Philip wrote:

>
>I was speaking only of Paleo foods, not of modern foods like grains, when 
>I said that demand will eventually exceed supply to the point that it 
>drives up prices dramatically, whether it takes 10, 50, 100 or 1000 years. 
>
>In the long run, the only question is when this will occur, not if. 
>Grains, like many of the modern foods, will likely remain relatively cheap 
>for a long time to come. Again, as Cordain stated, it is the cheap foods 
>like grains that have enabled the massive population growth that gives us 
>over 6 billion people. 
>
I see no reason to believe this.  It takes about 10 calories of energy 
to grow one calorie worth
of grain.  This is not sustainable.  There is no doubt we will run short 
of that energy some day, and
long before 1000 years passes; the only argument is about when., between 
those who believe the
effects will show up in the next 10-20 years, and those who believe we 
have 100 years to figure out
our problems.  Any food which takes an order of magnitude more energy to 
grow than its yield
is unsustainable.

>
>< "without agriculture's cheap starchy staples, it is no exaggeration to 
>say that billions of people worldwide would starve." -- Loren Cordain >
>
And without the cheap petroleum that causes the starchy staples to be 
cheap, it will also happen.
When grain is grown by horticultural means (producing more calories than 
it takes to grow), it will
be more expensive because it will embody more human labor.

>This logically leads to the conclusion that some 
>day it will require a doctor's prescription to buy the Paleo foods. This 
>would lead to people trying to get around this bottleneck by growing and 
>raising their own Paleo foods, by paying doctors to write them a 
>prescription and by buying Paleo foods illegally on a black market, but it 
>may be the least bad of several bad alternatives. Some people would get 
>doctors' prescriptions just so they could resell the foods to others, as 
>happens with valuable prescription drugs today.
>
Interesting idea.  We can get a jump on this by raising our own foods; 
organic home gardens are generally
well under the horticulture/agriculture limit (it's horticulture if it 
takes less than a calorie to grow a calorie, and
it's agriculture if it takes more).  I'm sorry I've forgotten the book 
where I read about this; maybe someone else
on the list has also read that book who has a better memory.

    Lynnet