Of starships and food banks
By Péter MARTON
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation warns in its most basic factsheet (under the very first point in that factsheet) that "Roughly one third of the food produced in the world for human consumption every year — approximately 1.3 billion tonnes — gets lost or wasted." Even if some of this waste is inevitable, this is a staggering figure.
Two things happened to me recently that are worth mentioning related to this; or, in truth, this post is getting written because of those two things, actually.
I finished reading Kim Stanley Robinson's novel Aurora, a major recent work of hard science fiction (Orbit Books, 2015). It looks at future multigeneration starship travel in a socially and environmentally sensitive (read: sober) way.
The implications of this sensitive, or perhaps simply just sensible, approach include that the idea of making a run for the distant starts comes to seem... preposterous. The book makes you ask those basic questions that were casually overlooked by many an SF writer before.
What about the human rights of the generations born on board?
And what about making complex ecological systems work on this planet in the first place, rather than on some distant wasteland awaiting terraformation? Planet Earth is, after all, the first place for humanity...
Make those ecological systems work here, or, more precisely, try not to mess them up too badly.
If and when we pass this test, then we may perhaps begin to project our vivid human imagination into the interstellar medium a little more legitimately...
The people on board the starship in Aurora are trying to make interstellar travel and exoplanet-colonisation-through-terraforming work, and many are talented and well trained at this among them. Artificial Intelligence helps out too, including the ship's quantum computer. Almost nothing gets wasted. But even in an almost perfectly devised and closed-off system such as theirs, managing all the waste is hard. Real hard.
And here comes the other thing that I was part of recently: an event on the cooperation between supermarkets, "food banks", humanitarian NGOs and family help centers in getting food waste to be used and delivered to the needy in Hungary. Among others Tesco, Auchan and Aldi play a prominent role in making the system work here, along with the Hungarian Food Bank Association (Magyar Élelmiszerbank Egyesület). Farmers, producers in food processing, retailers, the catering industry and consumers (I hope I didn't waste the opportunity to mention someone in the chain) together account for 1.8 million tons of food waste per year in Hungary alone. Retailers' share in that may be as little as 5 percent, but an enlightened approach on their part can go a long way.
Food banks and similar forms of cooperation exist elsewhere as well, of course, across the European Union and beyond.
So if a supermarketised world it has to be, due to various constraints and the tendencies of contemporary capitalism, we should at least have this kind of system in place everywhere on the planet. This is the bare minimum... For Starship Earth to run for a few more generations to come... You're getting my drift.
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation warns in its most basic factsheet (under the very first point in that factsheet) that "Roughly one third of the food produced in the world for human consumption every year — approximately 1.3 billion tonnes — gets lost or wasted." Even if some of this waste is inevitable, this is a staggering figure.
Two things happened to me recently that are worth mentioning related to this; or, in truth, this post is getting written because of those two things, actually.
I finished reading Kim Stanley Robinson's novel Aurora, a major recent work of hard science fiction (Orbit Books, 2015). It looks at future multigeneration starship travel in a socially and environmentally sensitive (read: sober) way.
The implications of this sensitive, or perhaps simply just sensible, approach include that the idea of making a run for the distant starts comes to seem... preposterous. The book makes you ask those basic questions that were casually overlooked by many an SF writer before.
What about the human rights of the generations born on board?
And what about making complex ecological systems work on this planet in the first place, rather than on some distant wasteland awaiting terraformation? Planet Earth is, after all, the first place for humanity...
Make those ecological systems work here, or, more precisely, try not to mess them up too badly.
If and when we pass this test, then we may perhaps begin to project our vivid human imagination into the interstellar medium a little more legitimately...
The people on board the starship in Aurora are trying to make interstellar travel and exoplanet-colonisation-through-terraforming work, and many are talented and well trained at this among them. Artificial Intelligence helps out too, including the ship's quantum computer. Almost nothing gets wasted. But even in an almost perfectly devised and closed-off system such as theirs, managing all the waste is hard. Real hard.
And here comes the other thing that I was part of recently: an event on the cooperation between supermarkets, "food banks", humanitarian NGOs and family help centers in getting food waste to be used and delivered to the needy in Hungary. Among others Tesco, Auchan and Aldi play a prominent role in making the system work here, along with the Hungarian Food Bank Association (Magyar Élelmiszerbank Egyesület). Farmers, producers in food processing, retailers, the catering industry and consumers (I hope I didn't waste the opportunity to mention someone in the chain) together account for 1.8 million tons of food waste per year in Hungary alone. Retailers' share in that may be as little as 5 percent, but an enlightened approach on their part can go a long way.
Food banks and similar forms of cooperation exist elsewhere as well, of course, across the European Union and beyond.
So if a supermarketised world it has to be, due to various constraints and the tendencies of contemporary capitalism, we should at least have this kind of system in place everywhere on the planet. This is the bare minimum... For Starship Earth to run for a few more generations to come... You're getting my drift.
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