81–90 of 138 posts
"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 inclu…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Having to work multiple jobs and many hours and low access to food (stores) is pretty much a uniquely US problem.
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-...
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…
Both those cities are way too dense for the population to feed themselves on home gardens and rabbit hutches.
One could almost see the blood dripping off his rhetorical knives here.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, a…
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…
So don't think that cooking is somehow a trivial problem, especially for the world's poor.
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…
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.
"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.
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 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…
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 ba…
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.