Post by Thoithoi O'Cottage on Jul 5, 2014 6:42:01 GMT 5.5
Andy Benson (37) is a forager who is often chewing on what others might call weeds, whom you cannot seemingly take anywhere without him snacking. Not a picky eater, he eats nettles and greenbriar, things most people hate to see much less eat. He eats flowers and lamb's quarters and the roots of burdock, those weeds that stick to your pants when walking in the wild. Writing about Benson in the USA TODAY, Mike Kilen says (4 July 2014):
The intended meaning is clear--the world's population is growing very fast and it will soon be more than what the planet can feed. Yes, the subject of the highlighted (part of the) sentence is the world's population, and due to its agentive status it is this population to produce food and supply it to "its" eaters. While the construction is wholesome in this sense, I would rather understand such a case to be an extreme case of the planet earth's capability (particularly of food supply here) against overpopulation, not (over)population against its supply capability because it is ultimately the soil, the earth that produces food, no matter who does the farming and how. This is not about the logicality of the sense or the objective/factual truth of the material world rather than the grammaticality of the sentence.
He is not a doomsdayer, although he believes the world's population is growing too fast to supply all its eaters, and is comforted to know he can survive "when the zombies arrive."
The intended meaning is clear--the world's population is growing very fast and it will soon be more than what the planet can feed. Yes, the subject of the highlighted (part of the) sentence is the world's population, and due to its agentive status it is this population to produce food and supply it to "its" eaters. While the construction is wholesome in this sense, I would rather understand such a case to be an extreme case of the planet earth's capability (particularly of food supply here) against overpopulation, not (over)population against its supply capability because it is ultimately the soil, the earth that produces food, no matter who does the farming and how. This is not about the logicality of the sense or the objective/factual truth of the material world rather than the grammaticality of the sentence.