13 ms·

The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People

152 points by tpush 3y ago

smitty1e 3y ago
> 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".
- TOGoS 3y ago
  I understood this comment about as well as I understood the article.
  - jfengel 3y ago
    TL;DR Modern farming is extremely bad. Old farming was insufficient. Some guy wrote a book that misunderstands why I say that.
    - pfdietz 3y ago
      "And I'm going to figuratively carve him to pieces for your enjoyment."
- jfengel 3y ago
  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.
  - smitty1e 3y ago
    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. Unless I've missed, like, a lot.
    - jfengel 3y ago
      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.
      - smitty1e 3y ago
        By all means, please link these (non-)famous places. Social media is so much Argument Clinic[1] crammed into the vastness of cyberspace. [1] https://youtu.be/uLlv_aZjHXc?si=5rmU6k71lJvJnhro https://youtu.be/uLlv_aZjHXc?si=5rmU6k71lJvJnhro
        wizzwizz4 3y ago
        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.)
goda90 3y ago
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.
- kranke155 3y ago
  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. Want to find solutions? Build them.
  - davedx 3y ago
    You don’t think books with solutions (like the author has written) are useful?
    - kranke155 3y ago
      Im sure that some are, but the text that is linked in this particular post - could you explain its usefulness?
      - spicymapotofu 3y ago
        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.
beebeepka 3y ago
What a nice blog. I don't think I have ever said this before. I read several articles and agree with the thought process of this person. This one touched me https://www.monbiot.com/2023/10/24/necroculture/ https://www.monbiot.com/2023/10/24/necroculture/
- Biologist123 3y ago
  He is a well-known British writer, fondly known as the Gorgeous Moonbat. His book mentioned at the link, Regenesis, is good.
aintgonnatakeit 3y ago
[flagged]
- hipadev23 3y ago
  Oh come on. We can criticize the article on a number of levels but it’s well-written (not well-researched) and clearly human.
MichaelRo 3y ago
I resonate with the article for several reasons: - 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
simbolit 3y ago
"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. Old story: China bad.
- feedforward 3y ago
  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.
  - cscurmudgeon 3y ago
    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.
  - c0pium 3y ago
    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.
- cscurmudgeon 3y ago
  Nah not really. Hint: India
- _c2xg 3y ago
  CCP bad, capitalism good
acestus5 3y ago
This author complains too much. People want to eat cheese in France because it beats eating Doritos in a tiny apartment.
photochemsyn 3y ago
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.
- infecto 3y ago
  Upvote for the fellow techno-optimist. I am pretty excited with some of the startups I have seen in the electric farm equipment space. https://www.monarchtractor.com/ https://www.monarchtractor.com/ 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.
teknopaul 3y ago
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.
- cscurmudgeon 3y ago
  Just because you value traditions it doesn’t void basic economic laws proved over centuries (supply and demand). > OK USA has screwed it's food chain, but that does not apply outside. How? Spain imports quite a bit food. https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/opportunities-us-agricultural-exports-spain-and-portugal#:~:text=Spain%20is%20a%20net%20importer,supplier%20of%20pulses%20to%20Spain https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/opportunities-us-agricultural-....
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  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.
Slava_Propanei 3y ago
[dead]
AlbertCory 3y ago
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?"
- elcritch 3y ago
  Perhaps because South Korea started marketing their food and culture? https://blog.hubspot.com/the-hustle/the-40m-bet-that-made-south-korea-a-food-and-cultural-power?hs_amp=true https://blog.hubspot.com/the-hustle/the-40m-bet-that-made-so...
- smogcutter 3y ago
  I suppose the “why” is that the Korean media industry has gone to great lengths to market Korean culture abroad.
- Almondsetat 3y ago
  The Korean government explicitly set up kpop for export, just like Thailand did with its food. If koreans feel that way then it’s a self inflicted wound
  - AlbertCory 3y ago
    I've been to Thailand, not to Korea. Somehow, the Thais don't seem to resent the tourists. Of course, that's just my perception as a Westerner.
- anigbrowl 3y ago
  Where is the devastating part in this anecdote? Not disputing your thesis, there just seems to be a bit missing.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
eh_why_not 3y ago
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)
- Mistletoe 3y ago
  https://zapier.com/blog/how-to-use-chatgpt-to-summarize-an-article/ https://zapier.com/blog/how-to-use-chatgpt-to-summarize-an-a...
- ForkMeOnTinder 3y ago
  I've been happy with Kagi's summarizer (it's not free though) https://kagi.com/summarizer/index.html https://kagi.com/summarizer/index.html
- zargon 3y ago
  Kagi has a summarizer. It does a decent job on this article.
Animats 3y ago
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.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  Monbiot rants most excellently. It's just wonderful to see nonsense dismembered so thoroughly.
jokoon 3y ago
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.
ruiisnwn 3y ago
[flagged]
- wizzwizz4 3y ago
  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?
progne 3y ago
"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.
- jvanderbot 3y ago
  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.
- curiousllama 3y ago
  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.
  - mips_r4300i 3y ago
    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.
TacticalCoder 3y ago
Great TFA but I partially disagree with this: > 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".
- picture 3y ago
  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"
javajosh 3y ago
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.
- vijayr02 3y ago
  In Europe, this exists at scale and is called the CAP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Agricultural_Policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Agricultural_Policy
jgraham 3y ago
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. [1] https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/317018/regenesis-by-monbiot-george/9780141992990 https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/317018/regenesis-by-monbiot-...
- peteradio 3y ago
  Free range eaters are hoping to maintain a relationship with their free range farmer if/as the screws get turned. Might not scale for... everyone.
  - asdff 3y ago
    There's always going to be "gourmet" free range meat anyhow. A lot of pasture land is pasture land because the land can't support much else.
pfdietz 3y ago
Monbiot is awesome. Even if I don't agree with everything he has said, his insistence on rigor and willingness to call bullshit is just indispensable. One could almost see the blood dripping off his rhetorical knives here.
georgeoliver 3y ago
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?
oldbbsnickname 3y ago
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.

152 points by tpush 3y ago

> 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".

TOGoS 3y ago
I understood this comment about as well as I understood the article.
- jfengel 3y ago
  TL;DR Modern farming is extremely bad. Old farming was insufficient. Some guy wrote a book that misunderstands why I say that.
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    "And I'm going to figuratively carve him to pieces for your enjoyment."
jfengel 3y ago
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.
- smitty1e 3y ago
  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. Unless I've missed, like, a lot.
  - jfengel 3y ago
    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.
    - smitty1e 3y ago
      By all means, please link these (non-)famous places. Social media is so much Argument Clinic[1] crammed into the vastness of cyberspace. [1] https://youtu.be/uLlv_aZjHXc?si=5rmU6k71lJvJnhro https://youtu.be/uLlv_aZjHXc?si=5rmU6k71lJvJnhro
      - wizzwizz4 3y ago
        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.)

goda90 3y ago

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.

kranke155 3y ago
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. Want to find solutions? Build them.
- davedx 3y ago
  You don’t think books with solutions (like the author has written) are useful?
  - kranke155 3y ago
    Im sure that some are, but the text that is linked in this particular post - could you explain its usefulness?
    - spicymapotofu 3y ago
      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.

beebeepka 3y ago

What a nice blog. I don't think I have ever said this before. I read several articles and agree with the thought process of this person. This one touched me https://www.monbiot.com/2023/10/24/necroculture/ https://www.monbiot.com/2023/10/24/necroculture/

Biologist123 3y ago
He is a well-known British writer, fondly known as the Gorgeous Moonbat. His book mentioned at the link, Regenesis, is good.

aintgonnatakeit 3y ago

[flagged]

hipadev23 3y ago
Oh come on. We can criticize the article on a number of levels but it’s well-written (not well-researched) and clearly human.

MichaelRo 3y ago

I resonate with the article for several reasons: - 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

simbolit 3y ago

"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. Old story: China bad.

feedforward 3y ago
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.
- cscurmudgeon 3y ago
  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.
- c0pium 3y ago
  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.
cscurmudgeon 3y ago
Nah not really. Hint: India
_c2xg 3y ago
CCP bad, capitalism good

acestus5 3y ago

This author complains too much. People want to eat cheese in France because it beats eating Doritos in a tiny apartment.

photochemsyn 3y ago

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.

infecto 3y ago
Upvote for the fellow techno-optimist. I am pretty excited with some of the startups I have seen in the electric farm equipment space. https://www.monarchtractor.com/ https://www.monarchtractor.com/ 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.

teknopaul 3y ago

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.

cscurmudgeon 3y ago
Just because you value traditions it doesn’t void basic economic laws proved over centuries (supply and demand). > OK USA has screwed it's food chain, but that does not apply outside. How? Spain imports quite a bit food. https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/opportunities-us-agricultural-exports-spain-and-portugal#:~:text=Spain%20is%20a%20net%20importer,supplier%20of%20pulses%20to%20Spain https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/opportunities-us-agricultural-....
fnordpiglet 3y ago
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.

Slava_Propanei 3y ago

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AlbertCory 3y ago

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?"

elcritch 3y ago
Perhaps because South Korea started marketing their food and culture? https://blog.hubspot.com/the-hustle/the-40m-bet-that-made-south-korea-a-food-and-cultural-power?hs_amp=true https://blog.hubspot.com/the-hustle/the-40m-bet-that-made-so...
smogcutter 3y ago
I suppose the “why” is that the Korean media industry has gone to great lengths to market Korean culture abroad.
Almondsetat 3y ago
The Korean government explicitly set up kpop for export, just like Thailand did with its food. If koreans feel that way then it’s a self inflicted wound
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  I've been to Thailand, not to Korea. Somehow, the Thais don't seem to resent the tourists. Of course, that's just my perception as a Westerner.
anigbrowl 3y ago
Where is the devastating part in this anecdote? Not disputing your thesis, there just seems to be a bit missing.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

eh_why_not 3y ago

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)

Mistletoe 3y ago
https://zapier.com/blog/how-to-use-chatgpt-to-summarize-an-article/ https://zapier.com/blog/how-to-use-chatgpt-to-summarize-an-a...
ForkMeOnTinder 3y ago
I've been happy with Kagi's summarizer (it's not free though) https://kagi.com/summarizer/index.html https://kagi.com/summarizer/index.html
zargon 3y ago
Kagi has a summarizer. It does a decent job on this article.

Animats 3y ago

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.

pfdietz 3y ago
Monbiot rants most excellently. It's just wonderful to see nonsense dismembered so thoroughly.

jokoon 3y ago

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.

ruiisnwn 3y ago

[flagged]

wizzwizz4 3y ago
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?

progne 3y ago

"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.

jvanderbot 3y ago
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.
curiousllama 3y ago
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.
- mips_r4300i 3y ago
  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.

TacticalCoder 3y ago

Great TFA but I partially disagree with this: > 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".

picture 3y ago
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"

javajosh 3y ago

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.

vijayr02 3y ago
In Europe, this exists at scale and is called the CAP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Agricultural_Policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Agricultural_Policy

jgraham 3y ago

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. [1] https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/317018/regenesis-by-monbiot-george/9780141992990 https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/317018/regenesis-by-monbiot-...

peteradio 3y ago
Free range eaters are hoping to maintain a relationship with their free range farmer if/as the screws get turned. Might not scale for... everyone.
- asdff 3y ago
  There's always going to be "gourmet" free range meat anyhow. A lot of pasture land is pasture land because the land can't support much else.

pfdietz 3y ago

Monbiot is awesome. Even if I don't agree with everything he has said, his insistence on rigor and willingness to call bullshit is just indispensable. One could almost see the blood dripping off his rhetorical knives here.

georgeoliver 3y ago

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?

oldbbsnickname 3y ago

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.