Resilient food solutions

New technologies have enabled us to biochemically produce food from some unlikely sources. In an extreme food supply shock, it could be useful to apply methods that allow us to obtain calories and nutrients from sources which don’t normally produce food. These could include plant fiber, CO₂, and potentially even resources typically considered fuels, such as natural gas or petroleum.

Today we know how to produce high-quality protein from natural gas or CO₂ and sugar from forest biomass. Since they are chiefly independent of food trade or agriculture, these food production methods are very resilient to many different types of food shortages, including those in which typical solutions could prove insufficient.

If traditional food supplies are unavailable over a longer time span, factories based on these technologies could be built to alleviate long-lasting supply shortages, once stored foods had run out. Large-scale production facilities could take around two years to build, but fast construction methods could potentially reduce the time down to about 7–8 months. These products have not yet been approved for human consumption, but some, such as protein from CO₂, are on track for approval.

Another possibility would be building some of these factories now, so that they’re available if a catastrophe occurs. While this would require an upfront cost, it would decrease costs during the catastrophe; building now would also bring some present-day benefits related to economic resilience and sustainability. Repurposing existing factories, especially paper factories, to produce food is also one of the more effective options ALLFED is looking into.

Our current resilient foods research indicates that the following solutions are the most affordable and most likely to be implementable following a number of different catastrophes, but especially those catastrophes that could reduce sunlight and drastically decrease global temperatures.

A number of risks could cause widespread electrical failure, including a series of high-altitude electromagnetic pulses (HEMPs) caused by nuclear weapons, an extreme solar storm, or a coordinated cyberattack. A more extreme pandemic than COVID-19 could cause people to be too fearful to come to work in power plants. 

Since modern industry depends on electricity, it is likely there would be a collapse of the functioning of industry and infrastructure in these scenarios. As such, any of these scenarios could be catastrophic to the food system, where we would face issues that could include loss of farm equipment, fertilizers, and pesticides. 

The first response to a catastrophe should be to reduce edible food that’s currently fed to animals or turned into biofuels, and instead direct that food to be provided to people. Replacement fertilizers could be obtained by burning wood in landfills for energy, phosphorus, and potassium, and planting a high fraction of legumes (peas and beans) to take nitrogen from the air. Farmers could implement low-tech methods for pest control and irrigation. These solutions may help enable communities to continue to grow and use high-performing crop varieties. 

These techniques alone could potentially feed everyone, but our research indicates that extracting calories from agricultural residues and expanding planted area could feed everyone several times over. However, nonmotorized transportation would need to be developed, including retrofitting ships to be wind powered and vehicles to be animal powered (with the animals consuming feed that is not edible to people). 

There are a number of other resilient food solutions that we think are less promising, either because of higher costs or because the solution would feed fewer people. However, future research could change this.