Our quest for food security must rely on green solutions

The obvious path of scaling up refrigeration poses climate risks that new approaches can eliminate

- RAHUL MATTHAN

Paul Ehrlich's 1968 bestseller, The Population Bomb, opened with an apocalyptic vision of humanity's near future: "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now."

Few have been more wrong. Today, we produce more than enough to feed every person on the planet, and if we still have food insecurity in some corners of the planet, it is because we haven't yet learned to deal with spoilage. If we can preserve all the food we produce till it gets to those who need it, we would easily be able to feed the millions who still go hungry. That we cannot, despite the technological progress we have made, is one of the tragedies of the modern age.

Freshly harvested food has a limited lifespan. Take vegetables, for example. From the moment they are separated from the roots and leaves that provide them with water and energy, they turn upon the stores of energy within their cells in a cannibalistic attempt to keep their cell metabolism going. However, it doesn't take more than a few hours before they burn through most of these stores, weakening their external defenses. This is the opening that bacteria and other microbial organisms need to launch an attack on them and those stores of energy. Within days, fungi cover them completely, overwhelming their defenses and consuming them entirely.