If you're interested in this topic, I can recommend his book on the subject of food production: Regenesis — Feeding The World Without Devouring the Planet [1].
It tries to look at food production as a global system, the successes it's had in terms of making food more affordable and avoiding global famine, but also the damage it's causing to climate and biodiversity, and possible ways forward given the constraints of making food production sustainable without creating mass starvation.
I will also say that many groups of people don't like the conclusions. Many farmers and meat eaters don't like the idea that livestock farming at the scale needed to support modern western diets is fundamentally unsustainable. People who believe that eating free range meat means that they've made the clearly ethical choice may be surprised at how that works out over an entire population. Many non meat eaters are uncomfortable at the argument that just hoping people switch to vegan diets is unlikely to work in practice. Many environmentalists don't like the conclusion that the best hopes for a way forward involve more technology, not less.
I'm not sure he ends up betting on the right horses, but it seems to me that the substance of the book is well thought through, and hard to disagree with without falling into the "let them eat cake" trap that's called out in this essay.
Starts out so wrong. I live in Spain, traditionally good food still a staple. Most of the world I have visited is like that too.
OK USA has screwed it's food chain, but that does not apply outside. People generally value traditions, and specifically food traditions, highly. It's a long way from financially difficult to keep these alive. People just have to decide they want to and spend time, not money.
People round here do that.
N.B. Traditional food does not come from a shop, you make it yourself. Thus, it cannot be gentrified away. Growing your own local specialities is usually easy where it is traditional.
If you can't imagine obtaining anything without going to the free market and haggling, your limited options are your own doing. That's not gentrification.
N.b., the author is British not American. Argindustry isn’t a uniquely American thing, it’s global and pervasive, specially for protein and animal feedstock. A lot of vegetable in a global context is grown locally and purchased at local markets (outside the US and urban settings globally, which are end to end industrialized), but most people don’t raise artisanal pigs for slaughter. Most people buy their meat from a store or merchant who buys from a middle man who buys from a dense industrialized setup. Even in developing countries dense animal farms are the norm for most meat, even if individuals raise some amount of animal for extra money or protein in their diet. The economics are just too strong. Likewise feedstock tends to be larger plot farming by either large land owners or corporations.
I do not believe you though that people in Madrid and Barcelona and other urban areas of Spain raise their own food in their studio apartments, herding their sheep in their half bath. They buy from supermarkets, or often restaurants, who buy from distributors, who buy from wholesalers, which buy from whoever sells them the food for the cheapest.
What the article gets profoundly wrong is that somehow tourism is driving industrialization of food production. What’s driving industrialization of food production is profit motive and a growing population with enriched tastes and growing wealth that’s outstripping the ability of small farm operations to meet at scale and relatively flat pricing as demand soars. That requires ever increasing supply, which requires ever increasing land productivity with a shrinking farm workforce and shrinking available arable land. The “it’s all the offensive bourgeois food tourists fault” is absurd and talks more to the author seemingly unreasonable social dislike of certain types of people than a level headed economic assessment.
Farming sucks. Farming at small scales really sucks. There is a massive incentive to consolidate. Even when left alone, farmers tend to form co-ops in order to mitigate risk.
I had a long talk with a local producer of "Hormone free, antibiotic free, grass fed, grass finished" beef (need it because of family member with corn allergy). The economics are brutal. Corn finishing a steer nets you 3x (or more) the weight. Grass is highly dependent upon rain. etc.
Basically, the best thing I could do was commit to buying a whole steer every 6 months and let them sell what I can't deal with. Effectively, I gamble that they can sell the extra meat or I eat the loss. It generally works, but how many people can float a $5K-$10K loan every 6 months? And, even if they can get enough customers to float the loan, it will quickly saturate the number of customers who can buy the "extra". It's really a tough problem.
Everybody talks like farmers don't know what they are doing. Go talk to one and prepare to be surprised--you'll find out really quickly that most farmers know their business extremely intimately and can tell you how every single dollar is put to work.
Oh yeah, farmers are engineers of the land and nature for sure. They know their processes, their dependencies, and procedures in extreme depth and they are complex and unforgiving. Farming isn’t gardening, and every farm is a business end to end - and a risky one with low payouts and huge downsides that are often entirely out of your control. Modern farming techniques aren’t that way out of some sort of malevolent spite, they actually work and make farms profitable reliably. That they blast the earth and poison the populace is sad and most farmers don’t relish destroying their land.
I didn’t take away the same message. To me it was a decent attempt to explain that offensive liberal bourgeois foodies have been sold a bill of truthy sounding bullshit because that is how free markets work. If you want to help someone tell them the truth, if you want to help yourself then tell them what they want to believe. There is a whole market of selling expensive things and claiming it will save the planet or the poor or stop colonialism or some other lie which is designed to enrich the seller.
In terms of peak bullshit, I personally think the absurd stupidity of vertical farming is what caused most people to realize the ideas coming out of one camp are mostly bullshit.
> even if individuals raise some amount of animal for extra money or protein in their diet.
It happens more often than I expected, but of course it's still not common.
A friend of mine living in an apartment in Shanghai once complained to me that her neighbors were keeping a chicken in their apartment and she was irritated by the daily crowing.
But she took the philosophy "soon enough they'll eat it and the problem will go away".
Hard to imagine something similar happening in the US.
This is incorrect. I have seen Madrid and Barcelona. Nobody is living off the land in those cities. They are fed by massive agricultural complexes and include alot of imports.
Both those cities are way too dense for the population to feed themselves on home gardens and rabbit hutches.
> People generally value traditions, and specifically food traditions, highly.
The author specifically discusses how, for example, the production of regional traditional French cheese is, in fact, highly industrialised:
"Meanwhile, to keep pace with gastronomic demand, farming relentlessly intensifies. In the famous cheesemaking regions of France, you will scarcely see a dairy cow. Instead, vast tracts are cultivated for maize. Passing tourists romantically assume it’s sweetcorn for human consumption – the French must eat a lot of sweetcorn! No, it will be turned into silage to feed the cattle stalled in the vast steel sheds – cow factories – that have sprung up from Brittany to Savoie, a business as brutal and industrial as any other. Milk is trucked across hundreds of kilometres, trade fairs market the cheese from Dubai to Shanghai."
This debate just feels like a useless distraction from what the people on the ground of sustainable farming are saying. We should be talking about how we can get high yield without destroying the ecosystem.
>We should be talking about how we can get high yield without destroying the ecosystem.
If you read his blog, which features hundreds of well thought out and thoroughly researched articles, he talks about this constantly. Someone wrote a book talking shit about him specifically (while making wild and often absurd claims about society and food systems).. I think we can allow him to spend a few paragraphs thoroughly refuting it.
Thats exactly how I felt. Do these two people feel important trading jabs through their environmentalist Penguin Books? Is this the environmental movement equivalent of a rap battle?
It feels really useless and dead to keep "talking away" like this. I dont know who either of these people are, but have they actually saved an indingenous community or improved the diet of a large group? Finding, promoting and selling good engineering and technology solves problems. These guys just seem to want to talk. I find this beyond useless.
>These guys just seem to want to talk. I find this beyond useless.
I'm not sure this is how George Monbiot defines himself, but for me he's an intelectual. There's a place and a value in what intelectuals do. They think, they talk, they discuss. Historically, good intelectuals have helped societies identify problems by asking questions and challenging common assumptions (something very difficult to do well).
And, of course, we need engineers and people with the right technical skills to develop solutions that improve life in practical ways.
A simple comparison might help: while from the outside this likely looks like the famous "leftist yells at leftist" scenario, the alternative - where a single expert has their theories elevated into law, without room for disagreement, looks a lot like Lysenkoism, and usually results in large-scale suffering with no scientific value (due to mistakes, large or small, in individual theories).
I'm not in this field and can't hazard a guess at the exact utility of this dispute, but when I see specialists and the impassioned debating vigorously on their principles, I trust it's because of relevant disagreements in the field, because that's what I observe in my preferred ___domain. Some amount of slapfighting is inevitable - we're all human - but this is a particularly humane way to hash out differences.
Lysenko was elevated in an totalitarian environment. It was also related to science, or something like it.
This text does not appear much related to a lot of science, more like "someone said something about me and Id like to refute it" but its 40 000 words or something instead of just a small text.
Yellow vests protests and Occupy Wall St. are examples of ineffective movements: lacking identification of root causes of problems, lacking specific demands to redress, lacking leaders, or lacking resolve. XR is also sort-of in this camp.
The unfortunate reality is declarations about existential peril and what we "should" be doing fall on deaf ears of policymakers and regulators where particular governments are de facto run by the billionaires. Most necessary changes cannot happen without first defenestrating corporate lobbyists and the money politicians receive. This won't happen by elections, by reform from within (Sen. John McCain discovered this), or by wishing for it. And honestly, most US politicians should be in prison because they do more than just take stacks of cash and gold bars to fund reelection media buys, many allow their attention and votes to be curried for it, and even propose bills verbatim from the lobbyists of their benefactors.
Change can only happen externally by many, sustained, nonviolent mass demonstrations sufficient to achieve specific policy objectives. ("World peace" and "save the planet" aren't policies, while "phase out all coal power plants in 5 years" is.)
In absence of the people demanding specific actions and changes, the "green revolution" will be half-assed for renewables in electricity (currently at 30% worldwide, may top out at 80-90%), but that's about it. No net negative global emissions and not much carbon sequestration. Ultra-processing and megafarming practices sure as shit won't change by debate or wishful thinking alone.
The main thesis of the article is that famine due to crop failure (as opposed to famine due to war) has largely been eliminated by two modern technologies: industrial agricultural methods (synthetic fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, equipment) and global trade (air and ship transport managed by markets).
This generally appears true - some time ago I tried to discover if total land area under agricultural production had increased since before the Norman Borlaug era and the answer seems to be no - as the author notes, per-acre productivity improvement accounts for the increase in food production.
The opposing argument is that this approach is not sustainable in the long run due to soil degradation and agricultural pollution of waterways, high energy costs of the industrial approach, dependence on fossil fuels (and threats of flood and drought related to global warming), and that eventually the system will crash leading to a new round of famines.
For the techno-optimists (e.g. myself) there is a way out - flip the industrial agriculture system off fossil fuels and onto renewable energy, i.e. electric equipment powered by sunlight and wind, and optimize use of inputs (fertilizer etc.) via adoption of machine learning and robotics (i.e each growing plant gets individual attention with this model). Of course this only works if we also stabilize the global human population and eliminate fossil fuels from the energy mix to avoid increasing drought/flood risk. Moving to a diet of no more than 5% or so animal products also makes sense as that means more primary production (direct photosynthesis) goes to humans instead of livestock, thereby reducing the pressure on agricultural land.
As Monbiot implies, anyone claiming a return to pre-industrial subsistence agriculture is a good idea is either a shameless marketer or a lunatic who has never tried to grow their own food.
I don't think of myself as a techo optimist, but mostly because I'm a politico pessimist. And some technologies are very problematic in the hands of bastards.
But I do think the issue of energy is mostly solved technically. And likely doesn't have the same problematic geopolitical issues oil and gas does. It's a big task to roll it out, but the momentum is there.
Also we basically solved the issue with exponential population growth via urbanization, birth control and reducing childhood mortality. That last two turned out to be exceptionally cheap. Snide comment, who knew women didn't want to be pregnant, breast feeding, and changing diapers for 20 years straight.
That leaves a lot of other things,
Legacy geopolitical stuff. Problems with authoritarian leaders. That 1/3 of humanity isn't particularly sane. These aren't tech problems.
Problems with sustainable agriculture and that we are using up resources over a few generations that took geologic time to collect.
I think it's important to not dismiss the issues we face. And equally important not to be despondent and give up. Because that's the worst thing we can do.
I don't find the opposing argument convincing at all. If you look at the US for example, all direct energy usage for crops and livestock production (~800 Tbtu) plus energy used for fertilizer production (~350 Tbtu) adds up to about 1% of all energy consumption [1]. This includes all the energy used to farm crops for biofuels and for export. This does not suggest some sort of looming agricultural energy crisis. The basic formula of mechanized agriculture has been in place for at least 100 years, and what is generally still happening is steadily increasing yields, decreasing energy consumption, and more knowledge and concern for soil quality and sustainability.
The argument that we all need to leave cities behind and "return to the land" is squarely in the horseshoe zone of radical politics. These days I associate contempt for modernity, industrial agriculture and cities more with far-right ideologues than the far-left ones he is targeting here, but to me they are on both sides borne out of a similar unrealistic, apocalyptic, and utopian mindset; and especially the desire (conscious or not) that such a destructive transformation would address their personal struggles or political grievances.
And, there's no reason why fossil fuels would be needed to provide the energy.
The only argument I can see that might have some validity is accumulation of nitrous oxide in the atmosphere from denitrification of fertilizers. But I think this can be addressed with denitrification inhibitors, some of which (procyanidins) can be produced by plants themselves.
>anyone claiming a return to pre-industrial subsistence agriculture
Yea, there is no possible way it could be sustainable, the amount of labor required would likely plunge the entire world into war. If I was told to drop my cushy computer job to go out into the fields with a hoe so I could survive by some glorious leader, rising up against the leader sounds like the much more productive of the options.
I don't own a farm so I don't have industry insight but it's exciting because I think this is a problem at least appears solvable. I realize large combines are probably an issue but if you can automate the process perhaps smaller machines workout because they can run without human intervention. I am especially excited from what I have seen from the herbicide side. Take pictures the crop is driven over, hit with lasers or targeted herbicide instead of spraying the whole crop. The future is exciting.
A story I found interesting on the farm equipment development, was the effect that games like "Farm Simulator" are having as feedback on the actual industry. [1]
Especially the "actual" gamist stuff. Like, "we need actual 3m tractors, they can't all be 9m $multi-million sales. How are we supposed to start out farming?"
Except the industry does not "natively" think this way. Which is so crazy. They all just wanna make the big sales and ignore the little guy. Note the quote below.
> Players need to be able to buy a three-metre cultivator early on, or a nine-metre version later.
> “The really interesting stuff is above nine metres, and that’s what everyone wants to advertise,” Seidel said. “It’s up to me and my colleagues to be patient and negotiate.”
Thou, while the description makes it seem like a high-utility and light-duty machine for high-margin farming (nuts&berries), it could also be total vaporware as the machines look "too tidy" and unused in the footage.
curious if anyone could chime in here and provide some organic feedback.
> A healthy, nutritious diet is much more expensive than a calorie sufficient one. As a result, three billion people cannot afford a healthy diet.
Is that so? My wife is the kind to obsess on healthy eating and always tells me it's cheaper to cook healthy than to cook unhealthy stuff. She's the kind that forces me to eat soup as dinner and that's it. It's not expensive to buy a few vegetables and to make soup.
(we buy, weekly, stuff from a local farmer btw and it's not exensive at all and he's happy to see people not buying everything from the supermarket)
Eggs aren't expensive: I find eggs super yummy.
Lentils, canned tuna (I love that: I just love that, not too sure if it's healthy or not but it's cheap), advocados (ok, they may be a bit pricey), corn, there are fishes that are cheap...
It's easy to go to a drive-in and buy junk. But they're not handing that junk for free at drive-ins. People who buy that could buy vegetables instead. Sure, there may not be same amount of calories and fat and whatnots but seen the average overweight person, I'd argue that that's... A good thing?
I mean, put it this way: it may be expensive to buy healthy food and yet end up as fat and unhealthy as when buying ultra high fat, ultra high calories, junk food... But maybe, just maybe, you don't need to be that fat and unhealthy?
My eight years old kid has been conditioned by my wife to only health healthy stuff: she sees a Mc Donald sign and pretends to throw up.
I understand that people can't be bothered to buy healthy stuff and don't have the will to eat reasonable amount of food and can't be bothered to make soup but I don't buy the whole "fat people are fat because they're poor".
They're fat and unhealthy because they are eating junk.
There's a spectrum between "Supersize me" and "three-star restaurant selling $$$ sushis".
He's talking in global terms here. This isn't directed at people from wealthy nations. He's talking about places where the majority of calories come entirely from grain, not because of dietary preferences or convenience but because of economic realities:
>The global definition of an affordable diet is one that costs 52% or less of average household expenditure. Using this definition, 3 billion people – over one-third of the global population – cannot afford a healthy diet. In other words, buying adequate food would mean spending more on it than on housing, energy, education, health, transport, clothing and all other items put together.
A typical "not-so-poor" country with large scale nutrition problems would be China. A look into the micros shows that ALMOST EVERYONE is short on calcium, riboflavin, a couple of other B vits, and Vitamin A. The current deficiency data by DALY accordingly shows large disease burdens on iron deficiency (somewhat linked to riboflavin), good old protein-energy malnutrition (child stunting and the like), and Vit A deficiency.
A lot of the issues with micros can probably be solved through food fortification, except the public is not known to appreciate the price increase (however small it will be) and the longer ingredients list. You might also suggest switching from white rice to brown or parboiled rice, but economics of scale and (for brown) the need for airtight storage mean that these things are much, much more expensive than a 2-year-old sack of white rice.
Even then you haven’t solved the big protein-energy issue. Sure, push legumes more, but these things still don’t have the price-calorie ratio that rice has, and you might compromise the energy part as you do it.
(For non-kids there’s still a big protein issue. Laborers just want to eat enough fuel to keep working, and good old white rice with Lao Gan Ma wins every time. Tofu is fast to shove down too, but it’s mostly water.)
[Legumes do provide a good amount of B too. Whole-ish beans and TVP are kind of awkward in Chinese fast food though. Maybe we just need more recipes with them as the star, instead of an accompaniment to meats.]
While eating healthy can indeed be cheap, I think systemically there are other costs like having the free time and free energy (which both might be depleted after a long day of hard work), other issues like the need to have some sort of transit to a grocer with fresh goods. For many parts of the United States, there's only Dollar General within accessible distance, and many people cannot afford to own or rent cars, and public transportation likely don't exist in their area. I think it's unlikely that prominent statistics of lower income being correlated with lower quality diets can be explained just by "poor people are lazy"
Even if one technically has time, cooking is a considerable commitment and so it’s easy to end up having little to no downtime after working it into a schedule, especially in a family situation.
It’s hard to keep that kind of tight schedule up for long periods while maintaining sanity. Even if you start out cooking regularly and eating healthy it’s easy to burn out and wind up in a funk which then causes a spiraling effect that makes it ever-harder to get back to a healthy lifestyle.
So I might suggest that many don’t just need time and energy to be able to cook healthy, but enough to cook healthy and still have time and energy left over. In other words, a sustainable schedule.
Cooking with modern methods can take much less time than with traditional methods.
Until three or four years ago, I was cooking traditionally. Because that required many hours, I could not do that daily, so I was cooking for the entire week during one day of the weekend, which was mostly lost to this activity.
Then I have switched to cook everything in a microwave oven (which I had previously used for decades only for reheating food), including things like baking home-made bread. This allows very short and perfectly reproducible cooking times. Many kinds of food, typically those with high water content, like potatoes or meat, can be just roasted in closed glass vessels without adding anything to them and they are much tastier than when they are boiled, without needing to fry them in cooking oil. Other vegetables are better boiled in water with salt, but regardless of the method all vegetables require less than a quarter of hour in the oven.
Since then, I am cooking every day what I eat just before I need it, which takes less than half of hour from start to finish for all operations, when cooking vegetables.
Meat required less preparation time but more time in the oven (at reduced power levels), depending on what kind of meat it was, e.g. up to 30 minutes, so when I was eating meat I was cooking it separately, in amounts sufficient for several days, and I was cooking everything else just before the meal, when it was combined with the precooked meat.
So with some experimentation, it is possible to find ways to cook your food without wasting too much time and energy with that.
Yes, that. Yay to ovens and electric appliances where you just set the power and the time and go do something else until the food cooks itself. I stopped boiling most vegetables, I steam process them over a pot with a strainer on top.
One thing to note here: although industrial agriculture in the US is criticized for using too much energy, we in the US use more energy cooking food than is used to grow it (including all energy used to fuel farm equipment and make agrochemicals.)
So don't think that cooking is somehow a trivial problem, especially for the world's poor.
Not directly, but various things I google show that in the US food system, only 10-20% of the energy used is on the farm. Much more is in handling (which includes cooking and refrigeration), transportation, and processing.
Sure other fuels go into it but it also takes in things like sunlight and water pressure as inputs for doing work (from the growing crops perspective at least). Whereas with transporting the goods, you don't have solar powered trucks or things powered from watermills or hydroelectricity moving these tomatoes. 100% of the energy makeup of the transportation side will be from fossil fuels, in contrast to the growing where fossil fuels make up some fraction but not the whole due to the work done by the sun and pressurized water. Likewise with handling and storage. I expect tyson foods has no bulk freeze drying apparatus that is powered independently with its own nuclear reactor, they are probably pulling from the dirty grid.
While the maximum energy efficiency for cooking is obtained with modern equipment, like microwave ovens, cooking equipment does not necessarily have to be modern and expensive.
I am pretty certain that the kitchen stove used by my grandparents had a much better energy efficiency than the kitchen stoves that burn natural gas and which are still very widespread now.
That old kitchen stove was a wood-burning kitchen stove, but only a small quantity of wood had to be burned, because it had a huge thermal inertia and after becoming hot enough food could be cooked for hours with minimal wood consumption. The heat transfer from the large hot iron stove (but with a temperature close to that needed for food, i.e. much lower than the temperature of a gas flame) was much better than from a gas burner, which resulted in much less lost heat.
The efficiency of such a wood-burning kitchen stove is likely to have been similar with the efficiency of an induction electric stove.
Poorer people are fatter in other countries too, and in most countries (at least the developed ones), very few people work more than 8 hours per day (so enough time to cook), and grocery stores are easily accessible.
Poor people often have to work multiple jobs and often work many more hourse than 8 hours a day. The stress of worrying about how you’re going to feed your kids, pay energy costs, rent etc soon eats time too
Maybe in USA, not in europe. 40 hours is pretty much the max, maybe 48 for some professions. Random independent contractors (electricians, painters,...) are an exception, but they're far from poor.
Having to work multiple jobs and many hours and low access to food (stores) is pretty much a uniquely US problem.
Depends where you live and work. I'd totally pick Romania or even Bulgaria over Germany. Healthier and tastier food for one, and I'm not talking restaurants, but farmer's markets. Cities are probably worse, more cars parked eveywhere, more annoying drivers operating them, more pollution, more chaos. I've also met people from Moldova and Ukraine telling me food is way less expensive there. They also eat tastier and more healthy food: borsch, fish, salads but lack EU regulation for big agriculture, so grain, and industrially grown vegetables and meat is probably laced with chemicals banned or regulated in the EU. In Germany the traditional food is quite boring. I won't venture to say awful, because it's still eatable, but doesn't have much variety or taste, like South or East European food. Czech Republic and Poland were also very pleasant food wise: great pickles or cabbage based foods. Hingary? They're eating too much meat. But the goulash and sausages ate usually quite good.
Healthy food is significantly cheaper than random food selected from what is easily available from a supermarket.
For instance, I live in the European Union and I eat very healthy food that I cook myself from raw ingredients, and in most days the food consumed during all day does not cost more than 5 EUR. Buying random food could easily cost ten times more than that.
Nevertheless, there exists much cheaper food than the healthiest food and the people who cannot afford the healthiest food choose cheaper alternatives.
For example, the largest amount of my daily fat intake comes from extra-virgin olive oil, followed by cold-pressed sunflower oil (used to add enough linoleic acid and vitamin E within a lower amount of calories than would be needed when using only olive oil).
There are many vegetable oils that are at least 6 times cheaper than the relatively cheap olive oil that I am using and at least 3 times cheaper than cold-pressed sunflower oil. Many people choose those cheaper oils even if they are less healthy.
Similarly, I eat a decent amount of proteins with balanced amino-acid profile, but it is very easy to reduce the cost of the food by replacing ingredients with high protein content with cereals like maize or with potatoes, which have lower protein content and higher starch content.
So if you plan a healthy diet you can save money in comparison with eating what you first see on the shelves, but eating an unhealthy diet can save significantly more money.
1000 calories of white rice and 1000 calories of soybeans (or any legume) give you 90% of the day’s nutrients which is what I mostly ate for portions of uni. Pretty solid and healthy base diet to work with and it’s super cheap.
you live near a local farmer that sells low cost produce. you have the time to prepare meals. you have either good refrigeration or the time / accessibility to purchase produce on a frequent basis.
Soups are great. But they take a long time to make. A lot of poor people's situation is that they can only get groceries from the dollar tree that prioritizes non-refrigerated goods and they have a very limited amount of time to do any of this. So you can make your cheap carbs (ramen/rice/pasta) + condiment or instant foods which suck or you can get some fast food which is very rewarding. Neither are healthy.
> Soups are great. But they take a long time to make
I should really experiment with slow cooker recipes, though I am (probably overly) worried about the fire risk of leaving a cooking appliance on unattended (either while away or asleep.)
This reads as extremely tone deaf and relatively privileged. Which isn't surprising given the cavalier attitudes towards impoverished people that I've seen many tech workers hold. I'm very glad that you have access to fresh produce on a regular basis. That is not the reality for everyone around the world, let alone everyone in developed nations.
Are vegetables still cheap when you need to travel miles and/or hours away from your place of residence/work? What about if you don't have own a personal vehicle and depend on public transit? When you need to work 3 jobs in order to not become homeless and then still care for multiple children, is it as easy to justify spending several hours of transit back and forth?
We aren't just talking about people eating fast food. That's only a percentage of the people who rely on "junk food" to survive. There are people who source 100% of their calories from a gas station because all the grocery stores, both small-bussiness and corporate, have closed due to crime and/or economic hardship.
There are places where even the local Dollar Tree shuts down. Leaving only gas stations or service stations some of which even keep many things behind bulletproof plexiglass to reduce theft. Would you really want to bus and walk around with a bag full of fresh produce when everyone else is just as hungry as you? That's if the metro service even still runs in your area.
Food deserts are a reality for many people and you have the luxury to live in an areacode that doesn't deal with this due to your relatively high paying IT job. And before you say "everyone can learn to code", no, they can't. Learning new skills requires free downtime that many don't have the luxury of. Many people spend every waking hour working and even sleep less that is healthy in order to work more.
This is only exacerbated when they don't have the fundamental math/science education that CS requires due to chronic underfunding of school districts in those same areacodes. Or even access to any computers besides mobile devices provided "for free" via a monthly service plan. Regardless of how difficult your upbringing was, it's extremely evident that you don't grasp many of the privileges you have had access to during your lifetime.
I can't find the exact statistics at the moment, but a larger than I would like percentage of the US pet food supply chain is consumed by humans. Are you really saying that people who need to eat dog food to get enough calories to not starve to death are just doing that because they are too lazy to go to a grocery store and cook vegetables into a soup?
It's basically a rant against some writer who wrote "Saying No to a Farm-Free Future", which apparently calls for "re-peasantization". If you like that sort of thing, go back to Thoreau's "Walden". It helps to know that Thoreau, with his little shack, had friends with houses nearby, often ate and stayed there, and had an income from a publisher in New York.
"In fact, and horrifyingly, it’s likely that, as a result of environmental disaster, rural life in many parts of the world will collapse before urban life does, as suggested by a highly disturbing recent paper in Nature, showing how and where the “human climate niche” is likely to shrink. If anything, we are likely to become more reliant on long-distance transport to deliver our food – a prospect no one, myself included, relishes."
Having moved from an urban to a rural area, I disagree. There is far more food produced per person in rural areas. Although I'm in high desert, there's probably a surplus of calories created here even with non-producers like me included. We are relatively protected from starvation in a disaster because of this and the often very very short transportation lines from yard to table. Someone that already has a rabbit hutch or chicken coop or vegetable garden can scale up quickly. And out here you can live off of small game if you can shoot or trap, as the natives did for thousands of years.
But we're highly dependent on gasoline. I'd have a 22 mile round trip walk to a mini-mart without it. It would take a serious amount of cooperation and adaptation to maintain here without it. I'm not sure if it's sustainable for someone like me.
In the event of disaster I would rather be surrounded by a lower density of desperate, starving people.
In the event of environmental disaster, those surplus calories would disappear. He's referring to the resilience of the supply chain vs the resilience of local food production when a "Big Disaster" hits.
A truly major drought would decimate local vegetable gardens and rabbit populations alike.
That paper you mention mostly highlights subsistence farmers - folks who definitionally don't have excess calories.
More generally, urban folks are more resilient because they're more flexible - as long as you're importing food, you're not reliant on one locale; you can always import as long as one place hasn't collapsed.
While I can't speak for an ideal subsistence farmer might act, out here in rural USA it would be very unusual for anyone growing crops to not store food and grow more than they strictly need.
Canning, freezing and other forms of long term food storage are vital, otherwise you have 50lbs of okra for a month and 0lbd the rest of the year.
Once you have those processes down, it's not hard at all to scale up even 50% and can a few more tomatoes. There is all sorts of informal barter for veggies and meats here, and the excess gets sold at farmers markets.
The urban folks do have slight end of chain distribution advantages. The imported food is consolidated at the grocery store or wherever. The price will be high, but you can pick new sources as they are available.
The city folks will be reliant on diesel for production transportation of the food. While the rural folks rely on diesel for production of food and for buying the rest of the goods they need.
The headline is misleading, but the sudden trendiness of a previously-unknown food is pretty devastating to everyone but the few who manage to cash in on the trend.
Witness: Korean food. I love it as much as anyone and have a container of gochujang in the fridge, but I read once about some poor Korean who, when told that Westerners were suddenly very interested in their culture, just said, "Why?"
When my wife and I backpacked Peru, we stayed with some local farmers. They refused to tell us what they were serving us, because after quinoa took off, nobody locally could afford it, and they feared that we would start another such trend.
There is nothing devastating about the anecdote? There exists a guy in Korea who does not care about Westeners liking Korean food. And? That makes sense ... some people would be happy, others simply don't care because it has zero impact on them... and yet otherwise find their own food boring so they genuinely don't get the appeal.
The solution is obvious, though: wealthy individuals, or collectives of such, should pay folks to live an authentic, poor, impoverished life, protect it as an island of authenticity, for some set period of time, and that person is forbidden from accessing their new wealth personally for X amount of time.
I'm not joking. This deal would appeal to many people who both want a hands-on life but who also want to retire to someplace other than an authentic, brutal poorhouse. In return, society gets to (synthetically) maintain a different way of life, which may come in handy when things change, when climate, asteroids, or revolts make "the old ways" more valuable again. And in the meantime, it would maintain a secret, private getaway for the ultra wealthy to enjoy very occasionally and discretely.
Off topic: maybe used to reading technical papers too much, but this is an overly long article for a pass-by read, and it has no paragraph summarizing the author's main thesis.
What are some good online services that can take a URL and give back a few bullet points? (which would then help decide whether to spend 20 - 30 mins to read the arguments)
Commercial, profit-optimizing meat and dairy ag inexorably lead to GMO corn megafarms, CAFOs, and overuse of antibotics bringing the risks of antibiotic resistance, pandemics, climate change, and pollution of air, water, and soil.
What is missing is regulators mandating genuine sustainable practices and taxing and fining where appropriate. The absurd cruelty of CAFOs and using the atmosphere as an open-air sewer for methane and CO₂ must end.
I don't know how the numbers would play out, but maybe higher average food prices would reduce global poverty if in general the global poor's income derives from food production?
> The argument in which he participates is a crucial one, the divisions are real and the debate needs to be had.
Sorry, sir. We are in a reductionist moment in history, where sides have been chosen; judgements made; debate stifled; views anathematized; and conflict reduced to an inevitable choice that is the fault of "other".
Debate doesn't seem the least bit stifled to me. Just the opposite: there is so much that we can't actually come to any conclusions. Coming to conclusions and debating really are in opposition.
There is no debate in the sense of dispassionately presenting facts; sincerely seeking to understand the merits of the opposing view; being willing to own fault where factually based; accepting compromise, &c.
There's plenty of it. It is fairly quiet and mostly happening well away from the places people go for "debate".
Often, conclusions are reached and the people drawing them move on to the next thing. The people seeking "debate" don't find answers because they don't know how to look.
It's not happening in “places”. That's the whole point. (If you trawl through my comment history, you'll notice I argue a lot on Hacker News, but that's very much a “hail Mary”: the learning and changing-my-mind is all happening elsewhere – “in the real world”, so to speak.)
- I lived in rural Romania through the 80s when Ceaușescu decided to basically return to war time rationalization of food.
- My father was an agricultural engineer on a state farm, a specialty almost forgotten today yet of utmost importance in the 50s-60s when he graduated university and got the job.
People today scorn at the idea of state farms but my father comes from a family of rather wealthy peasants from before collectivization and always told me that productivity was shit before modern cultivation methods, mechanization, chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides were used. He died this year at 82 years of age of Parkinson's disease, almost surely caught due to his involvement with agricultural herbicides. His 90 years old brother that worked as a physics teacher is alive and kicking. Takes the bus from the village everyday to the city to have a coffee with his friends.
Anyhow, I digress. Let's get back to the original article.
>> Much of the protein, insufficient as it was, came not from cheese and meat but from what we now call dhal. It had names (to give some English examples) like pease pottage, pease pudding, mushy peas and pea soup
The Romanian countryside was far better off in the rationalization period than the cities. I've visited my city-living aunt a few times and noticed the terrible queues to procure basically anything: bread, butter, meat. I don't recall much of my meals as a 10 years old (I was 12 when Ceaușescu was shot and shortages ended) and with my parents might have been a bit atypical. As my father being chief engineer of the state farm we never lacked anything, of course :)
But when living with my grandparents, I think my diet was a lot more what regular people ate. There was no lack of protein but it wasn't the obscene frenzy I see in American movies (probably fake?): all beef chops meat and basically no bread or carbs or vegetables at all.
I ate a serious amount of carbs from wheat bread and corn bread, lots of milk and derivatives, eggs, vegetables in salads and soups. Btw, a salad here is a mixture of vegetables that you eat with your main dish. It's never the main dish, another habit of well fed people. Chicken was a rare treat, my grandma would sacrifice growing chickens but almost never a fully grown hen that would lay eggs. And how much can you split a chicken between 2 adults and 2 kids (my and my cousin)? It was always stew, I never ever saw fried chicken EVER during those times. Almost all meat came from pork. Occasionally beef but the penalty for having beef in communist Romania was straight prison. Peasants were supposed to hand over the calves to the state, but sometimes they were born "dead" (i.e. kept in the stables and fed a bit until slaughtered). Btw, it's those times when I developed a less than today's modern sensible view towards animals as opposed to humans. First time slaughtering a calf or bagging a litter of puppies into a sack before drowning them is the hardest. You get used to it and learn this is life if we're about to live.
Darn, I digress again. Must be the 3rd glass of wine :P
>There was no lack of protein but it wasn't the obscene frenzy I see in American movies (probably fake?): all beef chops meat and basically no bread or carbs or vegetables at all.
It's not an every meal kind of thing, but it's a real thing. Especially if you go to a restaurant that specializes in barbecue. Here's a typical meal from Dickey's, the first chain barbeque restaurant I could think of:
Well the only time I get near that is once a year when I have my habitual one week vacation at an all-inclusive resort in Crete (Greece).
I actually tried eating all-meat but I guess my taste is too permanently distorted now. I can't help but eat the soup then raid the appetizing cooked vegetables area. Not counting the absolutely delicious bread, I could eat just that. In addition to the obscene amount of meats I'm placing on my plate, with the limitation that I'm eating them all and if I want more I take another plate and go pick another round. Obscene compared to my regular, I guess. I hate it when I'm starting to get full which happens pretty quick actually.
I read an article here on Hacker News which said what truly getting rich means. Well for starters, food no longer matters. At all. Like you don't even know it exists, let alone care about price and quantity.
Well, although I'm far from worrying about food today as a senior software engineer in Romania, food is still a weakspot of mine.
Like, employing company struggles like any other to convince people to come to the office as opposed to fully remote.
Well, when they offer food I endure the gruesome 1.5 hours commute each way because it's worth it! At least that's what my monkey brained trained through communist penury tells me c:)
The amount of meat people eat in the US per person (seafood not included) is only topped by Hong Kong. Also note that the distribution of people eating meat is uneven too. Especially as people hit the amount of income they can afford to buy meats for every meal.
When I was younger I knew some people that almost only ate meat for meals, and pretty much skipped anything that looked like a vegetable. I wonder if colon cancer has got them yet?
> People today scorn at the idea of state farms but my father comes from a family of rather wealthy peasants from before collectivization and always told me that productivity was shit before modern cultivation methods, mechanization, chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides were used.
In his memoirs, Khrushchev very explicitly repeats that these modernization efforts in the collective farms were done to emulate how agriculture was done in the USA and Western Europe. He went himself to Iowa to make friends with American farmer Roswell Garst and the Soviets sent large delegations to visit the state for weeks to learn agriculture from the Americans. This especially includes mechanization, chemical fertilizers and planting techniques.
Khrushchev admitted himself that it took several decades from after the revolution to return agricultural productivity to pre-WWI levels.
> People today scorn at the idea of state farms but my father comes from a family of rather wealthy peasants from before collectivization and always told me that productivity was shit before modern cultivation methods, mechanization, chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides were used.
“Modern cultivation methods, mechanization, chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides” don’t require the use of state farms. Evidence: farms in other rich countries of the time such as Western Germany and the USA.
I was referring to post-war Eastern Europe where land property was so fragmented that famines would still happen because individual peasants didn't have enough land to meet MVP (minimum viable produce of anything should anything go awry and it always did).
And 1900s Germany doesn't require state farms precisely because commercially viable land was already concentrated enough (though heck knows what sacrifices that we'll never know) to be viable in the hands of capital that has the means to handle it.
State farms were a great step forward for humanity, in spite of the terrific occasional human costs it incurred on the imbeciles who couldn't read the times. Capital where it wasn't compared to no capital, that is.
Talking about 1900s Germany, that reminds me of a story my grandpa told me. He had a cousin that moved from rural Romania to urban Germany in order to work in a factory, after abandoning his pig trade that my grandma was doing (fattening pigs and selling them in an animal market). The idea was not to immigrate but to make enough hard $$$ as to buy here at home enough land that he couldn't have even dreamed otherwise. An early IT-guy I guess :)
Anyhow after he came back, the women of the village asked his wife who was at all times following him. "How did you manage to buy things given you speak no German at all?!". "Well, unlike the backwards shop here where the seller sits behind a counter under the presumption that you'll steal shit and asks you what you want, in Deutschland shops are open space. They provide you with a basket on entry, into which said basket you freely pick stuff from shelves in the store and all you have to do upon exit is show the basket to the clerk store and they will show you the number. You pay that (it's just numbers so you don't have to know any German at all) and off you go".
By the way, they ("they" as in "companies") probably should have quotas for people like me. The disadvantaged. Born in a village.
Although peasants made 60% of the population in Romania in 1990 when revolution happened, and they still make a big chunk today, less than 1% of software developers in Romania originate in a village. And the ones like me who made it this far are met with scornful comments like "well, you wasn't really a peasant because youz family was if not rich at least definitely not poor".
i love that this story is 100 years old. people ask me how it is possible to live in china without speaking chinese, but i literally experienced the same thing in china and any other country that i have been to. heck even on a market where you don't serve yourself, i can point at the items that i want, even if i don't know the names.
it was in fact this very experience that made me realize that i can live in other countries without having to learn the local language before going there.
I spent most of my adulthood time in Europe talking to non-Roman speaking languages like German, French, Bosnian, Magyar.
First thing to realize about non-Roman languages is that non-Roman doesn't equal Latin. It helps but eventually you're gonna need to learn Russian, Magyar, German.
My response was flagged, but what this person says about creation of farms is just communist propaganda.
Sparkled by insults to victims.
And no, they were not performing better then western alternatives nor an improvement. These states could make liberal reforms, but choosen to go dictatorship way and people pay the price.
> State farms were a great step forward for humanity,
They were not. The case in point is higher productivity of western farms. They were dysfunctional, oftentimes lead by incompetent people and caused shortages.
They also destroyed actual existing business too.
> in spite of the terrific occasional human costs it incurred on the imbeciles who couldn't read the times
Read: those who did not wanted to have their property stolen and who run perfectly functioning businesses themselves.
The communist propaganda you are spreading here is really something. "Imbeciles who did not read the times" actually means opposition, victims and people who resisted oppression. They were heroes.
Please don't post ideological flamewar comments or personal attacks, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
I reacted to claim that people who opposed state farms were "imbeciles behind the time". That is an actual communist propaganda point person I responded to promoted. If they can say that, I should be allowed to respond.
How come calling victims "imbeciles" is ok while my response is not?
Also, creation of state farms happened through actual violence. Property was taken away from people and owners were put to jails or forcibly moved. I do not call it stealing as insult, I call it stealing because that is what it was.
> How come calling victims "imbeciles" is ok while my response is not?
It wasn't ok—it breaks the HN guideline against calling names—but we just didn't see it. The problem is that you responded by breaking the site guidelines considerably worse. That's not ok, regardless of how bad some other comment was or you feel it was. The guidelines are clear on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I really do not see how my comment is worst then original. Or worst then comments about slavery that are frequent in here when American history appears.
Only difference is that I argued against praise of state farms rather then argued against slavery or what not.
I was not much keen on sending my email and then just forgot about it.
It doesn't matter who's "worse" - everyone always feels like the other person started it and did worse. This is the most common response to moderation that exists, and it's beside the point.
The point is that if you post things like "The communist propaganda you are spreading here is really something" then you're doing exactly the kind of ideological flamewar we don't want on HN—regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. We need you, and other users, to follow the rules regardless of what other people are doing. Especially accounts like yours which have been around for many years and posted thousands of comments!
If you don't want to email, then I need to ask you here: can you please change your password and confirm that you changed it? There's reason to believe that your account was compromised.
Yeah well my grandpa wuz a hero. Narrowly escaping being shot on the spot for carrying a firearm (he was a partisan), got 16 years in the Romanian gulag, reckoned after 11 that noone's coming to the rescue as it happened to the West before USSR good a chance to "rescue" them.
What you are regurgitating is spoken precisely from the vantage point of a well fed ignoramus.
Please don't post ideological flamewar comments or personal attacks, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Retinol, aka Vitamin A1, is found in high concentrations in such foods as cow and chicken livers, butter, cheese and eggs, and cod liver oil. You can get enough by eating certain cooked vegetables, like carrots and spinach (it's hard to digest the Vitamin A found in most raw vegetables, and many vegetables are poor sources of retinol), but you can only really overdose by taking supplements or eating organ meat.
All that has very little to do with autoimmune conditions, and I'm not aware of any effect on intestinal permeability. What are you on about?
"falling hunger during a time of rising population"
I find it astonishing that Monbiot manages to mention China's famines in the 1950s and 1960s, but somehow fails to mention that most of the progress in the fight against hunger since the 1970s was made here: If you exclude China from the numbers, "falling hunger during a time of rising population" didn't really happen.
China was plagued by famine for centuries, including one in 1906 larger than the one a decade after the PRC was established. China's victory over malnutrition was won over the past 60 years, but none of this is convenient to his narrative.
1906 was roughly 20 million, which is slightly under the official estimates for the Great Leap Forward. The actual number for 59-61 is closer to 45 million. So no.
A bit part of it due to West opening it’s markets to mainland China. Remember neighboring country of Taiwan didn’t face issues and famines like those caused by Mao.
I haven't read the article, but I tend to believe that people in rich developed countries always lived in an insulting abundance, and they don't seem to understand the cost of supplying how they eat, and what it requires: they don't see the distant infrastructure required to feed them, while they are raining in what I see as luxury food.
The climate dictates that we need to prioritize food that can provide nutrition that is medically adequate, not just food that makes them happy.
Once you do that, things can drastically change, and you will see a lot of people feeling unhappy because they don't have the food they like. I bet people could riot because they can't get beef chicken or fries.
I'm also puzzled by people who pretend they can reach food autonomy by living in a community or something. That makes me chuckle. Growing a few vegetable in a few acre won't feed you, and it will certainly not reach a correct amount of calories.
It tries to look at food production as a global system, the successes it's had in terms of making food more affordable and avoiding global famine, but also the damage it's causing to climate and biodiversity, and possible ways forward given the constraints of making food production sustainable without creating mass starvation.
I will also say that many groups of people don't like the conclusions. Many farmers and meat eaters don't like the idea that livestock farming at the scale needed to support modern western diets is fundamentally unsustainable. People who believe that eating free range meat means that they've made the clearly ethical choice may be surprised at how that works out over an entire population. Many non meat eaters are uncomfortable at the argument that just hoping people switch to vegan diets is unlikely to work in practice. Many environmentalists don't like the conclusion that the best hopes for a way forward involve more technology, not less.
I'm not sure he ends up betting on the right horses, but it seems to me that the substance of the book is well thought through, and hard to disagree with without falling into the "let them eat cake" trap that's called out in this essay.
[1] https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/317018/regenesis-by-monbiot-...