Relatively few people are aware that Bill Gates has made predictions (or threats) about how we’ll feed ourselves in the years to come. He says humans must abandon meat for the good of the planet and we’re doomed if we don’t. Instead, we must eat a meat substitute made in a factory or we must eat insects. I’ll reference Bill Gates as a point man for these opinions although he is far from the only person calling for change. Gates is becoming a singular dangerous individual, a technocrat that’s buying wholesale change with the blunt force of his fortune, but I don’t believe Bill Gates is honest in why he calls for change.
There’s a lot to unpack about Gates’ campaigns and motives. There’s disturbing evidence about his role in Covid, the profiteering over vaccinations, and the wholesale control of populations. He’s openly and shamelessly positioning for a follow up global pandemic as if they were a regular feature even though it was exactly 100 years between Covid and the last global pandemic. Perhaps he’s planning its development or implementation. He’s bought up about a quarter million acres of US farmland, enough to skew food production and markets in multiple ways; in this alone, he could be regarded as a one-man sleeper terrorist cell, preparing to hold the country hostage to some dictatorial technocratic food crisis, and he shows no sign of slowing down. Somewhere along the way, he morphed from philanthropist to a puppeteer of human events.
Eliminating the eating of meat has always been a vegan/vegetarian objective. Sometimes the root ethic is religious, sometimes ethical, but always on the level of personal conviction. It’s great if you believe you should be vegan. It’s not so great if you angrily believe that non-vegans are your personal enemy. You are akin to war criminal if you make plans to force whole populations to be vegan. Add a negative bonus if you rig that system to rake in hundreds of billions of dollars to perpetuate your autocracy.
The proclaimed root according to Gates is climate change which could indeed be considered a religion. The assumption underlying the whole model is that the human population is in an inexorable numerical ascent, causing a correlating rise in human sponsored devastation via greenhouse gases and carbon emissions. While there are credible arguments to suggest that climate change is not man made, that it’s not even a net global warming outside of patterns established to have occurred well before mass human habitation, it’s easier to focus on a more fundamental factor in the equation from which the religious assumption is derived; human population is in a solid trajectory of eventual collapse.
Humanity is having far few babies, even in the developing world. Rather than post any one specific link, I’d refer the reader to do their own research and google projected global birthrates and studies on future population. Most developed nations are already below the replacement rate, some drastically so. Even countries assumed to be rapidly overpopulating reversed courses long ago, particularly China. Anywhere that a population has discovered or aspired to middleclass lifestyles and economic mobility, they connected the dots and realized that short of immediate subsistent agricultural needs, less children facilitate less expense and accelerate accumulating wealth. It even applies to African counties that are rapidly modernizing.
Population growth projections were built on straight forward mathematical models that are easily generated and accurate. A hutch of rabbits will reproduce at a predictable and accelerating rate as long as there’s room to live, food sources, and no disease. Under these conditions, there is always exponential growth until one or more of the variables fail. Depopulation works the same way in reverse. As X number of reproducing household units fall below the replacement rate in child production, the resulting population collapses at an accelerating speed. This has just this past month been observed and commented on by Elon Musk. China has expressed their own alarm, too little too late. While the world population is still climbing, albeit slowly, it’s slowly leveling off and is projected to peak within about thirty years, but by then, the underlying math will have been at work for a generation and will have already gutted the potential ability for humans to reverse the trend.
An added complication is in the micro details, that individual fertility is also in crisis for reasons that are not yet fully understood although the pervasive global presence of specific micro plastics or compounds is suspected as hampering the endocrine systems of most modern societies. Even if a grand scheme were developed to reverse conception and birthing trends, billions of people with sub-performing sperm counts might not ever be up to the task.
Bill Gates is not entirely dumb, and he of course is aware of these trends. His motivation for pushing the non-meat behaviors is either related to a larger agenda of oppressive social engineering or it’s a deliberate effort to push for depopulation. Meat consumption is physiologically tied to masculinity and virility. Soy based diets of which Gates is advocating, is proved to hamper masculinity and virility by disrupting endocrine function.
Fifty years from now, there will be plenty of land to support the husbandry of food producing herds. If there is any lack, it will be in the labor hands and skill sets needed to farm and process those meats. In fact, given the trend of humans consolidating into urban areas, its entirely conceivable that hunting may once again eclipse farm raised animals, taking us back ten thousand years. In fact, to take it one step further, it was far more recently when wild animals still posed a threat to human habitation. Not only did we hunt, we were also hunted. Of course, that proposition is theoretical, but it illustrates a point.
Anyone alive now will not be reading these predictions when they start to kick in. Gates will be long gone. His vision of highly controlled human life will probably be a lot more successful than we would hope today. My generation will still enjoy a diet for which I was evolved to enjoy. It will be up to successive generations to decide what they will eat and whether they should be told by others what to eat.