How we will survive
Summary
In my lifetime, the global population has more than tripled.
But technology has increased food production at an even faster rate. But that increase has been in sugars, fats, and carbs, while essential minerals and vitamins have not increased in proportion. Even more importantly, the beneficial microbes which regulate our appetite have actually decreased – modern food may be hygienic, but it is lifeless.
Here we show how virtually anyone, even living in an apartment, can grow food to provide these essential beneficial microbes and trace minerals by recycling waste organic material, supplemented with the basic minerals, at low cost.
With a little effort, you can do this right now, and as our understanding of food needs spreads, local growers may adopt this technology to provide an alternative food supply.
Has the world gone crazy?
If you are one of those rare people who still look at the news or read a newspaper, you may think the world has gone crazy with all the conflict and stress.
But why? We have amazing technology that can produce products and services quickly and cheaply. We should all be enjoying a near-luxury life, but we are not. We need to understand why.
The answer lies in what is called the third industrial revolution. The first industrial revolution was based on steam power and coal, while the second is based on oil. They have a common theme: self-interest will lead to maximum economic growth.
That may (or may not) be true when greed results in releasing untapped resources, but it is certainly not true now in times of limited natural resources.
Greed is not good
Leading modern-day thinkers are now talking about the third industrial revolution. This rejects the ‘greed is good’ philosophy when resources are limited and says we should focus on community benefit rather than short-term profit, with cooperation replacing competition.
The challenge is to show this isn’t some woke idealism, but a viable economic system.
But first, we have to understand why resources are now finite.
Finite resources
Every day, 374,000 babies are born, and 174,000 people die, meaning that each day there are an extra 200,000 people to be fed and housed.
But that is just the start of the problem. Much of this population growth is happening in developing or underdeveloped countries, particularly in Asia and Africa.
But the term ‘developing’ is outdated. These countries are rapidly modernising, and their populations expect a standard of living similar to that of established economies.
This industrialisation is putting an even greater pressure on natural resources.
Look at the problem in another way. When I was born, the global population was about 2.5 billion, and large parts of the world could still be described as wild.
In my lifetime, the population has increased to over 8 billion, more than trebling, and there are very few areas of the world that could be described as wild.
We need wild areas to help balance the atmospheric gases, but also for our psychological well-being.
Managing the population explosion
Population growth has put great pressure on food and housing. We cannot consider them separately; they are coupled.
When I was a kid, most people lived in rural areas or at least on the outskirts of towns. They had reasonably sized gardens with lawns, flower beds and, most importantly, a vegetable patch.
As the population trebled and people moved from rural to city living, block sizes shrank, and houses got bigger, leaving little room for a traditional vegetable patch.
We also went vertical with multi-story apartment blocks with no garden, maybe just a balcony.
The net result was that the population became dependent on supermarkets and the modern food system, which is very different from the food system I grew up with.
As a kid, I had a school holiday job on a local farm, and much of my work was muck spreading. In that era, manure was the soil’s main source of nutrients, and it is full of living microbes that breed in the soil, enter plants, and eventually end up in our guts to form our intelligent control system
But that all changed with the introduction of synthetic fertilisers. These may provide more concentrated nutrients, but they are dead and inert, with no living organisms, so we lost the steady supply of gut microbes.
Why microbes matter
The Earth contains a wide range of minerals that are needed to form nutrients. But they are insoluble, so plants and animals, including humans, can’t use them.
Microbes appeared and broke down the rocks, making them bioavailable, and life started in earnest on planet Earth.
But they do much more than that. Even a handful of living soil contains trillions of microbes from thousands of species – so complex that we have very little understanding of how they work as an integrated system.
But what we do know is that this complex collection of microbes has what we call swarm intelligence, which we see in many natural systems, from birds and insects to the peculiar material we call slime moulds, which show remarkable intelligence.
We may not understand how the massive collections of multiple species of microbes work in our guts, but we do know that it is critical for controlling our bodies, specifically how much and what sort of food we want to eat.
We know it works, as shown by the recent interest in GLP-1, a natural hormone produced by our gut microbes that makes us feel full, so we don’t want to eat.
It is the soil, stupid
If we had a system for controlling our appetite that has been tested over millions of years, discarding it would be a remarkable act of stupidity. Yet that is precisely what we have done with our modern food system.
The result is the modern epidemic of chronic diseases, overweight, diabetes, heart attacks, dementia, etc.
We don’t need to have all our food grown in living soil, just a small amount, and that is what the humble vegetable garden provided.
The challenge is to create a system that lets billions of people in our modern cities still access plant-based food grown in living soil.
That is the challenge I have faced for much of my eighty-six years. To me, it matters far more than my pioneering work in Computer-Aided Engineering, for which the Institute of Engineers selected me as one of Australia’s leading innovators.
On this website, I show how people can grow plants in living soil using what I call our Intelligent Control System, which regulates our bodies.
To keep my feet in the real world, I have created a fictitious character (but based on a real person), Mary, a single mum with three kids and two jobs, living in a flat, who is putting on weight and has been diagnosed as pre-diabetic.
I reckon if Mary can grow plants to feed her intelligent control system, then pretty much anyone can.
I have split the website into three main sections.
The first is Why, which explains why we need to change our food system so we can feed our intelligent control system, which regulates our bodies. Hopefully, at some point while reading these articles, you will say, “I am convinced; let us get on and do it.” Time to skip to the How section.
How is the second section, which covers the nitty-gritty of growing Metabolic food to feed our intelligent control system.
The third section is the Library. Over the many years I’ve worked on this project, I have written hundreds of articles that may or may not interest some people but need to be available as a record. When I have time (I am human), I am trying to make these many articles and videos easier to access.
Reading guide
Our focus is on how to grow metabolic food, that is, food that builds and maintains our bodies; this includes the well-known proteins, minerals and vitamins, but also includes the food for our intelligent control system, which regulates our bodies.
Introduction gives an overview
Looks at why we should be eating more Metabolic food
Food in an Imperfect World looks at the practicalities of eating healthy and the ever-present problem of adopting a new technology in a world gone crazy
Balancing food production looks at the practicalities of eating well in our modern, high-stress society
Understanding looks at the underlying principles of how to grow metabolic food
You may want to read all these articles, or you may just want to skip the theory and get down to the practicalities of how to grow, or at least access, metabolic food, in which case you will find further articles under ‘How’ in the menu.
If you share my views on the need to change our food system, why not introduce yourself by emailing me and saying hello?
