From: Julien Pierrehumbert >
There is a non-negligible amount of waste. Also, if you eat lots of meat,
you
>eat more food through it than if you did eat cereals. And there's your
>parenthesis...
>You don't systematically become fat when you eat too much. How much more do
>we eat in affluent countries than what is needed to live?
Yes. No arguement there. Any expansion of my "simplistic" argument would
elaborate on that.
>>If Nestor is there, maybe he
>can tell us what's the minimum of food necessary to live in China.
I am having difficulty understanding why you feel required to tie this to
economic or political boundaries. Surely the minimum amount of food
necessary to live anywhere is roughly the same? Or are Chinese a different
species from Botswanians and New Yorkers? If you are making the point that
the US wastes more than the Chinese, *perhaps* true. (but you should temper
that with understanding that in the US we do not have a masculine cult that
finds prestige in eating the last of an endangered species, we only have one
that delights in shooting them. <g>)
>With relatively free markets food is traded
>so that the supply is virtually unlimited if you can pay for it.
Temporarily, the food supply leads population. (Green Revolution!) If I gave
everyone in the world a coupon for a Big Mac, some would STILL go hungry. It
is a problem of equity in production and distribution, to be sure, but it is
also a problem of Malthusian issues as well. (This will become clear when
the petrochemicals go away, regardless of market forces!) Any way you
convolute the distribution, if less Big Macs are produced, fewer babies are
born. It ain't pretty and I don't like it, but that's what happens. (I am
NOT hinting that we withold food to anyone anywhere as a tool of population
control.)
>The point is that food is
>cheap in your country. How many hamburgers can you buy with one hour of
>minimum wage? Compare this with other countries... That's not bioregions,
>that's
>economic regions. And that's what determines who will be fed or not.
Nope. Food is cheap in my bioregion as well. We should probably draw a map
with overlays defining bioregions and economic regions if we wanted to
dispute this issue further. I think you have the tail wagging the dog.
Obviously the hand of man (and the hand of capitalist man)has much to answer
for in creating inequities regarding who gets fed. But there are other
determining factors about who gets fed, some of them natural causes
heretofore too much ignored.
Food is *realatively* cheap for anyone on the planet, because at the moment
"cheap" is defined without cognizance of land depletion, fouled water, etc.
etc. When your price to revenues computations take soil depletion into
account and when the market effect of minimum wage includes desertification,
I will pay more attention to this argument.
Quit messing with our heads, dude. You were arguing the obverse of this coin
with Tony only weeks ago.
>Sure, globally there is a relation between the amount of food produced an
>population. But if it's not food availability (in terms of price to
>revenues) which
>determines fertility, you could well say that enough food is grown to feed
>the
>population and not the reverse. It makes sense: If there's too much food on
>the
>market, farmers stop producing as much or go out of business.
Nah, yours is a somewhat tortured argument, Julien. You can say "yes" to the
reverse as well. A casual look at reality demonstrates that there is more
than enough food grown, of course, right now. And against all supposed
capitalist free market rules, farmers continue to grow food at an economic
loss. And a very great amount of food is grown outside of the "market",
(although I bet you will find some way to explain how the tomatos in my
garden and in my salad are part of some market. Whole villages live off of
subsistance plots.) I am sorry, but you must work harder to convince me that
economics is the main engine that drives population.
Tom
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