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Use It Up [overpopulation]
May. 27th, 2014 01:06 pmSometime in high school, my brother started learning about overpopulation and Paul Ehrlich's book The Population Bomb, and so I, too, learned about it through him. I think I can say that it has been the second major lurking fear I've ever developed (the first being a fear of nuclear holocaust, developed around the time I was in third grade). It has affected my thoughts about what to make of my time in the world - what I contribute (or don't) to humanity, and how. Many writers have picked up on Ehrlich's message, including some who have cautioned us about developing problems in countries like China, where the ratio of young men to women may lead many young men to despair of hopes to have a family of their own and instead turn to more violent pursuits, figuring they have nothing to lose.
Hard, heavy messages. If overpopulation is the root of all our evils, we have an individual responsibility to do something about it.
The message didn't really change much for me until a point in graduate school, when I was TAing an introductory Biology course taught by my advisor. There was a section in the course on population growth and population dynamics, including some discussion of what's known as the Demographic Shift. Somehow, I'd never learned about it previously. It's a change that happens over the course of industrialization. As countries become industrialized, and have access to things like better health care, education, and women's empowerment, birth rates fall. People begin to be able to plan for families. There are even countries with negative population growth and inverted population structures, like Japan and multiple countries in Europe. Inverted population structures present their own challenges (like towns in Japan that can't find young people to take over leadership roles), but they suggest that the human population is capable of being self-correcting.
And then there's a more personal take on things, an article that has just appeared, saying Actually, having kids won't destroy the planet. It reminds me, to some extent, of reading Diet for a Small Planet and learning that food production hasn't been the limiting step in global hunger, it's food distribution instead. Turns out the world is a complex place. The Atlantic article also makes me think of a Native American saying on a t-shirt my father used to wear all the time (until it wore out): We haven't inherited this land from our parents; we are borrowing it from our children.
I mulled over all of this while cooking breakfast, lunch, and dinner this morning. I'm still trying to figure out how to manage my own personal system of food production and consumption, trying to minimize waste while maximizing delicious vegetable matter. I finished cooking up some green tomato ketchup yesterday morning, to use up a small pile of green tomatoes culled off my tomato plants. I'm inventorying my flour collection and trying to work my way through it in preparation for moving, so none of it winds up like that one giant bag of chickpea flour that lingered for 5-6 years. This morning, I used up the remainder of a container of strawberries and container of whipping cream on some amaranth flour pancakes, cooked up some CSA green beans that weren't looking especially hot after a week in the fridge, used up the rest of a batch of marinara that![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
scrottie made, and started working through some angel-hair pasta as well*.
My refrigerator always looks different when S heads out of town. It's one of the biggest pieces of whiplash I experience as part of a long-distance relationship, going from lots of home-cooked, shared meals to batch-cooking just for myself. In either case, it takes some work, thoughtfulness, and creativity to figure out how to eat well with minimal waste. I only cook about 2 meals a week when it's just me, compared to ~4 meals a week between S and myself.
*But a note to self, when there's both chili and marinara in the fridge, keep them stored on different shelves! Tonight's dinner will be angel-hair pasta with a combination of marinara and chili, heh. I put some of the freeganed veggie soy-rizo in the chili - tasty! Only two more packages of it to use up.
Hard, heavy messages. If overpopulation is the root of all our evils, we have an individual responsibility to do something about it.
The message didn't really change much for me until a point in graduate school, when I was TAing an introductory Biology course taught by my advisor. There was a section in the course on population growth and population dynamics, including some discussion of what's known as the Demographic Shift. Somehow, I'd never learned about it previously. It's a change that happens over the course of industrialization. As countries become industrialized, and have access to things like better health care, education, and women's empowerment, birth rates fall. People begin to be able to plan for families. There are even countries with negative population growth and inverted population structures, like Japan and multiple countries in Europe. Inverted population structures present their own challenges (like towns in Japan that can't find young people to take over leadership roles), but they suggest that the human population is capable of being self-correcting.
And then there's a more personal take on things, an article that has just appeared, saying Actually, having kids won't destroy the planet. It reminds me, to some extent, of reading Diet for a Small Planet and learning that food production hasn't been the limiting step in global hunger, it's food distribution instead. Turns out the world is a complex place. The Atlantic article also makes me think of a Native American saying on a t-shirt my father used to wear all the time (until it wore out): We haven't inherited this land from our parents; we are borrowing it from our children.
I mulled over all of this while cooking breakfast, lunch, and dinner this morning. I'm still trying to figure out how to manage my own personal system of food production and consumption, trying to minimize waste while maximizing delicious vegetable matter. I finished cooking up some green tomato ketchup yesterday morning, to use up a small pile of green tomatoes culled off my tomato plants. I'm inventorying my flour collection and trying to work my way through it in preparation for moving, so none of it winds up like that one giant bag of chickpea flour that lingered for 5-6 years. This morning, I used up the remainder of a container of strawberries and container of whipping cream on some amaranth flour pancakes, cooked up some CSA green beans that weren't looking especially hot after a week in the fridge, used up the rest of a batch of marinara that
scrottie made, and started working through some angel-hair pasta as well*.My refrigerator always looks different when S heads out of town. It's one of the biggest pieces of whiplash I experience as part of a long-distance relationship, going from lots of home-cooked, shared meals to batch-cooking just for myself. In either case, it takes some work, thoughtfulness, and creativity to figure out how to eat well with minimal waste. I only cook about 2 meals a week when it's just me, compared to ~4 meals a week between S and myself.
*But a note to self, when there's both chili and marinara in the fridge, keep them stored on different shelves! Tonight's dinner will be angel-hair pasta with a combination of marinara and chili, heh. I put some of the freeganed veggie soy-rizo in the chili - tasty! Only two more packages of it to use up.
