In 2011, David Denkenberger read the paper, Fungi and Sustainability, which says:
“If the worst should occur, we can rest assured that fungi will rescue our planet again, perhaps even preparing a suitable habitat for future intelligent life.”
David wondered if, rather than humans going extinct and letting the mushrooms take over, humans could eat the mushrooms and survive. That question led him and Joshua Pearce to research and write Feeding Everyone No Matter What: Managing Food Security After Global Catastrophe (Academic Press, 2014). The book identifies a variety of “alternative foods” — what we now call “resilient foods” — people could consume to access necessary nutrients if the worst catastrophes occurred.
Ray Taylor had worked on disaster preparedness and response as a medic in Madagascar and realized the same could be done on a continental or global scale. He’d seen that one of the biggest challenges would be boosting food supplies fast, so when Feeding Everyone No Matter What was published, he saw this as an opportunity to help develop global resilience to catastrophes, and he reached out to David.
Together, David and Ray founded ALLFED in 2017, with the recognition that there is still more research needed to identify which resilient foods are most nutritious and cost effective, and that an alliance of governments, communities, finance, and industry is necessary if foods are to be available to all people during and after a global catastrophe.
