{"id":3513669,"date":"2025-06-11T09:50:29","date_gmt":"2025-06-11T09:50:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/?p=3513669"},"modified":"2025-06-11T09:50:29","modified_gmt":"2025-06-11T09:50:29","slug":"food-makes-babies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/stories\/2025-06-11\/food-makes-babies\/","title":{"rendered":"Food Makes Babies"},"content":{"rendered":"

Daniel Quinn returned to the theme that \u201cfood makes babies\u201d so often in his writings that it would seem he was continually dissatisfied either with the clarity of his case, or with objections people had, or both. I get it. I often return over and over to the same thorny themes, each time thinking I\u2019ll finally nail it. The exercise is as much for improving internal clarity as anything.<\/p>\n

Many of the comments following my\u00a0coverage of Daniel Quinn\u2019s\u00a0Ishmael<\/em><\/a>\u00a0focused on the food\u2013baby issue. The\u00a0more recent post on\u00a0The Story of B<\/em><\/a>\u00a0dwells on the topic as well, so I figured it would be worth dedicating a post to the matter, trying to covering all the angles.<\/p>\n

The statement that increasing food production leads to increases in population touches a nerve for some people, which is what makes it a valuable topic to explore. For some, the statement seems to be an affront to their notion of control. It implies that humans are \u201cno more than\u201d animals, which takes direct aim at our most prized mythology:\u00a0human supremacism<\/a>\u2014relating to Ishmael\u2019s\u00a0second dirty trick<\/a>: that we \u201cevolved from the slime\u201d\u2014barely tolerated by modernists, but only in a narrow technical sense.<\/p>\n

Now, the objections are not without demonstrable legitimacy. In this post, I will start with the basics, point out key objections, then see what we can make of it.<\/p>\n

Food Does Make People<\/h3>\n

We start with some obvious and incontrovertible facts. As for any animal, humans are built out of the food we eat. It\u2019s where the atoms come from. Humans have many holes (including pores) out of which to\u00a0lose<\/em>\u00a0mass, but only one mouth-hole for\u00a0adding<\/em>\u00a0mass\u2014in the form of tasty assemblies of atoms. Not just any atoms will do, but generally those biologically arranged into sugars, fats, and proteins.\u00a0No rocks for me<\/a>, please.<\/p>\n

I cant resist pointing out that the simple act of breathing constitutes a significant mass loss mechanism\u2014easily into kilogram-per-day territory. Not only do we take in O2<\/sub>\u00a0and breathe out CO2<\/sub>\u00a0(see what we did there? Kicked out a carbon atom!), but we also lose water molecules in our humid breath\u2014made visible by condensation in cold air.<\/p>\n

It is obvious, then, that if human population explodes\u2014as it has\u2014it must necessarily be\u00a0accompanied<\/em>\u00a0by an increase in food supply going into mouths. We\u2019ll get to causal direction later.<\/p>\n

Mouse Experiments<\/h3>\n

Daniel Quinn effectively employed a \u201cthought experiment\u201d using captive mice to demonstrate the point. True: mice are not humans, but I\u2019ll get to objections later. Holding daily food input steady results in a total mouse population fluctuating around a stable value. Providing daily increases of food (so that supply always exceeds demand) results in exponential population increase as long as suitable space avails and the regimen is maintained. Slowly decreasing daily food supply will reduce population, smoothy.<\/p>\n

Food is therefore a perfectly effective \u201cknob\u201d for controlling the mouse population: none better. Food availability is a key mechanism in ecology too, for arriving at balanced populations. This knob will work on any animal or plant or fungus or microbe. Humans are among the animals of which we speak (hold the \u201cyes, but\u2026\u201d for a bit longer).<\/p>\n

Feedback<\/h3>\n

The case of increasing daily food sets up positive feedback. More mouths: then more food. More food: then more mouths. The cycle continues as population swells. Exponential, runaway growth is the hallmark of positive feedback. The enormous human population surge could not have happened without a dominant dose of positive feedback. That\u2019s how math do.<\/p>\n

Negative feedback can take a number of forms: food depletion, predation, and disease being the most easily identified and common in ecological contexts. A dynamic equilibrium (fluctuation around a longer-term average) involves an approximate balance of positive and negative feedback.\u00a0Equilibrium doesn\u2019t mean none of them are present<\/strong>: they just act in opposition to each other, leading to partial or total cancellation.<\/p>\n

In a \u201cpioneer\u201d stage, positive feedback dominates over the others: not enough population to exhaust food supplies or concentrate disease, for instance. A late-stage population\u00a0still has<\/em>\u00a0the positive feedback mechanism as fully-engaged as ever, but it is offset by the now-more-prevalent negative feedback elements: all together at once\u2014all contributing.<\/p>\n

A Human Thought Experiment<\/h3>\n

To those who resist the notion that increasing food production also means increasing human population, consider this. In 1950, the global population stood at about 2.5 billion people. The Green Revolution was about to explode into global agriculture, substantially increasing crop yields on the back of profligate fossil fuel inputs (for fertilizer, mechanization, energy for irrigation, transport, processing, etc.). Let\u2019s say this tsunami of energy and technology had not arrived on the agricultural scene, and that moreover a global edict (\u201cmagically\u201d followed) held annual food production at the 1950 level thereafter.<\/p>\n

Would we have 8 billion people today? Impossible. We would still have 2.5 billion, correct? In 1950, the world produced enough food for 2.5 billion people, so that same amount of annual food would sustain 2.5 billion people today\u2026or perhaps 2 billion taller, heavier people; or 3 billion people with more equitable, modest distribution and less waste. But you get the point: hold the food supply steady and you essentially hold the population below some cap. Inarguable. Those additional 5.5 billion people were made possible by a technological wave of food increase.<\/p>\n

A Little Bit Louder Now\u2026<\/h3>\n

Around that same period, the Isley Brothers\u2019 song\u00a0Shout<\/em>\u00a0had this fun sequence of \u201cA little bit louder now,\u201d progressively escalating in volume. That\u2019s what actually happened to food supply, year after year. It is little coincidence that the highest-ever rate of human population growth sits right atop the Green Revolution. Food made babies. What else would babies be made of? As long as \u201cdecisions\u201d to grow more food each year manifested, the positive-feedback result was essentially guaranteed. It\u2019s certainly how things played out.<\/p>\n

But the story did not start in 1960. Oh no. What was that\u00a0other<\/em>\u00a0revolution that initiated the manipulation of plants for a higher level of human food production? Oh, it\u2019ll come to me in a minute.<\/p>\n

In the several hundred thousand years prior to agriculture, human population very slowly crept up, at a rate of about 0.0035% per year. Beginning about 10,000 years ago, the rate abruptly jumped an order-of magnitude, reducing doubling-time from the previous 20,000 years to 2,000 years\u2014and monotonically decreasing thereafter as techniques improved (another case in point). By the 1960s, we grew at roughly 2% per year for a doubling-time around 35 years.<\/p>\n

The volume knob (for food) was turned up a little bit louder each year, and human population rose along with it.<\/p>\n

The Causality Question<\/h3>\n

Okay, okay. Push-back against the food-makes-babies formulation does not tend to refute the fact that increased food production went hand-in-hand with population increase. After all, babies\u00a0are<\/em>\u00a0made from food. The argument centers on which\u00a0drove<\/em>\u00a0the other. Sure: population increase\u00a0requires<\/em>\u00a0food increase, but the reverse is not strictly true in pure (i.e., decontextualized) logical terms: an increase in food does not\u00a0require<\/em>\u00a0population to increase. Surplus food could theoretically accumulate on the shelf, go to waste, be used for art projects, fuel food fights, etc. It seems perfectly\u00a0plausible<\/em>\u00a0that food increases were always\u00a0in response<\/em>\u00a0to population increase.<\/p>\n

This is tangled territory, ill-suited for mental models. First statement: even if the imagined\u00a0intent<\/em>\u00a0was more food in reaction to population increase, it\u2019s quite possible that a misapprehension of the situation hid the causal nature of the positive feedback, so that more food actually\u00a0preceded<\/em>\u00a0demand. In any case, we remained firmly in the exponential loop.<\/p>\n

Second statement: let\u2019s say people in the past didn\u2019t get their act together fast enough and let several years or decades slid by before mounting an increase in production. Surely, procrastination is not a new human trait. The only way to keep population increasing (more mouths to feed) in this circumstance is for people to be progressively hungrier, with decreasing energy\/stamina. That\u2019s a hard place from which to mount a labor-intensive uptick. This argument\u2014as any other\u2014is not\u00a0by itself<\/em>\u00a0conclusive, but the essential point is that nature offers no financing: to make a baby, food is demanded\u00a0up front<\/strong>, which biophysically biases the situation for food coming first. Starvation conditions do not tend to produce baby booms that later require food production to increase.<\/p>\n

Third statement: uncertainty and prudence tend to result in conservative over-production of food. Planning for surplus yield acts as insurance against all kinds of uncontrollable events. Lots of things can go wrong: low rainfall; a sweltering summer; a too-cloudy growing season; floods; insect waves; rodents finding stores; raids on your food supply by neighboring humans; the list goes on. A safe practice is to produce more than you believe you\u2019ll need,\u00a0as a matter of policy<\/em>. In this case, surplus is not in\u00a0reaction<\/em>\u00a0to population growth, but sure as hell\u00a0enables<\/em>\u00a0it. It\u2019s another substantial bias tilted toward a food-first causality.<\/p>\n

Fourth statement: imperfect distribution means that even if enough total food is produced annually, some humans still go hungry and starve to death. In the modern era, the \u201chumane\u201d response has always been to seek increased food production\u2014intending to fix the problem once and for all. As long as this is the (collective; automatic) decision, we stay firmly in the grip of the positive feedback loop. Increased food production in a global distribution system means even those who are not starving (but are not necessarily affluent) have greater access to food, which is where population growth tends to be highest. The phenomenon is also much more fine-grained than the whole-country level. A country hosting a starving subset of their population receives food imports and experiences population growth, but not necessarily dominated by the starving segment. The food going to the country stays in the country\u2014some going to starving bellies and others going to well-enough-nourished bellies, some of which are \u201cwith child.\u201d Being a global phenomenon, increased food also finds its way into countries that do not have significant starvation, but still express high fertility rates: food increase means more to go around. Many channels operate in parallel, even if our brains tend to tune in to only one at a time.<\/p>\n

Fifth statement: aside from plague years, the experimental results are compelling: global population has increased for 10,000 years running\u2014still to this day, for now. Meanwhile, we have never deliberately turned the global food production knob to anything other than \u201cmore\u201d each year. If we haven\u2019t, then\u00a0could<\/em>\u00a0we, voluntarily? If we\u00a0can\u2019t<\/em>, in practice, can we\u00a0really<\/em>\u00a0claim to be in control\u2014more than just notionally or aspirationally?<\/p>\n

Some Data<\/h3>\n

Before getting into the legitimate confounders to the food-makes-babies recipe, I would like to share a peek I had into the situation, by using data from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations (UN), which provides extensive datasets (here<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0here<\/a>) on food production, imports, exports, nourishment levels, and lots more. I also utilize the UN\u2019s demographic data in the form of the\u00a0WPP<\/a>\u00a0(2022). An appendix at the end of this post provides more detail on my nerd methods.<\/p>\n

Below are two plots, each averaging the five-year period from 2009\u20132013 inclusive (latest period in the dataset I used). The first looks at births minus deaths in each country, divided by population and expressed as percent. By counting births and deaths, migration in or out is neutralized. The second has Total Fertility Rate (average number of live child-births per woman for the period in question, where 2.1 is the nominal replacement rate for modern societies). Both are plotted against caloric food import fraction, where each dot represents a country\u2014its area sized by population, and colored according to fraction under-nourished (blue is well-nourished and red is under-nourished).<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

See\u00a0this list<\/a>\u00a0for three-letter (ISO-alpha3) codes. The South American countries far to the left are tremendous exporters of cereals, but also of oil crops, and animal products to a lesser extent.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

See caption for previous plot. Both tolerate zooming in.<\/em><\/p>\n

The different appearance of the plots is mainly a reflection of demographic inertia. TFR is a more reliable \u201cnow\u201d measure, while higher net birth rates carry an echo of TFR a few decades ago when the current child-bearing population came into being. In other words, demographic bulges created in the past have worked their way to child-bearing years to keep the absolute number of births high. Both are valid captures in their own ways.<\/p>\n

For each, I outline a box in the upper right in which net food importers are making babies. What this says is that population growth is largely in countries living beyond their local production means, requiring imports to fuel their growth. Overproduction in more affluent countries therefore supports population increase in countries of lower domestic food capacity. Below replacement-level TFR, import fraction seems basically random. Above replacement, the situation is\u00a0heavily<\/em>\u00a0skewed toward food importers. One might say that this is the domain in which negative feedback has not yet overpowered the main positive feedback effect of food making babies (which has been the dominant story of the ages).<\/p>\n

In Necker Cube fashion, the same plots support the\u00a0opposite<\/em>\u00a0position: food excess (exporters) have low population growth (food makes\u00a0not<\/em>\u00a0babies). The situation will never be settled if focusing on only one or the other aspect, as both are simultaneously true in a heterogeneous context\u2014also complicated by a balance that shifts over time. Exceptions abound, but the\u00a0net effect<\/em>\u00a0has been clear: the population growth manifesting today is largely supported by food importation. I\u2019m not attempting to make a judgment here as to that practice so much as pointing out the biophysical underpinnings\u2014as supported by data.<\/p>\n

Real Grounds for Objection<\/h3>\n

In aggregate, then, I think we all agree that\u00a0no<\/em>\u00a0food increases would mean a cessation of population growth. The hangup is that continued food increase\u00a0need not<\/em>\u00a0translate to population growth, in theory. Except it always\u00a0has<\/em>, globally. But it doesn\u2019t\u00a0have<\/em>\u00a0to, and doesn\u2019t do so in all locations\u2014just in global aggregate throughout history.<\/p>\n

Two related phenomena provide legitimate and powerful reasons to doubt the formula\u2019s universality. First, affluent countries have the greatest access to food, yet show the lowest population growth rates (top plot)\u2014lately even negative for some few. That\u2019s real, and counter to the formula.<\/p>\n

Secondly, total fertility rate (lower plot) is now at sub-replacement levels for countries hosting over two-thirds of global population, and these countries tend to be OECD (affluent). That\u2019s also real. The sense this carries is that \u201ccivilized\u201d countries have \u201carrived,\u201d are in control, have defeated the \u201canimal\u201d feedback, and serve as a template to which others ought aspire.<\/p>\n

Any theory needs to then account for the historical connection as well as recent exceptions, which is essentially impossible in a single-formula model in the context of a world teetering on a massive modernity-busting transition. Lots of past truths are about to be up-ended.<\/p>\n

Nothing is Forever<\/h3>\n

Positive feedback never carries on forever, or the universe would break. Some influence (or many simultaneous influences) act to counter runaway growth at some stage. Having done so, the positive feedback contribution\u00a0is not null-and-void<\/strong>. It doesn\u2019t vanish from the equation: it\u2019s just counterbalanced or overpowered by negative feedback. It\u2019s more fair to say: food makes babies\u2014historically\u2014but only to a point. Food surplus\u00a0made<\/em>\u00a0more babies for 10,000 years (and continues today), but not universally, and not forever.<\/p>\n

In the current context of late-stage modernity, children become a costly affair in affluent societies. No number of all-you-can-eat buffets will offset the crippling cost of raising and educating children in a competitive market (obesity is also not the biggest turn-on). Adding to this is a sense among the younger-than-me generations (where babies originate) that prosperity peaked with the Boomers, that existential threats loom on all sides, and that the dream of the 1950s rings hollow today. Fertility rate is\u00a0plummeting globally<\/a>\u00a0as the system that has been thumping along for 10,000 years is cracking up. The positive feedback is finally becoming overwhelmed, and is very unlikely to be\u00a0exactly<\/em>\u00a0offset by the pile of negative feedback influences\u2014more likely trampled by them. It appears we\u2019re heading for a major population haircut, even if by \u201cbenign\u201d demographic adjustment. But again, just because the historically dominant positive feedback mechanism is becoming overwhelmed is not the same as being invalid, or plain wrong. The context is changing, and I would say not by the exercise of control.<\/p>\n

Speaking of context, the\u00a0emerging fertility decline<\/a>\u00a0was not on the radar when Daniel Quinn kept hammering the point that continuing an annual increase in food production was a form of insanity: doing the same thing for 10,000 years in a row and expecting a different result. I have to say that I can\u2019t see how he was incorrect. Had we stopped annual food increases at any point along the way, it is very clear that population could not continue to soar in some sort of biophysical detachment. That was his whole drive for returning to the subject: stop the insanity of food increases and the insanity of population increases will necessarily stop\u2014because food, indeed, makes babies. Not wrong, but a complete political dead-end.<\/p>\n

Reactions to the Knob<\/h3>\n

And to that point\u2026 Since Taker culture is obsessed with control of the planet, wouldn\u2019t the\u00a0ultimate control<\/em>\u00a0fantasy be to dial annual food production in such a way as to control human population? We know it to be effective. We also know that food production has only ever increased (minor, uncontrolled hiccups aside), while global population has only ever increased (again with the rare hiccup).<\/p>\n

Let me be clear that I\u2019m not\u00a0proposing<\/em>\u00a0food curtailment as the\u00a0right<\/em>\u00a0solution: attempts at (illusory) control are always going to go sideways, have more unintended consequences than intended consequences, and invariably hurt those who are\u00a0not<\/em>\u00a0jerking at the levers of (partial) control. I just find it odd that those who cite our superior\u00a0control<\/em>\u00a0as a basis for rejecting the animal-adjacent food-makes-babies formulation do not tend to advocate\u00a0actual<\/em>\u00a0control.<\/p>\n

This, I believe is the crux of why I am drawn to this \u201cfight.\u201d What can we learn about fundamental drivers motivating push-back against the biophysical formula? So, I ask you to consult your own feelings on the matter, in a thought experiment, to get at the core nerve the subject touches (if it even\u00a0does<\/em>, for you).<\/p>\n