View source for Draft:Why calories matter

If you live in a {{ap|first-world|is that politically incorrect?|developed|does a wide enough audience understand what that means?|rich|too vague on its own}} country, it might seem strange & wrong to see ideas centered around optimizing calorie{{x|or in some cases, protein}} production. After all, humans need a lot more than calories & protein! There are over [[nutrition|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 {{en}}
** 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{{x|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 "[[Term:kalories|kalorie]]" with a 'k' to distinguish it from an older, smaller unit of [[energy]] in physics.

==See also==
* [[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.{{en}}