World Food Day

[Dexter]

http://www.fao.org/getinvolved/worldfoodday/en/

Today is the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization's "World Food Day." The point of it, essentially, is to call attention to the fact that world hunger is still an issue of epidemic proportions. According to their figures, there are 1.02 billion malnourished people in the world... 1/6th of humanity. Those are huge figures.

It's tempting to think of that as an issue in the third world that doesn't touch us here, but that's not the case. The same figure - 1/6th - are starving right here in America. That's an especially important figure to those of us that live in the South, as according to Share Our Strength, 40.3% of starving children in this country live in the South.

More facts on hunger in American can be found here (link). Share Our Strength is a very good, very well-ran charity that you can feel confident participating in if you're so inclined. Besides donations, the website lists a variety of activities you can participate in to help out - from running a bake sale for charity, to simply choosing to dine out at any participating restaurant who will donate their profits during the Great American Dine Out (which unfortunately just happened and is over now, but I'm sure will be happening again next year).

If you can't pitch in on this, it's enough to just be aware of the fact that hunger is not something we've come close to solving in this country, much less the rest of the world.

 

[Razor]

World Food Day is a great thing. It seeks to raise awareness for those starving people of the world, of whom people seem to have lost touch with mostly. I'm not saying that to be elitist at all, I'm really bad about wasting food and what not. But still. We as a whole have seemed to forget about the less fortunate in our daily routine. That's why I've joined APO, so that I can give back to the community that I've seemed to have forgotten.

While World Food Day is a good thing, and solving hunger is a good thing, I think that World Food Day also brings into question whether we can actually stop world hunger. Can we?

Sure, as a Biological Engineer I can tell you that I we and my Agricultural Engineering brethren can and are coming up with ways to genetically modify food to grow more, grow faster, and grow stronger. It's nothing that farmers haven't been cross-breeding for for thousands of years....but we're doing it faster and with better results. Give us a set amount of years, and we can get you that corn that can grow anywhere we want.

However, that begs the question. We're nothing more than animals as it were, fighting for resources on this world. What happens when any animal gets too much, too many readily available resources? They sit around, and eat. And breed. Oh my god, how they breed. Like the world is ending tomorrow. So the more people we have fed, arguably the more people that will breed, which leads to yet more people to feed. Can we live up to that rate? Should we?

I have no answer for you. That gets into philosophical questions I don't even want to try to answer. Sorry to hijack your thread Dexter, but the questions popped into my head and I felt like getting Socratic Method on ya.

 

[Dexter]

Not hijacking at all. I was hoping this would spark some conversation on the subject.

You raise an interesting point about overpopulation. Of course it's an issue, but I don't see a solution as people obviously have the right to have kids if they want them, and yeah, that leaves us in the position of figuring out how to feed them.

What you're doing is likely the best way to go about that, and thank you for it. It's people like you (the biological engineers of the world that are finding ways to grow more and better food with less land that can be more easily transported) that are actually changing the world in important and meaningful ways. Unfortunately, and this completely baffles me, there are people out there that oppose genetically engineered food research because it's "unnatural". These are the people that spend twice as much on an apple because it's "organic"... which means almost nothing other than the fact that it has a little certification sticker on it.

It's a testament to how out of touch some of us have become with the state of the world around us that we can be so - for lack of a better word - selfish. Genetic engineering is the answer to our food crisis, and personally, I'm excited to see what you guys can come up with.

 

[Razor]

Not hijacking at all. I was hoping this would spark some conversation on the subject.

You raise an interesting point about overpopulation. Of course it's an issue, but I don't see a solution as people obviously have the right to have kids if they want them, and yeah, that leaves us in the position of figuring out how to feed them.

What you're doing is likely the best way to go about that, and thank you for it. It's people like you (the biological engineers of the world that are finding ways to grow more and better food with less land that can be more easily transported) that are actually changing the world in important and meaningful ways. Unfortunately, and this completely baffles me, there are people out there that oppose genetically engineered food research because it's "unnatural". These are the people that spend twice as much on an apple because it's "organic"... which means almost nothing other than the fact that it has a little certification sticker on it.

It's a testament to how out of touch some of us have become with the state of the world around us that we can be so - for lack of a better word - selfish. Genetic engineering is the answer to our food crisis, and personally, I'm excited to see what you guys can come up with.

Well, I mean, it's the same argument against Stem Cell research. We're using stem cells, which are used at the start of conception to form a human life, to repair damage that we previously thought irreversible. Parkinson's, Alzheimers, ALS, heart damage to heart attacks, anything really. We are researching new ways to apply these "blank" cells to essentially give cognitive life back to a ravaged body.

But you'll get the people who view this as playing God in a laboratory. As we're researching ways to create livers for those who are languishing on the Organ Transplant list, you'll get people protesting our work because only God should do such things. Of course, I would argue that God gave us the ability to think out how to do such things...so he obviously doesn't mind all that much. But that's another topic for another thread.

Then you'll get the crazier people, who think all medicine is essentially us playing God. Healing the sick of a tumor, disease, whatever is us stepping into an area only God should handle. God should determine if someone recovers or not, we lowly mortals are overstepping our bounds.

..It makes me twitch. But it's a good discussion to be had, I'm sure. And I thank you for the kind words about my area of study. The Bio Engineers of the world are really overlooked these days. It's because we're not Chemical Engineers overseeing Nuclear Reactors, Civil Engineers building roads, Mechanical Engineers building skyscrapers, or Industrial Engineers overseeing the delivery of every product trans-nationally. We get no love. But my fellow brethren power on. Because we got it like that.