What did you learn about dietary choices from using the footprint calculator? Now imagine that you could translate what you learned into an effective societal policy on food- what would it be? And how would this policy effect the need to alleviate world hunger?
925 million people on earth do not have enough to eat according to the FAO [Food and Agricultural Organization]. That's almost 1 in 7 inhabitants of our planet!
Food & Hunger >
Some thoughts about breeding
The day I calculated my footprint I realized how much beef and pork were influential in the food section. We can easily understand why: to produce meat, you need to feed an animal (a cow, pig, horse, ...). It is known (and it's also taught in geography classes) that the total output energy you can obtain from the final products is way inferior to the total input energy (for example water, grass, corn, ...). It's noticeable the fact that this is not a sustainable breeding.
So, what will we do when there will be too much demand (because the global population is augmenting exponentially)?
Humans, in history, have always found solutions to problems. In my opinion, economy will adjust everything automatically.
I don't totally agree with capitalism, but I can't argue its ability to auto-patch itself.
You see, if there's too much demand, prices will start to rise: at this point, people will not be able to buy what they want, so they will search for cheaper and, potentially, less polluting. The equilibrium between demand and offer will be reached: there won't be any more imp act in the environment caused by this way to breed.
Some say that we should follow the legal way, like restricting the portion of meat we could eat per month. I don't like policies or laws, because they limit our actions: we shouldn't be constrained to follow rules based on someone's ethical opinions, even if it's decided by the majority of a population. So, for me, it's just a bad idea.
Till now we talked about the rich part of the world: but what about the other (poor) part?
I believe that insects and algae are the solution: it's easy to "farm" them, they are cheap and, the most important part, they grow fast. Sure, maybe they don't taste as good as pork or beef, but if you really need food you will eat anything. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insect_farming )
Finally, if you really don't like them, you could (like I do) try to build a market garden somewhere in your garden (assuming you have one, but anyway you could just pick a random terrain). Then you could try to replicate the Wahlen plan ( https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_Wahlen ), an emergency alimentary plan invented during the second world war.