> focus on the World's broken food supply and its immense waste
That is an extremely hyperbolic statement.
According to the United Nations [https://tinyurl.com/y9esnjez] fruits, vegetables, cereals, and roots account for 70% of all food waste. It is unfortunate that due to a global pandemic they had to be put down, but chickens are the most efficient form for preserving and delivering calories from grains to the table.
Additionally, industrialized and developing nations waste food at the same rate - just in different stages of the logistics chain. No system is perfectly efficient, and while there are improvements to be made - it is pretty damn amazing that the majority of 7 billion people have a meal a day.
Well, that raises further questions. How could a chicken farm or chicken meat in a freezer be more efficient forms of calorie storage than a grain silo or a shipment of flour? Do you have a source?
Your comment inspired me to do a little reading, since this is an interesting idea (and maybe represents an opportunity in the supply chain... maybe what we need is better/newer technology for long-term storage of grains/flour/etc.).
Long-term grain storage concerns: https://www.agriculture.com/machinery/grain-handling-and-equ... ; as a non-expert, this begs the question of why more climate control is not done, to create indefinite/permanent storage (probably just not economical to do so, but given disruptions like COVID-19, maybe this will change?).
>> flour can (should?) be frozen for long-term storage
It can be forzen but there are lots of difficulties in doing so. Top of the list is moisture. Frozen flower is cold. If you take it out and put it on the shelf flour will condensate moisture, quickly turing it into a useless lump. Microwaving it is difficult. You have to warm it in a totally dry environment. A frozen chicken breast doesn't have these issues.
Yup. Grains are so incredibly cheap that's it's not worth preserving them.
My favorite stat to pull out at parties:
The price of a bushel of wheat (aka 60 pounds) has been approximately one British pound since the mid 1300's.
It's currently worth about 4 British pounds, but that says more about how much the British pound has declined against the USD than it says about the price of wheat.
First: Its only 'cheap' because Wheat is an almost universally subsidized crop in most of the World. Which means the farmers externalities are obscured in what is actually a ubiquitous but environmentally challenging crop to grow in terms of land use, and irrigation. Harvesting, too if you don't have access to modern combines and want viable yields. Not to mention growing practices themselves and if its a GMO crop its often sprayed into oblivion with all kind of pesticides that cross contaminate and pollute water supplies and kill local insects and soil bacteria, microbes, and unsettle the flora/fauna.
Second: The USD-GBP bushel parallel is also not correct as neither are what they were meant to actually represent since becoming fiat: A pound sterling in the case of GBP, and grains of silver (371.25) in the case of USD. The measurements are off for the analogy that you're trying to make.
Can you please point me to where this is investigated? I know rough vacuum-grade vacuum-packed frozen meat rates a 3-year shelf life [1]. I've yet to find information beyond rough vacuum [2], though. I would imagine ultra-high grade vacuum, in a retort bag, in a medical-grade freezer (-140 to -150° C [3], well beyond even commercial food deep freezers in the -30 to -50° C range) can extend that shelf life, but I've never found anyone who experimented and wrote it up.
Flour can be stored indefinitely in the freezer supposedly [4], but I haven't seen anyone investigate vacuum-sealed, oxygen-absorbed, frozen flour shelf life. Whole wheatberries when vacuum sealed with nitrogen flush will keep for 25 years at room temperature, don't know what adding freezing will do.
>> I know rough vacuum-grade vacuum-packed frozen meat rates a 3-year shelf life
That is the number for taste, not food safety. There is lots of guidance that meet is "good" for a few months to a few years. But it is also true that people have eaten mammoth meat frozen for thousands of years. The reality is that long-frozen meat will not taste as good as meat only frozen a few days.
>>Because freezing keeps food safe almost indefinitely, recommended storage times are for quality only. Refer to the freezer storage chart at the end of this document, which lists optimum freezing times for best quality.
Dried grain, when sealed against humidity, is stable in a passive store like an old mine for wau over half a century. So, no, grain storage is incredibly low-maintenance, compared to a freezer.
It isn't, having worked in both Agriculture and Culinary in 11 countries spanning two continents, and 2 islands I think my position is far more informed than your own and perhaps even those stats you have given as it only gives averages.
Context: I also have a background in logistics and supply chains at VW and BMW, and I can tell you that any Industry losing UPWARDS of 40% of all product from start to end (even more when viewing farm to end consumer depending on distribution channels) and accepts that loss is utterly doomed--the monetary losses are masked in murky mix of poverty and subsidies.
There are many challenges with having a global food supply system, some that we will have to radically alter or abandon altogether, which are mainly environmental in the best of times and scarcity ridden disasters and Humanitarian crises in the worst. I've seen it occur in Egypt, Somalia, Tunisia, Ukraine, Venezuela and had interactions with people on the ground as it happen or that lived through it themselves and we later worked together.
Its easy to dismiss when food is so plentiful at the shops, but this is actually why I went to IBM to go into their Food Safety program and left when I realized it was just vapourware.
I understood that it only takes very simple variable changes to alter the very delicate and fragile system we have in place that we all rely on. There is a massive opportunity loss in not addressing this on so many levels, but even the glaring monetary one seems to go past unappreciated despite the fact that Agriculture is the biggest Industry in the World only second to FOREX, and mainly because FOREX includes the transactions within International Ag supply chains.
Consider also that less 1.7% of the World's population feeds the other ~98% and things start to sink in really fast. The 'technical-debt' like issues with specialty crops that only grow in one specific area (almonds in Central CA is one example) rather than having several cultivars throughout the World are disasters waiting to happen. I'm not sure if its by design or sheer ignorance anymore, as some to profit from either scenario but either way it needs to be resolved.
I'm glad you guys have taken so much interest in this subject, as its a personal passion of mine; I will go thoroughly in all the responses, and please engage if you want to discuss the matter further as I welcome more discussion to get people involved as this is not only a dire problem, but its ultimately a solvable optimization issue given enough focus. And I think tech people are what are needed most, on a calories basis we've already reached a post-scarcity situation in food production already.
> No system is perfectly efficient, and while there are improvements to be made - it is pretty damn amazing that the majority of 7
Agreed, I would go so far as to say its a modern working miracle it does yield that result when you see its inherit flaws we seem to willfully neglect because it doesn't affect +98% of thew World's population, and have gone into detail before why that is in other posts. On the other end of that equation for the farmers is often poverty and suicide.
That is an extremely hyperbolic statement.
According to the United Nations [https://tinyurl.com/y9esnjez] fruits, vegetables, cereals, and roots account for 70% of all food waste. It is unfortunate that due to a global pandemic they had to be put down, but chickens are the most efficient form for preserving and delivering calories from grains to the table.
Additionally, industrialized and developing nations waste food at the same rate - just in different stages of the logistics chain. No system is perfectly efficient, and while there are improvements to be made - it is pretty damn amazing that the majority of 7 billion people have a meal a day.