How much don't we know about our food?

November 2021

Pity the poor plants. If you find something trying to eat you, you can run away, hide, bite back, kick, claw, or twist your way out, or avoid being in the wrong place at the wrong time to start with. Plants, held fast by the earth, can't evade or fight off predators: and there are lots of animals out there wanting to eat them.

One self-defence trick plants do have is a huge arsenal of chemicals with which to make themselves taste bad, look bad, indigestible, or poisonous.

Just how huge this arsenal might be can be judged by the composition of the humble iceberg lettuce. Mainly water and a little green colouring you might think? The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) recognises eleven constituents in an iceberg lettuce: detailed analyses have identified more than 4,000.

For those of us shoe-horned into thinking of food in terms of sugar, protein and fat with a few vitamins and minerals thrown in, this one real-life figure of 4,000-plus in a lettuce tells us just how dumbed down the information about our food is.

Doing the maths of bacterial burgers

November 2021

Do the sums of farm-free food fermented in the desert as the saviour of our over-heating planet really add up? [1].

The big why of fake food

November 2021

 

If you've just been reading about the plan to save the world by feeding people very strange burgers grown in vats on even stranger buns so that all the land we've destroyed with agriculture can be left to re-wild [1], you may well be asking yourself some 'why' questions.

Why would we consider junking the entire historic basis of human provisioning?

Why, when we're already suffering unprecedented chronic disease from our novel, over-processed, corporate-led diet, would we head off down a path which takes all these aspects to new extremes?

Why, when millions go hungry due to poverty, bad cultural influences and bad politics, are we concentrating on technofixes to our food chain?

Why, when there are more farmers in the world than in any other single job, would we scrap farming?

Cancer burgers in bacterial buns

November 2021

We're in a mess.

Our climate's crumbling and our ecosystem's in collapse.

Human 'progress' has become a one-way street, in which we're leaving a trail of devastation behind us and facing ever-more bleak views ahead.

In fact, we appear to be digging our own grave, and don't seem to know how to stop.