nuclear war, volcanic eruptions, and asteroid impact events can block sunlight, causing abrupt global cooling. In extreme but entirely possible cases, these events could make agriculture infeasible worldwide for several years, creating a food supply catastrophe of historic proportions. This paper describes alternative foods that use non-solar energy inputs as a solution for these catastrophes. For example, trees can be used to grow mushrooms; natural gas can feed certain edible bacteria. Alternative foods are already in production today, but would need to be dramatically scaled up to become the primary food source during a global food supply catastrophe
This is what ALLFED focus on, but other research or implementation work has been done on this topic separately from ALLFED (e.g.), and I currently think the topic is sufficiently plausibly important to get its own entry+tag rather than just being seen as just “that thing ALLFED does”.
Considerations regarding what to call this:
Alternative foods is the typical name, but sounds like it could mean alternative proteins or a bunch of other things
Apparently ALLFED are going to rebrand this as resilient foods, which does seem much clearer to me
But the fact that this term is currently not the standard term is a mark against it
Update: I’ve now made this entry.
Alternative foods or resilient foods or something like that
A paragraph explaining what I mean (from Baum et al., 2016):
This is what ALLFED focus on, but other research or implementation work has been done on this topic separately from ALLFED (e.g.), and I currently think the topic is sufficiently plausibly important to get its own entry+tag rather than just being seen as just “that thing ALLFED does”.
Considerations regarding what to call this:
Alternative foods is the typical name, but sounds like it could mean alternative proteins or a bunch of other things
Apparently ALLFED are going to rebrand this as resilient foods, which does seem much clearer to me
But the fact that this term is currently not the standard term is a mark against it
I’m in favor. Very weak preference for alternative foods until resilient foods becomes at least somewhat standard.