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The Population Bomb Hits 8 Billion
The world’s population is reaching 8 billion for the first time in history this month. This is the population bomb that Paul and Ann Ehrlich described in their 1968 book. They warned that the fight to control population growth was over and that hundreds of millions of people would die of famine.
The growth of the population slowed perceptively over the next half century, and some now proclaim the population bomb never detonated. In fact, another 4 billion people were added to the world’s population in the 54 years after Ehrlich’s book. Tragically hundreds of millions of people did in fact starve to death, even as food production has markedly increased, but malnutrition remains one of the leading causes of infant mortality.
It took seventeen hours of grueling airflight and two frantic airport connections for me to travel from Kansas City to Warsaw last fall, but I knew it would be so incredibly worth it. Poland had been on my bucket list forever and pandemic be damned, I was not going to postpone this trip again. But now that I was finally here, I had a desire that must be satisfied before I could visit one cathedral or memorial – I needed lunch. A good lunch. A non-airline-food lunch. A hot, inexpensive, fast lunch. How surprised I was to find a meal that met all these criteria waiting for me in an establishment advertised by a cow with a clover in her mouth. This neon bovine is how you know you’re in a milk bar – a bar mleczny – and it was the perfect introduction to the delicious country of Poland.
Food: it is a central part of our lives. It is surprising how relatively little fantasy and science fiction centers upon food. F&SF explores the human condition, extrapolating the present into alternate realities. Why not explore food?
