A reader continues his remarks on our general treatment of our food supply:
I wish I could find the time to write down (on the web) the litany of mankind’s offenses against itself that leads me to believe that at foreseeable technology levels, 3 or 4 or 7 billion people is just too much. Maybe if we had clean, compact, portable fusion devices or something, we’d be ok.
Just to give you an idea of the kinds of things I mean to write about is this recent research. Virtually every manufactured food item (e.g. most bakery goods) that needs to have liquid or powder ingredients mix well and stay mixed use an emulsifier like polysorbate 80. Turns out, it’s likely very bad for you in the long run. http://www.nih.gov/resear…/march2015/03162015additives.htm
And http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3667473/.
The vast majority of the corn, soybeans and sugar beats grown in the US are GMO in order to allow the use of glyphosate (RoundUp) as an herbicide directly on the crops. It kills everything except the GMO crop which is modified to withstand it. The mechanism involved uses a metabolic pathway that does not exist in mammals, so the residue left on food produced from those kinds of crops is considered safe for humans. Except that the gut microbiota, being bacteria, not mammals, do have that metabolic pathway. There’s evidence that glyphosate residues on foods are damaging, killing and/or unbalancing the gut microbiota. The more we learn about those microbiota, the more we are learning they have an even larger and larger part in our health. You’ve perhaps heard of fecal transplants?
Oh, yes, I have. I had not heard of the glyphosate connection, however.
This is all rather far afield of drought problems, of course. But what we’re doing to our food supplies is just one avenue in which we’re shooting ourselves in our collective feet.
I was rather morbidly ruminating on the demise of the vast herds of American Bison at the hands of European settlers, and wondering how, in the long run, the human species will compare in terms of sheer numbers at the height, and the following population crash I anticipate in my darker moments. The Wikipedia article has a lovely, unembeddable chart illustrating the bison population crash; and while it’s easy to argue that it’s an artificial crash, I like to remember that the “Balance of Nature” is a false notion; non-zero populations are constantly changing as predators and prey populations rise and fall, to cite the two most coarse variables. I suspect the Bison was a local dominant life form that was gradually wrecking its own habitat, and given a few more hundred years, they, too, might have found a way to extinction, or marginalization, much like any number of other creatures we now find only rock-bound.
Of course, the notion that we stand apart from Nature is also arguable. Every year another distinguishing feature of humanity is found in another creature (perhaps it’s just how we aggregate all these features … oh, wait: we have religion). So perhaps the near extinction event for the bison is not artificial, just the clearance of one species from its habitat in order for it to be replaced by hairless critters with hats on their heads. Perhaps 150 years ago the planet was mostly empty, but today it does seem awfully darn full.
Must be in a gloomy mood today.
