WATCH: The Future of Food
We all know the problems of the modern factory farming system. But, as bad as things are, they’re about to get even worse. New technologies are coming online that threaten to upend our understanding of food altogether. Technologies that could, ultimately, begin altering the human species itself. This is The Future of Food on The Corbett Report.
For sources, download options and a full transcript, click HERE.
SUPPORT OFFGUARDIAN
If you enjoy OffG's content, please help us make our monthly fund-raising goal and keep the site alive.
For other ways to donate, including direct-transfer bank details click HERE.
I find it astonishing and sad that apparently people are STILL eating soya protein based meat substitutes. I thought it is understood by now that it feminises men…. they are called soy boys for a reason…
I remember this shit (surplus from massive plantations originally for feeding cattle!!) was pushed as a vegetarian option to the non-parliamentary left and anarchist/ punk/ hippy student scenes back in the late 80s, along with kibbutz (on ethnically cleansed land) being passed off as socialist utopias with people encouraged to visit.
Of course “soya protein” is not like tofu, which is easily made with water. The soya protein found in vegetarian junk food is extracted from the beans with petrochemical solvents.
The best way to reduce carbon is to wipe the globalists and their enablers…
I think TPTB already figured that out. The Guidestones says down to 500 mio. anti-globalists. So you are in the right club Paul.
The “guidestones” are no more 🙂
You are smiling and think we are all saved? Not!! We still have the problem with the 7,5 billion globalist.
If you’ve eaten in a pub in the last few years you’ll understand part of the problem, ‘percieved value’
The other day, i ate in a pub with some friends. £17.50 for pie and chips with a bit of veg and runny gravy. The fish and chips was £18. Fish dishes started at £21
Desserts were a flat £8 for your choice of a spoonfull of ice-cream – any flavour you want !
Now, this wasn’t a particularly posh pub and the food was below average.
The thing is; everyone thought it was marvelous and “That’s the going rate”
Well, it shouldn’t be the going rate and until a few years ago I would have complained.
I had quite a reputation as a serial complainer but now I’m out of step so I just enjoy the company and pay up through gritted teeth.
I should add that I do show appreciation for quality food and service.
Whilst people are happy to pay over the odds and accept sub standard fare, it will continue.
(And they left a bloody tip ! )
Most pubs still surviving had to rebrand themselves as gastropubs. The problem is that the food quality does not always match up to the word “gastro”
There is a much greater margin (around 3 times costs) on food than the paltry margins on selling booze. Around 25% of pubs in UK have closed since year 2000, that is approx.13,000.
50 pubs a week are still closing now. High business rates, exorbitant electricity and gas bills add to the problem of cheap supermarket booze keeping punters at home.
The lockdowns were another nail in the hospitality sector’s coffin, with pubs being the worst hit.
Unfortunately, the plan to destroy independent businesses and kill off socialising outside of the four walls of the home in the15 minute ghettos has made great strides forwards so far.
Most don’t have a fully trained Chef either.
Take some of these chain theme restaurants and watch the cook wander to the fridge to pull out a factory made ready meal, open it, and toss it around in a pan, or microwave it. Not that anyone takes much notice of the value you aren’t really getting as long as it has a few leaves on the side of the plate to make the slop look pretty. It’s all about the presentation.
Even in 15-minute ghettos, expect to be ordered indoors to “protect yourself” from pollution, insects, accidents, crime, etc.
I would assume we are being “Amazon’ed” or “Bezo’ed”.
Drones are coming to our single Smart holes with chips and ketchup paid back with an Iphone QR code.
What is the American equivalent to the British word “bloody”. Are Americans allowed to use the term “bloody”. Just wondering. Have wondered for, at least, 50 years.
erm, ‘fcking’ . Its not deep. Sorry, it’s not bloody deep. I mean it’s not fcking deep.
Its FOKKING.
New rules on registering poultry are coming into force this year and backyard birdkeepers will need to officially register their flock regardless of the number.
Previously, only people with more than 50 birds were required to register, but the new measures announced by Defra has reduced this to anyone with just one bird.
Defra consulted on the changes in March last year and has this week announced that the government, along with the devolved administrations, has agreed to make the following changes in England, Wales and Scotland:
https://www.countrysideonline.co.uk/articles/new-rules-for-all-poultry-keepers/
The solution to this problem is?
Don’t comply.
If enough private individuals ignored such petty diktats, they would be unenforceable.
If some council jobsworth fuckwit comes a knocking at the door, don’t allow them in.
If people don’t start growing a pair soon, then it will game over.
Take a walk down lonely street. There’s more people who’d grass you up than would join you when the axe comes down. They’d think you were endangering the public health, the governors are using a powerful brand of brain detergent; remember the pantodemic?
So far your solution has worked for me (in Germany). I’ve had six chickens in my backyard for the last 12 years. I’ve never registered them and no official ever cared. The eggs are lovely.
Brilliant news. Let’s hope more people join you ignoring these tinpot tyrants.
Enjoy the eggs!
Good luck with that. They have an army of trading standards clipboard warrior jobsworths with nothing better to do than make your life a misery.
~A year ago a local farm got tested, so they imposed a 3 mile exclusion zone which we live within, first I knew about it was 2 clipboard warriors in my garden, I declined to register (under 50 birds) so got a 40min lecture on the rules with threats of £1000 fines for non compliance, then I got the same lecture from the AHPA on a 40min phone call, now I get on average one email a week from the AHPA notifying me of every outbreak from bird flu to blue tongue disease anywhere in the country, so it seems I got registered even tho I declined to register.
Not enough people keep chucks to have a critical mass for non compliance, nobody cares about your dying on this hill, lots of busy bodies care about killing you on this hill.
Pick your fights wisely, this one ain’t it IMO, tho it’s easy to sit in the peanut gallery talking a good fight about it when it doesn’t effect you personally.
Will they start using drones to find people’s coops?
How can they grow a pair when they are already sterilised?
All chickens must be vaccinated against bird flue. Otherwise they will be requested to wear masks, quarantined and lock downed.
Chickens will afterwards be suffering from Long bird flue and will demand the public sector’s attention and treatment.
“Join the discussion”? I would if I could.
Formulating our own plan for counteracting the “great food reset agenda” means understanding said agenda in a more balanced way than presented here. By way of context: soil exhaustion is a long-term problem extant from at least the early nineteenth century. The lack of fertility due to intensive monocropping—without replacement of nutrients or rotation—led to the Napoleonic battlefields being harvested for bonemeal, and later the importation of nutrients from the Peruvian guano trade. If soil depletion was a problem then, how much more so now after more than 200 years of increasingly intensive farming?
In the meantime, a temporary solution was found—the Haber-Bosch process. This means we can replace lost organic nutrients with synthetic ones in ever greater quantities…. So much so that synthetic ammonia is one of the four “pillars of civilisation” transforming the physiology of the earth and our bodies. At one food calorie per ten fuel calories—just in production—we are what we eat… oil. Hydrocarbons indirectly form a major part of our diets, along with synthetic nitrogen and >80,000 other ecotoxicological ‘novel entities’ we release, some of which will bioaccumulate forever as a xenobiotic physiology. Disruption of the gut microbiome, metabolic syndrome, and the numerous “diseases of civilisation” are just some of the symptoms of long-term food chain instability, despoilation and degeneration over the last ~200y.
So the “cost of living crisis” is the “cost of hydrocarbon crisis”. The cost of oil has more than doubled in the last two years and the “fertiliser crisis” is due to the embedded cost of gas (or should that be gaslighting?) making the Haber-Bosch process ever more inefficient. The key drivers of food inflation are in the underlying decrease, degeneration and dissipation of cheap hydrocarbons, the rising cost of manufacture and transport and so on which are all embedded in the food we eat. The war in Ukraine and corporate profiteering are not the main factors—hydrocarbon depletion is.
This affects not just agriculture, but industry and inevitably wages are decreasing as all other costs are increasing due to the same underlying factors. It is a vicious degenerative cycle and highly energy intensive biotechnology is not going to replace depletion, only further exacerbate the degenerative ecologic cycle. If we cannot keep increasing synthetic fertility, we cannot grow anything much at all… let alone harvest, transport, and process foodstuffs “just-in-time”. As the energy costs of production increase profitability decreases and profiteering breeds unrest. It is a fairly simple synergy of factors nobody bothered to grasp, or we could have avoided the worst case scenario of our own making. The only solution is in healthy soil, not unhealthy oil. We really are what we eat and embed in energy as embodiment.
Which brings me back to the self-incurred scenario the UK faces. We have insufficient landmass to feed or fuel 67m people without supplemental supply from abroad. Without our embodied energetic imperialism, even if we could grow enough food, we could not use the same land for fueling us with biomass in the Winter. The local future of food is “Feed or Freeze” as a “Hobson’s Arse” election of choice. What we are probably not going to do is stop blaming others for the consumer choices we and previous generations have made over recent centuries and actually take the future of food production into our own hands. Even though it did make quite a nice soundbite.
The UK really is facing an existential crisis, but not just in food and fuel sovereignty, but in food and fuel sufficiency…. Which nobody wants to think about. Unlike Norway, we gave away our North Sea reserves and did not form a sovereign wealth fund for the future. As hydrocarbon reserves will deplete even further: the good news is that there will be no lab-grown meat or bugs to eat. The bad news is that there may not be anything to eat at all.
Food and fuel inflation means wage deflation, add to that the rising rents and spiralling embedded energy costs…. It’s probably easier to blame someone else rather than contemplate radical self-empowerment and taking back food and fuel control throughout degrowth and relocalised understanding.
I suspect the course of action we will actually take is to ignore the real problem and mock ze eat ze bugs agenda whilst we can. Which will lead from a degenerative Haber-Bosch clear and present endangerment to a fullblown Heironymous Bosch futurity of our own energetic appetivity. Only this crisis is not a simulation.
We? We’ve got to take back the country or die. The first job is to realise that whoever creates the money runs the show. While the flim flam money monkeys can buy anything and everything we can’t do a thing. It’s that simple. Then it’s going to be hideous but not hopeless. Whatever happens there’s going to be a lot less people to feed.
‘We’ are embedded in a planetary economy that is totally reliant on hydrocarbon power-density. ‘Money’ is therefore a claim on future energetic and material social reproduction at the species scale. ‘We’ are “strip-mining” the soil we need for future food production using hydrocarbon fueled mechanical technologies and compensating for the erosion of fertility with hydrocarbon feed in the form of synthetic fertiliser. Ignoring the depletion, degeneration, dissipation and eventual dissolution of soil fertility has been going on for centuries. ‘Our’ consumer habits are eroding the future, not just of food production, but potentially of life itself.
That money creation involves our wages too, and therefore our consumer choices are part of a degenerative network of intensive food production, cash crop expropriation, habitat destruction, and general expropriation of all fertility without replacement, replenishment or fair exchange. This is why socio-ecologic metabolism is the necessary form of analysis: of the real social relations of how ‘we’ metabolise ‘our’ bodies as tertiary economies the soil and the rest of humanity can no longer afford.
A broader market anthropological analysis would have to go back to when ‘they’ decided that the biocapacity of the earth was not enough for market economics (the “ecology-free market”)… but that was more than two hundred years ago. Since when, ‘we’ have been involved in expropriative social relations with the soil, other People’s land, ‘their’ resources and ‘their’ labour which ‘we’ incorporate literally as embodiment and embeddedment in extractive and extreme despoilation of all fertility as corporeal reality.
Extreme poverty and extreme fertility exhaustion are literally in our hands to take or give back as ‘we’ see fit (physically manifested as our hands… manus = hand).
If we stop taking from the rest of the world they will no longer be poor. If we replenish the soil with less intensive eco-agriculture (or agro-ecology) then the soil will not be depleted or impoverished any further. If we act quickly, we may just avoid the inevitable dieback we are heading for as a self incurred matter of bad and ecologically blind choice.
It is and has always been that simple. We can choose less exploitative means of production but we refused and refuse to radically empower ourselves to do so. Ecological evolution is ours to choose. Which, in a highly qualified manner, was the moral of the video.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernozem
Kill Gates and other parasites have been buying land there…
I’m ashamed to say I shop on price.
I don’t feel as bad as I should, though, because I see everyone else in the supermarket comparing prices and putting back the more expensive option.
So that’s ok then.
If I had unlimited funds would I care more ?
Yes. I know that I would get better quality and probably enjoy it more if I spent a bit extra.
The thing is, cheap food is now normal.
There’s plenty of food that should be cheap (depending on location, season etc). The controllers love the phrase “cheap food” because it implies that it’s somehow an aberration.
If quality means fruit and veg that look better – e.g., have fewer spots – that comes from heavy use of agro-chemicals, green-houses, etc. Good luck to the wealthy.
Mike Stone, of ‘Viroliegy’ , answers The Question
“How many chooks in a flock have to be “infected” by
Bird Flu for the entire flock to be put down ?
‘Only One’, says Mike,
‘Only One !!’
https://viroliegy.com/2024/06/14/the-culling/
Mike also mentions ‘The detection of H5 viruses in one person in
the United States”…
Only one Person !
So shouldnt the Rule
“What’s good for the goose is good for the gander !” apply !!
So just ONE bird has to have the ‘flu’ for “an outbreak” of ‘bird flu’ to be declared ?
Just ONE !!
Doesn’t even need to have it, just test positive. I still hear of folk testing positive for covid. Dumb cunts and PCR tests are made for each other.
“having it” and “testing positive” are one in the same. As in, based on absolutely nothing. Just the same as all the idiots around me at work who seem to be constantly, chronically sick all the time.
If the work is indoors, they say the building is sick, not the cost-cutting sicko who will not get the air-conditioners serviced when the site is closed.
This double-talk reminds me of exhortations to seek “work-life balance”, never mind that many are struggling with extra hours or additional jobs to make ends meet.
This is a simple way punish a farmer who stood up to a bureaucrat.
Making a crisis out of thin air, again. Are “Climate”, “Viruses”, “Terrorists”or “Russia” not enough to freak you out?
You chose your own food and its quantities. Buy non-processed produce and wash it. With present food people become 100 years old – enough for the present state of consciousness. You will get a next life, as you have had already many times in many different places.
In a Cashless Economy,
“Digital money gives government control of your purse-strings.” … (anon) …
“And from our digital cages we wondered what are lives might have been like had we just used cash”
Noam’s unwell;
https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/06/a-message-about-noam-chomsky-an-update/
Old age (95), or his vehement, almost violent stance on vaccines?
Just sayin.
David Talbot, author of ‘The Devil’s Chessboard’, suffered a stroke last week.
A man reap what he sows. Challenging the devil dont go unpunished.
Many years ago I read “Manufacturing Consent” by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman. My first reactions were to praise these two authors for their “exposé” of the media propaganda machine and its mechanisms and purpose. It gave me the insight I was looking for to better discern the information or disinformation that was being broadcast via the so called “news” at the time via newspapers, radio and tv etc.
Years latter I was shocked by Chomsky’s stance and wholesale regurgitation of the official story of 9/11. I decided to reread “Manufacturing Consent” in an attempt to understand how Chomsky could veer so far from his own doctrine. My conclusion was that “Manufacturing Consent” was not an “exposé” but rather a training manual for the cogs in the propaganda machine.
FWIW, Chomsky’s response to the 9/11 events was also an eye-opener for me. Then, in 2008 or so, I read James Douglass’s justly praised JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters. Hitherto, I had “sensibly” avoided, or declined to pursue, the topic of JFK assassination and its vast “rabbit hole” of Sphere of Deviance research.
Only then did I discover that in the aftermath of the assassination, Chomsky had also taken essentially a “nothing to see here, move along” stance toward the JFK killing; he declined to critique the bogus Warren Commission report, and as with 9/11 superciliously discouraged righteous skeptics seeking the truth of the matter. This was news to me– bad news.
I can’t remember the source, but someone reacted negatively to Chomsky’s vexing stance by observing that brilliant thinkers create brilliant rationalizations; I came to refer to Chomsky’s sophistical trutherphobic arguments as “Chomsky Bubbles”.
I’d pondered over the curious “dog that didn’t bark in the night” circumstance of Chomsky, ostensibly an expert on “manufacturing consent”, somehow refusing to call out and analyze the most extensive and comprehensive postwar media cover-up in the US. When I investigated further, it finally became clear to me that although Chomsky may be a trenchant critic of “manufacturing consent”, he wasn’t above manufacturing some consent himself when crowded by circumstances.
Consider this an independent concurring opinion. 🤨
In hind sight many of Chomsky’s published works on foreign policy are just self-plagiarized clones which I can only speculate that he wrote to appear to stay relevant and for the obvious monetary incentive to do so.
A bit like Marx – a lot he said was true, but when you consider what he didn’t say…..
Chomsky remains a true beacon for Zionism’s left pillar. Thankfully his light is finally diminishing.
The old 5D chess hey?
Manufacturing assent for the ‘unbelievers’.
Cheers Johnny! Thanks for all your insightful and thought provoking commentary.
Long may you run.
From one busker to another.
“Never let a serious crisis go to waste”
Words from one of Obama’s $uiturd$.
More here:
https://brownstone.org/articles/their-strategy-in-the-war-on-food/
“Life is not a predatory jungle, ‘red in tooth and claw,’ as Westerners like to pretend, but is better understood as a symphony of mutual respect in which each player has a specific part to play. We must be in our proper place and we must play our role at the proper moment. So far as humans are concerned, because we came last, we are the ‘younger brothers’ of the other life-forms, and therefore have to learn everything from these other creatures.”
— Vine Deloria, Jr.
Where Does Your Food Come From?
“One small question that could save the world.” Max Wilbert
https://maxwilbert.substack.com/p/where-does-your-food-come-from
UPDATE: Fire destroys Covered Bridge Potato Chip in Hartland
https://rivervalleysun.ca/breaking-news-covered-bridge-potato-chip-plant-on-fire/
First Canadian-grown genetically modified Atlantic salmon being harvested and sold
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-first-canadian-grown-genetically-modified-atlantic-salmon-being/
But… but… sentience!
The New Age has been pushing sentience for half a century and has got many people (mostly well-intentioned) to accept it as part of their “common sense”, something they unthinkingly accept.
Since this started, ample evidence has emerged that insects and plants are sentient to which they react with the denial and sometimes anger typical of cognitive dissonance.
The crucial divide is not around sentience but around reason and a sense of death (you know, like practically all humanity said it was for centuries). Animals feel pain and fear so there’s no excuse for cruelty but they have no concept of death, this belongs to humanity alone. Some would try to paint that statement as one of arrogance and will-to-power but it’s rather one that brings great responsibility and it’s that some people would like to avoid given our encouraged childishness.
“A migrant worker’s child sleeps on a highway in locked-down New Delhi, India, March 29, 2020. On March 30 2020, 8 year-old Rakesh Musahar died of hunger as his family struggled to make ends meet during the lockdown. Rakesh hailed from the Mahadalit Musahar community. He was a ragpicker & sold junk in the market. His father Durga Prasad Musahar was a porter. Rakesh died on Mar 26. His family waited for several hours for local admin. officials to come & make arrangements. However, nobody arrived. Dejected, Durga Prasad & a few other locals finally carried the boy’s body on a cart and cremated him.” [Source] REUTERS – Adnan Abidi
LOCKDOWN THERAPY FOR CAPITALISM
https://www.wrongkindofgreen.org/2020/04/23/lockdown-therapy-for-capitalism/
The war against nature is futile.” Bittu Saggal
Interview with Bittu Sahgal https://derrickjensen.org/2018/07/bittu-sahgal-resistance-radio/
Even Wilderness is Not Safe
https://maxwilbert.substack.com/p/even-wilderness-is-not-safe
The world needs India to avert climate catastrophe. Can Modi deliver?
https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/07/india/india-climate-change-efforts-cop27-intl-hnk/index.html
The majority of people seem to be concerned with what is in their food. A few may be concerned with what is not in their food but they don’t know the root cause of the problem. I like William Albrect’s explanation in that “Food is fabricated soil fertility”.
This guy is new but i already like him more than Corbett because there is no talking head, just the info.
https://www.youtube.com/@eyes_wideopen
Your new too but
I don’t like much if anything I read in the Newspapers now, and some of it is true…I will quote two disguting things I have read this week of covicted criminals re the lenghts of their sentences whether or not the two individuals were guilty…
They need people in their prisons to suck the public coffers.
What you write on the Internet, doesn’t really matter, if you write what you think is the truth, even if you haven’t learnt the art of précis durng your English Literature Class even if it is terminably boring such that the moderator immediately bins it…
I thank the Moderator.
Meanwhile, somwhere (possbly unz) I found a list of hits – which I think is probably true of Independent websites in league order of hits and page views…(unz is intermibably boring and most of his fabs are mad)
Off Guardian was well up there on people who read your blog…Nearly as many hits as Moon of Alabama, and well ahead of The Intercept
So well done Off-Guardian.
Moa really is a one man band, I wish Bernhard Hostsman well, Yes, I know he is German, and does war stuff, a bit like the Saker, who Resigned, probably because he wanted to live. He got covid wrong too, but he did post some of what I wrote, even when I said don’t get jabbed.
I know it really annoys most people, when I sign what I write ..but was I right?
Of course sometimes, I am wrong, but I try to be honest
Tony
Oh yes, The Saker. I remember him, he who said the Ukraine ‘war’ would be over in days. Giving a blow by blow account of Russia’s advance into Ukraine, then attempting to justify their subsequent stalling tactics and advance that became more of a retreat. Especially, the infamous tank column heading towards Kiev that suddenly stopped only kilometres outside of the city.
Previous to that, Saker banned anyone from commenting – and outright told his readership that he would do so – if they denied the existence of the big, bad Covid-1984. A real man of the people…not!
I think you are ok. Some comments have value.
Faker Saker introduced me to the real picture of Russia which I could follow up on in other relations.
But for me he turned up as one of those previous secret Intelligence employees who train in subversion of the public pretending he was now on Russia’s side (living in Florida) and now was on the resistance (controlled opposition’s) side. Not.
Buyer beware: pick your poison.
Trust big business to label truthfully? Trust regulators to ensure this? The same authorities who approve of various farm and factory poisons?
Reply gone pending.
Thanks for this.
Excellent comment sharing the info with my family and friends.
Life is stressful enough without constant politically motivated scare tactics with this madness in both the media’s with scaring us about food or scarcity of food.
Your driving in to cannibalism…
Let’s ‘Eat the rich’;
https://grammarusage.com/eat-the-rich/
Careful you might get gout or sepsis and possibly something worse. 🙂
What’s most stressful is getting het up about it but not doing anything about it.
The role of ‘stress’ is to tell you that something is wrong and you need to do something about it. In a well-functioning body, if you can’t do anything about the stressor, the body learns to adapt so you don’t get stressed out in future.
So your decision right now has to be whether to do something about your stressors or to come to accept that you can’t do anything, hence why stress?
Haarp vs.Var
Bet the cloud lifts for Varland, in a month, no ?
Scots drubbed, knew it would be 6, somehow
Heres a scots music god deriding conspiracies
Their Point being:
You think you’d riot
you think you’d cry
instead
you sit there, fucking Numb
because
They’ve got Your Attention…