Crops can blight, animals can get diseases. I don’t know much about hydroponics but I know that bacteria are a concern. What food source is the most reliable, the least likely to produce less food than expected?
I think the answer is potatoes. Other root vegetables might be equally reliable.
Not what I heard from an Irishman…
But jokes in poor taste aside, yeah. I’d have to agree. A lot of grains can also do really well, but potatoes are hearty, have a lot of what you need to live, and require no attraction work to make into food after you dig them out of the ground. Onions would also be high on the list, but aren’t as viable for keeping you alive as long when eating them, nutritionally.
@ColeSloth @IzzyData As I recall, the issue with the potato famine was more that, if you’re *only* growing potatoes, while they grow just about anywhere, they’ll also get diseases really easily.
Which is why on the Lemmy instance linked to, people mentioned a variety of crops is the trick.
So, potatoes, but *also* onions, and *also* wheat, and *also* corn is the true answer, as I understand.
In spring, I put a few sprouting potatoes in the compost, waited a few month and since July or so I have a huge bucket of homegrown potatoes that I have problems to use up. So very easy food source. Can recommend. There were a few pill bugs/ potato bugs who love the taste of the plants, but their damage had not much effect on the harvest in the end.
The problem with the potatoes in Ireland at the time is that they were basically a monoculture and all had the same susceptibility to the same diseases.
If you grow them as they’re traditionally grown in Central and South America, you have hundreds (or thousands!) of varieties of potatoes planted in different climate zones by utilizing mountains. You have basically no risk of a total crop failure as long as it rains or you can irrigate them.
Cockroaches. They can survive nuclear events and will eat almost anything. They multiply faster than plants too.
Likely Algae. Good luck intentionally getting less
One possibility is breadfruit. We, realistically, can’t depend on one though. Even the most robust staple food will still have some sort of vulnerability so it will always be of benefits to have several.
Every form of production will have defects. The goal of perfecting production is one to be sought, but never achieved. We should always try to make food production more efficient with less loss, but there will always be loss, and always be waste.
Even new means of production like lab grown beef can have waste and loss in batches that don’t “grow” properly because they didn’t mix hormones correctly or whatever. I actually don’t know how the science behind that works, but I do know it’s a process. And where there’s a process there’s room for error. That’s where we get loss from.
We’ll never make something fool proof. Perhaps lab grown meats will be the most efficient form of product in that they have the lowest loss and production can be tweaked fairly quickly so there’s not a lot of loss and ramped up for shipments to areas with food shortages. Honestly, lab grown in my opinion has the best chances of being a major breakthrough but it’s still too early to be sure.
There’s no way that lab grown meat would be more efficient than just growing vegetables,
The “extra” plant matter should be composted, and used to replenish the nutrients back into the soil, and more importantly. The resources used to grow that plant is then restored to the source and more importantly feeds the ecosystem better. Remember the inputs into growing in soil are mostly from the sun, rain and carbon dioxide. They are a completely natural source of solar power and carbon capture.
