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.
The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People
51–60 of 138 posts
Re: The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People
#52The 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?"
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.
Re: The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People
#53This 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 go…
You don’t think books with solutions (like the author has written) are useful?
Re: The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
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Re: The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People
#55I 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.
Re: The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People
#56Earlier 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…
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Re: The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People
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Re: The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People
#58Starts 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…
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Re: The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People
#59"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.
Re: The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People
#60Great 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".