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Comment by catmanjan | Hacker News Reader

>food is largely a solved problem

It really isn't...

Distribution is an issue, but the imminent capacity issue perceived in the late 1960s when The Population Bomb was written was already being solved when it was entering the popular consciousness (but the impact of the solutions had not been fully appreciated) by the Green Revolution through high-yield crop varieties and other advanced in agriculture.

Production of calories is a solved problem. Distribution of food to people in need on the other hand…

There's more to nutrition than calories. Generally speaking: the more nutritive, the more expensive.

It's not really a solved problem, we're depleting many extremely slow to recover resources in order to produce the amounts we are today.

Yeah, spoken like someone who only understands food as something that magically and without fail appears on their local stores.

*logistics of food is not solved?

Neither production nor logistics is solved at all. We have bought ourselves time, largely by racking up environmental debt on our planetary credit card. Food is still massively dependent on fossil fuel consumption (machinery, transport, fertilizer).

The good news is that the answer is to reduce the cost and carbon impact of energy production, and we’re making great progress here, but we cannot afford to take our foot off the gas, because although Ehrlich was wrong about the timing, he wasn’t wrong in his fundamental observation that the Earth has a finite carrying capacity.

The idea that he was off on the timing is wrong. He was wrong and continued to be wrong even as he insisted his predictions would come any day now

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