Grounding what we eat
Not just our food chain but the whole of life on earth depends on soil; soil is where it happens. Macro fauna and flora, like ourselves and the trees, are largely irrelevant in the scale of things. We don’t see it like that because we are macro and filled with our own importance. But we are discovering (again, this is how civilisations collapse) that both in the quantity and the quality of what we eat, the soil is where it is at.
Assessing our food supply chain is that simple. Does the food we eat and how it was distributed and how it was grown protect the vital asset it is based on? Or does it degrade that asset for short term gain, or indeed for any other reason? Since the vast majority of the world’s soils are not only being degraded but are being eroded away entirely, we can guess that the food supply chain is utterly broken.
We can also look at the quality of the products supplied in the chain and their effect on human health. We note that here also the judgement is dire: the food we are supplied with is grossly deficient in essential nutrients and directly causes many long-term conditions that destroy our health. About 1 on a score to 10 would be generous, despite all the marketing hype — because of all the marketing hype.
The food chain destroys its own foundations and it destroys its “customers”. It also does things that we might not realise are connected. The soil largely controls the propensity for floods downstream, something that is increasingly destructive. The soil largely controls the damage done by wildfires, again massively prevalent recently. The soil controls the mechanisms for local cooling of the environment, something that is pressing while global warming continues. Corporate farming methods seriously undermine social structures and cohesion, producing displacement and poverty. The Clearances and Enclosure[1] are still with us. Why?
Don’t forget either that some high proportion (30%?) of food in the supply chain goes to waste. In an ecosystem nothing is wasted, everything is recycled. Our previous food systems where many people had chickens, a pig, and a small vegetable plot had far lower levels of waste; close to zero.
The pandemic shows the connections to human health at a population level. People with metabolic syndrome (most of us) are more prone to infection, become more seriously ill, and are infectious to other people for longer. There are so many items on this list that we cannot afford. . The official list of “underlying conditions” doesn’t get close to the underlying reasons.
So, the next time someone tries to tell you that we need “efficient” agriculture, meaning patterns of combine harvesters in huge fields dependent on artificial fertilisers and a range of biocides, you are entitled to snigger. Such ignorance and “efficiency” are literally unaffordable in the medium-term of a few years. As ever in our economic theory it is simply a matter of who pays the price, of who gets to field the unavoidable costs that the supply chain has externalised and shuffled off. Criminal, nothing less.
Local effects
There is a fine chap who runs his sheep on our fields here. He does many jobs simultaneously for local farmers and friends. We have spoken about us consuming some of the lambs that he raises. I want hoggets (slightly older than lambs) with lots of fat on. You will find when they are open again that this is the demand also of top London restaurants and their chefs. When Hywel takes his lambs to market however he is “hammered” if they are fat. Even with my own personal supplier I am struggling to acquire healthy meat with lots of fat.
For an even more extreme anecdote, while talking to Hywel about these matters he mentioned that he had had to put down a beef cow that had injured its back. This cow apparently had a great deal of fat around its kidneys. Hywel had just thrown it away. Again, people who sell suet fat from grass fed cattle find they cannot keep up with demand. In the event Hywel arrived at our door with 20kg of fat in a piece that he had fished out of the rubbish.
I settled down to cut up and render down as much of this fat as I could manage. It made beautifully clear, sweet cooking fat that is far healthier than commercial alternatives. It is stable at room temperature and doesn’t smoke when frying at high temperatures. Just brilliant and not only free but valued negatively as a cost in the supply chain.
Part of the effect of the lockdown has been to allow local supply of this nature to emerge. People who find the shelves in Sainsburys empty find alternatives that they realise are cheaper, tastier and healthier.[2] This applies to meat, eggs, dairy, fruit and veg. There has been an explosion, too, of direct supply of veg boxes, meat, and cheese via courier.
Before any of the pandemic nonsense started, I spoke to the local butcher to find a cow for our freezer that was just how it should be: fat enough and in prime health. He took three weeks looking round his local suppliers for just the right animal, then it was slaughtered and hung for a month. I feel this is genuine consumer influence on production, bypassing all the distortion of “demand” in the supply chain.
Although this is anecdotal, I think many (rural) people’s experience is that good nutritious food is available cheaply or for free and that the expensive food that has been through the supply chain is neither healthy nor appetizing.[3] It is not even necessarily convenient or available in the present circumstances.
Of course, homegrown can be hard work. During the drought that I am hoping is finally ending today there was a lot of water to carry in order to help the fruit trees and bushes get established.
POSIWID again
The purpose of a system is what it does (Stafford Beer), so a supply chain system that wreaks such universal havoc must have a purpose elsewhere. Its purpose is to provide a massive and continuous flow of revenue to the big food corporations. We must be addicted to our food both physically and financially. We must see it as socially conventional, inescapable in its convenience, and cheap at the point of consumption. We must be thoroughly and completely hooked for life, even when we are aware of the destruction we are contributing to.
Shares in big food companies and supermarkets are a haven in times of recession for this very reason. We cannot avoid, or are convinced we cannot, our spend at Sainsburys. My premise in moving to a smallholding was to provide the grandchildren with food that is not like that, is not addictive and constricting and ultimately poisonous. That proves to be a very demanding project, to do real regeneration of an area of land to produce food that is actually nutritious, but it throws the alternative into very sharp relief. My POSIWID seems to be to discover why all the shortcuts in the food supply chain are destructive.
Given the POSIWID of the food supply chain, it can only externalise costs and damage. That IS its purpose. That is why we must recognise it is not about gradual reform against a set of values that think that the status quo is efficient and necessary to feed the world.
It is a POSIWID that has absolutely nothing to do with feeding people food that supports their health that means that the science will be corrupt. The science is not in support of the deeper truths so is corrupted before it even begins. Nutritional science is not even science at all.[4] Epidemiology of nutrition is at least 80% wrong with hindsight. No-one has got to grips with human societies that eat healthily in a way we do not recognise.
The bad science is legitimised by regulatory bodies that have been completely and irredeemably captured by corporate concerns. The recent process in the US to renew the guidelines has not managed to remove the strictures over saturated fats despite there being no evidence to support them. Regulation is there to provide air support for genocide. I got support for a tweet suggesting the experiment of abolishing Public Health England to see how long it took for the real science to recover.
After forty years of lies, the bad science is now even embedded in school curricula. Imagine having to give answers that you know in your own body to be wrong in order to get marks in an exam.[5]
Farming
I do farming, after a fashion, though it appears the locals regard it as “gardening” and call me the head gardener. Farming has been pushed into a notion of what the market wants, what efficiency is, and what there are government subsidies for, until it is divorced from any notion of how humans can be integrated into the ecosystem. The question of how we can play a sensitive and integrated role in local ecosystems is still largely to be tackled, though there is plenty of evidence from regenerative agriculture that ecosystems can recover from their damaged state and start to show promise of harmony.
Everything in nature can be regarded as farming. A plant can be seen as an algal organism that has learnt how to farm fungi. Many insects farm plants and even other insects. The human version of farming was destructive from the start: destructive of human health, destructive of social structures, destructive of the soil. There are, and more so were, hunter-gatherer tribes that farm forests much more subtly, so that we typically do not recognise it as farming. For instance, in the Amazon forest, tracks over huge distances that we cannot even see are marked by food trees that have been planted along the way: trees that belong there but have been persuaded to support culture.
Precisely because we can’t see these systems and their interdependence, we think we can source food without consequences. We think we can destroy soil fungi by ploughing and the soil will still be fertile. We think we can dump artificial fertilisers on the soil to get a flush of growth without harming the real fertility mechanisms. We think we can destroy insects for our convenience, affect the climate, and expect everything to work as it did. That is the implication of regarding the supply chain and meeting customer demand.
If you listen to supermarket spokespeople when they are challenged about what supermarkets sell, they always say they respond to customer demand. Customers get the blame for the food they eat that makes them ill. That is the significance of the current situation when other food in other circumstances becomes available. Just like we have all noticed that the air is so much cleaner and clearer when there are fewer cars, so we could notice that people do better when they do not shop in supermarkets. We won’t even ask the question of course.
For whose benefit?
If people want to eat healthy food, they have to be able to actually demand it and to stick to their demands. That implies having institutions that actually work for them rather than being subverted. That implies being able to check out the science for bias and corruption. As a first approximation I can demand, or even produce for myself, food from regenerative agriculture. The opposite of the argument in this blog that all the nasty “unintended” consequences of the supply chain are because of its POSIWID is that a supply chain based on the principle that ecosystems should recover when things are done tolerably right will produce healthy food.
If current public institutions work against our own interests, make us ill rather than healthy, then we need enough independence of evidence and science to find a path that avoids their advice and, in the end, produces a different sort of supply chain altogether.
[1] https://www.fff.org/explore-freedom/article/enclosure-acts-industrial-revolution/
[2] Here in London, I’ve lost count of the people who’ve told me that they’ve recently discovered their local butcher…
[3] One of Philip’s uncles is a Welsh sheep farmer who was mortified at a charity’s dinner event to be served over-small over-cooked portions of non-local lamb
[4] We’ve written about real science before, as distinct from the bad science of increasingly precise ‘experiments’ about increasingly irrelevant sub-topics that have been carefully isolated from anything that really matters.
[5] This, in turn, is why we can’t hire university students as interns or junior consultants; in order to be effective participants in our work, they’d have unlearn their thinking such that they’d struggle to pass the exams that they still believe to be relevant…
We, as do several of our professional colleagues, prefer to hire people with the ‘wrong’ backgrounds who don’t have to do quite as much unlearning in order to participate in relatively real work
