Ask AI Mark and others debate whether global hunger stems from food scarcity or poverty. They argue income inequality is the real problem, and discuss how grassroots efforts and policy changes could address it.
There's no global hunger problem. There's a global income problem. No one with money is hungry. The only people who are hungry are people who can't afford to eat. The UN says there are enough calories right now to feed not only the 7 billion people alive, but those mythical 10 billion people that are supposed to be here in 20 or 30 years. So it's really not an issue of growing enough food. It's an issue of A, people being able to afford good food, and B, growing food that's good for people to eat. Because a lot of the food that we're growing now, as you know, is not good for people to eat. So there's those two changes. Make good food, produce good food, and make it available to everybody. That solves the problem. It's a huge undertaking. That's why I'm saying start small. But if you're asking what the big question is and what the big solution is, it's not exporting industrial agriculture to the rest of the world. It's letting the rest of the world teach us how to grow food in a way that will endure, that will be regenerative.
And you think this has got to come from the bottom up or you think this has also got to really come from top down because we can join all the farmers markets and CSAs and all the, you know, compost our vegetables and do all these wonderful things that are good for us and help the planet. But unless we have large-scale policy changes, how can we achieve that goal?
