Paleooceanographer Traces History Of Population Collapses Through Menus

[hatrack]

GLENN JONES, of Texas A&M University, is a palaeo-oceanographer—an archaeologist of the oceans. He investigates both the mysteries of the deep and the secrets of the past. He and a colleague once estimated the temperature of the sea floor a century ago by studying the “isotopic composition” of mollusc shells. His latest method of inquiry, on show this week at the “Oceans Past” conference in Kolding, Denmark, is a little easier to understand. He reads old seafood menus. Lots of them. Mr Jones reckons he and his team have trawled through 40,000 or so, dating back as far as the 1850s.

Why? His menus, mostly from American cities on either coast, have allowed him to track the price of seafood back 150 years, much further than anyone has gone before. The menus show that the bountiful seas of centuries past have become more miserly in recent decades. From the early 1920s to the late 1930s, for example, a San Francisco restaurant would charge only $6-7, in today's money, for a serving of abalone, a type of mollusc. By the 1980s, however, abalone was selling for $30-40 a meal. The collapse of abalone stocks prompted a 1997 ban on commercial harvesting off California's coast.

EDIT

Of course, restaurant prices reflect much more than the cost of the food on the plate: rent, for example, might also outpace inflation. But Mr Jones says that his menu prices track wholesale prices quite closely in the 50 years for which we have reliable numbers. This gives him confidence that the menus are also a sound guide to the price of a catch in the hundred years before that.

More fundamentally, a price does not reveal anything about supply, unless you also know something about demand. And Mr Jones has some interesting observations about that side of the market too. Demand for lobsters, for example, has evolved in a curious way. The armour-plated delicacy used to be super-abundant and dirt cheap, he says—so cheap that it was fed to inmates in prison and children in orphanages. Farmers even fertilised their fields with it, and servants would bargain with their employers to be given it no more than twice or thrice a week.

As the crustaceans became harder to find, canned lobster ceased to be profitable. Live lobsters, by contrast, grew in status as they became dearer. A meal that cost $4 (in today's money) in the 1870s cost $30 or more a century later. What was once a manure substitute is now a prized delicacy. What the lowliest servant once refused, the swankiest restaurateur now offers with pride. Mr Jones's menus may reveal something about the historical fate of fish, crustaceans and molluscs. But there is no accounting for that peculiar land-based mammal that eats them.

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http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5091088

[NNadir]

1. Interesting.

[phantom power]

2. Meat of any kind may become an expensive delicacy in our lifetimes.

[Angry Girl]

3. That it will. Seen the movie Soylent Green?

Even though the meat will be cloned, it will cost a fortune. How much is beef (regular kind, not Kobe beef) in Japan these days? And has anybody noticed how the price of tuna fish has gone up these past few months?

I think many of Soylent Green's scenarios are likely, if not already in force (police state).

[phantom power]

5. Yes, I've noticed food getting more expensive. Probably just beginning.

Soylent Green is an interesting movie. The implicit assumption was that eating recycled humans is somehow horrific. The ultimate horrible state secret! But if you look at the big picture, we already eat recycled humans, and recycled everybody else. The atoms in my body will someday find their way into other future humans, at least as long as there are future humans.

To me, the horror of Soylent Green was a quality-of-life thing. Living in a world where humans had choked most other life into extinction. Living on top of each other like cattle in endless rank cities.

I expect that the world of Soylent Green is not technically possible. If we destroy that much of the biosphere, we will surely all perish. Eating each other in any form won't save us.

However, I can imagine living to see a world where the human dead are recycled into fertilizer, to grow crops. I have no special problem with that. I expect my ashes to be scattered somewhere anyway, in which case they will surely fertilize plants, somewhere.

[Angry Girl]

6. I agree. It wasn't the recycling bit that was scary

After all, dead is dead IMHO and if the remains can be used to help, what the hey...
http://promessa.se/index_en.asp

But we're certinaly on the road to developing the huge gap between the wealthy and the poor, with little in between. A couple more Katrinas or one more Bush in the White House and we're there....

[Boomer]

7. We've been there before

The Soylent Green scenario was probably the final stage of social collapse on Easter Island, with other island inhabitants being the only source of food left after massive deforestation undermined their ability to build boats.

A less drastic version was in place in Europe just prior to the Black Death. Population had grown to such an extent that any arable land was used for grain and little else in a desperate attempt to feed too many people.

After the plague decimated the continent, reducing the population by at least one-third if not a half, agricultural yields began to rise because there was enough surplus land to allow plots to go fallow for awhile. There was also enough land to spare for growing fruit and vegetables. So, as a result of the massive depopulation, living standards actually rose.

[Angry Girl]

8. But not immediately

At first there were problems finding the labor to till the fields and such. And then there was a lot of reshuffling of the land, with many new laws created.

[Boomer]

9. That was afterwards

My point was that due to overpopulation on the European continent, the standard of living began to degrade.

That's where we're headed with our current depletion of the ocean resources. Many other articles posted in this forum underscore the depressing assessment of the ocean ecosystems and their state of collapse.

Without an immediate and drastic reduction in human population numbers we'll end up like Easter Islanders. And since curbing, much less reversing, our birth rate is a near impossibility for the human psyche, I don't see much hope for the future.

[Angry Girl]

10. Aaaah! Yes, I agree with that

If resources are dwindling and the population is rising, well, what's to hope for? Another Great Plague? Probably.... I'm glad I don't have kids. :scared:

[kineneb]

11. Read the book

by Harry Harrison (I think),never saw the movie. In the book, the soylent stands for soy-lentil, the main food source. The book really hits hard on the Catholic/fundie aversion to birth control, as well.

[glitch]

4. Excellent post as usual Hatrack.

Most often heartbreaking but always interesting.