Food Pipe

There are a lot of people in this world that just can’t get enough food. Now that isn’t something that I lose sleep over every night but it just isn’t really a nice thing if you start to think about it. There are a lot of adverts and a lot of ways that you can give money to charities that go to feed the poor in these countries but how much money actually does go to feeding the poor and how much goes to adverts and paying the people that produce the advert and the people that work in the charity?  Some charities however are staffed with volunteers but picking the good from the bad is impossible. The amount of money governments throw around could also kill world poverty but there seem to be economic problems why this won’t happen and also political problems as well.

Tall Hamburger

I  have flown in Somalia Sudan and other African countries taking aid, which included food to the starving,  so I have had first-hand experience of the situation. Although I wouldn’t say I was an expert at things of this nature I feel like I have some sort of understanding at least.

I was talking to my son the other day (amazing really because teenagers don’t really talk to dad’s!) And an idea came up that sounded really quite daft and absolutely impossible to carry out. These sorts of ideas always sound impossible But the impossible ideas are always worth doing. Well the idea was to build a pipe to transfer from fat countries to the starving countries. Don’t laugh that does sound a bit silly and there are a few problems like keeping the food fresh and the physical act of laying a pipe from the fat country. There is also the massive problem of getting the funding from the stingy governments involved. This is starting to look like the other problems the other solutions have and without doing a couple of years analysis it is hard to tell but it’s worth looking at anyway, well I think so anyway.

Could a pipe be laid for food? Pipes are being laid all the time for Internet, Gas, oil and who knows what else? Their same machines can be used to lay a pipe for food.

Pipe Layer

The SMD Ultra Trencher 1 (UT1), a 50 ton, £10m ($19.8m) ROV the size of a small domicile (25.5 x 25.5 x 18.3 feet). Capable of sucking up two megawatts of power while using its “jet swords” trench deep sea pipelines up to a meter wide and 2.5 meters deep into the sea floor (while operating at a depth of up to 1500m). This is a pipe layer that could be suitable and is already available.

Another question offers itself up at this point and that is, is there really any point of transferring food if it never ends up at the destination safe to eat? I suppose you could have an ultrafast pipe piping the food at extremely fast speeds and just piping certain foods that don’t go off (so that unfortunately stops us piping a cream tart) It would probably involve liquidised foods so really wouldn’t be that tasty but if the people are starving then they shouldn’t really be that fussy should they?  That doesn’t really seem plausible to me so it would probably be frozen foods or refrozen foods.  As we are trying to send our leftovers to the problem countries then it would probably be refrozen foods.

If everybody was sending foods, which seems  the best option, then it would all have to be frozen and deposited at a collecting station.  The biggest problem is getting all the separate food to the pipe to actually transport the food.  This would involve a load of trucks or loads of pipes to the main pipe.  Recycling has taken off so I don’t see why this shouldn’t really take off.

All this doesn’t really seem like such a good idea now but with future technologies and more to the point people’s perception of what we can and can’t do then this could become reality.  For the moment though you just might want to donate to charity freely by using this website and clicking.  This will cost you nothing, well that’s what it says anyway, but the click profits will be donated to charity.

• World Food Map

Underwater Cable/Pipe Laying