Draft:Why calories matter

If you live in a first-world country, it might seem strange & wrong to see ideas centered around optimizing calorie(...)( or in some cases, protein ) production. After all, humans need a lot more than calories & protein! There are over 30 essential vitamins & minerals that everyone needs. And maybe you live in a society where people get too many calories and not enough of those other nutrients.

Calories & protein require land
- Agriculture & deforestation ^{[ELABORATION needed]}
- Compare worst-cases
  - Calorie or protein shortage leads to famines
  - Vitamin or mineral shortage can be solved cheaply by fortifying foods with nutrients produced using almost zero land footprint
    - See also: food/faq on "natural" vs synthetic vitamins

Optimizing for calories tends to optimize for other nutrients as well
- crop choices
- preventing food waste
- even grains(...)( if turned into whole-grain flour ) have some vitamins and minerals

Sometimes we need a consistent metric for "total amount of food"
- A kilogram of grain can feed a lot more people than a kilogram of fresh tomatoes, for example.
- Calories are a simple enough way to "compare apples to oranges". Another reasonable alternative is to compare food by dry mass.

Ok so what are some solutions for healthy eating that can scale up to 8 billion people?
- Plant-based - cheap & expensive versions both work
- Balanced diet with junk food

Disambiguation

For food, we sometimes spell "kalorie" with a 'k' to distinguish it from an older, smaller unit of energy in physics.

Why scalability matters - When we say we need ideas that can scale to feed 8 billion people, we don't mean there has to be a "one-size-fits-all" solution. We mean that the resource footprint (per unit) has to be small enough that we don't end up with zero-sum games. Instead of one solution for the world, there could be hundreds. But each one still has to have a reasonable resource footprint per unit, so that a mix of them can scale.^{[ELABORATION needed]}

See also