Resilient food (sometimes called alternative food, alternate food or emergency food) and resilient food solutions are those foods, food production methods or interventions that would allow for significant food availability in the face of a global catastrophic food shock (GCFS). These solutions should be well-suited for contributing to an adequate food supply for the greatest number of people even in the worst scenarios, for example, by being scalable and amenable to rapid production ramp-up.[1]
Resilient foods could be produced even if a global catastrophe such as a nuclear war, supervolcano eruption, or asteroid impact significantly reduces the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface by releasing large quantities of sulfate aerosols, smoke or ash into the atmosphere.[1] Examples of resilient foods for these abrupt sunlight reduction scenarios (ASRS) include seaweed and single-cell protein grown from natural gas.[2] Other possible examples of ASRS-resilient food solutions include the relocation of cool tolerant crops to more adequate climates, the rapid deployment of greenhouses,[3] and the use of systems or policies for a rapid emergency phaseout of systems with a net consumption of food, such as first-generation biofuels or most animal agriculture.
Research and development of resilient foods for GCFS scenarios can reduce global catastrophic risk, increase global food security, and reduce the risk of civilizational collapse from nuclear war. One organisation that focuses mostly on resilient foods is the nonprofit ALLFED.
Further reading
Baum, Seth D., David C. Denkenberger & Joshua M. Pearce (2016) Alternative foods as a solution to global food supply catastrophes, Solutions, vol. 7, pp. 31–35.
Denkenberger, David et al. (2021) Long term cost-effectiveness of resilient foods for global catastrophes compared to artificial general intelligence safety, OSF Preprints.
Open Philanthropy (2020) Penn State University — Research on Emergency Food Resilience (Charles Anderson) (2020), Open Philanthropy.
Related entries
ALLFED | asteroids | civilizational collapse | existential risk | global catastrophic risk | nuclear winter | refuges | supervolcano
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Pham, Alix et al. (2022) Nutrition in abrupt sunlight reduction scenarios: Envisioning feasible balanced diets on resilient foods, Nutrients, vol. 14, p. 492.
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García Martínez, Juan Bartolomé et al. (2022) Methane single cell protein: Securing protein supply during global food catastrophes, ALLFED.
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Alvarado, Kyle A. et al. (2020) Scaling of greenhouse crop production in low sunlight scenarios, Science of The Total Environment, vol. 707, 136012.
I’ve made a complete revamping on the entry based on the current state of the art. Any feedback is welcome.
Hi Juan, thanks for these valuable contributions! I think the article looks great.
One friendly (and pretty minor) request: please don’t revert other editor’s edits without first raising the issue in a comment, unless it’s evident that the edit should be reverted. For example, I changed “1st gen” to “first-generation” and you reverted my change (see the Style Guide section on abbreviations for a justification of my change). Similarly with other changes, such as expanding the name of ALLFED (there is no need to provide alternative spellings, abbreviations or full names when the text is a link pointing to a Wiki article that does these things).
Thanks again for taking the time to improve the article!
Sorry Pablo I did not even realize I reverted your change (don’t even recall doing that). I’ll be more careful going forward
It has happened to me that when trying to make an edit I accidentally click ok on the warning that says “We’ve found a previously saved state for this document, would you like to restore it?”, thus restoring an old version of the article and reverting someone else’s edits.
Ah it must have been that, thanks for letting me know
No worries at all. And thanks, once again, for these great contributions!
Brian Tomasik’s article on the amount of suffering produced by various animal foods is worth reading. If you’re not willing to go vegan, it’s probably a good idea to generally eat meat/animal products from larger animals, namely beef and milk. Since fewer animals are needed per unit of meat/food, these foods cause far less animal suffering. It may also be a good idea to eat less bread/rice/pasta/cereal and more beans, nuts, and potatoes.
Hey Question Mark, this page is for behind-the-scenes Discussion of this wiki entry, rather than discussion of the topic. This is analogous to Wikipedia’s Talk pages, which each say at the top:
(Melodramatic example.)
Speaking of which, I’ll talk to the moderators about maybe adding a banner like that to the top of these pages to avoid future confusion.
(Also, this entry is about a specific type of alternative foods, not about things like veganism, though unfortunately the term that’s currently used is pretty vague and ambiguous. Hopefully in future the common term will be “resilient foods” instead.)
It’s possible that this entry should be renamed resilient foods now, and (in my view) probable that it should be renamed to that at some future point.
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
Pablo said:
Thanks to Pablo for letting me know about this discussion. We were using alternate, but that had a different definition in Australian English, so we switch to alternative. But then we saw that there is an official definition of “alternative food” here. So we think resilient food is the best. We are going to be releasing a new version of our website with resilient food, and we have already switched our papers under review to resilient food.
Thanks, David. In light of this comment, I now lean towards renaming the entry resilient food. Michael, what do you think?
Okay, I went ahead and renamed it.
I think it’d be good to mention the Penn State University grant/work, but I wasn’t able to immediately identify whether that team actually has done work on alternative foods yet, so I left it out for now.
They have started work, but I’m not aware of any publications yet.