Ok, one thing that strikes me every time I read articles about the daily life in SR is the soy foods that are so popular. Presumably these are made of soybeans, similar to how tofu is made. However reliance on a single crop like soybeans is problematic, especially when you consider how in the awakened world, as well as in the real world, depending on a single crop for all of your nutritional needs is asking for famine and disaster.

Instead I propose that soy probably does not mean "food substitutes made with soybeans" but "food substitutes made with a standardized biomass manufactured from a variety of crops and other sources."

Basically it works like this. A factory gets a load of plant matter which it processes into a edible sludge. Then that sludge and perhaps its inedible bi-products are either sold to be processed into food and other goods or processed on site.

A SOTA plant of this type would be able to take a wide range of plant matter, or if less reputable other biological matters (what is soylent green made of?) and turn it into a controlled mixture of starches, proteins and sugars ready to be made into something that is very near real food.

This would be cheaper and easier as a farmer growing crops for such a plant wouldn't have to worry about using as much insecticides or fertilizer to get the normally edible parts of the plant, the fruit leaves or seeds to grow especially large. Indeed insecticides may be forgone mostly because a harvester could scoop up the bugs and have them processed right along with the rest of the field.

Basically what the consumer is paying for when they buy real foods is the discrimination to grow and separate out the naturally edible parts. Even for livestock it is cheaper to produce a meat emulsion rather than a particular cut.

It's really short for "soylent".



<ducks and runs>


-karma

Its people! People!

someone's going to get fed into the bioreactor if they keep leaking the secret...

Given that 'real food' is the preserve of the rich, vat grown mycoprotein and similar substitutes must be rediculously cheap to produce. Especially in comparison to even the most intensive farming. The complete lack of environmental controls due to corporate power in government, and the extraterritoriality that would go with being a major agricorp to circumvent any laws that did happen to pass, would probably render most farmland useless in quite a short time, probably around 2020 to 2030 on the SR timescale. As Backgammon says, it's down to short term profitability, not sustainability.

There are of course the paracritters and spirits to think about it, and not just toxics. Nevermind wolves stealing sheep and foxes bothering chickens - there are far bigger scarier things after a quick tasty docile snack, and there are plenty of nature spirits that don't want a farm on their patch. And then there are shadowrunners with all manner of reasons to come in and spoil a crop, be it for ecoterrorists, or a rival corp. Those things add to security costs, on a big farm, that's big money. Those stacked vats in a warehouse are looking a lot more profitable.

Well according to the lifestyle table in the SR4 book. Real food starts at middle lifestyle.
"maybe even real food" is the quote. So at middle lifestyle you can afford real food at least some of the time. At high lifestyle we can assume its real food all time.

I actually like the idea of just harvesting a patch of land with everything in it (plants, insects, animals and even the occasional metahuman who is at the wrong place in the wrong time), mincing it really small, adding a few chemicals and selling it as cheap food.

Lack of arable land is something to consider as well, particularly for the UCAS. The world has lost a lot of arable land du to war, toxic spills, meltdowns, and other natural disasters. The UCAS lost a lot of farm land to the NAN.

All that reduced usable land means every square meter must pump out more. You can only grow 1 "layer" on a normal farm. You can however have a vat growing protein or whatever that's 12 storeys high.

I agree though that overall, farms are not gone. Snohomish is all farm land. The NAN have tons of farm land (though even they try to optimize it.. I remember a quote from SoNA where Aztechnology was doing some work to augment crops in one of the NAN).

But for the masses, cheap vat grown stuff is the basis. The economy sort of adjusted to the cheap stuff. If a person can sustain himself on the cheapest soy product at 1$ a meal or whatever, minimum wage will take that into consideration, and consequently all other wages. Soy, or whatever, is sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

for large engineering and set-up costs, I'm pretty sure you could stack farmland...

or hyrdoponics, at least.

Of course you can.

Consider how efficent soybeans are (tonnage per acre), they fact that they are 40% protein, 35% carb, and 20% oil, and the fact that they are nitrogen producing crops (meaning they produce it in the soil, which is a good thing in general because it can be rotated with things like wheat or corn, which dont).

If you only need one plant, you only need the equipment for one plant, and chemicals for one plant, the knowhow for one plant. If that plant can br processed into everything from fake beef, to cow feed...

In all fairness, pretty much every society since the inception of agriculture has depended on a regionally relevant staple crop. As locality for agricultural production becomes less important, it only stands to reason that the most efficient crop will become a global staple.

I feel like everyone is missing the point. The dependence on soy products goes back to the orientalism of the 80s. At the time everybody was convinced that the Japanese economy and their electronic technology would take over the world and we would be forced to offer up our Midwestern auto workers to them as burnt offerings. At the time, the idea of soy cultivation as some kind of solution to world hunger or nutritional problems had something of a far away novelty to it. And lastly, it turns out that Japanese people had been eating soy products for a really long time, such as tofu or natto.

So, everybody being forced to eat soy while Japanese corporations figurately sodomize them through economic and technological dominance is just another manifestation of 80s shtick. And that's why we all must eat soy and like it while Fuchi and Renraku make us buy their rating 6 stereo systems.

Also, edemame(sp?) are yummy.

Just as Frank said. The corps may be bi-and-large short sighted (though I question this b/c some of them are run by Great Dragons and immortals who are anything but short sighted) a parcel of land can be drained of nutrients in under a decade with monoculture, and the corps certainly are not that short sighted, esp when it comes to their own property.

10 years of gaining resources with he cost of depleting the land is certainly something that Lofwyr would agree to. In 2071, corporations are living in the post-land economy. With agile capitol, the arcology structure, limited availability high-volume rapid transport, and of course the encroachment of the awakening - land is no longer valuable.

The horizontal city structure is a thing of the past. Every square kilometer has to be fought for and supplying it with resources cuts into fuel reserves. There's no possibility of utilizing all of the land, so being forced to abandon some of he land is essentially a non-cost.

Which is nice for cyberpunk, because it means that there's a constantly available pool of buildings and farmland that was abandoned in the recent or moderate past. But it's also nice for large corporations, because larger entities have more agile capitol resources and can simply move whenever a site gets polluted or depleted.

----

That being said, while the long-term costs of monoculture at a site are meaningless to those making the decisions, it still doesn't make sense to perform mono-culture overall. Leaving labor and mechanical resources unused for most of the year is bullshit and major corporations are not going to allow that. So they're going to have a set of distinct of crops with different growing seasons and they are going to produce them near one another so that the harvesters can be run year-round. But they're still not going to switch the crop on any given field because that takes land-clearing resources up without producing anything during the entire period between the harvest time of the last crop and the planting time of the new crop.

So what you're going to see is clusters of adjacent monocultures that will remain in place until the land no longer has high yield and then the entire agro-business is going topack up and move over to a new location and defend that from the Keller's Locusts, the Drop Bears, and the Juggernauts.

But while S-K has no problem chewing through the soil until it's gone and moving on like a Sahel goatherd, there's no fucking way that they'd be producing less than 4 distinct crops in any arable region. That's an infficient use of capitol resources.

-Frank

Always look for the real purpose. Some of the proteins in soy are chemically very similar to estrogen. As shopping to relieve stress is one of the common behavioral patters in human females, adding an abundance of soy into females may make them show this trait to an even greater degree and may induce this trait in steroid free males.

Result, more profit.

Side affects may include increased violence on a roughly monthly basis.

...mmmmmm TVP..... ahhhhhhhh.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050...50709-5076.html

a bread-maker-like machine that makes meat-slury has been in the works for a few years now.

Something else I thought. Perhaps soy is so much more common in SR because the environmentalists put on enough pressure to get rid of most of the cows. They say now that cow flatulence puts out more greenhouse gases than all the transportation in the US. So, out go most of the cows and in come the soy fields and fake meats.

Maybe animal farming just went out of fashion when 10% of your livestock turned awakened and it's 'fightback' factor went from "small risk of charging" to "high risk of immolation". I'd certainly be more careful with a cattle prod if I thought the cow may just fight back with a force 6 fireball.

The primary problem with cattle is that they are inefficient at producing human food. For every pound of cow, it took 12 pounds of feed. Previously this wasn't such a big deal since cows and the like can eat food humans can't eat anyway (such as grass), and therefore can make non-arable land useful for human consumption. However, as technology progresses, I suspect that limitation will be gradually removed. Why raise a herd of cows, which take up tons of space and produce food at a 12:1 ratio, when you can make a hydroponic farm on the same land, use a fraction of the space, and produce food at a '1:1' ratio?

IF you can find a buyer. How many people are going to be selling steak when 80% of the population can't afford it?

Right, but most of the food produced will not be produced that way. That's why most people don't drive lincolns. So in other words, yes, there WILL BE people who raise cattle. But for the majority of the food needs, meat is not the way to go.

Why would you raise animals if you're just using the proteins though? You can get protein from any number of much cheaper sources (including, say, soy!) Are you putting in ground up meat for flavor? Why do that when you have industrially produced syrups?

I can't understand why you are now trying to argue for why livestock will be raised for the man on the street. Livestock is terribly inefficient and thusly, expensive. The man on the street does not want livestock, when he can pay a quarter to a tenth of the cost for flavored kibble, which is just as 'healthy' (as far as he can tell.)

As for religious requirements, I am unaware of any religion that requires you actually eat meat. Soy is completely kosher. Therefore, there should be no religious reason why people can't eat kibble/soy (although krill is not kosher, strictly speaking, so Orthodox Jews will have a little trouble in that area.)

Also, I suppose that heavy catchall use of the term "soy" could be a tribute to Soylent Green.

Did any of you see the original advertisment for that film? "THE PEOPLE NEED...SOYLENT GREEN!"

I wonder if it contains essence, for the vamps?

Well it would defuse the classic vampire angst paradigm.

[infomercial]
Hello, I'm Steve and I'm a vampire. I used to struggle with the brutality of stealing some of the soul of a human, like I once was, on a regular basis just to stay sane. Fortunately, one day when I was trying to get away from some self-proclaimed vampire hunters, I hid in a Catholic cathedral just before mass was to begin. To avoid drawing attention to myself, I played along. I wasn't paying attention until some mention of freely shed blood started making my mouth water. Shortly afterward, they passed around some bread and wine. While such food usually makes me ill, I decided I could hide the effects until the ceremony had ended. Imagine my surprise when it not only didn't make me ill, but actually satisfied my thirst for human life.

That's how and why I'm standing here today offering this special deal. While the Church will not reject any of my fellow vampires who seek solace and forgiveness, the standard sacrament isn't as filling as draining an untainted human. So, for my fellow vampires who need to recover much of themselves, I have convinced the Catholic Church to endorse this deal. If you show up at any Church and undergo a non-intrusive verification of your vampirism, a priest will bless up to two entire loaves of bread and two bottles of wine for your life restoring needs. After that, regular attendance should be enough to keep you complete so long as you abide by the Church's teachings.

[small print]
vampirism confirmation includes astral scan, blood test, and verification of mist form supernatural ability
[/small print]
[/infomercial]