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The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People

monbiot.com

31–40 of 138 posts

Re: The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People

#31

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 h…

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.

Re: The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People

#32

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)

Kagi has a summarizer. It does a decent job on this article.

Re: The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People

#33

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?"

Perhaps because South Korea started marketing their food and culture?

https://blog.hubspot.com/the-hustle/the-40m-bet-that-made-so...

Re: The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People

#34

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?"

I suppose the “why” is that the Korean media industry has gone to great lengths to market Korean culture abroad.

Re: The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People

#35

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?"

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

Re: The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People

#36
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Unless I've missed, like, a lot.

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.

Re: The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People

#37
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 far…

I'm not talking about today's Germany. 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 (th…

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".

"Shoot the Kulaks", right?

Re: The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People

#38
post #3

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.

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.

Re: The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People

#39

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 h…

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…

Dense? It's pigs under old oak trees?

Re: The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People

#40

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/

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