Half a croissant, on a plate, with a sign in front of it saying '50c'
h a l f b a k e r y
Not so much a thought experiment as a single neuron misfire.

idea: add, search, annotate, link, view, overview, recent, by name, random

meta: news, help, about, links, report a problem

account: browse anonymously, or get an account and write.

user:
pass:
register,


                                   

Ban Fresh Food

Reconstitute everything from powder.
  (+10, -7)
(+10, -7)
  [vote for,
against]

The plague of hunger upon humans is not due to overpopulation. Overpopulation is induced from a percieved food shortage. It is the selfish demand for fresh food that leads food to perish while millions worldwide slouch starving in their own muck.

If all food produced was immediately processed into a viable dehydrated powder form, immense quantities of food could be stockpiled. In the beginning of implementing this new law people will first subside on loaves and cakes. However before long they will form gelatinous masses that will repicate those fresh foods that insistemce for killed so many.

Fresh food would not be entirely restricted, however. People can labour in the hot sun, bitten and sore tending to their own garden for fresh carrots. They can do this in the knowledge that 25 kg bags of carrot powder are neatly stacked and waiting to be rehydrated into a thin but nourishing broth.

rcarty, Jun 04 2012

[link]






       Where are you going to get the water to perform this miracle? It's already accepted that there is not sufficient clean water to provide everyone with enough to live comfortably.
UnaBubba, Jun 04 2012
  

       Freeze-dried humor, and flawlessly delivered.
Alterother, Jun 04 2012
  

       That's the beauty of this plan. The water comes from the food!
rcarty, Jun 04 2012
  

       Except for the title, I actually like the idea! You may have a rehydrated croissant!
xandram, Jun 05 2012
  

       Nope, I don't get it - is this something to do with the Disney announcement that they've decided to drop advertising from junk-food providers?   

       At the risk of totally missing the joke, don't we already send large quantities of non-perishable food around the world to areas undergoing food shortages?   

       I don't really see how my not having a carrot would do much to alter that.
zen_tom, Jun 06 2012
  

       Noble goal, workable idea [+], and it may save the energy used for running refrigerators.
But I hope that we would still be able to have enough of fresh food.
Inyuki, Jun 06 2012
  

       This posting was entirely to produce discord. Certainly zen-tom, your single carrot has not much effect, but everyone's insistence for freshness becomes an immense vacuous monster. Often areas that require famine relief export fresh food for foreign freshness fiends.
rcarty, Jun 06 2012
  

       Other than the 'ban' part of this idea, I quite like it. If grinding and dehydrating eliminates bacterial problems, then the amount of vitamin rich biomass discarded by some places could easily feed small countries.   

       Question is, who foots the bill?   

       Whoever kicks the duck.
UnaBubba, Jun 07 2012
  

       I cannot bone this enough.
Voice, Jun 07 2012
  

       Note to Unabubba: for water supply, see 'Recharging the Oglalla'
briancady413, Jun 10 2012
  

       How does my UHT milk fit into this? I always considered this to be the height of common sense, but it would appear that my stockpile would be raided and destroyed during the early days of the implementation of this system. I also want to know where tins sit in the categorization. Presumably I could get dispensation for this. Perhaps Mitt Romney with his Mormon upbringing will be the first to institute this. (apparently Mormons must maintain a year supply of food in preparation for the second coming of their deity). I for one would love to see this happen in the US. From what I can tell of normal US cuisine, this is already well underway through frozen turkey strips and potato based deep fried products.
PainOCommonSense, Jun 11 2012
  

       On the positive side, it should generate lots of jobs in the food processing industry, and since it's relatively expensive in capital terms to set up a factory, it should help close down all of those pointless smaller non-government sanctioned farms and markets where food is currently sold willy-nilly. Hopefully, those peoples who have traditionally suffered food shortages due to their short-sighted lack of factories should quickly get their acts together and improve road-networks and all the other supportive infrastructure necessary to more efficiently distribute carton and tin packaged foods, from the other side of the world, while also providing a much needed opportunity to deal with all of the new packaging waste, providing even more much-needed employment in such layabout locations.   

       It's a clearly genius idea in that it clearly identifies the root-cause of the problem and can only have positive benefits on those who are in immediate danger of starvation due to the dangerous perception of not having any food.   

       So is bread included in the non-banned foods? Or only if it is sufficiently stale? Some forms of fresh bread are dangerous in that they have shelf-lives of perhaps 1-2 days before going a bit mooffy, which obviously has a direct impact on localised drought-ridden areas in for example West Africa. By eating stale/powdered bread and perhaps getting additional nutrients from powdered deserts like Angel Delight, Jell(y|o) I can probably additionally save the lives of countless individuals in (for example) Bangladesh or North Korea.   

       Meanwhile, hopefully, this will finally mean the end for those naughty farmers who for the last millenia or so have been selfishly producing fresh food in so-called sustainable farms all across the world and bring in a new era of the kind of intensive mono-culture farming that would be required to support this particular proposal. Why waste all that time and effort producing diverse foodstuffs pandering to outmoded and frankly bourgeois concepts such as "taste" and "genetic diversity" when it would be much more efficient to replace the market with one or two proven and standardised crops such as rice or wheat that can be more readily harvested and converted directly into starch? Ideally, we could standardise further and use only government sanctioned GM crops that further improve efficiency and would ensure everyone's belly is suitably full (of starch) all around the world.   

       If the problem is shipping and transportation of all the food that is available in some locations to other locations that don't have enough; It's common sense to do that in a grand, centralised, internationally enforced, government-mandated policy than it is to make those other areas self sustaining without external support. After all, sustainability isn't for everyone is it? What's needed is a brittle and democratically fragile system that enables people to live in areas that would otherwise be unable to support them. Hopefully, we can build up populations in these less fertile, non-sustainable areas by simply delivering lots of dried food to them. It's so simple, I find it hard to believe it's not been done already. In fact, we could go one stage further and mandate that missiles be sent into space to continually rain down (slightly charred) grains and other dried-foods on every square centimetre of the Earth and in that way, finally banish the inherent inequities of geographic diversity and planetary variance. Everyone could just pick up a few grains off the floor on their way into work at the food-processing plant.
zen_tom, Jun 11 2012
  

       What [zt] said, but totally different: perhaps a 25km fresh-food distance: everything else to be soylentized when shipped in bulk.
FlyingToaster, Jun 11 2012
  

       //If grinding and dehydrating eliminates bacterial problems//   

       Of course it doesn't. Drying would reduce active bacterial load, but that's no where near enough. It doesn't even begin to destroy spores (bacterial or mold) or any of the many bacteria that encyst themselves under such conditions.   

       Grinding to the level of powdering would have absolutely no effect on bacterial loads.
MechE, Jun 11 2012
  

       Thats a steaming load of fresh produce meche. Powders can be irradiated, powders can be added with preservatives such as salts, powders can be compressed into dense bricks that lack the conditions to support life. Look at agar powder for example. If scientists only had a stinking load of seaweed to conduct research we probably would not have antibiotics today. But because that seaweed is reduced down to a pure and bacteria free form it can be used to carry out scientific experiments where any trace of unwanted bacteria would present a problem.
rcarty, Jun 11 2012
  

       Yes, irradiation sterilizes powders (although it's still iffy for some spores), but it also sterilizes fresh food. It's also an expensive and resource intensive additional step to food production, which is generally only used for high value fresh food crops. I also didn't say that dry powders would grow bacteria, they won't. But any attempt to reconstitute the powders into edible food will produce a nice nutrient broth, with the spores already in.   

       I was responding specifically to the drying and powdering process, which doesn't touch microbes. (And for the record, I'm pretty sure agar is generally heat, not radiation, sterilized).
MechE, Jun 11 2012
  
      
[annotate]
  


 

back: main index

business  computer  culture  fashion  food  halfbakery  home  other  product  public  science  sport  vehicle