Eat This Blog

In 1946 Geoffrey Pyke, an eminently sane scientist, put forward the idea of using what little coal there was to refine sugar rather than feeding it to locomotives. Human muscles would make far better use of the energy than steam engines. The problem Pyke tried to tackle remains essentially unsolved: where is the power for food production to come from?

There's a lot more at the original site, for example:

This episode is an abbreviated version of a paper on Food as Power: An Alternative View, which I am presenting on 30 May 2018 at the Dublin Gastronomy Symposium. The entire symposium is on Food and Power, so what’s alternative about my view? Pyke’s insight, that the production and transport of food requires muscular power, remains true today, and despite the very clear evidence and advice that Pyke offered in 1946, it also remains more or less ignored.