Grains, Rice, Corn, etc. Whats their purpose...? page 5

[heatseeker]

Well, from an objective, scientific standpoint, I agree with you wholeheartedly, Knifegill. But the problem is, we now have those extra people. What are we supposed to do, remove all the cheap filler foods these people survive on and say, tough luck, you get to starve and we get to survive because we have grassfed beef and organic kale from sustainable farms?

Hindsight is 20/20. Obviously we've dug ourselves into an overpopulation hole with mass farming and the availability of cheap grains. But how do we now get out of it? We can't just kill the extra people. At least, in my opinion, we can't. YMMV on that.

You simply insisted on overgeneralizing and stating outlandish speculation as fact and I disagreed with you.

It cracks me up that "a grain-based diet will not lead to optimal health" is apparently outlandish speculation. My bad, I thought these were the Mark's Daily Apple forums.

[itchy166]

That IS the problem. Where death by starvation should have been natural, instead you have unnatural pain prolonged by pseudo-foods. Is it responsible to have a garage full of cats and feed them all cardboard because that's all you can afford? No? Then why do humans not deserve the same care? The extra people are extra people, and should not exist at all.

And the great cull will one day arrive. Better to be predator than prey when it gets here.

[heatseeker]

And the great cull will one day arrive. Better to be predator than prey when it gets here.

LOL, yes. Reasons why I work out a lot! With functional movements! Gotta be able to sprint, climb, and swing a weapon when shit starts going down...

[Sabine]

Bird food.

[RichMahogany]

A plant exists to reproduce, grow and populate its environment.

Yeah, there's such a strong complex of assumptions underpinning the original question I don't think any of us can answer more adequately than this. The book The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins has all the answers you seek and more, dear OP.

[MEversbergII]

At the risk of sounding like a HEARTLESS MONSTER, I'm with Knifegill on this one.

Also, I'll put in that I don't believe farming was the problem. Our population explosion came from a nose-dive in infant mortality rate in the 20th century. Plus, probably other things too, but that's a big one.

M.

[itchy166]

Yeah, there's such a strong complex of assumptions underpinning the original question I don't think any of us can answer more adequately than this. The book The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins has all the answers you seek and more, dear OP.

Excellent book, should be a "must read."

[itchy166]

LOL, yes. Reasons why I work out a lot! With functional movements! Gotta be able to sprint, climb, and swing a weapon when shit starts going down...

Better to be predator than prey when it all falls apart. Our chances may be marginally better.

[RichMahogany]

Also, I'll put in that I don't believe farming was the problem. Our population explosion came from a nose-dive in infant mortality rate in the 20th century. Plus, probably other things too, but that's a big one.

M.

Where'd we get the materials to make the extra people? Unicorn tears? Pixie dust? We made them out of food, and in order to do so, we turned billions of acres of extremely diverse biomass into monocrops.

Some have suggested that it's actually corn that has made use of us to spread itself across the world, rather than the other way around. I think this is what an alien anthropologist would see as having gone on.

In other words, if we were still living "off the land" (taking what we need, but not altering entire ecosystems by turning them into factories of fungible, commodifiable single crops), there wouldn't (couldn't) be 7 billion of us, regardless of medicine, birth control, etc.

[JoanieL]

Where'd we get the materials to make the extra people?

When the mommy human and the daddy human are so in love and so close that they are almost one person, that love makes a baby human.