Journal
BIOSCIENCE
Volume 65, Issue 8, Pages 758-768Publisher
OXFORD UNIV PRESS
DOI: 10.1093/biosci/biv081
Keywords
food security; human macroecology; Malthusian-Darwinian dynamic; technological innovation; sustainability
Categories
Funding
- National Science Foundation Macrosystems Biology [EF-1065836]
- Program in Interdisciplinary Biological and Biomedical Sciences at the University of New Mexico - National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering [T32EB009414]
- James S. McDonnell Complex Systems Scholar Award
- NSF [EF-1038682]
- Emerging Frontiers
- Direct For Biological Sciences [1065836] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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Human societies have always faced temporal and spatial fluctuations in food availability. The length of time that food remains edible and nutritious depends on temperature, moisture, and other factors that affect the growth rates of organisms that cause spoilage. Some storage techniques, such as drying, salting, and smoking, date back to ancient hunter-gatherer and early agricultural societies and use relatively low energy inputs. Newer technologies developed since the industrial revolution, such as canning and compressed-gas refrigeration, require much greater energy inputs. Coincident with the development of storage technologies, the transportation of food helped to overcome spatial and temporal fluctuations in productivity, culminating in today's global transport system, which delivers fresh and preserved foods worldwide. Because most contemporary humans rely on energy-intensive technologies for storing and transporting food, there are formidable challenges for feeding a growing and increasingly urbanized global population as finite supplies of fossil fuels rapidly deplete.
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