This web is about the global food crisis. It is not a pretty-pretty web but neither is the global food crisis – the biggest threat facing humanity.

Here and now

The global food crisis is not some threat for the future, it is here right now, it is not just about poor people starving in some remote country it is about people in rich countries suffering from chronic diseases, such as obesity, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia.

It is man-man made, if you face having a leg amputated it is a direct result of the food crisis – the wrong sort of food from our modern food system.

Balance of foods

It is not a simple shortage of food, it is about the wrong balance of foods and that is not what you may expect so it takes quite a bit of explaining.

I understand that everyone is busy these days but I hope that everyone who visits the site will at least read the front page, but more important we need a few people to really understand the issues and become ambassadors for change. If you think you could be a food ambassador and say hi just email me.

Become a food ambassador

We can’t expect big business or even Governments to initiate action, we need a groundswell from the public to create the social pressure for change and that will be led by these ambassadors.

It is a question of what sort of world do we want to live in. Should food be purely about maximising wealth for a small number of people or should it be for the health and benefits of the community as a whole.

Food for energy

The basic facts are simple but unexpected. We need food for energy and that comes mainly from the sun. The amount of energy coming from the sun is vast in comparison with all man’s use of energy. There is no absolute shortage of energy.

Plants are brilliant converters of the suns energy into food energy, they just need water, carbon dioxide from the air and a few minerals which act as catalyst.

Food for replacement

We may think we are the same person that we were a few months ago but we are not, we are continuously replacing our body parts as they age and wear and that requires a complex array of chemicals which largely comes from the soil via plants.

There is truth in the saying that ‘Health Starts in the Soil’

But even this replacement food is not a crisis. We have a very sophisticated science of biochemistry. We know exactly what chemicals we need and how to produce them, preferably in our food which give a better balance but if all else fails, from pills which are readily available – even if at a high price.

Intelligent control system

Our bodies are very different to a jelly fish, aimlessly swimming around hoping to find food. We have a highly sophisticated intelligent control system which automatically regulates what we want to eat, among all our other bodily requirements.

It is like having a supercomputer in our gut and brain which working away in our subconscious regulates our bodies.

Unlike the mature sciences of biochemistry and microbiology, we really have no idea of the coding that drives this supercomputer but we know that it starts learning from the first suck on Mum’s breast until when we die.

We know that we have to feed it gut-brain food, if it senses deficiencies it will send out signals in the form of hormones so we overeat and get fat and sick.

But we also know that our gut brain is like a city, the city lives on over the centuries but the individuals are continuously breeding and dying, but the microbes have a life span measured in days rather than decades.

If we don’t create the right conditions for these microbes to breed we will end up with the wrong sort of microbes in our gut and our gut brain will not work properly at all.

This is the biggest threat in the global food crisis.

So, if you want a stable world for you and your grand kids, become a health food ambassador.

Getting started

I know, from bitter experience, that if I started by saying that Gbiota is about growing bugs that will live in your gut, and have swarm intelligence that controls what and how much you want to eat you would probably find the whole idea repulsive and click away.

So let me start by telling you what I do every day, that I am 84, fit and healthy and there is a whole tribe of us doing the same thing.

It is in three stages

Stage 1 breeding beneficial bugs

I do breed beneficial bugs, I do this in a Gbiota bed or box. I fill just the base with any organic waste I can lay my hands on, mostly kitchen scraps and grass clippings. The upper layer is filled with Wickimix, a really nice soil where I grow my plants.

I flood just the base of the box with soil blood which is what I call the fluid in the base of the box as it does the same job as our blood, distribute nutrients and air throughout the soil.

When I flood I expel all the stale air, I wait and let the soil blood wick up to the root zone of the plants growing in the Wickimix. Then I drain the base of the box which sucks fresh air into the box.

I store the soil blood I catch ready for the next flood and flush cycle.

I eat the plants that I grow, and every morning I make a green smoothie which is full of beneficial bugs which end up in my gut to power my gut-brain.

Stage 2 training my gut-brain

Now I train my gut-brain by eating all sorts of different foods so it learns what foods work for me and what don’t.

Even though I am 84 I will still listen to a 24-year-old nutritionist just out of University and if they tell me I need to get some more Vitamin K or B12, or zinc or whatever I will start to eat food that contains that possibly missing nutrient.

Stage 3 listening to my gut-brain

Now I learn to listen to my gut-brain. I don’t go on any restrictive diet, I think about that famous Wodehouse saying ‘Giving up wine, women and song’ does not make you live longer, it just makes it seem longer.

If I go to a party and a pretty girl comes around in a low-cut dress offering me a piece or two of cheesecake she has made for the party then sure as eggs are eggs I am going to stuff myself.

But the next morning my gut-brain is going to tell me ‘Colin, you had a bit of a wild party last night, so it is just your green smoothie and one slice of toast for breakfast for you.

That way I keep myself fit and healthy and also enjoy life, which seems to me to be the point of living.

What I do in life

So what do I do in life? I show people, anyone who is interested in keeping fit and healthy, how to grow this gut-brain food, train and listen to their gut-brain and hopefully have a life in which they enjoy one of the great pleasures of life – eating.

One tribe

The Earth has been spinning around the sun for four and a half billion years and we can expect it to be still spinning for a few more billion years.

Modern humans have only been here for a blink of an eye – 200,000 years and an agricultural society for a mere 10,000 years, and industrial society for 200 years and an information society for fifty.

Humans – we are all part of a teratribe

In our modern world we are all part of a teratribe. Part of this tribe can cut down forest in Brazil and that may lead to flooding in New York or Delhi.

We produce enough food to feed everyone on the planet yet millions go hungry, we know that an all-out nuclear war would destroy us all yet we continue to stockpile deadly weaponry, we know that the planet is heating up, sea levels are rising and finite resources are running out yet we continue to emit greenhouse gases at an unsustainable rate.

With our understanding of food and nutrition most of us should be fit and healthy into old age yet we have mega global corporations spending billions of dollars on very clever manipulative advertising so we buy their products and end up fat and sick and maybe having our legs chopped of from diabetes.

The easy bit-last

In the second half of this web I describe the technology of growing food so most people can expect a long and healthy life, that is the easy bit.

I became involved with how to grow food when I was recruited by my Mum as non-optional child labour to grow food in WW2. It is not difficult to grow healthy food sustainably, it is difficult to condense 84 years of learning into a three world acronym, even Eat, Fresh Food Grown in Living Soil takes six words.

There is no doubt that if we want to live long and healthy lives we have to change out food system, we know how to do that – the difficult bit is convincing people that living solely of a diet of chicken wings and chips followed by a double portion of cheese cakes is not the way.

But how to convince people there is a better way is the difficult bit that comes first.

Learning my lesson

But I did learn a very valuable lesson in my era as a pioneer of computer aided engineering, in the early days of computers when they were seriously clunky machines.

I developed software which solved coupled non-linear partial differential equations using an iterative predictor corrector scheme. Sounds boring and it was, but I ploughed on giving lectures on the technology with as much success as trying to stop teenagers thinking about sex.

Does it work?

But then I learned my lesson, people were just not interested in the mechanics of how it worked, there were a few people, the pioneering types, who just wanted to know how to operate the software well enough so they can go away and test it for themselves.

Does it work?

There was no reason why they should believe me but they were happy to run the risk of testing it to see if it worked as I predicted.

Fortunately for me it did and what came next is the interesting bit.

The interesting bit

These early pioneers became really excited about this new technology and with no help from me, I am an engineer not a marketing person, they showed their results to other people and soon this technology, which was at first seen as a bit weird became the norm.

A paradigm shift had occurred right before my eyes.

Feeding 8 billion people

I know that if we are going to feed 8 billion people so they have a long and healthy life that there needs to be a paradigm shift in our food.

I also know that I cannot bring about the paradigm shift myself but I know what I have to do. Find those enterprising early adopters, just a few of them, persuade them to set up Gbiota beds, eat the food and see if this improves their health.

They will then become enthusiastic and they will create the paradigm shift.

So if you find this web dull and boring, not to worry, just hang around and watch what other people are doing.

But if you are one of those early adopters who see the need for a food paradigm shift then I have created this web site for you and I am more than happy to meet up with you, this is my email address and I look forward to chatting with you.

Food security – real or hype?

Is food security real or hype? This is what I examine here first and later and more importantly what to do about it.

The Supermarkets are bulging with food so maybe we can just relax. Reliable figures for total food production are difficult to come by but is seems that we can identify production of at least 4 billion tonnes of food a year but the actual figure is probably much higher. Enough to feed the entire world for now and years to come. All seems good.

But let us start breaking this down. We are a thermodynamic machine and we need fuel for energy. That comes largely from the sun. The amount of energy falling on the earth from the sun is huge, far greater than all the energy used by mankind in all ways. No need to worry?

Plants are very effective solar panels, using the energy from the sun to break down water molecules and combining this with carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to produce carbohydrates for energy.

If we were to adopt a plant-based diet there would be more than enough energy food, the biggest threat would be fresh water. We are already draining global aquifers for irrigation which are running dry while climate change will increase total rainfall but clump the rains together causing flooding and periods of drought with no usable water.

Then we have fires which are a serious concern.

But food does more than supply energy. We may not seem to change much year to year but our cells are dying and being replaced on a short time scale.

This requires a whole range of complex chemicals which originate from minerals, which we mine, but are processed so they are bio-available by a complex array of microbes, fungi and plants which we eat as phyto-chemicals.

We are rapidly exhausting some of these basic minerals, particularly phosphorous which is serious but even worse our system of modern agriculture is destroying the microbes and fungi which process these basic minerals into nutrients into the food chain.

This is a genuine threat to our food security but we can still manage on a reasonable time scale.

But there is a third function of food, to power the intelligent control system which regulates our bodies. This may be only a very small proportion of our food intake but is critical, in the way the pilot of a plane is only a minute proportion of the energy used by a modern airliner but it is absolutely vital for the smooth and safe operation of the plane.

Lack of the right food to power our intelligent control system is not some distant threat, it is here and now. The modern epidemic of chronic or non-infectious disease, which causes three out of four deaths is the result of deficiencies in our food system.

This is a problem demanding immediate attention, fortunately we know how to resolve this, at least technically, the solution is simple and saves money.

The challenge is to gain attention in the world of hype and disinformation in which we live.

Recycle not exploit

Gbiota technology allows virtually all people to breed beneficial microbes at home in organic waste.

For the best part of a million years humanoid creatures have eaten plants grown in living soil teaming with microbes , both good and bad, but many died from infectious diseases from the bad bugs. In the Gbiota technology we engineer the conditions so the good bugs out breed and out compete the bad bugs.

Our gut biome is part of our intelligent control system which regulates our bodies. If it has the wrong microbes or senses deficiencies it will send out hormones to make us feel hungry so we overeat and get fat.

Fat in the wrong place is the underlying cause of the modern epidemic of chronic diseases.

But there are more important but longer-term implications. We are exhausting the natural resources that feed our food system such as phosphorous but most important is fresh water on which all life depends, and which will be grossly affected by climate change.

The Gbiota technology is based on recycling rather than exploitation of the earth’s natural resources and is particularly efficient in its use of water based on the principles of flood, flush and recycle.

It is hoped that this is appreciated by those concerned about climate change and who are prepared to set up demonstration sites to convince the general public of the importance of recycling.

The web has become so saturated with disinformation that there is widespread scepticism. People will only be convinced by practical demonstration.

Both industry and Governments are under short-term pressure to act, but regular people have a great concern for the lives of their future children and grandchildren.