It's all about calories/m^2 or calories/watt. If yo want to farm spirolina or chlorella, your level of automation and efficiencies will be much higher. I can easily see a machine a few times the size of a refrigerator able to produce enough food for a single person on 25cents of electricity/day.
The point is being able to survive (or not) off of vertical farming. I'm sure you can synthesize vitamins in a lab too much more economically but the metric used in the anthropology books I've read have always been kcals/acre in terms of supporting a population.
I totally agree and share your problem of trying to give away free citrus. I used to have two orange trees and got hundreds of gallons every year, ie, multiple 50 gallon garbage cans full of oranges. We got just as many lemons off of the single lemon tree. Also included were a tangelo , a tangerine, 3 peach, 2 apricot, a fig and pomegranate. We'd donate or throw away hundreds of pounds a year all on about a third of an acre, ut this was in AZ full sun an a lot of water. You're never going to economically get that much light in downtown of a city. Plants are only abut 4% efficient converting light to sugars (carbohydrates) which works out to ~60kwh/day for a 2,000kcal diet.
I grow both lettuce and cauliflower in my garden. Given the relative effort needed for both (harvesting a salad worth of leaves every three days vs waiting three months for a single cauliflower), you'd be paying $20 each for each head. In general, there's absolutely no way for a small garden (under a few aces) to be able to compete with a lager one. There is significant fixed cost ($100's of dollars) work to grow a single plant (soil preparation, watering, fertilization, cultivation, de-weeding and harvesting). It takes 10 seconds to plant a second seed and double the amount of the harvest.
Note: farmers get about 5,000heads of cauliflower/acre at about $1/head
The average diet is 2,000kcals/day. The average herb salad sans dressing is 10kcals. You'd need to eat 200 salads every day just to stay alive over the period of a few months.
I had both parents working and not only had to cook my own meals, but meals for the whole family from around the age of ten And we almost never ate out or ate premade meals. And it takes literally a couple of minutes to make a healthy meal. 1 chicken($7)+2 cans of green chili($2)+1 onion ($1), throw everything in a slow cooker at 6am, turn on low, by 6pm you will have the best chicken you've ever tasted.Serve with tortillas ($0.20 each) or rice.
I make pizza all the time. I buy 50lb bags of flour [webstaurantstore.com] at costco. $16, good for 50 pizzas. I use spaghetti sauce and buy in large cans. One can costs $1 and will make three pizzas. Mozzarella cheese is $14/kg, and use about 500g. Pepperoni is another $1 [walmart.com].
$1+$.30+$4+$1.50 = $7 (ultra conservatively) Also note this is a lot more cheese and pepperoni than you'll get on any frozen pizza. The primary cost is the cheese and if I used the same amount of cheese as a frozen pizza, the cost would go down to about $4/pizza and still be a lot better.
I make pizza all the time. I buy 50lb bags of flour at costco. $16, good for 50 pizzas. I use spaghetti sauce and buy in large cans. One can costs $1 and will make three pizzas. Mozzarella cheese is $14/kg, and use about 500g. Pepperoni is another $1.
My last house had no kitchen. All I had to cook with was a hotplate (fry, stirfry, sauces), slow cooker (full meals, soup, bbq ribs ) and rice cooker (rice, pasta, soup), yet was able to cook good healthy meals from raw ingredients in less time than it would have taken to drive to macdonalds and back. Including cleanup. And all that I had was a dorm refrigerator.
I'd write a book on how to do it, but there are a thousand youtube videos.
When I was a kid, going out to eat was a once a year experience (my grandmother's birthday) and it meant going to Red Lobster where there was always a 45 minute wait. It seems people today not only don't know how to cook, they don't want to know.
People have a choice. They can go back to farming and growing or raising your own food. I did. It's not expensive, but you no longer have money for various wants and you have to budget your money carefully. I know many others who did also.
One of the reasons I eat so well, is that I am so poor and cannot afford luxuries like soda or fast food. It as been over three years since the last time I drank a soda (dr. pepper. I remember it because I had no refrigerator to store it). My last fast food was over a year ago and was on a cross country road trip).
I think one of the reason is that I grew up in a mostly 1st gen immigrant neighborhood and truly poor know how to eat well for cheap.
Slashdot Mirror
Pathological science is an area of research where "people are tricked into false results ... by subjective effects, wishful thinking or threshold interactions."
Polywater is an example that I remember from university. Today, polywater is best known as an example of pathological science.
It's all about calories/m^2 or calories/watt. If yo want to farm spirolina or chlorella, your level of automation and efficiencies will be much higher. I can easily see a machine a few times the size of a refrigerator able to produce enough food for a single person on 25cents of electricity/day.
The point is being able to survive (or not) off of vertical farming. I'm sure you can synthesize vitamins in a lab too much more economically but the metric used in the anthropology books I've read have always been kcals/acre in terms of supporting a population.
I totally agree and share your problem of trying to give away free citrus. I used to have two orange trees and got hundreds of gallons every year, ie, multiple 50 gallon garbage cans full of oranges. We got just as many lemons off of the single lemon tree. Also included were a tangelo , a tangerine, 3 peach, 2 apricot, a fig and pomegranate. We'd donate or throw away hundreds of pounds a year all on about a third of an acre, ut this was in AZ full sun an a lot of water. You're never going to economically get that much light in downtown of a city. Plants are only abut 4% efficient converting light to sugars (carbohydrates) which works out to ~60kwh/day for a 2,000kcal diet.
What about the fuel needed for farming equipment?
The cost of fuel as a percentage of deliverable product is insignificant and you don't have the efficiencies of mechanization.
http://freakonomics.com/2011/1...
Note: farmers get about 5,000heads of cauliflower/acre at about $1/head
The average diet is 2,000kcals/day. The average herb salad sans dressing is 10kcals. You'd need to eat 200 salads every day just to stay alive over the period of a few months.
It's much nicer to be outside and active when it's 10C @95% humidity than 38C and 95% humidity.
I had both parents working and not only had to cook my own meals, but meals for the whole family from around the age of ten And we almost never ate out or ate premade meals. And it takes literally a couple of minutes to make a healthy meal. 1 chicken($7)+2 cans of green chili($2)+1 onion ($1), throw everything in a slow cooker at 6am, turn on low, by 6pm you will have the best chicken you've ever tasted.Serve with tortillas ($0.20 each) or rice.
I make pizza all the time. I buy 50lb bags of flour [webstaurantstore.com] at costco. $16, good for 50 pizzas. I use spaghetti sauce and buy in large cans. One can costs $1 and will make three pizzas. Mozzarella cheese is $14/kg, and use about 500g. Pepperoni is another $1 [walmart.com]. $1+$.30+$4+$1.50 = $7 (ultra conservatively) Also note this is a lot more cheese and pepperoni than you'll get on any frozen pizza. The primary cost is the cheese and if I used the same amount of cheese as a frozen pizza, the cost would go down to about $4/pizza and still be a lot better.
$1+$.30+$4+$1.50 = $7 (ultra conservatively)
I'd write a book on how to do it, but there are a thousand youtube videos.
address the question of why people eat more than they need
Why single out humans? Other animals do this too. You know, maybe its just hardwired into the brain. Occam's razor and all.
http://www.fhi.no/eway/default...
No, the problem simply lies in the mentality of 'bigger is better'.
This is hardwired into the human brain. Studies show that even babies understand bigger is better.
http://www.livescience.com/116...
Less than 13% of US oil comes from the middle east.
nutritious food is too expensive.
No it is not.
doesn't give out many pleasures to the poor
Can you list some of those pleasure so that I can know what I'm missing?
There were 1,921,058 small farms in the US in 2009, which translated to 90.1% of the total farms in the US at that time
http://smallfarms.cornell.edu/...
When I was a kid, going out to eat was a once a year experience (my grandmother's birthday) and it meant going to Red Lobster where there was always a 45 minute wait. It seems people today not only don't know how to cook, they don't want to know.
People have a choice. They can go back to farming and growing or raising your own food. I did. It's not expensive, but you no longer have money for various wants and you have to budget your money carefully. I know many others who did also.
I quit my $120k/yr job and now live in poverty and my stress has dropped to almost nothing compared to what it once was.
I think one of the reason is that I grew up in a mostly 1st gen immigrant neighborhood and truly poor know how to eat well for cheap.
I used to follow IBM closely. Through their almost going extinct phase n the early 1990's. At the time, everyone thought that IBM was failing because it lacked vision (and also they were so far gone that no one could possibly save them). Lou Gerstner was hired for the job declaring that "the last thing IBM needs right now is a vision right now" as he instead focused on execution, decisiveness, simplifying the organization for speed, and breaking the gridlock. To the dismay of all the IBM supporters. And while IBM did fall relatively, it increased its position fourfold ($30B-$170B) at a time most had written it off.