Food futures in the making

When in the second half of the 18th century Thomas Malthus wrote his famous essays on ‘the principle of population’, he ran counter to the optimism of some of the Enlightenment thinkers with respect to their assessment of the carrying capacity of the earth. Human societies, he argued, are bound to face famines time and again because any progress in food production will immediately be leveled out by a corresponding yet exponential growth of the human population. Malthus argued that Condorcet and other Enlightenment advocates at the time were argued to be wrong in their conviction that in principle the production capacity of the earth could be stretched infinitely.