Food is sustainable during a lifespan: Climate, Ecology, physical and mental health - my presentation at Nordic Future Food

On May 11 this year, I participated as a speaker at the Nordic Future Food fair in Kista outside of Stockholm.

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On May 11 this year, I participated as a speaker at the Nordic Future Food fair in Kista outside of Stockholm.

My presentation Food is sustainable during a lifespan: Climate, Ecology, physical and mental health (Mat är hållbar under en livstid: Klimat, Ekologi, Fysisk och Psykisk hälsa) - was based on my research at University of Helsingfors - The Future of Agriculture from a Perspective of Rational Entrepreneurial Thinking. I presented the seven chapters from my report (in Swedish): Vad är det finländska jordbrukets framtid från ett perspektiv av rationellt entreprenöriellt tänkande?

Chapter 1. Psychology, general.

Chapter 2. Mental fallacies - dysrationalia.

Chapter 3. Rational Entrepreneurial Thinking (my own model).

I then used that perspective to delve into four concepts:

Chapter 4. Climate, based on chronostratigraphy.

Chapter 5. The origin of the human kind, based on biological anthropology.

Chapter 6. The Epipaleolithic, Holocene, and the Agricultural revolution.

Chapter 7. Nutrition.

I started to give a brief description of the mind, and how it operates.

Then I talked about mental fallacies (there are at least 200), in particular Dysrationalia - the inability to think and behave rationally despite adequate intelligence (Stanovich, 1993).

Then I presented my own model for Rational Entrepreneurial Thinking (Österberg, 2021; in Swedish). The model is based on a three factor structre:

Epistemic Vigilance (Sperber et al. 2010).

Numeracy (Brook and Pui, 2010).

Disjunctive reasoning (Stanovich, 2015).

Based on Rational Entrepreneurial Thinking, I analysed (4) Climate, (5) The origin of the human kind, (6) the settlement of humans and the introduction of agriculture, (7) nutrition.

To describe the climate, I used chronostrategraphy.

Even though the climate has been around since Earth formed some 4.6 million years ago, the climate is basically assessed from the start of Phanerozoic and the Cambrian Explosion 541 million years ago. Climate is a complex where trace gases move in a cyclic fashion between five spheres: The Atmosphere, the Biosphere, the Cryosphere, the Hydrosphere, and the Lithosphere. And since the introduction of the Cambrian explosion, when the atmosphere contained 5000 ppm CO2, 90 % of that CO2 has moved to the bedrock, the forests, and the oceans.

The origin of humans.

66 million years ago, an asteroid struck what is now known as Mexico. The impact created the Yacantan peninsula, and wiped out the dinosaurs in what is known as the 5th extinction. When the dinosaurs weren't around, that opened a door for other creatures to thrive.

Read: Österberg (2022). On the Relation between Climate and Creativity – a time line.


~4 million years ago, just after the Messinian salinity crisis, our ancestors started to put meat on their plates (Mann, 2018). And four hundred thousand years later, findings suggest they introduced a new predatory pattern - smashing stones on bones of big dead animals to access nutritious bone marrow. That changed the shape of their hands, started an expansion of their brains, and a reduction of their guts (Aiello and Wheeler, 1995; Thompson et al. 2019; Williams-Hatala et al. 2018). A bigger brain had room for bigger thoughts; social cognition, symbolic thinking, and eventually executive functions including creativity (Ambrose, 2010; Coolidge and Wynn, 2018).

Food production. During most of the part 4 million years, our ancestors got their food from scavenging meat from animals that some other predator had eaten from, bone marrow, and very recently, from farming.

~25 000 - 20 000 before present, at the very end of Pleistocen (2.58 Mya - 11 600 thousand years ago), the Epipaleolithic occurred (Hodder, 2018). Our ancestors started to settle and 14 400 years ago, they baked the first bread (Arranz-Otaegui et al. 2018). ~1500 years later, they brewed the first beer (Liu et a. 2018). ~12000 years before present, Göbekli Tepe was erected in what is now southeast of Turkey. Despite beer and bread lacking nutrients, archeologists noted that they put a lot of effort in producing bread and beer.

11 600 before present, Pleistocen was replaced by the Holecene (11 600 - ). The Climate became warmer and more stable. A couple of thousand years later saw the emergence of the first agricultural revolution. The result was an increase of conflicts and stunting (Kohler et al. 2017; Mummert et al. 2011).

”Drawing on the passage in Genesis (1:29-31) in which God Institute a vegan diet, Swedenborg said that meat-eating corresponds to the fall from grace in the Garden of Eden and was, therefore, the point of entry of sin and suffering into the world” (Phelps, p. 149).

During the 1700s scientist turned theologian and mystic, Emanuel Swedenborg (1688 - 1772), promoted the idea that we should all go vegan to prepare for the second coming of Jesus. That followed with the emergence of various vegetarian associations, with names like Sylvester Graham (1794-1851). Yes, that him with the crackers and the flour. During the late 1800s, Ellen G. White (1827-1915), a member of the Seventh-Day adventist church, called for veganism. That was motivated by the claim that meat, butter, and dairy triggered carnal urges among men.

Read: Österberg (2019). "Perception versus facts": What is the future for sustainable food? The case of the prospective mind (UH).

2000s, some stakeholders claim that meat has a huge impact on the climate. One argument is that burping cows emit methane.

Are the claims valid?

First, let's look at the Global methane budget.

And then have a look at the Biogenic Carbon cycle.

And if all Americans abstained from animal source food, the reduction of green house gases would be marginal (Liebe, Hall and White, 2020; White and Hall, 2017). When it comes to GHG from agriculture, the US is similar to the Nordic countries.

A study that compared traditional monocultivated production maximization (MCPM) with regenerative farming, showed that regenerative farming was better for soil health, but still less effective than MCPM. I used an analogy to mobile phone batteries. In the early 1990s, a small phone battery of a Motorola Micro tac would last for ~10 minutes. A significantly smaller battery in a modern smartphone will last a whole day.

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Nutrition. Humans need to consume 30 micronutrients to sustain physical and mental health (Adesogan et al. 2020; Balehegn et al. 2019; Dobersek, 2021; Itkonen et al. 2020; Ylilauri et al. 2019).

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Conclusion.

Climate - food production in the western world is climate-smart

Ecology - mono-cultivated production maximization, supported by Glyphosate, is challenged by Regenerative production methods.

Physical and mental health depends on:

1. ~ 30 micro-nutrients. 
2. Cooking together (Lustig, 2017). 
3. Eat and drink together (Dunbar, 2017).