Why food? Moving on from consumer code

I have written code professionally for at least twelve years. But when I think of my most interesting and impactful moments, they were rarely in front of the computer.

Diet and Thriving

Our diets can add or subtract years from our lives. As someone who has struggled with my weight, I can say that they have a tremendous impact on not just our quantity, but also our quality of life.

My fiancée works in a hospital, and the amount of patients she sees with issues caused by their diets has caused us to think carefully about what we eat. I have worked with medical data, and the numbers that are spent to address the effects of the foods we eat are simply astronomical.

We are really getting the worst of all worlds.

We spend increasing sums of money to buy foods that make us obese and undernourished, all while destroying the environment, just to end up in the hospital with preventable conditions.

There is no logical sense in continuing with the current paradigm.

Overfed and undernourished

This is a growing issue around the world.

I love a lot about Central Asia, and I think there is so much to learn and do there. They have some of the most extreme environments - parts of Uzbekistan went from -30 degrees C to 30 degrees C in a matter of weeks this year - and some of the world’s most interesting plant life has developed there in response to that.

Unfortunately, they have a massive food problem

In another case of extremes, within the space of a few decades, Central Asia went from widespread nutritional stunting to widespread obesity. Uzbekistan has topped the list of diet related deaths.

I am convinced that it is because of the massive amounts of refined seed oils in their diet, especially sunflower oil.

We always hear of rising obesity rates - are there any cases where a society has successfully lowered their rates of obesity? Why does it have to be accepted that economic development leads to obesity?

Fixing land use

There is nothing I like more than exploring somewhere and seeing how the environment works. I can spend hours looking for plants I read about online, sometimes for no real purpose other than to find something in its habitat.

Anyone who has this hobby can tell you that one of the saddest things is to return to where you have seen something rare, only to see it taken over by something else or destroyed by some kind of development. Sometimes this development is not meant to be intrusive, like adding in a simple path, but small changes can cascade and change water patterns, leaving things that once thrived to die.

My grandfather was of mostly Incan origin. He grew up near Cusco, in the Sacred Valley of the Incas. The Incas were masters at sculpting difficult environments into places that worked for them. They turned dry mountains into green and productive farmland by storing water at progressively higher places and routing it smartly down the mountains. They were able to support populations in arid deserts, brutal mountains over 4000 meters, and in thick Amazonian rainforest. In each of these cases, they engineered the environments in sustainable ways that have persisted even after places were left uninhabited.

At some point, I would like to return there and study these extensive waterworks more in depths.

A view of Ollantaytambo, from a Peruvian government website. My grandfather was born very close to this area.

Enhancing Biodiversity

I am currently living in Ankara, Turkey. The natural environment of this area is mostly sparse, arid hills that experience winters of -10 degrees C and summers of 40 degrees C. When Turkey became independent 100 years ago and chose the centrally located Ankara to be the capital, they also began a massive effort to re-engineer the landscape. They built dams and catchments to store the water that comes in a short season of heavy rains. They then used this water to irrigate mass plantings, mostly of drought tolerant pines. As these trees grew and created shade, it became possible for year-round grasses to cover the ground between the trees. These efforts continue today, with a few other suitable plants added in. They have certainly made it possible for the area to support over 6 million people today.

Sometimes these new forests or plantings can be boring to look at. They are composed of a very small group of species that are repeatedly tissue-cultured. I have walked through plenty of these forests and parks. They are often empty and devoid of life. In some ways, they are not so different than the massive monocultures of industrial farming.

I have been refining a few idea for some months now into an Agtech Manifesto.

With automation like Carbon Robotics laser-powered weed killer, we can move from monoculture to polyculture. Nitrogen and other inputs are expensive and can have terrible environmental costs. I am very interested in the potential of robotics to enable intercropping methods on a large scale. The Three Sisters methodology, where corn, beans, and squash are planted together, supported large populations on continuously cultivated land in Mesoamerica for hundreds of years, and it has proven to be effective in providing food and improving the soil in harsh environments like Arizona.

Advances in biotechnology will greatly advance composting and soil science. We

Impact

I think about my time in the boom and busts of the tech world. I remember giving a huge amount of my time and energy to a project that was cancelled after 10 months of working many late nights on it. I remember thinking that if I worked on tech that supported medical research or financial inclusion that I would feel a greater satisfaction in my work.

I can’t imagine anything more satisfying than restoring environments and enabling better health.

We eat a few times per day, and these choices have a massive impact on everything from infrastructure to less quantifiable things like productivity, health, and happiness. I don’t think it is a good thing that many people know very little about the source of their food and how it reached them. I think that we have so many opportunities to make food production closer and more visible.

The number of people living in a society that is metabolically healthy has rapidly declined. Many people in the world live in places where a majority of people are metabolically unhealthy.

I am looking for roles where I can use my experience to think about new paradigms in addressing these issues.