Swap your grass for a well-planned garden. If you're going to do maintenance anyway, may as well be of something you can eat at the end of the day.
I wasn't really suggesting that I want a garden.
I want a machine that replicates a cow's stomach and makes all of the inedible cellulose heavy plants edible to humans.
A device that could potentially end world hunger, since it would vastly increase the food supply by allowing humans to get our energy requirements from raked tree leaves, grass clippings, sawdust, hay, ferns, etc. The stuff that grows everywhere without any need for farming. The stuff that I put into huge brown bags for the city to haul away.
In theory, that stuff we throw away is all huge quantities of food. We just can't digest it, so we don't see it like that. Instead we're limited to a small subset of the world's plants that can be directly processed by our human stomachs. Doesn't have to be that way. And those edible plants generally consume a ton of energy, water and human labour to be cultivated.
So I'm suggesting the world needs a device that can transform those waste products into edible food. Cow stomachs are nature's version of that device. And since they already exists in nature, we know it's possible to build one that uses less energy than it produces.
And then one day we'll figure out another device that can efficiently replicate photosynthesis and we'll cut out the grass as a middleman too.
Since that's all food is....just a means of converting solar energy and some basic raw materials into the chemical energy our bodies run on.
But it's an insanely inefficient way to do it when you have to go from sun to grass to a cow to a truck to a processing facility to a steak to a truck to a supermarket to my car to my stove to my mouth.
One day we'll just be able to mix sun and some raw materials together in a machine and get directly consumable food energy out the other end.
That may sound like science fiction but there's really no reason to believe it's not possible.
