Replying to a comment!

I felt this deserved a whole post because I wrote too much to respond in a comment; the comment too (by Emily Smith who has a great blog called Treading on thin ice; about glacial melt and it's consequences - its great please take a look, I am not doing it justice!) highlights some issues that we face in the coming decades.

Her original comment was: 

"You're right it is a really provocative video. I hadn't even heard of the riots in 2008, let alone known they were partially due to phosphorus shortages. It really makes you think about our priorities, especially if the peak could be reached by 2035. Even if the peak is in 300-400 years like the Fertiliser Agency stated, its the wrong attitude to pass it off to future generations to deal with. Saying that, I'm not sure how many people, me included would be willing to give up meat. And even if they did, if it's a finite resource, I wonder what proportion of the population can be sustained when the phosphorus resource has run out? Not 7 billion I expect."

My Response:

It is very true, I personally love to eat meat occasionally, but how much meat we eat I feel is the question. Humans have always eaten meat, and in some parts of the world, meat is reared without the use of extensive amounts of resources, for instance well within the ‘carrying capacity’ of certain countries; especially subsistence farming.

Intensive agriculture has resulted in massive amounts of fertiliser being used when it is not even required (Europe for instance; I have read this in a journal article but fail to remember at the moment!). We eat a lot of meat, but by just looking at any reduced aisle in any supermarket we can see huge amounts of meat wasted; no one buys every meat product. Just think, how many times have you walked past a butchers or a deli counter in a supermarket and thought about buying meat a few days to expiration and left it? Or even thrown out some left over gone off meat? Please do not think I am accusing you personally of this (lol!) but society is wasteful, regardless of how conscious we are individually.

By reducing waste in the consumption of meat, I’m guessing (not very academic here!) that we will naturally produce less meat, or meat per capita. The alternatives of a low-meat high-protein diet result in either large shifts in diets to legumes/beans/soya (which the cows generally eat as feed now) or fish. Fish is one of the most consistently exhausted and depended upon food sources we have, adding more pressure could cause greater depletion of an already controversial ‘commons’ resource.

The fact that meat production will almost certainly increase in line with demographic change requires a renewable source of P, that’s where natural fertilisers come in. Like the video material has shown, P is not really absorbed by our body, so most of it passes straight out; the P used to make the meal for one person is now available to be used to make food for another person. We just need to roll this out on a large scale, thanks to urbanisation; the feasibility of capturing P from human waste is easier from cities. There is a great potential in harnessing P; and there are just as interesting ways of utilising this resource which I hope to explore in greater depth soon!!!

Sorry for the long reply! :D And I hope you do not mind me using your comment!