The big, fat, smelly elephant in the room is of course, population. Or, an overabundance thereof.

In 1798, “An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society” by economist Thomas Robert Malthus, went to print.

Within the book’s 130 pages, Malthus pointed out that improvements in food production, resulted in better general well-being for a population, but this would be temporary as the well-being was parlayed into an increase in population, which resulted in an overall decrease in food production per head. Malthus’ concern was that, eventually, humanity’s population would grow to the point whereby its size would have overtaken its ability to produce enough food for consumption. Driving the living standards of the population into subsistence or famine.

Boy, did he get that wrong. Mostly.

What Malthus had not predicted was improvements in our ability to produce food. Advances in machinery and equipment, their utilisation in clearcutting and factory farming, and the use of chemical compounds. Equally, Malthus also could not have predicted the innovations in medical care. Increased knowledge, coupled with the ability to mass produce antibiotics and other medications, which resulted in higher survivability rates.

In 1798, survival was still a numbers game. Families had as many children as they could, fighting against illness and starvation, in the hope that at least a few might survive into adulthood and have progeny of their own.

It took homo sapiens around 200,000 years or more to reach a worldwide population of one billion in the year 1800. Another century of vigorous humping, brought us an additional billion by 1927. The global population went from two billion, to three billion thirty-three years later in 1960. In the sixty years since then, the world’s population has scooted upwards by nearly 5 billion.

(Interestingly 1960 is also the year the Combined Oral Contraceptive Pill, or “birth control” pill, was approved for general use. So, either that worked out great, or had no impact whatsoever.)

The global population, in 2021, sits at 7.8 billion. By 2030, it’ll be 8.5 billion, and by the end of the century, 11 billion. And they’ll be needing homes, jobs and items to consume

Although, Malthus’ prediction has not yet come to pass, it might. Or has it? In a way, maybe.

We have something of an obesity issue. The last time the World Health Organization had a good look, in 2016, almost 2 billion adults were considered overweight and 650 million of those considered obese. Conversely, in 2018, The W.H.O. calculated that 820 million were undernourished. A number up from the previous year’s 811 million.

Yet, globally, we somehow manage to waste 1.3 billion metric tonnes of food per annum at a cost of close to 1 trillion dollars. Your favourite fast-food restaurant might throw away as much as 90,000 kilograms of food waste each year. Which ends up in landfill, and produces methane as it rots. Now think about how many fast-food outlets there are around the world.

We have at the same time, both a problem with overproduction and waste and, on the flip side of the coin, a measurable percentage of the population going hungry. It would seem that Bernard London’s observations about distribution remain pertinent.

Okay. Now what?