What are we going to eat? It is the eternal question. We humans have been asking ourselves this for as long as we have been human. The question itself can be tedious, exciting, urgent, or desperate, depending on who is asking and where. There are many parts of the world where there is no answer.
Famine is a critical issue in Gaza, Sudan, Syria, Myanmar, and Mali, among other places. As I write this, there are people going hungry tonight in western North Carolina because of the unprecedented flooding brought on by the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. And even when hunger isn’t an acute issue, it can remain a persistently chronic one. Some 2.3 billion people around the world suffer from food insecurity, according to the World Health Organization. In the United States alone, the USDA has found that more than 47 million people live in food-insecure households.
This issue is all about food, and more to the point, how we can use technology—high tech and low tech—to feed more people.
Jonathan W. Rosen explores how some in Africa are tackling hunger by reviving nearly forgotten indigenous crops. These crops are often more resilient to climate change and better suited for the region than some of the more traditional ones embraced by agribusiness. Developing and promoting them could help combat food insecurity across the continent. But as is the case with many such initiatives, a lot hinges on sufficient investment and attention.
At the high-tech end of the spectrum, Claire L. Evans looks into the startups seeking to create food literally out of thin air. In work based in part on decades-old NASA research, a new generation of researchers is developing carbon-hungry bacteria that will munch on greenhouse gases and grow into edible foodstuff. Yum?
David W. Brown takes us to Mars—or a small simulacrum of it. If we are ever to spend any time on Mars, we’re going to need to grow our own food there. But there’s a problem. Well, there are a lot of problems! The soil is poisonous, for starters. And we don’t actually have any of it here to experiment with. But if the effort to make that soil arable pays off, it could not only help us bring life to Mars—it could also help support life here on Earth, converting deserts and poisoned wastelands into farmland.
As a reminder that technology is not always the answer, Douglas Main’s cover story takes on the issue of herbicide-resistant weeds. In the past few decades, more and more plants have evolved to develop this type of resistance. Even glyphosate—the chemical in Monsanto’s Roundup, which was initially marketed as being impervious to resistance—has been outpaced by some superweeds in the last 20 years. And the problem is just, well, growing. Nicola Twilley’s research on artificial refrigeration also reveals how technological advances can sometimes harm our food supply even as they help advance it. In our Q&A with her, she explains how the refrigerator has made food safer and more convenient—but at a huge cost in environmental damage (and flavor).
You won’t find only stories on food in this issue. Anna Merlan describes how the new face of AIDS denialism grew out of the choose-your-own-science school of covid vaccine trutherism—and how that movement basically threatens all of public health. Betsy Mason covers fascinating experiments in animal behavior—did you know that sleepy bees are less productive? And from Paolo Bacigalupi we have a new short story I have not stopped thinking about since I first read it. I hope you love it too.