Perhaps it's true that you can't feed the whole world without industrialized food, but you could feed the vast majority of people who live in cooperative climates. It's debatable whether the rest couldn't be fed as well.

Also, it wouldn't take "most people" to support small-farm agriculture. Many would gladly raise organic produce and livestock, and sell locally if the food economy were not stacked against them. It also provides more financial independence than minimum wage jobs, and many full-time jobs. Not to mention it would create many jobs.

Creating jobs that people don't want and won't show up for, more like. With unemployment where it is now, you'd think Americans would sign up to pick fruit. But they don't, and we're dependent on migrant labor. More labor also means more expensive food.

In the whole spectrum of human existence, farming sucks. It sucked so much that people remained hunter-gatherers as long as they could to avoid it, and it sucks so much that people leapt at the chance to become industrial wage slaves to avoid it. Turning more people into farmers out of some crazy left wing ideology sounds like a bad idea to me. I think Cambodia tried it once.

Unfortunately, your opinion just isn't based in fact.

My opinion is based on the current US farm labor situation and the general history of mankind that saw hunter-gatherers forcibly displace agricultural civilizations throughout the Middle Ages followed by massive migration to cities since th Industrial Revolution. Your opinion is based on what facts exactly?

The displacement caused by industrialization and imperialism, and the economies they foster, is not a situation in which enfranchised working class people are making informed decisions about their future, freely choose their lot, and draw from the public resources managed by their benevolent representative governments.

It wasn't the case then, and it isn't the case now.

The fact is that industrialized agriculture represents a massive centralization of the production of a basic necessity of life. It is made to be perceived to be less inexpensive through subsidies on low-nutrition crops such as corn, sugar, and wheat, subsidies for import and export, state-funded research into literal Frankenstein's monsters built of corn, fish, and insect genes. Patents for the basic building blocks of life are issued and violations enforced, even cases of accidental spread of these genes by wind. Pollutants and hormones abound.

And what do we get? Lower nutrition when picked, lower nutrition because of shipping and storage, insecticides, hormones, anti-biotics, factory meat and egg production that makes a mockery of animal life, runoff that poisons our water supply and wildlife.

What is good about subsidizing junk crops? What is good about subsidizing the fuel used to ship food across the world when it can be grown literally in one's backyard? What if we funded robotics and technology for small agriculture instead of drones that kill Pakistani civilians and children? What is good about the conflation of money and value, to the point where money is lauded over health and freedom?

Your premise seems to be that people have decided they want industrialized agriculture because farming "sucks." To you this seems to imply that therefore industrialized agriculture is good and that there are not alternatives. We will and should become more and more materialistic, inert, disconnected from family and nature, because what people want must be good. We are not being manipulated by world government systems that have their own benefit at heart.

I reject this premise wholeheartedly.

I think you're drawing a false dichotomy. It's certainly possible, and probably preferable, to have large scale agriculture that limits ecological impact, produces nutritious food, and avoids antibiotic use without requiring large numbers of people to work as farmers.

Well, you may be right. I'd be happy with any system that avoids the negatives of the current food infrastructure.

Why should anything scale to feeding 7 billion? You realize we are at 7 billion now because of previous scientific food efforts, like hybridizing wheat / GMO / toxic insecticides?

All science is doing is making the problem bigger and bigger. Stop subsidizing population growth.

So you recommend letting people starve to death.

There are 7 billion people alive today. If we can't produce enough food for them all, people will starve. There's nothing false about that dichotomy, only your evasion.

So if the african, muslim countries, and india adopted a one child policy tomorrow like china did, how many people would starve? versus your proposal of continuing mad science and putting it in our bodies.

We have 1 billion undernourished today (note that there were only 1 billion in the whole world in 1804). And most of the rest of us are getting diabetes due to massive sugar and starch intake, promised by science as being 'good for us'. We also have mercury in our fish, hormones in our cows, insecticides in our veggies, fracking chemicals in our groundwater to get natural gas to make synthetic fertilizer, chemicals fed to pigs to make them grow faster (in the US anyway, china doesn't even allow that crap to be sold)...

So why exactly do some people still think malthus was wrong? How exactly can some people defend population growth?

How exactly are you going to prove this shit is 'SAFE'? When scientists for 50 years haven't even been able to prove if animal fat is healthy for us or not? And we have been eating that for a million years? Do you understand 'First, Do No Harm?'

There are seven million people alive today. If tomorrow there is not enough food in the world to feed seven million people, some of them will starve. How can you keep evading this?

Even if we're talking about staying at 7 billion vs. scaling to 10 billion, your first solution is to forcibly eliminate the reproductive rights of the browner-skinned half of the world population?

"Eliminate Reproductive Rights"? Seriously? Do you normally watch television pundits and debates where talking points and demagoguery like that are taken seriously? Where you put words in people's mouths? That's the second time you've done that, so I'm done. You aren't interested in actually discussing this.

I was blessed with two sons and got myself fixed (note: 2 kids is below replacement rate), so I've done far more good for this planet than you will _ever_ understand.

You have twice as many kids as you're willing to allow to half the world's population?

When you start the discussion by saying we shouldn't even produce enough food to feed all seven billion people in the world and refuse to acknowledge the consequences of that, you're being dishonest. Maybe I should have asked: how many people should we produce food for, and how do we choose which people don't get food?

I'm in favor of reducing the ecological impact of agriculture, improving food quality, and reducing population growth. But you can't just ignore the requirements that we actually need to feed everyone who's already alive, and we shouldn't selectively implement coercive measures on people in other countries we are unwilling to impose on ourselves. It turns out there's a lot you can do within those constraints. That's the conversation worth having. I'm not going to entertain the notion that organic food is worth starving people and selectively depopulating entire continents over.