This is something that humanity actually solved thousands of years ago. We can grow food in the earth in all but the most harsh biomes, and have done so sustainably for thousands of years. We have extended the reach of agriculture with countless ancient innovations such as irrigation, and in more modern times with greenhouses, and then climate control, and now grow tents and grow LEDs, low cost/complexity automation. We have a range of options for improving yields and growing in areas that might otherwise be non-arable.
But the bulk of our food still depends on there being a predictable climate.
What happens once the climate has collapsed to the point where we don’t know when the frost dates are going to be? When we don’t necessarily have predictable seasons? When we can be flooded out one year, and bone dry in other years?
We need self-contained and portable solutions that will just churn out food indefinitely. And just as with rewilding, we need variety – lots of potential solutions with new ideas bouncing between them. Because some will fail unexpectedly, or turn out to have been deficient in some way we previously couldn’t measure. Variety born of local autonomy maximizes the chances that at least some of those solutions work for the long term, or that between them we’ll be able to cover our nutritional needs.
The Smörgåsbord
We need a variety of food generation techniques, and they need to be at different technology levels – we don’t yet know how far this civilization may sink in the coming decades, even as we attempt to build up supports and life-sustaining systems. So let’s take a look:
I’m Hearing Crickets
Okay so take a look at this snippet from an old BBC Horizon episode. A low-tech approach to farming insects – in this case crickets – that could easily be adopted worldwide to provide a ready source of food.
There are tens of thousands of small cricket farms in Thailand, in a “cottage industry” that has been operating for decades, and almost wherever you go in the world there’s a kind of grasshopper or cricket (or some other species of orthoptera) that thrives there.
If you don’t like eating the insects directly, there are various ways to make derivatives that are less insectoid – from simply grinding them into flour to making sixtein high-protein powder or similar.
So this is already an infinite food lifehack. People are already using it, you don’t need much to get started, and there are plenty of overview videos and howto videos to help you build something up from nothing.
What’s the catch? Well, the crickets need to eat, too. What happens to their food as the climate collapses? At least at the moment, there are locally available feeds everywhere that the insects can eat and thrive on, and we’re relying on the insects to turn that less digestible low-protein vegetation into even more high-protein insects we can munch on. Absent a reliable climate, we may need to rely on indoor growing of plants that insects eat, so it’s not a self-contained solution. However, the amount that they eat is pretty minimal, and for a more circular approach can include scraps from human food production that would otherwise be discarded. So whatever plant food you can grow that insects might eat, the cricket farm becomes a force multiplier to that effort.
Solein – Food From Air
What if instead of farming insects we could just farm bacteria? Well, that’s possible too, though decidedly more high-tech. Where does it all start? Remember those hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean, with tube worms inexplicably thriving there using chemoautotrophic bacteria to provide their food source?
The solar foods company has an idea that they’ll build massive food production facilities that will grow these same bacteria, and harvest them to turn into protein-rich meat analog products, including but not limited to protein powder. They have a whole bunch of patents around this, including genetic modifications for the bacteria to reduce potentially harmful byproducts, processes for separating out the protein from the rest of the harvested biomass, etc. Look at the claims on this one patent for an overview of what they’re doing.
Okay, so once you have a suitable bacterial strain, and a process for growing them, and a process for turning them into food products, now you just need to do the opposite of what the solar foods company wants to do – you miniaturize the whole thing into a box the size of a bread machine that can fill a small tub full of protein powder every day, sufficient to feed a person, or a family, release the designs as open source, and then sit back and watch degrowth of the entire meat production industry in real time.
I can dream, can’t I?
Can I Have More?
I need to get better at posting regularly, so I’m not going to delay this post any further while I try to find other ideas. But I’ll try to build up a knowledge base so that folks can easily get to a list of all the good infinite food lifehacks, with links to ready-to-go instructions on how to get started with each, because there are generous people all over the world who are developing these solutions and sharing their expertise, and we should all be learning from them.
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