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Review - George Monbiot article

October 4, 2023 at 12:31 pm, No comments
George Monbiot has written a very interesting article on The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People. He writes of the current trend for romanticising life in past generations, including food production, when a far higher proportion of people starved to death through famine than today - a century ago 82 per 100,000 people starved to death, as against 0.5 per 100,000 today.

He writes of the difficulties of producing enough food to feed 8 billion people (and the global population is rising rapidly), and the well-fed's enjoyment of "peasant food" and low-yield agriculture - somehow more authentic (my words) than higher-yield. He doesn't, to be clear, advocate the industrialisation of agriculture, but there is much that has been learnt over the past century about maximising production without damaging the land. 

This is part of an important debate about how to feed people on a planet where resources are increasingly stretched, and I recommend it.

The tomatoes are my own! Look out for a post next spring about maximising yield in an organic raised bed system. I have discovered a technique which yielded 45kg from 7 plants in 2022 (the hottest and driest UK summer ever), and 38kg this year (2023 - a cool and wet summer). Not bad - and the tomatoes clearly were very happy!




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