Food and Energy

There is nothing more critical to human existence than food. While a proper climate and water are arguably as important as food, they are usually present, but food shortages from population expansion, climatic extremes, conflict, and concentration of output in the hands of the powerful are a nearly constant characteristic of one part or another of the world’s human population for as far back as we have records—and probably far before that. For example, huge famines occurred in China in the sixth and twentieth century AD, and many centuries in between, most of Europe in the fifteenth century, Ireland in the middle of the nineteenth century, Bosnia, Philippines, and Sudan during this past century and countless other locations all over the world. But we in most of the developed world live today in a situation of incredible food affluence, and famine seems to have left much of the world except for areas of political-military conflict. How has this come to be? The most general answer is the application of fossil fuel technology and its ancillary technologies, most notably the production of nitrogen fertilizer and substitution of mechanical work for human and draft animal labor, to food plant production. This has allowed an enormous expansion of food production and has allowed us to think about food from many other perspectives, including aesthetic, moral and political. We examine human food production over millennia with a particular focus on energy: the quantity and quality of the energy of the food and also of the energy required to produce it.