The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People

“food and farming, industries now intimately connected in some places with tourism, are caught in the endless tension between their reality and their representation.”

“As soon as a region becomes celebrated for its food, gastrotourism accelerates its gentrification.”

“The products are real but the stories that surround them – the autochthonous peasant economy, the weathered subsistence among woods and meadows – are vitiated by their telling.”

“The money generated by the myth of timelessness draws local people away from the sparse living the labels revere.”

“To seek to reverse such economies of scale is not a relaxation into a “simpler” mode, but a conscious and frantic race against entropy. Fair play to those who succeed! We need, among others, small local producers, ideally using new forms of high-yield agroecology. But it’s not for the faint-hearted. They are running up the down escalator, and it accelerates every year.”

“What we now fetishise as “peasant food” is much richer and more diverse than the food peasants would once have eaten, except, perhaps, on feast days.”

“Many of the “traditional” ingredients considered essential to the cuisine – such as tomatoes in Italy or peppers in Spain – were unknown until surprisingly recently to those whose diets we claim to honour.”

“We benefit above all from a different legacy: the marvel of the past 50 years of falling hunger during a time of rising population, a marvel we in the rich world scarcely acknowledge, so comfortable has it made us. This remarkable phenomenon was widely considered, just 60 or 70 years ago, simply impossible.”

“three things upon which I think we can all agree.”

“that this marvel came at a great environmental cost.”

“that it also involved severe social and political dislocations, including land-grabbing, enclosures and rising corporate power and concentration.”

“that it might now be running out of road”

“how we can feed a population likely to rise to 9 or 10 billion by the middle of the century before starting to decline, reliably, equitably and at a much lower environmental cost.”

“how we might feed the world without devouring the planet”

“There are, as I found, plenty of possible ways forward. But there are no ways backward.”

“In 2023, a world of 8.1 billion people suffers far less hunger and famine than the world of 3.2 billion did in 1963, the year of my birth.”

“There are several reasons, but let me dwell on two of the crucial ones.”

“One is the much greater availability of food per person.”

“Another is the long-distance transport of food, something that many of us have railed against, but which, for all its downsides, makes an essential contribution to falling rates of hunger.”

“Returning to earlier modes of subsistence is a formula for global catastrophe on a scale that defies imagination.”

“the romantic story of how food “should” be produced is entirely qualitative.”

“It is the great indulgence of those who never miss a meal to celebrate the times and modes in which people missed plenty.”

“I thought I had seen it all: the full gamut of cruel fantasies which privilege bucolic comfort zones above global necessities. But this was before I read the new book by Chris Smaje, a small farmer and writer with an academic background, called Saying No to a Farm-Free Future”

“It promotes what appears to be a recipe for mass global starvation.”

“Though his book is framed as an attack on my book Regenesis and, more broadly, on me, I’m glad he has written it. It is highly instructive.”

“If you believe that enough food should be grown to feed everyone, you are also guilty of “productivism”, “consumerism”, even “colonialism”.”

“a certain number of people requires a certain amount of food, and this food has both to be produced and to reach those who need it. If there’s not enough food, or it’s not accessible and affordable to everyone, people will starve.”

“One of the reasons why high yields ensure that more people can be fed is that more supply reduces the price of food, making it more accessible to the poor. Chris flatly rejects this reasoning. He asserts that “Low food prices, high yields and overproduction are absolutely at the root of food system problems, including global poverty and hunger.” He then goes on to make two statements that left my jaw on the floor:

Lower food prices are “the last thing the global poor need. The result is usually more poverty, more hunger”.

and

“Higher food prices might alleviate hunger globally”.”

“they are asserted without justification.”

“Yes, the problem is poverty: a gross maldistribution of wealth. Yes, this maldistribution urgently needs to be addressed, which is why we need political and economic change, not just new technologies. But while I have seen no evidence (and Chris provides none) that higher food prices alleviate global hunger, there is a wealth of evidence that they exacerbate it.”

“who, in this world of “self-provisioning” and “repeasantised” commercial farmers, will feed those who do not feed themselves?”

“Most of the places where large numbers of people live do not have sufficient fertile land nearby to support them. A paper in the journal Nature Food found that only a quarter of the world’s people could be fed with staple grain crops grown within 100 kilometres of where they live.”

“The average minimum distance at which the world’s people can be supplied with staple foods, it found, is 2,200 kilometres. Much of the world’s food is grown in vast, lightly-habited lands (US plains, Canadian prairies, Russian steppes etc) and shipped to tight, densely-populated places.”

“These are the numbers to which people of Chris’s persuasion most furiously object, even though they have no answer to them. Why? Because the numbers are incompatible with their worldview.”

“while agrarian localism might be great as far as it goes, it simply cannot, by itself, meet the challenge of feeding the world.”

“Discussing his own, proudly low-yield production of wheat and potatoes, Chris states:

“there’s no point labouring for next to nothing on someone else’s behalf when you’ve already grown enough to eat for yourself.””

“This is why farmers who do not share his worldview pursue higher yields: these yields make it economically worthwhile to produce staple foods that can be sold to other people. We should thank our lucky stars for such people.”

“It is true that cities rely on unsustainable and exploitative models of extraction, consumption and dumping. But this applies to the economy as a whole, urban or otherwise.”

“The answer, I believe, is not to rain curses on them and their people, but to replace the destructive economic models with systems in which everyone’s needs are met without breaching planetary boundaries.”

““private sufficiency, public luxury””

“When your solution is societal collapse, you should ask yourself some hard questions about what you are trying to solve.”

“I guess there’s a small consolation here: that Chris might have given up on the idea that his xià xiā**ng – the mass migration to the countryside he envisages – will happen voluntarily.”

“most people have no particular desire to have to grow their own food and fibre, make their own clothes and build their own shelters.”

“he now appears to believe that urban people will be forced by catastrophe to leave the cities and succumb to “re-ruralisation” and “repeasantisation””

“How mild and gentle he makes it sound! Refugees from the cities “spreading themselves out in the landscape”, “producing a modest livelihood from the local ecological base.””

“If history is any guide, this is not quite how it’s likely to pan out. The more probable outcomes of societal collapse include warlordism or full-scale war, coercion, fascism, slavery, disease, starvation and mass death.”

“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.”

“Whether there is enough food and everyone can afford to eat is, Chris says, a “secondary goal”. This is because it doesn’t “speak to the mysteries and passions of what animates human (or non-human) life”, which Chris describes as our “primary goals”.”

“There is now a wide movement, some of whose leading figures are quoted on or in Chris’s book, that prioritises its mysteries and passions above other people’s survival to the point at which it promotes the idea of “withdrawing” and “walking away” from the effort to prevent Earth systems collapse.”

“But there is no “away” to walk to.”

“Ecological and social collapse will find us, wherever we go. What some people can escape is the shared responsibility for facing our multiple crises, and our duty of care towards others.”

“The acceptance of – sometimes apparent longing for – collapse is among the greatest self-indulgences in human history.”

“we have no right to grant ourselves this indulgence.”

“Given that rich nations and wealthy people are primarily responsible for the planetary dysbiosis we all face, including the massive burdens the food system imposes on the living world, we all have a duty to engage.”

“Engaging means valuing the lives of others as we value our own. Living on this planet, especially as a member of a privileged society, our lives are intimately bound with the lives of others, including those who live thousands of miles away. We cannot excuse ourselves from the responsibilities we owe to each other.”

“Our aim should be not to use societal collapse as a tool to shape the world to our tastes, but to seek to avert societal collapse.”

“The answers, contradictory, incomplete and inadequate as they will always be, will be social, political, economic, organisational and technological.”