Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t Dr. Willie Soon – According to British MP Michael Gove, cheap food damages the environment and encourages poor people to overeat.
True cost of cheap food is health and climate crises, says commission
Damian Carrington Environment editor
@dpcarrington
Tue 16 Jul 2019 06.00 BSTRadical change needed to make UK food and farming system sustainable within 10 years
The true cost of cheap, unhealthy food is a spiralling public health crisis and environmental destruction, according to a high-level commission. It said the UK’s food and farming system must be radically transformed and become sustainable within 10 years.
The commission’s report, which was welcomed by the environment secretary, Michael Gove, concluded that farmers must be enabled to shift from intensive farming to more organic and wildlife friendly production, raising livestock on grass and growing more nuts and pulses. It also said a National Nature Service should be created to give opportunities for young people to work in the countryside and, for example, tackle the climate crisis by planting trees or restoring peatlands.
“Our own health and the health of the land are inextricably intertwined [but] in the last 70 years, this relationship has been broken,” said the report, which was produced by leaders from farming, supermarket and food supply businesses, as well as health and environment groups, and involved conversations with thousands of rural inhabitants.
…
“Farmers are extraordinarily adaptable,” said Sue Pritchard, director of the RSA commission and an organic farmer in Wales. “We have to live with change every single day of our lives.
…
Gove said: “This report raises issues that are hugely important. We know that it is in the interests of farmers and landowners to move to a more sustainable model.” He added that the government’s agriculture bill would reward farmers with public money for public goods and a new “farm to fork” food review would look to ensure everyone had access to healthy British food.
The report was backed by Labour and the Liberal Democrats. The Green MP Caroline Lucas said: “This monumental report is a powerful and profound account of the ecological transformation of our food and farming system that we urgently need – and where we can start.”
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/16/true-cost-of-cheap-food-is-health-and-climate-crises-says-commission
I’m less than reassured by Gove’s promise that everyone will have enough to eat after he abolishes affordable food.
Green energy Britain has an atrocious record of helping people suffering fuel poverty. Occasionally even young people in Britain die because they missed a meal once too often to ensure their children are warm and have enough to eat.
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Michael Gove is in urgent need of a brain transplant but the NHS has failed him in this regard. The waiting list stretches into the next century.
The political classes in Britain have never been so obviously deluded and out of touch.
This isn’t just a problem for the Tories … I can’t remember the last time I heard anyone from the ruling party in Scotland. They just don’t seem to understand that many people like me are no longer watching programs nor viewing internet sites where these politicians appear (except as Josh cartoons).
As for ‘Cheap Food’….food in the UK already costs twice what food costs in Australia. Meat, Fruit, and vegetables are at least twice the price now, and the quality is better and fresher in Australia. Michael Gove should study the damage that socialism has done to the British way of life since WWII.
I wonder if that view depends on the exchange rate Nicholas Tesdorf?
The last few visits I was rather struck by how cheap most foodstuffs were compared with Australia!
I wonder what Jamie Oliver (famous British cook) would say about this?
Britain has come a long way from the Watford Gap (hit song about bad mororway grub).
It would be much better if the Cabinet Office recommended good cooking, yet Gov’t fingers in the dinner is not to be recommended – they have been counting loot at the greasy till.
I wouldn’t want Gove’s fingers anywhere. Odious little man.
Hopefully Boris will sort this Gove fellow out and give him his marching orders on half rations.
In france they did away with their kings and that was called regicide. Fathers = patricide, brothers = fratricide.
I’m sure Michael Gove should not be tinkering with the countryside.
Green austerity. It’s coming to a place near you. Just don’t expect the left to utter a word against it.
Until “sustainable” is clearly defined this means nothing.
Gove doesn’t have a clue.
I was going to end my comment since it speaks for itself but:
I’m a working class lad, never been wealthy and an ex-labour voter.
The whole idea that the sort of food people with my background eat is cheap is BS.
I’ve seen the queues outside the takeaways for fish and chips at £7 a pop or £28 for a family of 4. I’ve seen the shopping trolleys full of frozen pizzas at £5 a pop and the 6 pack of 2 litre coke that makes up the diet of people “like” me. Add 200 cigarettes and 24 packs of beer and you have a typical night in for a few people that I used know.
I’ve argued with people “like” me in the pub, explaining to them that they can eat cheaper if they just bought fresh food and actually did some cooking.
For example, a couple of pieces of salmon cost £3 from Sainsbury’s. Throw them in the oven for 15 mins of so with a bit of salt, pepper and lemon, add some veg and potatoes and you have a simple dinner for 2 for less than £5, and it’s not difficult.
Yeah, but that involves cooking they say.
They’re obese, I’m not.
According to the cardiologist, I have the heart of a 25 year old athlete.
But perhaps you are a 25 year old athlete, we don’t know 🙂
LMAO
I’m well into my sixth decade
Well said MangoChutney,
We have the same problem in New Zealand .
Obesity and other diseases caused by to much carbohydrates and sugar and lack of exercise and always alcohol and smokes that have to be purchased with the groceries.
As a general rule of thumb organic food production produces around half the output and people are prepared to pay more for organic food .
Forty years ago I recall a presentation from a professor at Lincoln University at a conference who gave a talk on organics versus normal food production and he said that the growing plant does not differentiate between phosphorus potassium or nitrogen from out of a bag or from a manure pile .
What is fed to animals can make a difference to their milk or meat but generally I would defy anyone to pick the difference in taste and nutrients between organic and normal food in a blind taste test.
Graham
A number of blind tastings have been performed to compare “organic” and traditionally-grown fruits and vegetables. To everyone’s surprise the organic produce usually scores below the ordinary stuff.
Penn and Teller did a documentary about that and their results matched your comment.
> I have the heart of a 25 year old athlete.
Does s/he know it’s missing?
I ate his heart with some fava beans and a nice Chianti
and the power bill to use the oven/stovetop?
I used my oven for 3hrs to bake a roast and a pie (homemeade)
my bill was 8$ higher for the month over previous and that was the ONLY differing thing, my washer was broken so I was minus 4 hrs use fo that also.
avg electric oven draws 3000watts n hr
old coiltype hotplate i used to use n hr a day was costing me 50 a quarter on the bill
swapped to a pressurecooker(electric new style) bill dropped 50 a quarter thats how i know the massive cost difference. mwhich is ok if you want everything stewed steamed etc but a crisp baked spud etc it needs oil n dry heat and yes you can use electric frypans and I do, but its not the same as larger oven cooked.
Ive managed for decades on a pension due to disability and the paucity of work available to anyone over 50, no matter how multiskilled you are, if i didnt have the ability to cook from cheap basic goods and make do and mend and have expectations of nothing new , ever Id be like others I know further in debt and depressed and looking at having to sell up and hope for space with families(those who have em)
I had to look up pulses, and I guess in a nutshell they are nitrogen-fixing legumes.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t nitrogen-fixing plants accomplish that by stimulating microorganisms?
Don’t microorganisms emit CO2?
So wouldn’t pulses actually contribute to global warming?
And as far as restoring peat bogs, correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t an active peat bog a huge emitter of methane?
As long as they don’t catch fire, aren’t peat bogs less contributors to global warming when they are in a dry, inert condition?
And in the digestive system, pulses create a lot of gas, so it’s a double whammy.
Am I the only one to perceive a contradiction in those two sentences?
If it is in the the farmers’ and landowners’ “interests” to move to a new model, why do they need to be rewarded with “public money”?
The public money is the purported interest. This is Nordic welfare socialism in nutshell. Tax, subsidize, regulate. No freedom, but public ‘good’ defined by majority (or elite) rule. Welcome to spoondigger’s ditchparadise, where everybody is employed, nobody is efficient, nothing advances and progress is all lefty.
The farmers will sell into the market, however it shapes. How is Gove to affect the price? Slap on a tax? Which foods? Forbid certain foods to be produced? Which? Appealable diktats? And this moron sucked up to that autistic psychopath Greta Thunberg. WHAT IS HAPPENING TO US.
Now I get it.
Climate Change Alarmism = Anorexia Nervosa and Bulemia. An imaginary problem that can kill you.
Politician promise 2019 –
No dam chicken, no dam pot.
I guarantee you Grove will never go hungry.
“Gove’s promise that everyone will have enough to eat”
If you like your hamburger you can keep your hamburger.
Yeah, I like the prime rib patties from Walmart. Nice lean beef, fine flavor, and freezable. $1.75 per beef patty for a pack of 4 of them – still cheaper and healthier than pizza.
Likely within fifteen years, these Liberal-Green-Lilliputs in UK Parliament (and their climate-alarmist network beyond like Gove) will require UK livestock-producers take an oath (to adhere to the Green-Lilliput-AG agenda) while also holding their right foot in their left hand, placing the middle finger of their right hand on top of their heads (with right thumb on the tip of the ear) to even borrow money under rational terms at all–or to obtain UK Govt. subsidies so as to convert their livestock farms to pulse farms, gardens and orchards according to Green-Ag Codes or they will be punish-taxed out of their property/land.
When he was Education minister he recognised and confronted what he termed the ‘blob’ – the unhealthy vested interest of influential education ‘professionals’ who presided over the great dumbing-down of much of the education system over the years (helped by incompetent governments of both sides of the spectrum, it must be said). I had some respect for him then. But since then, and especially since becoming Environment minster, he’s gone mad, swallowing every bit of green-blobbery imaginable. He was first in the queue to kowtow to that awful Swedish brat when she was over here. Absolutely loopy.
Maintain the Party line this week and you will be given your spinach ration comrade, if supplies last.
Funny, I know plenty of wealthier people who swear by organic this n that, gluten free, nothing from Walmart, wouldn’t set foot in a family dollar, and they are legit morbidly obese in spite of it. Because they eat way too much of it.
Unfortunately this prat is our local MP who is under the thumb of his newspaper reporter wife. What do you expect from an English graduate from a Scottish university? He commended the actions of the Swedish Kid(Greta Thurnberg) the unpaid PR wonk for her mothers climate change book.
“And encourages poor people to overeat“
I wonder what his wife has to say about that? She’s hardly a stick-thin catwalk model…
I think they should tax Members of Parliament, Members of Congress, and other such legislative representatives starting with 50% of their net worth (that is provided by the people they represent ) in their first term of service. Then increase that to 100% if they serve a second term and going to 200% if they are elected to a third term. Should they stand for a fourth term the tax should be 400% and 800% for a fifth term.
That should go a little ways towards putting the ‘Service’ back in public service. Oh sure, they will all have to scramble to increase their kickbacks and rakes to cover the bill, but why should they get to keep all the loot?
This ignorant and irresponsible mp has already helped screw the motor industry by saying that all diesel cars will be banned by 2040 because pollution from them causes deaths, specifically.
If you like your health insurance you can keep it.
If you like your food ration you can keep that too.