Eating Ourselves Out of House and Home….

In the Guardian (UK edition) this morning is an article re food shortages…

Food shortages could force world into vegetarianism, warn scientists

I think that vegetarianism might be the answer to a lot of our cultural problems in the West, like obesity, for a start..and many of us eat far less meat than we used to, for economic as well as health reasons..the stuff is expensive and loaded with chemicals, unless you are  rich enough to afford ‘organic’ fed beef, etc.

Free range eggs are my only luxury, and the protein they pack is cheap in comparison to even ground beef of the cheapest variety..

It’s interesting for me to look back to my early adult years and see what the West was doing about  population explosions, as they were called then….

Back in the ’60’s, when I was in my late teens, I was given the opportunity to learn about ZPG, or Zero Population Growth…
Having no emotional need to bear children myself, the decision was fairly easy for me to have a childless existence…and thereby, hopefully, contribute a positive to what resources are still available..
Many people my age in N. America also chose to not have children, until the 80’s, when there was a seeming surge of babies being born to women in their 30’s and 40’s who claimed to have ‘put off’ child bearing to have a “career”…
The rest of the world seems to breed at will, and even one child only experiments like China’s, which I suppose was well-meant for the purposes of controlling their population, only led to increases in female infanticide so that families could ‘enjoy’ a male heir, more desirable in their eyes…
Now there is a net shortage of females-to- males in the breeding years ratio, and China grows increasingly less likely to maintain in their own borders; young men without sexual outlets are far more aggressive than those with access to women, and young men are still and always the basic cannon-fodder for their older counterparts’ ambitions…unconsidered, unintended consequences? Maybe, or maybe China realized that they would have to ‘spread out’ to support their population. They seem to be investing an awful lot in raw resources here in Canada, and the rest of the world…
In all drought and large natural event situations, populations have fled the dry for the fruitful…war seems inevitable, and on a scale we can hardly imagine.

Being a vegetarian seems a whole lot less scary than fighting tooth and nail for leftovers….