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...