Blogger Alexis Madrigal has just written up a brilliant suggestion for reducing the cost and environmental impact of our food supply.
We should eat pigeons.
Madrigal claims to be only 65 percent serious because while the logic is great, the idea seems a bit, well, yucky.
Assuming pigeons only seem yucky but are not actually dangerous to eat, I am being 100 percent serious in advocating the idea.
For one thing, pigeons may seem disgusting but they’re biologically almost identical to game birds that are delicious (and very expensive), so flavor is not an issue.
The issue is efficiency.
Unlike cows and pigs and chickens — which all require that we grow food especially for them — most of the world’s 400 million pigeons live by eating the food that we humans discard.
They are incredibly efficient machines for turning our garbage into tasty protein and a waste product that is an incredibly rich fertilizer.
You may be objecting at this point that 400 million sounds like a lot of pigeons, but it wouldn’t really go too far in feeding a human population of 6 billion.
True enough, but pigeons breed and grow incredibly fast. If we killed 350 million pigeons tomorrow, we’d be back to 400 million pigeons in six months, scientists say. Within reason, the population of pigeons depends not on how many we kill but on how much food there is available.
If there’s food — and there always will be in big cities — pigeons will breed enough to eat it.
Madrigal well understands the importance of all this:
A food source that lives on our trash that is so reproductively prolific that we can’t kill it off?
That’s green tech at its finest! Pigeons are direct waste-to-food converters, like edible protein weeds, that leave droppings that could be used as fertilizer as a bonus.
I’d add one extra benefit that Madrigal doesn’t mention. Presumably, pigeon meat would be cheap, so it might help fight the rising cost of groceries.
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