To food labels, and beyond!

 The below is one I posted last night, in response to an Hereford Times reader's letter response to the HT's 'Buy British' campaign.

Hereford Times: It's apple season,
so let's buy British!

Dear Letters Editor

Writing regarding the importance of buying locally sourced food, Elizabeth Gwynne points out that packaging of th supposedly ‘farm fresh’ produce for a cauliflower she bought in a country shop was labelled ‘Country of Origin: Poland’ and notes, “Presumably the wages of those working on the land there, producing mushrooms, are so low that despite the costs of flight etc, the UK business people can still retail at a profit.” (Letters, October 15.)

Julian Day Rose’s book ‘In Deference of Life’ gives a detailed analysis of such trading practices with a special focus on Poland. Before Poland exited the Warsaw Pact, Polish farming served local communities, yet Poland’s debt crisis on exiting the Soviet empire led to a restructuring of the Polish economy. 'Structural adjustment’ directives of the International Monetary Fund, and the ‘bail out’ terms of the World Bank and European Central Bank and their economic principles were culpable. A reviewer writes: “Rose is critical of Europe’s subsidy system and the way it pays per hectare regardless of farm size, favouring big farms. He goes to the heart of what it means for farmers on Europe’s new industrial frontier – Poland – describing his personal battles to stop small farmers there being driven out of business...

"Whilst no fan of Europe, he is equally critical of the UK which 'thinks it clever to copy the United States' he says, and 'apply Ford motor company principles to the management of sentient livestock.'"(1)

A reason there are so many Polish workers in the UK, as a Social Researcher and ‘critical friend’ of the EU told me, is basically because of what the West did to the Polish economy as it leapt to the West.

Yet there is or was more hope for a small-scale and local future for farming in the UK by remaining in the EU than by the vulnerability associated with Brexit, a nonproportional electoral system and ‘"whatever next?" terms and conditions’ — especially post Covid-19 lockdown! The Head of the World Bank now says, “[P]eople, even the world’s poorest and most destitute, are required to pay their government’s debts as long as creditors pursue claims.. In the worst cases, it’s the modern equivalent of debtor’s prison.” As Nick Dearden of Global Justice Now writes: "If the head of the World Bank can call the global financial system a ‘debtors’ prison’ anything is possible."(2)

I believe international co-operation and democratic transformation from within trading blocs is key.

Alan Raymond Wheatley
Notes
(1) https://www.ciwf.org.uk/philip-lymbery/blog/2015/05/book-review-in-defence-of-life-by-julian-day-rose
(2)  https://newint.org/features/2020/10/14/official-global-economy-debtors-prison

Is "100 per cent British beef" really 100 per cent British?

Is "100% British beef" really low in food miles? slide show

.... academics, policy makers and businesses increasingly consider a shift towards so-called “plant-based” diets which principally require less land, energy, and other resources.

Why exactly is that so? Whilst meat’s, less so dairy’s, high environmental impact has received some public attention, rarely the biophysical reasons for it are made explicit. Essentially, in the production of all animal-sourced foods that involve the metabolism of an animal, energy is lost and emitted to the environment. Rather than electricity or fuels, energy here means the nutritional energy within the plants eaten by animals that in turn produce or become food. The feed conversion ratio puts the feed input in relation to the food output. Raising and slaughtering cattle for beef, for example, requires about 18kg of feed for 1kg of yielded meat; 4kg/1kg for pork; 2kg/1kg for chicken (de Ruiter et al. 2017). Based in the laws of thermodynamics, this poor energetic efficiency is to an extent improvable but ultimately inevitable whenever animate beings, who by moving and maintaining body heat use energy, grow the tissue that becomes food for another animate being. Thus, via an additional body, animal-sourced foods are an energetic detour in comparison to the energetic shortcut of so-called “plant-based” diets in which humans eat plants directly.

The physical necessity of feed conversion losses not only means that meat and dairy too are based on plants (in form of feed crops), but that base of plants is also much greater than what is required for direct human consumption of plants. Thus, by focussing only on the consumption end, the conventional use of the term “plant-based” falls short of conveying the plant-intensive (and thus energy- and land-intensive) materiality of animal-sourced foods. That term we use to describe our food, as much in academia as in everyday life, only scratches the surface of the materiality of production, and I contend that so does our mindfulness of why meat and dairy play a major role in mass extinction and climate breakdown....

Source: https://discoversociety.org/2019/08/07/all-food-is-plant-based-particularly-meat-and-dairy/

 See also