I loved this sentence in a blog post about Meishan pigs:
If one reflects for a moment on the needs of Chinese subsistence farmers, it makes sense that the Meishan is the pig that it is; it is a pig best-suited for a Malthusian world.
it’s completely a problem on my end, but when I hear about the relative tastiness of various breeds of pig, I cannot help but think of the Restaurant At the End of the Universe….
One of the interesting things about China (and to a lesser extent, India) is that it has always been an enormous chunk of world population; by 1850 the population of China was about 400 million, rather more than the population of the US today and about 1/3 of world population at the time. For a very, very, very long time it has had just about as many people as could possibly survive on the land given contemporary crops, animals, and technologies. While I think population growth & high population levels are problems in many ways, the modern belief that high population is a scourge tends to make us forget that simple survival of such large numbers on limited resources is quite an accomplishment. They made it through that, and even through the 20th century’s population explosion, and are still making it.
And I love that there are still these things to find out about one another in all kinds of areas.
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