# Jan 6th - What I'm reading this week | Sustainability, Affordability, and Healthcare

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- Published at: 2026-01-26 22:37:44 UTC
- Updated at: 2026-01-27 19:05:19 UTC

## Author
Joe Berusch

## Subject
Sustainability, Affordability, and Healthcare

## Content
Article: Report from S2G Ventures on Aquaculture Feed Innovations (download)Really cool analysis of the major achievements and opportunities in agriculture. I'm biased because I used to work at S2G, but I love their reports. Some bits I found fascinating:Farmed fish convert feed into protein 3-7x more efficiently than beef, making aquaculture potentially one of the most sustainable ways to scale global protein supply.Currently, 1/5 of all wild-caught fish (~16 million tons/year) gets ground up to feed farmed fish - a massively inefficient protein transfer with 35-50% losses. Is it canabalism to feed fish to fish?Black Soldier Fly larvae can yield 1,500x more protein per hectare than soy and grow 200x their size in 15 days while converting food waste. Companies are building this at industrial scale.I started reading this report because, on a personal level, aquaculture is something I've thought about on and off since I stopped eating meat six years ago.I stopped eating meat to lower my carbon footprint. Since then, I've always counted fish as meat, but I keep coming back to the following chart that I first saw in 2019 when I was researching the carbon footprint of meat. Basically, the feed conversion of fish is far, far more efficient than for land-based farm animals like cow, chicken, and pigs.I've wondered on and off if I should incorporate fish back into my diet, leading with the idea that well-sourced aquaculture fish can be healthier and use fewer environmental resources than many other protein options. Some anecdotal horror stories I've heard of diseases, poor labor practices, and inefficiency of feed production have prevented me from making that switch so far... but it remains on my mind.Article: Opportunities to Improve Housing Affordability by the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (link)Articles like this one, about the broken housing system, fascinate me because they highlights two realities that seem like they shouldn't both be true. On one hand, affordable housing is an incredibly complicated problem, involving layer upon layer of local/state/federal codes, poor incentive structures, self-interest, etc. On the other hand, it boils down to a rather simple problem that's tailor-made for a startup: if you can build a cheaper house, you can (basically) solve the problem.Anyway, I loved this article. Some bits to call out:Regulatory capture killed prefab: Factory-built homes cost 1/3 as much per square foot as stick-built, but they're only 10% of new construction (down from 60% in the 1970s). Why? In 1968, HUD subsidized mortgages for stick-built homes but not prefab. The National Association of Home Builders then pushed through the 1974 Act that essentially functions as "a national zoning ordinance" against factory-built housing.The residual income trap: Even if you follow the "30% of income on housing" rule, a median-income household paying $1,780/month in rent faces ~$1,200/month in childcare costs alone, plus transportation eating up to 54% of income. Median earners are spending more than they make.The Fed arguably made it worse: Near-zero interest rates from 2008-2015 and 2020-2022 incentivized large financial institutions to buy up residential real estate, adding fuel to the fire.The report also references this Forbes article, arguing that housing investors aren't responsible for the crisis in housing affordability. It's interesting, but I honestly haven't researched the issue enough to know.Trend: VC money flowing into "Climate Tech" seems to only go up.2150 raised a €210 million fund (link)Footprint Fund raised €76 million (link)This article argues that the AI boom is driving climate tech investment because of the massive energy demands. I believe that argument, though I remain skeptical that it's trending towards a better direction long-term.I haven't yet had the time to dive into where all this money is flowing -- I'm always a bit skeptical of things labeled "Climate Tech". If anyone is tracking closer and knows, drop a comment!It's been a heavy work week, which sadly means a light reading week -- most of my research time went into reading the S2G report I mentioned above. Beyond that, I've been reading The Sum of Us, which so far I highly recommend.Have you read anything recently? Or any thoughts on the above? Comment it below!