Not to scare you but it happens every year, constantly. There is always another new disease or an new mutation to an older disease that is attacking crops.
It’s only by constant research, phytosanitary processes and breeding efforts that our food supply is as secure as it is.
And then there are bananas. No genetic variation. Just clones of clones of clones. 1 disease away from being totally wiped out.
There was a scifi novel in the olden days that had exactly that scenario: A fast spreading disease that first took out rice, which lead to mass starvation and politicla unrest in Asia. This was countered by sending food from the US and Europe, depleting their reserves. Then, the next year, the virus (or whatever) made the jump over to all members of the oryzee family, i.e. all cereals, worldwide. No wheat, no barley, no maize - all dead except a few plants kept safe in secure labs.
Yeah that’s totally unrealistic, in a biodiversity ecosystem, the varus shouldn’t be able to propagate wildly, I mean, for that to happen you would have to have planted vast areas of monoculture crops, all with the same or similar genetic traits, without many buffer zones, and a depleted soil full of biologically inert chemical fertilisers, devoid of a healthy and resilient soil microbiome… oh… oh no…
Fun fact, this is happening with Bananas. The only way they can contain it is by annihilating entire fields.
Fun! Fun, fun, fun. Fun.
Cool cool cool cool cool. Cool.
True, but all bananas are clones and have almost no genetic diversity and are all susceptible to the same diseases.
So are many of our food cash crops.
Keep in mind that the book is so old, I cannot even find it online. It was published in a “Classic Science Fiction” edition when I was a kid.
I believe the book you are talking about is "The Death Of Grass’.
Figured that would be Nancy Reagan’s autobiography.
Brand new idea, you say? Let me get my writing fingers on.
Isn’t this also the basic plot of Interstellar?
It is. The corn is all dying and is so monogenetic that it is all susceptible to the same diseases.
No idea. Never seen it.
interstellar music
That I’ve listened to, it is a great organ piece.
In the movie Interstellar there’s a blight that is destroying all of the crops across the world.
I mean, just look at the potato famine, that was on par with any pandemic.
If you’re talking about the Irish one, yeah.
The disease that made food inedible: British imperialism.
Hey! Where’s Perry?
I meanbstuff like that exists, ergot for example really sucks. But you can kill and burn infected plants and animals. Can`t really do that with humans. So it is overall much easier to controll.
Edit: Some weird formating stuff
Ergot was what i was going to reply with
there is asso things like potato blight that in part caused the Great Famine
I really don’t remember well anymore right now, but there was some infection 2 years back or so, where if you had it, you couldn’t process some kind of meat/any meat anymore.
Lone star tick bites can cause a condition called alpha-gal syndrome that makes you allergic to red meat.
Yeah I think that was it. Thank you :)
heard diesel is like a few thousand calories, so we could maybe switch to that
I will not think about this further, I feel light headed
