A Recipe For Disaster
We’re going to pay the price for turning the world into a giant farm.
Supermarkets are stocked to the brim with thousands of exotic products. Takeaway services are delivered to your front door. Restaurants offer cuisines from every part of the world. When it comes to food choices we’ve never had it so good. But to feed eight billion people we’ve had to turn the Earth into a giant farm. By doing so we have inadvertently created a recipe for disaster.
The idea the Earth is a giant farm may feel like an exaggeration. It’s not like we’re being overrun by farm animals. And when we look at images of the Earth, we see vast forests that stretch beyond the horizon. We see awe-inspiring landscapes and angelic beaches.
What we don’t care to look at are the vast swathes of land that have been converted into farmland. We’ve become so detached from food production that we tend to disregard how food is produced.
Producing food happens to be one of our greatest strengths. We’re so good at it that we produce enough to feed ten billion people. That’s an incredible feat. One which owes itself to fertilisers. Fertilisers have greatly enhanced yields, hence why we can produce more food than we need.
The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) data gives us a…
