Feeding Everyone No Matter What

Feeding Everyone No Matter What: Managing Food Security After Global Catastrophe is a book written by David Denkenberger and Joshua M. Pearce and published by Elsevier under their Academic Press.

Food storage for the entire global population is the only historical solution for a global disruption of conventional agriculture due to global catastrophes such as abrupt climate change and nuclear winter, despite three decades of awareness of the problem.^[1] But for large global catastrophes, at least five years of supplies are needed because agriculture would be hampered for that time. This large of a stockpile is economically prohibitive on a global scale or even within the US.^[2] The number of global catastrophes that apply is large and the book analyzed five crop-destroying catastrophes (sudden climate change, super-weeds, super-bacteria, super-pests and super-pathogens) and three sunlight-extinguishing events (supervolcano eruption, asteroid or comet impact, and nuclear winter).^[3]

The book Feeding Everyone No Matter What proposes more than 10 solutions for providing the global food supply according to Discovery News.^[4] Gizmodo reports that Denkenberger and Pearce covered two primary classes of solutions: 1) convert existing fossil fuels to food by growing bacteria on top of it—then either eat the bacterial slime or feed it to rats and bugs and then eat them and 2) use rats and insects to convert stored vegetation (e.g. wood and fossil fuels) into food.^[5]

The study that is the foundation of the book involves interdisciplinarity and gives instructions for the survivalism movement. Feeding Everyone No Matter What has been covered extensively by the international media.^{[3][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14]}

Claims

The authors, David Denkenberger and Joshua Pearce, claim alternate food sources could feed everyone even if the sun is blocked by catastrophes like nuclear winter, supervolcano eruption, or large asteroid/comet impact. At first this appears unlikely because malnutrition and hunger-related disease now kill 6.5 million children under five years old each year.^[15] This is because the book focuses on what is technically possible and assumes global cooperation. The solutions also address crises including abrupt climate change, super weeds, super crop pests (animals, e.g. insects), super bacteria (e.g. disrupts beneficial bacteria) and super crop pathogens. The solution using fossil fuel energy source is natural gas digesting bacteria.^[16]

A solution if the sun is not completely blocked is ocean fertilization because 0.1% of the ocean area undergoes coastal upwelling (bringing nutrients to the surface) and yet this produces 50% of the world's fish catch.^[17] Ruminants and other grazers can digest dietary fiber, but do not have enough offspring to feed everyone within 5 years.^[18] Mushrooms can grow directly on wood without sunlight.^[19] Some beetles can digest cellulose.^[20]

Cellulosic biofuel production typically already creates sugar as an intermediate product.^[21] There are edible calories in leaves, but there is too much dietary fiber, so solutions include making tea, chewing and not swallowing the solids, and making leaf protein concentrate.^[22][23] Biomass can be predigested by bacteria so that animals that are not good at digesting cellulose can derive nutrition, such as rats^[24] and possibly chickens.

As a backup plan, it is even possible that humans could eat this predigested biomass.^[25] In a sun-obscuring crisis, stored food would last the human population less than one year. The book shows how many of these solutions can be ramped up in less than one year.

This book also addresses other issues, including energy supply, water supply, forest products, human nutrition, and preserving endangered species. Furthermore, the book gives instructions for the prepper movement.

Criticisms

Some Reddit users^[26] have argued that there will be a social acceptability issue with the solutions proposed in the book (e.g. eating insects) and others even within the survivalist community have shown concern for the taste.^[27] In an interview with Nautilus magazine, one of the authors admitted to trying many of the solutions himself and said, “It’s not like you have to eat insects raw. You would never know the difference between say, a sausage patty, a veggie sausage patty, and an insect sausage patty.”^[28]

The authors themselves admitted a potential moral hazard with publishing the solutions, as for example Mikhail Gorbachev explicitly stated that a motivating factor for reducing the nuclear arsenal of the USSR was the studies predicting nuclear winter and therefore destruction outside of the target countries.^[29] However, despite the knowledge of the possibility of nuclear winter, the overall global aggregate nuclear arsenal remains large enough to potentially cause nuclear winter (see: List of states with nuclear weapons). Similarly, though there is a clear and present threat of anthropogenic abrupt climate change, the results of efforts to prevent global climate change have been ineffective.^[30] In their analysis, Denkenberger and Pearce argue that the benefits of a food solution backup plan would reduce overall harm to humanity in the global catastrophes over which control is possible and could reduce the damages associated catastrophes over which humanity has no or very little control (e.g. supervolcanos).^[31]

See also

• Famine
• Food security
• Food systems
• Global catastrophic risk
• Survivalism

References

External links

• Feeding Everyone No Matter What on Appropedia.