Food, drinking water and shelter are three essentials of human life. More than the other two, limitations in food production threaten well-being and create suffering. After all, more shelter can always be built. As for drinkable water, it can be challenging to distribute to all who need it, but the actual amount is sufficient to slake the thirst of everyone on earth many times over. The limited capacity of the Earth to produce food, more than anything else, limits human population. More importantly, limitations in food production conspire with the Malthusian tendency of human population to expand to the limits imposed by available resources, threatening to maintain much of humanity in a borderline state of chronic food insecurity. A result is inability of humanity to efficiently develop its intellectual, artistic, athletic, and social potential due to inability to efficiently develop those potentials among many of its members, because they are preoccupied with just feeding themselves and their families. If only food security could be dramatically improved!
Agricultural productivity through mechanization. In wealthy and technologically advanced countries like the US, UK and Australia, agricultural employment is in a long-term decline. In the UK agricultural employment has declined from 700 thousand in 1984 to just under 550 thousand in 2004; in the US the percentage of the labor force devoted to agriculture went from 33% in 1900 to 2% in 2000; in Australia the percentage decreased from 6.3% in 1986 to 4% in 2004. This is certainly not causing food production to become inadequate – obesity is going up in all three countries. Thus, food production per person-hour of agricultural labor has been increasing. This is a happy trend so we should pursue ways to continue it. Unfortunately, at least in the developed world the potential for improvement is somewhat limited simply because food production is so labor-efficient already. If only 2% of the workforce does agriculture, doubling labor productivity would make little difference in the scheme of things.
We need to look at other methods besides the expensive forms of mechanization that have been boosting agricultural productivity so effectively in developed countries. That mechanization has reached an impressive acme. Many center pivot irrigation systems can water large circular patches of land a mile in diameter. You can often see them from airplane windows when flying across the US. Prices of these machines in dollars will set you back 6 digits. That might sound like a bargain for a precision machine half a mile long, but it means they won’t be purchased to increase farming productivity in third-world countries any time soon. The situation is analogous for large farm harvesting combines – which are essentially grain processing factories on wheels, often with GPS tracking and other high tech components.
Secret of the bison? The plains bison, a subspecies of American bison, formerly ranged the great prairies of North America. Feeding on naturally growing vegetation, bison did not domesticate their food plants nor did they ever employ farming techniques. They mostly just wandered around eating. Sometimes they fled from hunters. How could clueless beasts enjoy such a plentiful food supply? It turns out that natural ecosystems (prairies, rain forests, etc., etc.) are highly productive, ecological productivity being the quantity produced per unit of time of plant and animal tissue. In fact, the greater the diversity of species in an ecosystem, the more productive it tends to be. One road to dramatically higher agricultural productivity, therefore, is to increased species diversity. Yet modern agriculture focuses on monoculture, or cultivation of a single species in a field. Unfortunately, unlike the bison, people can’t eat random plants growing in a prairie. Furthermore, people must work in the fields because domesticated plants can’t compete with wild plants; they need human labor to grow and thrive.
Thus one may conclude that natural ecosystems can have both higher ecological productivity than farmed monocultures, and higher labor productivity (because they produce while left alone). To the extent that farm productivity is due to fertilizer and irrigation, of course undomesticated habitat can be fertilized and irrigated too. If only humans found enough wild plant tissue edible, there would be more food, and less labor would be required to produce it. It would be good for the environment, too. Less (as in no) pesticides would be needed. Natural habitat would be less disrupted, since it could be used sustainably rather than cut down and destroyed. If only…. Yes, one can wish for it,but as the old saying goes, “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.”
Human consumption of wild plant species would indeed be a good thing. And since it potentially would supply more food per acre than farming, it would continue the long-standing trend of increasing food productivity typified by the “green revolution” of the latter half of the 20th century – so momentum is in its favor. We merely need to figure out how to do it. The big problem is solving the edibility issue. All the ecological productivity in the world won’t get the dinner table set, currently. An ideal solution is the “analog food mill” envisioned by Macfarlane. You stuff any plant or animal material into the input hopper and it extrudes a “square strip of heavy paste” which can be flavored like chicken (of course), but also fruit or cheese – not to mention govond and oegel, whatever they are. This while “chuffing” out quantities of dry dust from the waste port. As an added benefit it can serve as a small bomb by throwing it against a rock or hard wall, if you’re not planning on getting hungry later.
What we can do
To get used to trying new and tasty comestibles, perhaps the easiest thing an individual can do – and the most likely to leave a good taste in your mouth, pun intended – is wander the aisles of the nearest asian food store. They usually have canned exotic fruits that may be unfamiliar (think breadfruit, lychee, etc.) but, like regular canned fruit, are pretty good. For society as a whole, technology is the best hope for achieving the ecologically favorable continuation of the agricultural green revolution noted above.
From recipes to genetic engineering to robots. First of all, recipes need to be made easily available that use edible wild plants. (Note: do not try consuming random plants without knowing what you are doing – many are poisonous.) Researchers can start inventing “analog food mills” that might not work on all plants at first, but could grind up, flavor, and process some plants, say non-poisonous ones, into a tasty and nutritious form. Another path is genetic engineering, applied to make wild plant species more edible while maintaining or improving their ability to compete ecologically. This would require considerable research as well as updates to the current US regime for certifying (”deregulating”) transgenic plants. The current certification regime is so expensive that only major commodity crops are worth deregulating. In addition to analog food mills and genetic engineering, small solar powered robots programmed to recognize edible plants and to snip the stems of competing inedible plants in close proximity could be turned loose. They’d also be useful for weeding conventional farms, thus providing even more incentive to invent them.
Second secret of the bison. Long term, the nutritional value of plants would be increased across the board if only cellulose, a major component of plants, were digestible. Horses, cows, and other ruminants (like bison) can do it. Termites can do it too. Their trick is to host symbiotic microorganisms in their digestive tracts that break the cellulose down in to sugars, which are then easily absorbed. Humans host symbiotic microorganisms in the gut too, but they are not the kind that break down cellulose. This is an obvious target of genetic engineering: we need our intestinal bacteria genetically modified to do for us what their cousins do for goats, sheep, bison, etc., and termites.
Bison’s lament. Plants themselves use, for “food,” sunlight, water, air, and minerals. Wouldn’t it be useful if humans could too? The engineering goal here is genetic improvement of humans. Bison (and humans, currently) can’t but coral, sea slugs, and even giant clams can. So do some large snails. The flatworm Convoluta roscoffensis appears in densely populated, green areas on beaches in the U.K. It acquires algae by eating the egg case from which it emerges, and which algae seek and adhere to in anticipation. The algae take up residence in the worm between cells of its body. According to Oschman, “Upon loss of the theca, the alga assumes an irregularly shaped form. Fingerlike processes of the algal cells penetrate between adjacent animal cells.” The worm seeks sunlight to support the algae. As the worm matures, its digestive system degenerates and it begins to rely for nutrition on the algae that live in its translucent body, because it can no longer eat.
Increasing the degree of plant-animal integration further, the method used by giant clams and some other animals is to have the symbiotic algae living, not between their cells, but actually inside some of their cells. The algae live inside “symbiosomes,” blobs inside the animal cells that hold the algae separate from the rest of the cell. Sort of like tiny terrariums. The cells supply the algae, in its symbiosome home, with basic chemicals and exposure to light. In return the algae produce nutrients that the animals extract and use.
The degree of integration can be made tighter still by observing that algae (and other plants) do photosynthesis using chloroplasts, small green organelles (organs inside of cells) that give plants their green color. These chloroplasts are thought to have once been independent organisms that, over many long eons, became organelles in the cells of the green plant kingdom as well as some organisms outside that kingdom, like kelp. Why not genetically modify animals so their cells can contain chloroplasts directly, eliminating the inefficiency of using algae as middlemen? The animal kingdom shares the superkingdom of the eukaryotes with the green plant kingdom and some others, so animal and plant cells are not radically different.
Food, again. Indeed, why shouldn’t people and other higher animals do photosynthesis using extracellular algae like the convoluta work, intracellular algae like the giant clam, or chloroplasts like ordinary plants? There seems little point in restricting this valuable food production technology to plants and lower animals like worms, clams and snails. We would develop an attractive, healthy-looking greenish sheen, and would be making some of our own food from sunlight, further advancing food production by having some of it done by our own bodies. Technologically this is a tough task, and a long-term goal presumably involving genetic modification of the human germ line. But the benefits certainly seem impressive, and the scientific advances required to make it happen, worth supporting.
References
“In the UK agricultural employment has gradually declined…”: 20 year plus trendwatch, UK Agriculture, http://www.ukagriculture.com/farming_today/20year_plus_trends.cfm.
“…in the US the percentage of the labor force devoted to agriculture…”: E. Nosal and M. Shenk, Is manufacturing going the way of agriculture? Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, http://www.clevelandfed.org/research/trends/2007/0307/02ecoact.cfm.
“…in Australia the percentage decreased…”: L. Lu and D. Hedley, The impact of the 2002-03 drought on the economy and agricultural employment, Australian Government Treasury, http://www.treasury.gov.au/documents/817/HTML/docshell.asp?URL=03_article_2.asp.
“…obesity is up in all three countries!”: F. Sassi, M. Devaux, M. Cecchini, and E. Rusticelli, “The obesity epidemic: analysis of past and projected future trends in selected OECD countries,” OECD Health Working Papers, No. 45, OECD
publishing, 2009, http://masetto.sourceoecd.org/vl=3780186/cl=24/nw=1/rpsv/cgi.....wz9z7k.pdf.
“…productivity being the quantity produced…”:
“…the greater the diversity of species”:
E. O. Wilson, The Future of Life, Random House, 2002.
“If wishes were horses, beggars would ride”: James Kelly, Scottish Proverbs, 1721. Http://www.google.com/search?q=”beggars+would+ride”
“analog food mill”…”square strip of heavy paste”…”chuffing”: W. Macfarlane, Free vacation, Analog (Oct. 1967, vol. LXXX, no. 2, pp. 114-125.
“Coral, sea slugs, and even giant clams do it.” D. Yellowlees, T. A. Rees and W. Leggat, Metabolic interactions between algal symbionts and invertebrate hosts, Plant Cell Environ. (May 2008), vol. 31, no. 5, pp. 679-94.
“So do some large snails.” T. Berner, A. Wishkovsky and Z. Dubinsky, “Endozoic algae in shelled gastropods – a new symbiotic association in coral reefs? I. Photosynthetically active zooxanthellae in Strombus tricornis.” Coral Reefs (1986) vol. 5, pp. 103-106.
…”Upon loss of the theca, the alga assumes an irregularly shaped form. Fingerlike processes of the algal cells penetrate between adjacent animal cells.”…: J. L. Oschman, Journal of Phycology (Sept. 1966), vol. 2, issue 3, pp. 105-111. Also R. E. Lee, Phycology (3rd ed.), Cambridge University Press, 1999, who puts it, “Upon loss of the theca, the alga assumes an irregularly shaped form, with fingerlike processes of the algal cells penetrating between adjacent animal cells.”
“These chloroplasts are thought to have once been independent organisms”: J. W. Kimball, Endosymbiosis and the origin of eukaryotes, in Kimball’s Biology Pages, http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/E/Endosymbiosis.html, 2009.
A younger science than physics, biology is more linear and less exotic than its older sibling. Whereas physics is (mostly) elegant and symmetric, biology is lunging and ungainly, bound to the material and macroscopic. Its predictions are more specific, its theories less sweeping. And yet, in the end, the exploration of life is the frontier that matters the most. Life gives meaning to all elegant theories and contraptions, life is where the worlds of cosmology and ethics intersect. 
