Why do humans have to pay to stay alive? Part 1

To stay alive, humans need to eat a certain amount every day or so. Maybe science will change that someday but for now, it’s fine.

My main problem is that we have to spend a good chunk of our lives making money to spend on food which just ends up in the toilet! According to Business Insider, the average annual food cost for one person is about $3000. The average US salary is $31,000, meaning that people spend about 10% of their salary before taxes on food!

Why can’t food be given to us for free?!?

On the simplest level, getting food for oneself is a relatively simple, repetitive process. One must grow and tend to crops, harvest them, and prepare it as a meal. A robot could be coded to do all these things!

Of course, people will not be satisfied with eating a plain potato or apple all their lives, nor do many people have the space necessary or desire to grow crops on their own land. People want more than straight plants! They want meat, animal products, and combinations of all of the above!

This means that plants and animals need to be grown somewhere else and transported to you. It also means that those raw ingredients may need to be sent to facilities to be combined with other ingredients, unless you want to try to make Cheetos from home!

This could still be done for free though! Animals can be nurtured, slaughtered, and prepared for transport by robots, although this doesn't seem to be a common practice now. Given the right ingredients and coding, robots can combine our raw or prepared ingredients to make more complex foods. This is why many popular brands can make their products so inexpensively! Machines do much of the heavy lifting; humans just fix problems that arise.

This all sounds like what a grocery store does on a regular basis; we just see the tail end of the process. So, if robots and machines did all the growing, preparing, mixing, packaging, transporting, etc. that happens before we arrive at the store, could food be free then? Possibly, given a few prerequisites!

*This is assuming that the food providers are ok with making no money and provide the necessary start-up equipment.

First, the robots, machines, transporting vehicles, and food-related buildings need to be powered by a renewable energy source. Sunlight, wind, waves, etc. can be used (for free) to replace electricity and gasoline as a power source for all these processes.

Yes, I know that solar panels are currently only 11-15% efficient and wind turbines are 30-50% efficient but I have faith that those numbers will increase! This means that the amount of equipment and space needed to power all my crazy ideas may seem unreasonably large now but will shrink into focus soon.

Second, food needs to be grown in an environment that allows robots to do the work, not humans. Indoor farms are becoming more popular: small plots of soil grown in a laboratory-like environment that is controlled by machines. If this kind of building (covered in equipment to capture renewable energy, of course) could grow all the food in this example, the only other costs would be the equipment. If this system were combined with an animal production farm, fertilizer would be free. I’ll cover the topic of water later.

Third, food needs to be transported more efficiently. I don’t think truck drivers enjoy their jobs so much that they would volunteer to drive all this food for free…

Tesla currently seems to be the leader in self-driving electric cars. This inspires me that all transportation could someday be like this! I know many people are skeptical of self-driving cars because of video footage of crashes but I am not. If I had to bet on a computer or human being a better driver, I’d always bet on the computer. Especially if computer-driven vehicles replaced all human-driven ones, there would be such a small chance of error!

Fourth, if people could give up the option of going to stores and instead have their food delivered to them, food could be free. If the same processes that were used to transport the food to the store could be used to organize it in the store and deliver outside the store, the costs would still just include the equipment. Robot “employees” would not have to deal with human interactions and could do their job more efficiently than humans do now. Stores could be completely redesigned if human safety and comfort weren’t an issue!

What is the bottom line of all this? Food could be free! It is still a futuristic concept but one that I see as not far off. The holes in my logic and the technology not yet in existence are small obstacles to overcome, I believe!

Please read my other posts to continue to learn about my dream for the world. Thank you for reading this one!