What would we eat in the event of global catastrophe? Two researchers have come up with the answers and let’s just say that it involves plenty of bacterial slime and rats.
In a new book titled Feeding Everyone No Matter What, risk researchers have imagined eight scenarios where some calamity destroyed our ability to grow crops. The list includes sudden climate change, super-weeds, super-bacteria, super-pests, super-pathogens, super-volcano eruption, asteroid impact, and nuclear winter.2
The authors of the book, Joshua Pearce at Michigan Technological University and David Denkenberger at the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute, were tired of people imagining apocalyptic scenarios without offering solutions for how we might plausibly feed ourselves after global devastation.
Too often futurists have simply wallowed in the apocalypse porn aspects of how many people might die or where we might live after a given disaster. But figuring out how we’d feed ourselves is obviously one of the most important elements of rebuilding society.