We live in the digital age where we seem to expect that any problem can be solved by a few minutes’ search on the internet. If you think this is the way to feed eight billion people food that will keep them healthy (so they don’t get fat and sick and have their legs chopped off from diabetes) – and all in the middle of climate change with floods and droughts and a global political system which is decidedly wobbly – then you are wrong and this is not the site for you.
Life wasn’t meant to be easy.
But I have prepared a series of posts which analyse the key issues to develop a plan and appropriate technology to solve this horrendous problem.
Food and the Gut biome (read here)
This first article discusses food and the gut biome. The simple fact is that people eating fresh food grown in soil full of minerals and teeming with beneficial biota (such as the few remaining hunter gatherers and people living in the blue zones) have a far healthier gut biome than modern man does eating a conventional diet.
But, and there is always a but, in the last eighty years population has trebled, and there is just no way we can feed the current population in these traditional ways.
But let’s stick with the facts – while the population may have trebled over these eighty years, our production of food has increased some 40% faster than the population has increased.
There is no “absolute” shortage of food; the problem is that there are big holes in our food production and distribution systems with a surplus of some foods – like fuel – and not enough of the critical foods – like gut brain food.
Despite any opinions you may have of our global leaders, we are not cold-blooded lizards but warm-blooded creatures – and we need food as a fuel to keep us warm and power our bodies.
Some 80% of the food we eat is just fuel, and as long as we can burn it off it does not matter what sort of food it is – it is just fuel.
So don’t panic – we have been incredibly successful in producing vast quantities of food for fuel to feed the eight billion people on earth.
What we have missed is that we have an intelligent control system which regulates our bodies, particularly how much and what we eat. It is a combination of our gut and head brains, and for this intelligent control system to work properly we have to feed it the right kind of food – gut food.
It may only be a small percentage of the food we eat but if we are to avoid getting fat and sick and having our limbs chopped off from diabetes, we must eat the food that feeds our gut brain.
How did we miss this? We may have amazing capabilities in technologies like DNA sequencing yet we have no idea how the coding in this super-computer gut brain system actually works.
Water (read here)
It may be a bit difficult to get excited about water – it is just everywhere and we are so used to it that we fail to appreciate just how weird it is. But we all understand it is essential for life so, before we go off on some wild campaign to change the world, I’d like to take a bit of time to explain how this weird stuff actually works, how it moves through the soil and why it is so important for our gut brain.
How Gbiota beds work (read here)
Whether we like it or not, we live in a state of ecological balance. It is true that I can go to my local supermarket and I really don’t have to worry that I am going to be eaten by a tiger.
Tigers, sharks and rhinos kill very few people but bugs do. They live in their own very tiny world of ecological balance – basically trying to out-breed each other – and that depends very much on moisture. Too wet and the bad bugs win and then us humans have problems. Too dry and the good bugs that we need can’t breed, so again we have problems.
So how can we grow our food in soil with this magic Goldilocks moisture? We need to understand water and how it moves around the soil.
This may help give us the technology of growing gut food – that is the easy bit. We now have to actually get the change to happen and that means understanding how the real world – particularly the world of innovation and adoption – works.
The real world
The real world is driven by a lust for profits and power, and fortunately for humanity a desire by a few to do the right thing for society.
But the reality is that the mega corporate giants are not going to suddenly set up giant facilities to grow gut food until they see a demand. And that demand needs to be generated by the few prepared to do the right thing.
Choices – grow gut food in your back yard, which is pleasant, or have your leg chopped off from diabetes – which is not so pleasant.
This choice falls to individual people, probably home growers, who want to grow gut food for their families.
Here we hit yet two more technical problems to resolve:
The early Gbiota technology was developed thinking it would be adopted by technically sophisticated organisations – yet we are now looking to home growers to be the early adopters, and they want things to be simple.
We also have climate change and these extreme weather events – the floods and droughts – which are going to make any sort of food production that much more difficult.
Soaker beds (read here)
So I did more development work, ending up with the Wicking Soaker Bed – dead simple and providing a level of protection against floods.
Making it very easy for home growers to become early adopters.
In the world of new technology and innovations the actual innovators typically find it very difficult to get their ideas accepted. Then along come the early adopters – hopefully in this case the home growers – and they, not the innovators, drive the process of adoption.
Then a second wave comes – in this case we are looking for community growers – not exactly commercial growers but people growing for their local communities. They can expect to get paid for their efforts thus leading to the third stage which is the commercial growers who now see there is a genuine market.
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