Jeremy Cherfas

”Plants are energised by zero-carbon, zero-cost sunlight, whereas factory-produced microbial biomass is energised by generated electricity at an energetic cost amounting to at least an order of magnitude more.”

Not going to quibble about that order of magnitude greater than zero. The point is very well made: Proposed ecomodernist solutions to future food supply are not solutions at all.

In other words, there’s no sign of an energy transition out of fossils yet.

Just in case you were feeling optimistic because energy from solar increased by 24% last year ...

Tim Harford's lukewarm review of William MacAskill's book.

If he is right, how could I justify giving £10 to a food bank today when I could set up a charitable trust, let the money accumulate centuries of compound interest before lavishing the proceeds on future generations? Are we morally obliged to live at subsistence levels to maximise the resources available for investment and research so our great-great-great-great-grandchildren will thrive? Such questions have been discussed and analysed at great depth in the literature on climate change. It is surprising to see them waved away with a few sentences here. 

Is it that surprising, really?

George Monbiot illuminates and infuriates in equal measure, although I suspect, after reading Chris Smaje’s review, that I will not be paying much attention in future. I have not read Regenesis, so will say nothing about it myself. Two quotes from Chris (of many others I could have chosen):

“[A]n alternative, perhaps counterintuitive but more plausible argument [is] that low food prices in fact are a fundamental cause of global poverty.”

“[T]here’s no such thing as ‘an inexorable economic logic’, there are just political games with winners and losers – a point the old George Monbiot once understood.”

Yup.

Excellent, thought-provoking read on the fall and rise of local food traditions.

For one thing, it's a lot easier to call yourself a "nutritionist". Then again, where do food scientists work except in industry, or training more food scientists?

Interesting piece from Tom Philpott at Mother Jones, pointing out that ALL the big brewers use additional sources of food for their yeasts. Some use corn, some use rice. A pox on all of them.

Colin Tudge at the Campaign for Real Farming points up just a few of the ways in which the current approach to research into food and food production lets us all down.

PESOS from Reading.am.

On World Food Day, so delighted to see this piece from Gene Logsden pop up in my feed.

https://thecontraryfarmer.wordpress.com/2018/10/15/our-hidden-wound-2/

Not the most important point in the article, but an important point:

Wansink’s sense for harnessing buzz may have been a skill in the wrong domain. He’s a camera-friendly performer who might’ve done very well as a Bill Nye– or Neil deGrasse Tyson–type infotainer, in an industry where simplification to build a compelling narrative is not a bug but a feature, given the explicit mission to deliver an attention-grabbing-and-holding product to an audience.

“Folks in the 60s and 70s didn’t know how to work with whole grains, and were getting super gritty and dense baked goods,” says Kaufmann. For many in the counterculture, eating these brick-like baked goods was an anti-authority act unto itself. “You were committed to the idealism behind baking whole wheat bread, even if that meant retraining your palate to enjoy it.”

Refusing my mother's wholewheat quiche was the anti-authority act here.

This one is really interesting, and had never occurred to me. Not that I have much choice when changing continents.

PROPERLY BREAKING UP A FLIGHT JOURNEY

Simple rule, I’ve learned the hard way: 2 equal length legs of a journey are far better than one long leg and one short one. If the entire world is conspiring against you, and you cannot get a non-stop flight, pick the one with the most equal durations of flying times and try to get a 2 hour layover. That’s enough to pee, stretch, eat, and not stress if your incoming flight is delayed. Also: it’s always better to fly in and out of larger airports as there’s far better food options.

[T]he sort of dining rooms that tend to do better on the World’s Top 50 Restaurants list than they do in the Michelin guide; the kitchens where the artistic imperatives of the chef tend to outweigh any questions of what a customer might want to eat; the meals after which a cynical diner, confronted with 20-plus courses of kelp, hemp and tree shoots, makes jokes about stopping for tacos on the way home.

Yeah. No.

My old mucker in fine form. To whit:

For in truth, the reasons why so many people in Britain cannot afford food that’s good and fresh has almost nothing to do with the cost of production; and the reasons farmers go bust has almost nothing to do with their supposed “inefficiency”; and the current obsession in high places with robots and GMOs and industrial chemistry is a horrible perversion of science and a huge waste of money which, in the end, is public money. Food is too expensive for more and more people in well-heeled Britain for three main reasons, none of which has anything directly to do with the cost of production, and none of which is alleviated by attempts to make production more “efficient” by sacking people, joining big farms into big estates, or festooning the whole exercize with high-tech. Attempts to mitigate rising prices in the short term by buying more from the world at large will only transfer misery elsewhere, as indigenous agricultures everywhere that evolved to serve the needs of their people are replaced by industrialized monocultures owned by corporates, to provide commodity crops for export.

Not that anyone who needs to is listening.

Marion Nestle links to Dole's declarations as it prepares to go public. As ever, though, while the company may have to settle lawsuits and what have you, it does not contribute to the costs borne by those who succumb to food poisonning.

It makes me sad to think that so many of us come to see this kind of food paradise as something threatening, full of foods we mustn’t eat and joys to be avoided.

Me too