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posted by janrinok on Friday December 16 2016, @06:35AM   Printer-friendly
from the I-thought-it-tasted-funny dept.

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?


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  • (Score: 2) by DutchUncle on Friday December 16 2016, @03:35PM

    by DutchUncle (5370) on Friday December 16 2016, @03:35PM (#442068)

    Oh, wait, we already had (and have) that, and we avoid engineered food because we don't trust it.

    Also that "consumes 800 l of water" sounds ridiculous; the water passes through all sorts of steps along the way, and is probably RE-used by the time a single growing season is done.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 16 2016, @11:02PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 16 2016, @11:02PM (#442263)
    Read Tuf Voyaging [wikipedia.org] by George RR Martin, multiple short stories, the S'uthlam arc talks about engineering food. Green Revolution is in the first stories of the arc, time will tell it goes into the last one or magically manages to keep solving the problems.