re: Prepare for starvation

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fertilizers.

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Going to point out a few issues noted by Pollan in Ominvores Dilema

Modern Big Ag has been maximizing the utility of corn. This has led to:

-Large scale monocropping (often corn or soy)
-Animals no longer needed on the farm as they take up too much space (that could otherwise be used to increase corn yield)
-Instead, animals are now managed concentration camp style on a feedlots (unironically given corn to fatten them up as opposed to their natural diet of grass)
-The land loses its fertility because it is missing the animals to deliver said fertilizer
-Farmer "overcomes" this by applying synthetic fertilizer to the soil ($$$)
-Animals instead are now shitting all over the spaces they occupy in the feedlot and have to be managed with antibiotics (leading to antibiotic resistance and disease)
-Sick animals are then consumed by sicker humans
-The whole system is out of balance as humans think that science can overcome completely fricking nature over (for profit...)

Quantity was chosen over quality ($$$)
Tradeoff was made to ensure that the population would not starve, but instead be chronically diseased(Medical Industrial Complex, $$$)

This modern, common farming practice (that we accept as "normal") was assisted by the MIC needing to move product...

https://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/farmer-in-chief/

quote:

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Before the application of oil and natural gas to agriculture, farmers relied on crop diversity (and photosynthesis) both to replenish their soil and to combat pests, as well as to feed themselves and their neighbors. Cheap energy, however, enabled the creation of monocultures, and monocultures in turn vastly increased the productivity both of the American land and the American farmer; today the typical corn-belt farmer is single-handedly feeding 140 people.

This did not occur by happenstance. After World War II, the government encouraged the conversion of the munitions industry to fertilizer — ammonium nitrate being the main ingredient of both bombs and chemical fertilizer — and the conversion of nerve-gas research to pesticides. The government also began subsidizing commodity crops, paying farmers by the bushel for all the corn, soybeans, wheat and rice they could produce. One secretary of agriculture after another implored them to plant “fence row to fence row” and to “get big or get out.”

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Similar story relates to chemotherapy and Big Pharma (moving product...)