&lt;p&gt;- Humans need food to live because it provides energy and nutrients.&lt;p&gt;- From a fundamental standpoint of physics and available materials, nutrients are relatively easy to get; as far as I know, most vitamins and minerals are pretty cheap to either come by naturally or manufacture, and you don&amp;#x27;t need that much of any of them to keep a person healthy, so let&amp;#x27;s assume food energy is the real limiting factor here.&lt;p&gt;- The energy in most food comes from photosynthesis (either directly, in the case of eating plants, or indirectly, in the case of feeding plants to animals for growing meat).&lt;p&gt;- Photosynthesis is an &lt;i&gt;extremely&lt;/i&gt; inefficient way to turn solar radiation into chemical energy. Only about 3 to 6 percent of incoming solar energy is used by plants to create biomass, and not all of that biomass necessarily equates to calories we can digest and absorb.&lt;p&gt;So, while this isn&amp;#x27;t a particularly appetizing future to imagine living in, I don&amp;#x27;t know of any fundamental reason why artificially producing edible calories via solar electricity and chemical processes couldn&amp;#x27;t vastly exceed the efficiency of natural-grown food. It might be tricky getting to the point where fake food like this is healthy and tastes good...but if it saves the world from starving and stops civilization from collapsing then hey, it&amp;#x27;s not a bad fallback plan.&lt;p&gt;Besides being a big jump in efficiency, this type of tech could also enable the use of non-arable land for food production, since presumably you could set up the necessary manufacturing facilities anywhere you want.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>paulddraper</author><text>In theory, you&amp;#x27;re absolutely correct.&lt;p&gt;In practice, the replicating the composition of food (proteins, carbs, fats, vitamins, minerals, bacteria, fiber, etc.) is a huge feat. Especially because we don&amp;#x27;t understand enough about human diet. (See: 1 gazillion articles about dieting.)&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s like gene editing. There&amp;#x27;s a lot that theoretical possible, but the real sci-fi stuff is &lt;i&gt;way&lt;/i&gt; out of our reach right now.</text></comment>