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29 Oct 2026
How to grow and eat food that will keep you healthy – but first.
This is the home of the food reformers, people who want to see the focus of food production on community health and not short-term profits.
It seems there are 8 billion philosophies or ideas on how to live, but there are three key groups.
The first group believes that if you make enough profit, you will have the money to solve any problem.
The second group provides the grunt force that makes profit for the first group. The snag is that they spend so much time filling out computer-generated forms to make the first group’s profits that they have little time left to enjoy life.
They spend the rest of their time managing passwords to keep the computers happy. Every ninety seconds, they are told they need to change their passwords, and they must contain at least two numbers and two characters.
The smart people have figured out that they can take the basic word ‘password’ and create a massive number of passwords by simply adding capitals and symbols in a system, and this will keep the dumb computers happy, e.g., p3aSsw4o#rd
The third group recognises that humans are just another species among millions of species living in a normally balanced and sustainable ecosystem and if we want to survive as a species we better protect that ecosystem.
We may be among the most intelligent of species, with an IQ approaching that of a Cockatoo.
Cockatoos have worked out how to open a rubbish bin with just a beak and can also hang upside down to take a bite out of a ripening fruit. This has two benefits: firstly, it deters those pesky humans from taking their fruit, and they get to eat the fruit at the peak of perfection.
I am in this third group, and having visited the slums in Brazil and India, I understand what the essentials of life are.
Clean air is important, but food that keeps us healthy is a bigger challenge. We need clothing and housing to protect us from the elements, but there is a bigger need.
However bad things are, we need entertainment. In fact, it is a reverse relationship: the worse the physical conditions are, the more we need entertainment to escape the horrors of reality.
Now, I am not an entertainer, but I do try to keep my articles fun to read; my real purpose in life is to show people how they can grow and eat food that will keep them healthy.
People often think that technology development is a logical linear process. Nothing could be further from the truth; an unexpected snag may seem to block development but can lead to a new approach that is so much better than the previous plan.
I call this zig-zag development.
My plan was to develop a technology for growing food that provided the full spectrum of nutrients the human body needs. But I hit a snag. If the soil was too rich in nutrients, it would kill the plants that were supposed to be our food.
To overcome this problem of excessive nutrients, I experimented with a system where the excess nutrients were used in what I called daughter beds, but were really dummy beds to mop up the excess nutrients.
It turns out that this was potentially a major leap forward, dramatically increasing the supply of food while reducing costs.
That is how we dull, boring introverted engineers get our kicks – but it is exciting.
You can read about this development in my article on daughter beds.
If you too find discovering a new way of feeding humanity exciting, then please welcome aboard my website and start with ‘Food in an imperfect world’
Colin Austin
