Or a Willy Wonka thing.
https://hips.hearstapps.com/cosmouk.cdnds.net/14/36/3200x1930/nrm_1409568407-charlie-chocolate-factory-missing-chapter-roald-dahl-cosmopolitan-1.jpg?resize=768:*
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That Technicolor! 
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Yup, you’d need at least three full 21st century Batman films to get that much color and light.
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The sad fact is that over the course of a year consumers and restaurants throw away an enormous quantity of food because there’s no good way to keep leftovers for more than a few days. My goal is to develop a small countertop freeze dryer machine that leftover food, collected over the course of several meals, would go into in a batch rather than be thrown out. With the right planning, this freeze dried food sealed in mylar pouches could become a significant portion of the backup food supply for a household.
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Agreed, but I think the larger point is that this is going to lead a shortage, not a complete collapse.
Disagreed. Even if I wasn’t naturally inclined to buying in advance (I want to go to buy things once and be done with it for the year), there’s nothing morally wrong with buying when the prices are low. Buying up things I won’t use to resell is ethically questionable, and capitalism, but I probably wouldn’t do it even if I could think of a business model. Buying the good pork at low prices now so I don’t need to buy the ractopamine-(s—, I spelled that right on the first try)laced pork at high prices later is smart. Buying at low prices now so I can buy things my family needs later is ethically preferable.
Even if I thought things were going to get really bad, stocking up can ease the transition so that it doesn’t smack you in the face like it did most Americans. When the whole covid thing began and no one knew quite what was happening or how bad it was going to get, I wrote a rantish but, I think, ultimately helpful drunk-post about advance planning for emergencies. I don’t think this is that again.
It could, who knows the fate of men? But I don’t think this is that.
Yeah, but you said:
which makes it sound like it’s happening often. Also, you said “adult beverages”. Dittohead? Or did that phrase actually get into the ether?
These kind of self sufficient farming isn’t going to get you very far, like 5 cucumbers for 2 months of work. Factory farming is practiced because it’s efficient.
Plus you still feed fertilizers and chemicals that needs to be imported, farming tools, etc. not to mention lots of land which Taiwan doesn’t have a lot of.
I like the sound of it. Are there advantages to freeze drying over air drying?
Dam-! I guess I got lazy. I had 3 bottles of Frank’s because we can’t always find it, but I guess I was resting easy and didn’t buy more.
That’s probably smaller than what I have but I have a freezer about half width and depth and half as high as a fridge on sale for $4.4k. We just have a 200 something litre fridge, but with a bigger one it would be almost as good.
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Nah. It’s practiced for a variety of reasons, but efficiency is not one of them. It is possibly the most inefficient way of producing food: the oft-quoted metric is “ten calories of oil for one calorie of food”, which is a foolish oversimplification, but it’s not far off the mark. And that ignores the consumption of other resources which are either non-renewable or not being renewed, such as soil fertility, groundwater, and phosphate minerals.
Bottom line is it’s the method that governments favour (with subsidies for those who comply, and harassment for those who don’t) and the methods used are designed for the convenience of the machines that are available.
Fertilizers and chemicals are about to disappear, thanks to oil shortages. The point about growing your own food is that, if you don’t do it, you’re at the mercy of governments and big business. That’s not a nice place to be. However you’re right that a balcony doesn’t give you a whole lot of options. If that were all I had available, I’d be investing in a vertical aquaponics system, some growlights, and some solar panels to run everything from.
I grew some carrots and garlic on my balcony once. The carrots took six months, the garlic a year, from memory. In the end the ‘harvest’ was enough for about two meals. Carrots tasted good though.
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These require money, for solar panels, or lots of electricity for grow lights.
If you live in a city you are at the mercy of governments whether you like it or not. Only way to avoid it is to not live in a city.
Nuclear power would have solved much of electricity problem, but society collectively fear them, so they don’t work.
Well, sure they do. But the alternative is to queue up in the bread-ration line every day and spend your money there instead. At least the choice is there.
Auxiliary grow lights need about 30-60W/m2, depending on what you’re growing and how much sun you’re getting, so for a balcony-sized setup you’re looking at a pretty modest solar installation that’s well-matched to the load.
True enough. If the shit really hits the fan then there will probably be a mass exodus from cities - people who can get out will get out. OTOH, if you’re stuck there with no other options, sitting tight and hoping for the best is probably not a great plan.
On the bright side, a prolonged energy/resource crisis will probably force a correction in Taipei’s real estate prices …
Governments have just spent two years shovelling all of their spare change into a big hole in the ground. Then they borrowed more and shovelled that into another hole in the ground. Nobody’s going to be building any nuclear power stations - they’ve got no more money.
The only reason why nuclear power is so expensive is because politics prevent it from actually happening. Sure the engineering challenge is there but if there were no political obstructions a nuclear power plant should open in about 4 years or so.
So fossil fuel plants are built because even though they are worse in every way but there’s no politics that stop it from happening. Society may not like climate change but they tolerate it more than nuclear power.
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Just one of the reasons food prices appear to be going a little wack:
That’s the Federal Reserve, doing their best to trigger a hyperinflationary crisis. I’d be interested to know what the equivalent for Taiwan looks like - anyone know where the government publishes such things?
Because powering electric scooters with electricity made 80% from fossil fuels was a much better idea.
45% from coal, 35% from natural gas. The windfarms looked so good on TV. It was like we were really doing something. At least Taiwan tethered itself to someone other than Russia.
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If blueberry muffins follow I’m leaving.
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Sadly that is very true here in taiwan for many farmers as well. Its nt a wellfare situation because they do work. They just arent paid fairly for their efforts.
I feel it wont be food inflation so much as lessened food deflation. The prices have to rise, it would be very wise to plan accordingly. even without war, the wave of absurd uncontrolled wastage we have been riding is nearing the coastline.
For those with a sunny balcony, rooftop or land, maybe we can make a list of easy, fast and good yeilding plants to grow. Things like romain lettuce, corn, strawberries etc are wastes of space in such scenarios. Things like okra, certain pole beans, sweet potato (leaf) etc are far more practical for above mentioned scenarios.
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Freeze drying (lyophilization) removes the water content from food without destroying its cellular structure. It’s then sealed in Mylar bags to remove all oxygen. Without oxygen and H2O food keeps for up to 25 years without spoiling while retaining up to 95% of its nutrition and flavor. The result is light and easy to ship due to the removal of water content and no need to refrigerate to prevent spoilage.
The biggest advantage? Being able to convert an environmental menace into a food resource for the future:
“ Taiwan generates an estimated 16.5 million tons of food waste a year. That’s enough to fill 182 Olympic-size swimming pools every day all year, year-in and year-out. For most people, it’s out-of-sight, out-of-mind – at worst, someone else’s problem.
In reality, food waste costs Taiwan taxpayers billions of dollars a year. It is a significant source of air and water pollution and Taiwan’s already oversized greenhouse gas emissions. Soil contamination from food waste reduces our limited farmland every year.”
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If you’re talking about assuming the government and private enterprises will not be looking after your interests, nuclear power isn’t going to do anything for you — you still need to cross your fingers and hope they’ll be providing power to your home.
I grew beans in a window box (roughly 0.4x0.4x2m) a few years back. They do indeed grow very well, but my problem was that they covered half the window bars and blocked out the light to the other plants. D’oh!
I had a moringa tree growing at one end of the box. It did fine, but never produced any ‘beans’. That was a bit of a waste of space because although I like the leaves in small doses, it produced way more than I wanted to eat.
Okra probably would have been a good bet, but I don’t much like okra. Sweet potatoes, definitely.
If we really had to grow our own food, I don’t see any option other than getting auxiliary lighting set up. Without it, you don’t have enough square footage, and it’s too complicated to work around the available sunlight. With careful choice of crops you could probably get 5m2 crammed vertically into an average balcony, producing maybe 50-70kg of food over the course of a year. If you had enough money to add fat and protein from animal products, that’d be enough to keep one person healthy. You’d want to ferment all your scraps and put them back into the growbeds.
A compact freeze-dryer is a great idea - I was actually looking for a product like this a few years back - but I’m not sure that food waste is the underlying problem here. How on earth does food waste generate “soil contamination” or water pollution? That makes no sense at all. It’s more likely to be due to the sort of behaviour that @Explant flagged up last week - plastic waste, burning trash, etc.
Returning food waste (I mean genuine food waste, like peelings, trimmings, and inedible stuff) back to the soil is exactly what you want to happen. But it needs to happen much more efficiently than it does now. Freeze drying is great for food preservation for the off-season, which reduces sales bottlenecks during production gluts.
Food is never really wasted if you think about it. Even if you don’t eat it some bacteria will, or wild animals will eat it.
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