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Every meal you eat now costs the planet 10 kilos in lost topsoil.
That's the warning of "Surviving the 21st Century" author Julian Cribb to an international soil science conference in Queenstown, New Zealand on Dec 15, 2016.
"10 kilos of topsoil, 800 litres of water, 1.3 litres of diesel, 0.3g of pesticide and 3.5 kilos of carbon dioxide – that's what it takes to deliver one meal, for just one person," Cribb says.
"When you multiply it by 7 to 10 billion people each eating around a thousand meals a year, you can see why food is fast becoming the challenge of our age."
"The human jawbone is now by far the most destructive implement on the planet. It's wrecking soil and water, clearing forests, emptying oceans of fish and destroying wildlife as never before – but few people realise it because of long industrial food-chains that hide the damage from them," he says.
Do the 10 kg of lost topsoil result in 10 kg of night soil?
(Score: 1) by DBCubix on Friday December 16 2016, @02:27PM
According to this scientist, 800L of water are consumed with every meal. Computing 3 meals a day, for a year, for 7billion people (assumptions made) results in 4.29x10^16L of water consumed. Just for the sake of comparison, if we took the top 1m of ocean water off [quora.com], it is 3.6x10^17L. So roughly every year (without replacement) our oceans would drop by nearly 1m???
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 17 2016, @08:31AM
I think this is the same argument that is used to prove that the Earth is 6000 years old [landoverbaptist.net].