Star Trek

[delilah]

Dear Mr Monbiot

Journalist, campaigner, farmer-basher: TFF will I imagine be compulsory reading over breakfast. Good morning.

Last night I heard you speak at length for the first time. I have successfully avoided you till now, and thought I was safe in the early hours with the World Service. But there you were . Sneaky.
You speak very well, and it is clear where you wish all of this to end. We will get all of our nutrition from a tablet, produced entirely by machine, swallowed whenever prescribed necessary. Just like Star Trek. This throws up some important issues:

Work.
The school dinner lady. The waiter. The baker. The rice grower. The tea picker. The goat herd. The chocolatier. The fisherman.
What will they all do ? Watch telly ? Shop ? Fight ?
Laborare est orare.
Margaret Thatcher showed us what happens when you rob a community of its right to work. Loss of purpose, cohesion and dignity. Replaced by drugs and Jeremy Kyle.
What Mrs T demonstrated in the pit village, you are advocating on a planetary scale.

Health.
The human body is designed to run on food. Farmers know better than anyone what happens when you are told by the experts that it is OK to meddle with a species diet. You are advocating fundamental changes to the human diet in a shorter time frame than it takes for a cancer drug to be approved. Can you reassure us that this will all be safe ?

Control.
So long as the primary means of production – land – is owned and controlled by millions of individuals around the planet, we can be confident of some degree of democracy in our food supply chain. These machines of yours: Who will own them, or more importantly the patents that will inevitably be attached ? The state ? The Chinese ? The Mafia ? Spectre ?

The environment.
In each successive decade, since the Industrial Revolution, the percentage of household income spent on food has fallen. And what do we spend this spare money on ? Tat. Plastic tat. Which, if you could bring yourself to train your sights on something other than farming, is the real environmental issue. Will your nutrition tablets lower the cost of feeding ourselves still further ? What will be the environmental implications of this ?

Looking forward to your response.
(and copied to you via The Grauniad).

 

[Muck Spreader]

I did notice national treasure Sir Daivd Attenborough with his stop eating meat and save the planet yesterday. There is only one thing that will bring potential stabilisation to rising temperatures that we have control over and that's a big reduction in the use of fossil fuels. Everything else, planting trees, not eating meat, protein from air or water, painting the arctic white, etc is just irrelevant nonsense.

It was interesting to see the Russian scientists on Ben Fogle's programme the other night wanting to cut down all the Siberian Forests, grow grass and have thousands of cattle, buffalo and Bison grazing it, in an effort to slow down the thawing of the permafrost by up to 4 degrees.

 

[unlacedgecko]

Has George responded or acknowledged this?

 

[delilah]

Has George responded or acknowledged this?

Not as yet, I also sent it to him via his website and asked for a reply, I will ask again. I also sent an amended version to the letters page of the Grauniad, but not being a reader I wouldn't know if they printed it, but an educated guess would say not.

 

[delilah]

Just sent the below to George. He wont reply, but that doesn't really matter. He is an influencer, so it is enough to influence the influencer.

Dear George
I hope you and yours are keeping well in these interesting times.
You will have noticed how, right now, it is the food industry that is keeping the UK afloat.
It is the food industry that is still going to work, paying taxes, to pay for the NHS.
Perhaps you could write an article about that.
To include a comparison with The State we would be in if we were, instead of eating food, popping your nutrition tablets.
Yours etc.

 

[delilah]

Big day for you today then, George.
You still haven't answered any of the questions around food security, food sovereignty, jobs, taxes, health.
But then I guess none of that will matter to you in your ivory tower.

https://www.theguardian.com/environ...l-lab-grown-meat-to-go-on-sale-for-first-time

 

[unlacedgecko]

Big day for you today then, George.
You still haven't answered any of the questions around food security, food sovereignty, jobs, taxes, health.
But then I guess none of that will matter to you in your ivory tower.

https://www.theguardian.com/environ...l-lab-grown-meat-to-go-on-sale-for-first-time

“growth medium for the Singapore production line includes foetal bovine serum, which is extracted from foetal blood, but this is largely removed before consumption”

 

[Ted M]

https://www.facebook.com/666355153498434/posts/2087823431351592

Might be interesting....

 

[delilah]

https://www.facebook.com/666355153498434/posts/2087823431351592

Might be interesting....

If you are attending that could you report back please ?

 

[DaveGrohl]

@delilah you might also want to ask him how the last few decades of food manufacturers corrupting what were once natural foods have gone. Is human health better now because of the nutritional route the food industry have driven us down or is it in fact much worse due to people consuming far too much processed crap? Has he spoted the epidemics of obesity, diabetes, cardio-vascular disease and metabolic diseases in general that have coincided with the human race collectively losing its way nutritionally? And does he think that even more of the same direction will be a good thing?

The thing I find most bizarre about all of this food lunacy is that science is finally waking up (painfully slowly) to the fact they've been preaching the wrong message on food for decades, and that we need to get back to eating real food. This is the very opposite of what the likes of the Moonunit is preaching. These foods are all about money of course once you remove the nutter from the equation.

 

[Ted M]

If you are attending that could you report back please ?

Have registered, it's not on until 7pm US central time so going to be a late one unless it's possible to listen at a later date

 

[Ted M]

https://www.facebook.com/666355153498434/posts/2088312031302732

Just come across this also. Huge amounts of reading by the looks of it if you have the time

 

[Nick Adams]

@delilah you might also want to ask him how the last few decades of food manufacturers corrupting what were once natural foods have gone. Is human health better now because of the nutritional route the food industry have driven us down or is it in fact much worse due to people consuming far too much processed crap? Has he spoted the epidemics of obesity, diabetes, cardio-vascular disease and metabolic diseases in general that have coincided with the human race collectively losing its way nutritionally? And does he think that even more of the same direction will be a good thing?

The thing I find most bizarre about all of this food lunacy is that science is finally waking up (painfully slowly) to the fact they've been preaching the wrong message on food for decades, and that we need to get back to eating real food. This is the very opposite of what the likes of the Moonunit is preaching. These foods are all about money of course once you remove the nutter from the equation.

And sadly farmers are largely complicit in that they have been happy to become commodity producers for global corporations instead of food producers for their local communities.

 

[delilah]

@delilah you might also want to ask him how the last few decades of food manufacturers corrupting what were once natural foods have gone. Is human health better now because of the nutritional route the food industry have driven us down or is it in fact much worse due to people consuming far too much processed crap? Has he spoted the epidemics of obesity, diabetes, cardio-vascular disease and metabolic diseases in general that have coincided with the human race collectively losing its way nutritionally? And does he think that even more of the same direction will be a good thing?

The thing I find most bizarre about all of this food lunacy is that science is finally waking up (painfully slowly) to the fact they've been preaching the wrong message on food for decades, and that we need to get back to eating real food. This is the very opposite of what the likes of the Moonunit is preaching. These foods are all about money of course once you remove the nutter from the equation.

Have previously pointed Mr Monbiot to here, will send him a nudge now so he sees your post. What would be most useful, of course, would be for George to join the discussion.

 

[Barleycorn]

Have registered, it's not on until 7pm US central time so going to be a late one unless it's possible to listen at a later date

I've registered, and they say it will be recorded, 1 AM is a bit late for me.

 

[Ted M]

I've registered, and they say it will be recorded, 1 AM is a bit late for me.

That's good to hear. I was was wondering how to stay awake

 

[Dalos]

Ted, looking forward to your report in the morning

 

[Ted M]

Thanks Andy, (maybe not tomorrow morning)

 

[Ted M]

Haven't seen it myself yet, but it's only been put out in the last 24 hours.

 

[delilah]

Haven't seen it myself yet, but it's only been put out in the last 24 hours.

Thank you for putting that up. It's quite long but you don't have to sit and watch it, just listen whilst pottering. Have copied the link to George via his website in case he has missed it.