The Incredible Shrinking Man

The 1991 OFA report ‘Microlivestock: Little-known Small Animals with a Promising Economic Future’ introduces several alternative small animals for domestication and meat and dairy production. Small animals are easier to breed and keep, and are a quick way of supplementing a diet, especially in less developed countries. One of the species of great interest to [...]

Tom Watkins is a 15 year old kid from Amsterdam that’s being raised by his single mother on a Raw food vegan diet. Raw foodies eat uncooked, unprocessed organic foods as a large percentage of the diet. The idea is that raw food is healthier than cooked food because it doesn’t destroy nutrients and doesn’t contain as [...]

According to the Water Footprint Network the fresh water involved in the production of a single cup of coffee (125ml) is 140 liters. One part of coffee consumes 1100 water parts. To make an average cup of coffee requires around 40 coffeebeans. To produce one bean requires 3,5 liters of water. In total the global [...]

The era of world food security is coming to an end simply because we can’t sustain the way food is produced. Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Research Centre in Washington, says the demands for food are growing so fast that unless we deflate the food bubble at wartime speed, a breakdown is inevitable. The inability [...]

Mexican protesters against the high tortilla prices in 2007 rallied around an oversized corn. Their public display of the desire for an abundant food supply ressembles cargo cults in which the visualisation of desired abundance, or the context in which the abundance is believed to exist, is reproduced in order to attain it. But obviously they don’t. [...]

During TEDx Brainport Arne Hendriks gave a short talk on some of the reasons the human species should shrink, some of its possible consequences, and how it could be done.
See it HERE.

If we are to believe this last report published by MIT Press, economic collapse is just around the corner. If that’s true it won’t hurt to prepare our children both mentally and physically for a world in which there will be a lot less of everything.  A decrease in length of only 10% already lowers [...]

One of the most important reasons to shrink the human species is that we’ll shrink ourselves into a world of abundance. At 50 cm we’ll only need about 2% of the resources we need now. A simple grape will have the size of a mango. A chicken will be the size of an ostrich, and a [...]

During the Second World War Mussolini’s government urged Italians to keep guinea pigs to supplement their meager meat rations. It was not a bad idea. Rodents are the world’s most widespread, adaptable, and prolific group of mammals. They reproduce well, grow fast, and can adapt to a wide variety of local conditions.  Many are herbivores and [...]

If we decide to shrink the human species to 50cm our livestock needs will shrink with us. We’ll only consume about 2 to 5% of the food we consume today. The meat of one chicken could easily feed 100 people and one egg alone would be enough to make an omelet for 25 to 30 people. Poultry [...]