Food and the Human Future

A Transformative Pathway to Remaking Ourselves in the Best Way

“The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody’s guess.” – James Thurber, Author, Humorist

Our current human circumstance is becoming more unsettled, more uncertain with every passing moment.
Our human population now exceeds 8 billion. That’s more than double the number we were just 50 years ago. Before the end of this century, the human population is expected to reach 10 or even 12 billion.
The wants and needs of so many billions of humans are sucking the life out of our planet Earth, the home we all depend on, the only one we have.
Humans have unleashed climate change, global pandemics, unchecked gun violence, nuclear-armed political conflict, and chronic food insecurity for many of the world’s people. We are awash in every kind of dysfunction. A big part of our problem revolves around how we humans feed ourselves.

We are using essential resources like soils, freshwater, and mineral nutrients at far greater than sustainable levels. And the food system is contributing to pollution at levels that are disrupting natural systems on a planetary scale.”
Jane O’Sullivan, Food System Scientist, University of Queensland

Our Eating Habits are Killing our Planet
Humans are omnivores. That means we are known to eat all variety of things – plant and animal.
Food has become a massively consequential human issue. Our ability to produce more than enough to feed ourselves has been a primary driver behind the steady growth of our population. From our modest post-Neolithic beginnings, humans have become the most successful animal species on Earth.
Early in the 21st century, we are still adding about 75 million more humans annually to our Earth’s population. That’s equivalent to about 19 cities the size of Los Angeles every single year.
Each human we add requires food, water, and shelter to survive. Think for a moment about the massive demands that go with humanity’s outsized footprint on Earth.

“You can’t build a peaceful world on empty stomachs and human misery.”
Norman Borlaug, Agronomist
¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬_______

Food Production is a Planetary-Scale Enterprise
Much of the developed world has ceded the production of our food to giant corporations. Big business has made it very easy for those who have money to feast all day, every day, on an incredible variety of foods.
Humans reduce the animals we eat to commodities like eggs, beef steak, pork cutlets, chicken nuggets, etc. The living creatures these foods were taken from are culturally invisible, out of sight and out of mind for most people.

“The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that is the essence of inhumanity.”
George Bernard Shaw, 19th Century Sage
¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬__________

The Way We Feed Ourselves
In the U.S. and other developed nations, our supermarkets are always stocked full for shoppers. We can eat whatever we want, whenever we want it. In the world’s developed nations, that’s what we’ve come to expect, right?
Those eggs always available in cartons at the market for $3/dozen come from factory-scale facilities, where millions of commodified hens are cruelly confined, and pumped with hormones and antibiotics to keep them laying eggs, day after day, until they are exhausted, at which time they are killed and reduced to meats for humans, and feed for other commodified animals.
To cheaply produce the milk and cheese humans take for granted, industrial diary operations keep nearly ten million cows pregnant so they will produce lots of milk. When calves are born, they are immediately removed from their mothers, whose genetics and gestation cycles are efficiently managed to keep them producing maximum milk yields, until they are exhausted, at which time they are sent to slaughter.
In the U.S., something like 56 billion animals are slaughtered every year to provide humans with a vast variety of ribs, cutlets, fillets, and other cleverly packaged forms of animal protein. A recent study published by the National Academy of Sciences states that while humans constitute only 0.01% of the planet’s biomass, we have annihilated 83% of all wild animals and 50% of all plants. Of the birds remaining on Earth, 70% are commodified poultry raised for human consumption. Of all the warm-blooded mammals remaining on Earth, 60% is livestock bred for slaughter. Another 36% of warmed-blooded biomass is just us humans. Only 4% of mammalian biomass is all that remains of wild mammal species. Let that sink in. It is a description of life on Earth woefully out of balance.
We are also mining our oceans to provide cheap seafood for humans to consume. Most of the commercial fisheries around the world are now either exhausted or are well on their way to that point . Large predator fish like tuna have been depleted by 90% in just the past 50 years.
If you count the farmed animals we raise and slaughter with the living creatures we take from our seas, the total number of animals killed and consumed by humans exceeds a trillion every year.
The industrial scale with which we exploit other animal species and reduce them to supermarket commodities is mind-boggling. Humans have shaped a global culture that ignores the cruelty and indifference that goes with the foods we choose to eat.
Where nourishment is concerned, we humans are at a turning point. Agriculture, as we know it, is challenged to accommodate the 8 billion people already here. Itit currently takes about 2.75 hectares of the Earth’s productive area to support the average human – yet the Earth itself only has 1.5 hectares of biologically productive land and water to sustain each one of us.

“Were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to raise, kill, and eat animals the way we do.
Michael Pollan, Author, The Omnivore’s Dilemma

The Footprint of Agriculture on Earth
Nearly half of the habitable land on Earth is dedicated to food production. Of that, 77% is used for raising livestock, and 22% is used to grow crops.
The modern food chain is responsible for about 30% of global greenhouse emissions.
The flooding of our Earth’s atmosphere with heat trapping greenhouses gases is causing unprecedented, climate-induced weather extremes. Droughts, flooding, and wildfire are rendering massive amounts of our Earth’s habitable landscape unusable for producing food.
In this third decade of the 21st century, we already have nearly a billion humans suffering from chronic hunger. That will only get worse in coming decades.
The time for a fundamental remake in the way we humans feed ourselves has arrived. Achieving that lofty aspiration will require an unprecedented outreach effort; a global-sized vision that galvanizes all humans, all together behind one worthy, common purpose vision.

“Food is national security, Food is Economy. It is employment, energy, history. Food is everything.”
Chef Jose Andres, World Central Kitchen

The Promise of a Collective Voice
Humans do have a bit of good fortune going for us. Just when we need to be working together, all the world’s cultures together, we now have the means to face down the daunting range of existential challenges that define life for us. We have – like never before – the ability to connect nearly all of our Earth’s people in real time. The internet and the social media allow us to share the same messages at the same time in every corner of our world.
The trend analysis firm, Techcast is reporting humanity is within a handful of years of becoming linked together, like a kind of ‘Global- Collective Consciousness.’ Arguments can be that we are already at that point.
In this emerging world, all of humanity is aware of its stake in our common struggle against our worst cultural instincts.
We must find a way to get past our petty tribalism. We must find a way to accept each other and celebrate our common humanity. That’s how we learn to trust and cooperate, standing all together, behind life-affirming common purpose.

‘All of us share this world for but a brief moment in time. The question is whether we spend that time focused on what pushes us apart, or whether we commit ourselves to an effort — a sustained effort — to find common ground, to focus on the future we seek for our children, and to respect the dignity of all human beings.’ – Barack Obama

Eating in Tune with Nature
When humans substantially embrace a plant-based diet, we accomplish two worthy goals. First, and most important, we take tremendous pressure off our biosphere; the one we all depend on for survival.
A recent study suggests that if humans largely go to plant-based eating, the amount of land used for agriculture would drop by 75%. .
Personally, knowing there was no cruelty or suffering involved in putting food on my plate, feels like a good way to redeem one’s soul.
Julian Cribb, Author, Food or War, identifies three parts to a culturally transformative food system that would massively reduce the impact of agriculture on our earth’s natural resources and biodiversity. The first is to farm the land that remains dedicated to food production regeneratively rather than intensively. Author Cribb says, ‘The basic idea is that agriculture should more closely mimic the processes found in nature and minimize the waste, pollution, and other collateral damage that over-industrialized systems can cause.’
The second part of producing food sustainably involves tapping our Earth’s underutilized deep waters. Author Cribb expects ‘The development of worldwide deepwater aquaculture of fish, aquatic creatures, microalgae, and seaweeds on a scale several times larger than today.’
The third part of a sustainable food system will come with the rapid expansion of an idea author Julian Cribb refers to as urban food production. It amounts to a range of methods for producing fruit and vegetable crops involving advanced techniques that are cost-effective and efficient. One category of urban food production that is fast emerging is known as vertical farming.

“With vertical farms scattered throughout the urban landscape, city life will start to reflect the essentials of ecological process, producing food and recycling all waste.”
Dixon Despommier, Vertical Farming Pioneer

The Upside of Growing Our Food Indoors
There’s a lot to like about vertical farms. They can be built from new designs. They can also be a cost-effective way to reuse old shopping malls, warehouses, and vacant commercial buildings.
Vertical farms are seriously resource efficient. They require about 90% less water than cropland farms. They don’t need chemical fertilizers, pesticides, or toxic chemicals of any kind. Vertical farms are organic farms.
Well matched with clean, renewable sources of energy, vertical farms are designed with highly efficient OLED lighting, tuned to deliver optimal plant growth.
A square meter of vertical farm delivers as much as fifty times the harvest of a square meter of dedicated cropland. Most traditional farming is seasonal, yielding a single harvest. With vertical farms, there are no seasons; three, even four harvests are possible.
Traditional crops can be ruined by weather extremes; vertical farm crops are grown indoors. They are not subject to the weather.
Pretty much any vegetable that can be found in a grocery produce section can be grown in a vertical farm. The cost per unit of production in a vertical farm of tomatoes and leafy greens is already or is becoming competitive with crops harvested from traditional farms.
Vegetables grown on industrial scale truck farmlands in California’s central valley or imported from other countries can travel thousands of miles and take a week or more before ending up in someone’s kitchen. Local, community-based vertical farm crops can go from harvest to dinner plate the same day.
Another consequence of traditional cropland farming is the massive amount of ag chemical runoff that spills into rivers, and then oceans. An example: the Mississippi River watershed carries ag run off from ten states, and dumps it into the Gulf of Mexico, resulting in a 5,000 square mile toxic dead zone in the Gulf. There is no toxic ag runoff with vertical farming.

Food grown locally using urban production methods also can create huge numbers of local jobs.

Vertical farming pioneer, Dixon Despommier believes urban, indoor farms have the potential to meet 60-80% of a community’s food needs, reliably and cost-effectively.
Isn’t that exactly the right prescription for remaking the human narrative so that it’s life-affirming and sustainable?

“While convincing eight or ten billion people to eat more sustainably may appear a tall order, in fact rising awareness of the damage caused by lifestyle diseases and industrialized diets, as well as the effects of today’s food system on the climate, water, and wildlife of the planet, is already spreading at breathtaking speed among consumers, thanks to the internet and social media.”
Julian Cribb, Author, Food or War

Correcting Course Starts with Cultural Accountability
The United States Constitution claims to be ‘Of, By, and For the People”. In fact, what our government is actually about is serving corporate interests and the rich and powerful people behind those interests.
Think about our food culture as currently constituted. Who is it designed to serve? The evidence is clear. It’s not ‘We the People’.
Industrial, agricultural, and big finance interests leverage their wealth and power to elect the politicians they want. They own many of the politicians that shape our cultural design. The rules that define our culture are not about the public interest. The law thatand govern s life areis codified to favor profit interests first.
Bottom line: the industries making big money from humanity’s need to eat are heavily invested in the food culture as it is. They have little interest in changingare not eager to remake a system that what works very well for them.
What the world desperately needs at this moment is a fundamental course correction. It has to start with our politics. The biggest share of the people elected by the voting public are failing us. They are not working for our community interests.
All of our politicians are accountable first and foremost to the citizens they represent.
Elections happen every other year. The next big election in America is November 2024. That’s our next chance to rid ourselves of corrupt politicians wedded to the old order.
If we elect politicians that actually represent the best interests of all our citizens, we will get the public policy we want and need to save life on Earth for coming generations.

“We are not helpless. The fire is still burning. Please go out and vote…Too many people have died and sacrificed so much for us to have our voice, we have to use it. Get in formation. Use our voices to do something great for our children.”
Beyoncé, American Entertainer

Building Political Will and Common Purpose
Before imposing accountability, we the people must come together. That’s all the world’s people. We must get past tribalism and learn to see ourselves first as planetary citizens. We do that by accepting a common, culturally binding standard for how to live and relate to each other.
It happens that a common standard that can bind all of humanity together already exists. Endorsed by the United Nations, it’s a cross-cultural manifesto the world has come to know as The Earth Charter.
The ixteen Principles of the Earth Charter

1. Respect Earth and life in all its diversity.
2. Care for the community of life with understanding, compassion and love.
3. Build democratic societies that are just, participatory, sustainable and peaceful.
4. Secure Earth’s bounty and beauty for present and future generations.
5. Protect and restore the integrity of Earth’s ecological systems, with special concern for biological diversity and the natural processes that sustain life.
6. Prevent harm as the best method of environmental protection and, when knowledge is limited, apply a precautionary approach.
7. Adopt patterns of production, consumption and reproduction that safeguard Earth’s regenerative capacities, human rights and community well-being.
8. Advance the study of ecological sustainability and promote the open exchange and wide application of the knowledge acquired.
9. Eradicate poverty as an ethical, social and environmental imperative.
10. Ensure that economic activities and institutions at all levels promote human development in an equitable and sustainable manner.
11. Affirm gender equality and equity as prerequisites to sustainable development and ensure universal access to education, health care and economic opportunity.
12. Uphold the right of all, without discrimination, to a natural and social environment supportive of human dignity, bodily health and spiritual well-being, with special attention to the rights of indigenous peoples and minorities.
13. Strengthen democratic institutions at all levels, and provide transparency and accountability in governance, inclusive participation in decision-making, and access to justice.
14. Integrate into formal education and lifelong learning the knowledge, values and skills needed for a sustainable way of life.
15. Treat all living beings with respect and consideration.
16. Promote a culture of tolerance, nonviolence and peace.

Mirian Vilela, Executive Director of Earth Charter International, says this about its place as a reflection of common purpose. “People can use the Earth Charter as a guide, as an ethical compass, as a reference for decision making and policymaking. We have more and more people using it as an educational instrument to stimulate dialogue about what kind of world we all must be working for.”
Imagine if a big, cross-cultural share of our world’s people made support for the Earth Charter an acid test for politicians getting elected to public service.
Right now, the social media can spread the Earth Charter’s common purpose message to all of humanity in real time, and in infinitely creative ways. We have the means to build a cross-cultural, planetary-scale constituency for the Earth Charter.
It’s worth repeating. We make support for the Earth Charter vision an acid test for getting elected for all politicians.
It’s a bold step. We must assertively address the relentless drone of media resistance. We must use our global block of votes to elect people that will work for the kind of world we’re asking for.
We must expect our lawmakers to represent the public interest. We must expect the Earth Charter, or something like it, to be the standard used to inspire our politicians in remaking the rules and regulations that govern our lives.
The trends are clearly telling us where the human culture is headed. It’s a good place defined by cross-cultural commitment to gender equality, and a growing human determination to evolve ourselves collectively into responsible planetary citizens.
In a world that reflects the best in us, we humans are all equal as Earth citizens. We all share the same human rights. We all live by the same commitment to care responsibly for our planet’s living biosphere.

“The capitalist era is passing…not quickly, but inevitably. A new economic paradigm – the Collaborative Commons – is rising in its wake that will transform our way of life.”
Jeremy Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society

The look of a Worthy Human Narrative
In our best future, we recognize and embrace our obligations as Earth’s apex most consequential species. We align our human needs with our commitment to live in harmony with nature.
Governance, in the best kind of future, will evolve from patriarchy to gender-equal partnership
The majority of all people in that new era will choose to trust and cooperate with the cross-cultural processes at work. The biggest cultural decisions will not be left to politicians. Instead, they will be decided by a referendum process that will include all humans exercising their equal voting rights at all levels.
In a partnership world, a living income will be a human right. Creativity and entrepreneurship will still be rewarded in wonderful ways, but there will be no ‘billionaires’, and public policy will discourage egregious consumption.
A substantial share of the habitable land on Earth currently dedicated to agriculture will ultimately become part of the cultural commons and will be returned to nature under worthy human stewardship. As part of that commitment, the human culture will stand together to restore a healthy, biodiverse ecology to our home planet, Earth.

“Public ownership – by virtue of being tried, resilient, popular, and scalable – has the potential not only to be deployed more widely to deliver, real, tangible socio-economic benefits, but also to be reimagined and reinvented in such a way that it can serve as the institutional basis for a more far-reaching transformation of our failing contemporary political-economic system.”
Thomas Hanna, Author, Our Common Wealth

A Cooperative Model for Feeding All of Earth’s People
Food is a human essential. The way to deal with our food issue is to showcase it in the public media. Let’s get angry and agitated about food. Let’s make the way we humans feed ourselves a defining issue for our time. Let the way we grow and consume our food be the catalyst for a planetary-scale cultural transformation.
Fast forward to the year 2050. Humanity, after a rash of intense turmoil, has embraced the Earth Charter as its cultural manifesto. The corporations that once fed humanity have largely given way to cooperative-business networks. Every community has its own cluster of indoor farms, providing half or more of the nutritional needs of all residents.
By 2050, there will still be some livestock agriculture, but it will have taken a decidedly regenerative turn as it serves a decidedly down market.
The majority of the world’s people will be plant-based eaters, but not all. Those who still have a taste for meat will have options. For the most part, they’ll get their pork, beef, and chicken from lab-grown, cruelty-free, large-scale, ‘No Kill’ meat-cell production. If a burger or a bag of chicken nuggets still sounds good, no animal will have to suffer and die to make it possible.

“The health of the planet is at stake, because the cruelty and the waste that accompanies the slaughter of billions of animals each year literally infects us all. We could consume healthy plant-based food produced at almost infinitely less cost. What does that say, really, about us and what we’re doing… to animals and to ourselves?”
James Cromwell, Actor, Planetary Activist

Embracing Common Purpose and Commitment
To those who remain skeptical about humankind’s ability to remake its place on Earth over the coming decades, let’s remember what we’re up against. The existential threats to our future that loom darkly are unrelenting. They will only get worse unless we stand together, act decisively and make them go away.
The only path we humans have to get past our own dysfunction and overreach is to culturally embrace a transformative way of being human. The Earth Charter is our beacon. We have the means through the social media to share our life-affirming message in real time.
Food is an essential element of life. Let’s shape a common purpose commitment around the way we humans feed ourselves. While we’re remaking the way we eat, let’s use the momentum behind that planetary-scale effort to examine and revitalize our human relationship with nature, and with each other.
Some will scoff at the sheer scale of this aspirational story of humans coming together and seizing the moment.
To that, this writers says, ‘If remaking what we eat and where it comes from is the absolute right thing for humans to do…If food can get us together on the same cultural page with the rest of the world, and we have the means to communicate that message to all of humanity now; at this moment…If all that is true, then all of us share a human obligation to stand together, and assertively shape the way forward for ourselves and for future generations.’

“Food can give full rein to humanity’s imagination, dreams and ideas. It can prevent war and secure our future in the time of our greatest peril.”
Julian Cribb, Author, Food or War