Swedish Scientist Promotes The Most Gruesome Solution Ever For Fighting Climate Change
A Swedish behavioral scientist from the Stockholm School of Economics has an economical suggestion for fighting climate change: eating human flesh.
Speaking at the Gastro Summit as a panel considered the topic, "Can you Imagine Eating Human Flesh?" Stockholm School of Economics professor and researcher Magnus Soderlund opined that since food sources are diminishing, people should accustom themselves to eating foods considered taboo, as The Epoch Times reports.
The Epoch Times notes that the panel's talking points included these questions: "Are we humans too selfish to live sustainably? Is cannibalism the solution to food sustainability in the future? Does Generation Z have the answers to our food challenges? Can consumers be tricked into making the right decisions? At GastroSummit, you will get some answers to these questions—and also partake in the latest scientific findings and get to meet the leading experts."
When Soderlund asked his audience to show how willing they were to consider his idea, only a few people raised their hands, but he said later that 8% of the audience was willing to consider the idea. Asked if he himself would be willing, he answered, "I feel somewhat hesitant but to not appear overly conservative … I'd have to say … I'd be open to at least tasting it."
The Malthusian myth of world food scarcity has persisted for centuries; as Scientific American wrote, "In 1798 Thomas Robert Malthus famously predicted that short-term gains in living standards would inevitably be undermined as human population growth outstripped food production, and thereby drive living standards back toward subsistence. We were, he argued, condemned by the tendency of population to grow geometrically while food production would increase only arithmetically."
In his 1798 "Essay on the Principle of Population," Thomas Malthus wrote:
It is an evident truth that, whatever may be the rate of increase in the means of subsistence, the increase of population must be limited by it, at least after the food has once been divided into the smallest shares that will support life. All the children born, beyond what would be required to keep up the population to this level, must necessarily perish, unless room be made for them by the deaths of grown persons… To act consistently therefore, we should facilitate, instead of foolishly and vainly endeavoring to impede, the operations of nature in producing this mortality; and if we dread the too frequent visitation of the horrid form of famine, we should sedulously encourage the other forms of destruction, which we compel nature to use.Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague. In the country, we should build our villages near stagnant pools, and particularly encourage settlements in all marshy and unwholesome situations.
But as The Guardian pointed out in 2014, "Chronic hunger has a range of causes, but global food scarcity is not one of them. According to the World Food Programme, we produce enough to feed the global population of 7 billion people. And the world produces 17% more food per person today than 30 years ago, and the rate of food production has increased faster than the rate of population growth for the past two decades."
