You’d think that any society, after thousands of years of food problems, would be a bit better focused. The headlines about the present food crisis are far more than just current issues. They’re a virtual guided tour to prove how fragile and insecure essentials are these days.
Remember, it’s only taken a few months of the Ukraine war to jeopardize global food supplies. The overall mess is spreading, and it’s been getting messier. The current global food supply chain is so complex it’s absurd, and now, it’s dangerous. Add an obscene war in major food production areas, and inevitably the food chain gets disrupted.
Add a climate crisis, and the supply is always at risk by definition.
Add price wars, and a lot of people are in trouble worldwide.
Add absurdly high energy price rises, and it gets worse.
Add a maniacal housing sector situation, right in everyone’s core cost base, and it doesn’t exactly help.
Food waste; emissions, costs, and more
This merry situation is also very much aggravated by food waste. Efficient food production doesn’t automatically translate into efficient distribution and consumption. Quite the opposite; what’s produced isn’t necessarily distributed efficiently. “Food deserts” are all too real.
Consumption after purchase delivers an astonishing figure of one third of all food produced being wasted at the consumption end. That is truly horrendous. It does quite literally mean that one-third of the food people actually buy is wasted throughout the entire food production and consumption cycle.
The FAO breakdown of food wastage, including the food wasted before it even gets to the market, isn’t exactly reassuring. The figures look systemic, even at first glance. This is without even considering poverty, food spoilage, harvest failures, food accessibility, etc. Add those charming un-remediated realities and it’s much worse in many parts of the world.
Lack of objectivity – The suicidal circular rut the world is in
I don’t want to bang on about the obvious. Just check the links and be prepared for some very grim reading.
I see another much more pervasive and far more dangerous issue –
The future is now being totally ignored. It’s become a meaningless abstract.
To survive, you need a future in which to survive.
You also need something to survive with, like maybe food.
That’s not happening, in too many ways.
This total lack of provision for the future is the new hallmark of the global atrocity called politics. It’s a fundamentally useless component in human existence. You can’t eat ideologies or live in them. You can’t heal a broken leg with a political speech, however fanatical you may be.
…Yet the world is now focused on politics quite literally to the exclusion of all else.
The Western conservative mantra of making housing, education, decent incomes and health inaccessible is the exact opposite of objectivity. It’s also the exact opposite of a survival strategy.
Improving quality of life was a real thing back in the mid-20th century. The future, aka right now, was going to be great. It isn’t, for those who haven’t noticed.
Sheer social mediocrity took that away fast enough. Pedants and moneygrubbers took over from practical people and highly educated visionaries.
The Boom society went mentally and ethically bust fast enough. So did the quality of life. This food situation is the bastard offspring of that bust. The current food chain is a sort of obituary to the basic living standards of that time.
Food also covers a vast range of social and economic issues. A lot of that food doesn’t deserve the name. “Poison” would be closer to the mark. It’s spectacularly low-quality garbage, saturated with useless toxins like high fructose and fats. It shouldn’t be on the market at all. (Talking about global objectivity, you’ll notice that food-related disasters like diabetes and obesity aren’t ideological issues.)
…So why is this utter rubbish being produced at all, let alone millions of tons of it? It’s easy enough to create really good food that tastes better than that slop. Yet resources and a lot of actual food are diverted to make it.
(One of the great ironies of food production quality is that you don’t actually need much tech to deliver top-quality nutrition. To mass produce “anti-food”, you start with top quality food, then add expensive filth to dilute it and add volume to make more money to pay for the expensive filth, and somehow that’s “smart”. It’s not. It’s just another form of food wastage.)
The story so far about the food crisis is that the entire food chain is highly vulnerable. Loss of crops due to climate change is endemic. Compromised global water supplies don’t help. It’s a colossal mess, now made visible by the Ukraine war.
To fix that you need:
- Some comprehension of basic human needs.
- Proper management of the food supply chain.
- Proper regulation of food quality.
- Sane environmental management and detoxification.
- An end to food waste throughout the food cycle.
- Advanced agriculture and efficient land management.
- An efficient food distribution network that doesn’t fall to bits due to local issues.
…Now put on your stupid political sun bonnets, polish up your alleged IQs, and see if you can do something right for the first time in about 70 idiotic years. The future of humanity is on the line here in too many ways.
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Disclaimer
The opinions expressed in this Op-Ed are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Digital Journal or its members.
