Over Seven Billion Bellies

I've long thought that the best business to own as a crime lord is a high quality restaurant. Not the gaudy kind that attracts the upper echelon for prestige reasons, but a family oriented one with traditional and experimental recipes to tie generations together.

Primary benefit with this setup is that you can eat high quality, comforting food everyday for free without having to cook. Anytime i met with a friend or an associate, I would treat them to a belly filling on the house.

It amazes me how much time our society in aggregate expends on filling our bellies. There's over seven billion of us, and the large majority of these bellies get filled multiple times a day. From within my imagination of being a crime lord filling his belly with seafood and olives surrounded by friends, I take a moment to pause and ponder. How do the other billions of people do it? How do they find the time out of their busy, anxious days to fill theirs and also others' bellies who depend on them?

It's a question I've been obsessed with since I didn't have a meal plan at the university dorm and felt hunger for the first time. How do all these people feed themselves? Why aren't we all starving?




Agriculture 🤷‍♂️... Most families in the rural parts of less developed nations are straight-up subsistence farmers.
2020-12-16 11:18:19
According to Bill Gates, this is going to be a major problem as a result of climate change, especially for farmers who live along the equator. It will be too hot and dry to grow crops. 
2020-12-16 16:35:47
Not just agriculture. I mean also the daily grind of having to afford, obtain, prepare, and clean. A lot of things to keep in mind. I think it's easier to do when food plays a central role in life rather than a means to an end (only fuel). 

I do fear what will happen with climate change. I think looking back we've already seen the strategies humans have adopted to cope. Like even in the 1800s you didn't need to have farms for cattle, you literally had Cowboys walking their cattle across the country and there would be enough grass for them to eat. But now we have resorted to either farms with grass + hay or even grain feeding. 

We've resorted to growing vegetables in water (hydroponics). These are all fine for increasing the most obvious output of food (the food itself) but I think we are still too unclear on the full ramifications. Like the nutritional effects of food grown with new methods.


2020-12-16 17:36:11