When people imagine the possible collapse of highly centralized systems, like food production & distribution in developed nations, they often assume the result can only mean disaster.
But renewables point to a different outcome – decentralized self-sufficiency.
With your own solar setup, you can power all your energy needs, including transport with EVs. Not only that, you can power all your basic metabolic needs. Living off nothing but Solein doesn't sound like much fun, but it's a complete protein, so at least it would be a healthy diet.
Decentralized renewable energy is spreading throughout the developed world; will decentralized renewable-powered food production follow?
Source 2 – This Protein Powder Is Made Out of Air and Uses 600 Times Less Water Than Beef
Will solar power make famine a thing of the past? Solein is a protein produced in solar-powered bioreactors from C02, water, & minerals, and is going on sale around the world.
byu/lughnasadh inFuturology
11 Comments
Not until we move past capitalism. We already have enough food production to feed every person on the planet food rations. We do not because money.
Using bacteria and yeast to grow high protein food (or as food) is a pretty common trope in scifi. It is interesting to see this concept take off in real life.Â
No.
It has been told countless of times that its a distribution, waste and access issue.
Protein powder is not food. It’s just a component of a diet. You need fats and carbs too. And a long list of micronutrients.
Places where people starve, do not have a functional transport network or money.
They won’t be able to buy it, even if its cheap. Transport, storage, manpower etc is not cheap.
Famine in the past 40-50 years is a product of economics not production. Even logistics is not much of an issue these days.
Because people go hungry even in “first” world countries. when food production corporations are allowed to dictate access to food we get the current conditions.
In our lifetimes, famine has mostly been caused by failures of distribution rather than insufficient calories.
No, because famines are the result of politics not crop failure. The issue is always the distribution of resources, not how many of them we have.
The answer is that so long as resources are distributed according to who can pay rather than according to who needs them, we will continue to have famine in a world of plenty. No technology will solve that.
Probably not. At least not any more than traditional gardening does, unless it was somehow substantially easier to maintain and cheaper to get started.
How is it decentralized when the supply chain for solar panels and chips and the like is centralized
Famines are political, we produce too much every year. The problem is mostly greed, a new protein won’t change that.
People in large groups are rather stupid. That’s how we got here. It doesn’t matter what you think you could feed them, they’ll still find a way to outgrow their food supply. We should solve how to raise smarter people, not feed the idiots.