Lec. 18 The Future Of Food

Question 1

How long did it take our human population to go from one billion to 7 billion?

Answer 1

~200 years.

Question 2

Which gas in addition to CO2 produced from agriculture is a powerful green
house gas?

Answer 2

Methane

Question 3

What proportion of green house gases comes from agriculture?

Answer 3

> 20%.

Question 4

What is the notion of evolutionary mismatch between human biology and modern life conditions?

Answer 4

Most of our biology was shaped over hundreds of thousand of years in an environment with limited calories,
- high mobility
- and difficult access to fat, salt and sugar,
- now we “swim” in them.

Question 5

What is the diet gap?

Answer 5

The gap between what people eat and what they should eat under a balanced, healthy, and sustainable diet.

Question 6

What is the mooring tree?

Answer 6

Drimstick tree,
- fast growing
- drought resistant
- subtropical tree from the indian subcontinent
- that produces many edible pots: leaves, seeds, and flowers.

Question 7

What is the nutritional advantage of eating sprouted seeds?

Answer 7

The young sprouting plants contain new vitamins and proteins not present in the dormant seed..

Question 8

Give two examples each of insects farmed for food and materials?

Answer 8

honey bees and mealworms for food, lac insects and cochineal for shellac and pigment.

Question 9

what fraction of total food produced globally is wasted?

Answer 9

~30%.

Question 10

What is UDP-GlcNAc?

Answer 10

An important sugar donor nucleotide
- providing the single sugar (GlcNAc)
- for an enzyme that modifies many
- important proteins by adding this sugar to serine or threonine amino acids.
- This regulates the activity of these proteins inside cells.