We all thought that Billy’s dad, an inventor, was weird. Even Billy’s mom thought so. She left him to live in the city. When I visited Billy’s “house”, it was a loft in an apartment above the invention workshop in an old factory building in town. He and his dad lived in an open concept loft painted in bright colors and geometric designs. You peered over the living room balcony and his machines like drill press and lathe were right below. His dad was ahead of his time. At the time, folks lived in houses, not in a loft in an industrial building. They didn’t paint stark, vivid colors on the walls. But the weirdest thing was an absolutely huge window that was almost entirely shaded by a jungle of tomato plants with big, fat, juicy tomatoes hanging from them. They were growing hydroponically on a system invented by Billy’s dad. It had all sorts of pipes, pumps, nozzles and bits that made it look steam punk. Billy’s dad’s inventions were as weird as his house. He invented and sold an inclinometer to the Department of Highways that let them measure road grades and bends without needing a surveyor.
Fast forward several years. Peter, a cousin by marriage was a self-taught mechanical and computer whiz. He was the only permanent resident in a condo at a very famous eastern Canada ski resort (until he got a girlfriend who made him sell the condo, move to the city, and then dumped him. The price of the condo had risen so much, that he couldn’t afford to buy it back.)
He made the acquaintance of a nearby farm trying to grow tilapia fish in huge plastic barrels for the local market. The farm needed some sort of filtration system to remove the uric acid, ammonia and nitrogen out of the water from the fish excretions. They hired Peter to spec out such a system. Peter proposed an experiment that he had read about. Instead of buying an expensive filtration system, he suggested that they run the water through a hydroponic system growing lettuce. The lettuce roots would filter out the ammonia and nitrogen from the fish waste and use it as fertilizer. It worked so well, that after a series of expansions, three years later they were shipping a million dollars worth of lettuce and greens a year to the local markets as well as about $250,000 of tilapia product on a yearly basis. This was done indoors during the cold Canadian winters.
Fast forward to yesterday. The news was scary as hell. The Gulf Stream system could collapse as soon as 2025, a new study suggests. The shutting down of the vital ocean currents, called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) would bring catastrophic climate impacts. The AMOC is responsible for bringing warm weather to England and Scotland despite their northerly position. It would also disrupt rain that billions rely on for agriculture everywhere from South America to India. It could shut down as early as 2025. The UN secretary general, António Guterres said “The era of global warming has ended and the era of global boiling has arrived” after scientists confirmed July was on track to be the world’s hottest month on record. Coral reefs in my beloved Caribbean are already being bleached due to hot oceans. They are destroying the habitat of my favourite seafood on earth — Stone Crab claws. (If you haven’t eaten them yet, they are worth booking a flight to the Thirsty Mermaid Raw Bar Restaurant in Key West Florida, or Café Matisse in Nassau, The Bahamas, to try them before they are gone. They are one of the most sublime foods that I have ever put into my mouth.)
We have already seen subtle changes. Champagne producers are buying land in Argentina and Canada, because the climate is getting too warm in some parts of champagne country in France. Birds traditionally seen nearer to the equatorial parts of the earth have been moving northward. Even the ticks that feed on the blood of animals in the forests, and cause Lyme Disease in humans, are moving further north, previously being held at bay by cold, killing winters. But never mind subtle changes. Saguaro cactuses in Phoenix Arizona are collapsing from the heat. These are plants made to withstand desert temperatures.
So one of the first impacts to take the heat, so to speak, is food security. We have already seen that with the price of tomatoes and salad stuff (lettuce, greens and other rabbit food) jumping in price and creating shortages in the UK. Crop failures due to heat and drought in places like Spain have made the price of fresh produce one of the biggest contributors to inflation in the UK (compounded by Brexit and tariffs).
If the global warming accelerates, then there is the very real threat of food shortages. Although the impact will be felt in less developed countries, it will affect everyone. Who would have thunk that there would be a salad crisis in the UK?
The future big problem that is beginning to manifest itself now, is food affordability. What happens when cheap food goes away? We have seen 30 years of cheap money go away and the same could happen to food.
With the clear and present danger of food security due to global warming, I think that we should all be thinking about investments in food security. This means using technology applied to food growth. If the climate is too volatile, we should start investing in indoor vertical farms, as shown in the photo below:
There should be a concerted effort to investigate and research methods to grow food in cities, ranging from roof tops to open spaces such as city green spaces. I can see a transitioning where supermarkets of the future will grow food on premises. But the biggest trend that I am predicting is the explosion of home appliances for growing food. There are already growing cabinets such as this one prototyped by Samsung:
But this may be unsuitable for small apartments, and we will see more and more small food growing appliances hitting the market like this one:
Why have a coffee table, when you can have a piece of furniture that grows food, and still have surfaces that hold the junk that your coffee table has on it? LED technology to provide light in the sunlight spectrum wavelengths is now cheap and energy efficient.
Just like we have seen massive venture capital in generative AI after ChatGPT hit public awareness, we will see the same investment frenzy happen to food security technology. But there is one big proviso. It will not happen until the general public in G20 countries gets hit and suffers from food security issues. We are always a day late and a dollar short on preventative action.
There is another solution to food security, but it might not be the most palatable one. We could all be eating frankenfoods — genetically modified edible stuff that can be grown on sewage and garbage, breathing in the sulfur dioxide smog of big cities, enduring the blistering heat to make a Soylent-like pablum.
Soylent: In January 2013, American software engineer Rob Rhinehart purchased 35 chemical ingredients—including potassium gluconate, calcium carbonate, monosodium phosphate, maltodextrin, olive oil—all of which he deemed to be necessary for survival, based on his readings of biochemistry textbooks and U.S. government websites. Rhinehart used to view food as a time-consuming hassle and had resolved to treat it as an engineering problem. He blended the ingredients with water and consumed only this drink for the next thirty days.
The Soylent company evolved from this action. The word Soylent evokes the 1973 film adaptation Soylent Green in which the eponymous food is made from human remains. Prior to Soylent, the human species was already eating a cardboard-tasting, toe-jam-like substance called tofu.
There is an even more compelling reason to start thinking about food security here and now. That reason is geopolitical stability, moral clarity and moral imperative. There is a good chance that hunger in developing countries will increase in magnitude and scale. Aristotle, the Greek philosopher wrote that poverty and hunger is the parent of revolution, crime and war.
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.”
— Dwight D. Eisenhower
And it wasn’t Eisenhower who espoused that sentiment. His successor, John Fitzgerald Kennedy also echoed that sentiment.
“The war against hunger is truly mankind’s war of liberation.”
— John F. Kennedy
It’s time to start thinking about food security and real solutions to climate change. And it’s time to start thinking about food security on a personal level. What are you going to do when the grocery store shelves are emptier than they should be? Otherwise we, as a species, will be like the person who fell off the Empire State Building in New York. As he fell past each of the 102 floors of the building, folks at each window could hear him say “… so far, so good”. That sentiment gets old (or obliterated) in a nanosecond.
Thanks for reading.