Trousers Brown: Blighty faces 'food security' threat Just in case we didn't all have enough to panic about these days - what with energy prices, global financial gloom, impending ecopocalypse, terrorism etc - the government says any British trouser not yet besmirched by fear is definitely worn by someone who isn't paying attention. Apart from all of the above, we now face a "food …
I found the BBC six o'clock news coverage of this issue hilariously breathless and credulous. Brown's fear-mongering was swallowed wholly uncritically and regurgitated as shock-horror sensationalism. Both Brown and the BBC have this much in common - they both like to moralise. Brown should keep his nose out of my private life and get on with running the country. I can manage my own food budget thank you, until and unless he re-introduces ration cards. Which wouldn't surprise me. Somebody should eat the fuckwit. Great article, btw.
I'll east most things, many of them cold, but I really don't like apples from the fridge.
Also, I can't help feeling like every time I come across and article with some sort of environmental focus, the author seems to be working to prove the fruitlessness of any efforts suggested therein. I understand the concept of arguments and a balanced view, but perhaps Tesco is right after all and every little really does help.
Sorry, but I find all the faffing everybody does these days very frustrating. These days! I'm 27! Oh, Lordy.
When, exactly, did the UK last feed itself ? Go to the back of the class.
3% is 3% and not to be sniffed at. Lewis again shows he can't see a bargain when he sees one. I imagine he gets all hot and excited when he sees the word FREE though.
<-- yep, its the Nomex Winter Jacket, excellent for those balmy July days.
Tell you what Gordon, you sort out the millions, if not billions, of pounds your cack-handed, micro-managing, nannying, patronising, bullying, money-burning, corrupt government wastes and I'll try not to throw away the odd ready meal that went past its sell-by date and looked a bit manky?
Deal? Cos otherwise you can sod off.
We have pretty much rumbled the security issues (Give the terror message, hike taxes, remove liberties)
Now we're rumbling the green issues (Give the green message, hike taxes, remove opportunties)
Now they have a food issue that they're preaching about.
What's next, a lack of oxygen?
Brown & co, we the people of the UK have had enough of useless claptrap. It's time you left Westminster and joined the ranks of the useless and unemployable!
we've still got a responsibility ourselves......we can't decry what the government says and then do nothing until they come up with a decent idea.....if they can't give us answers we must find more.....
look at the fuel 'crisis' ...governments of the US and UK do jack squat about it and insist grubbing up the Antarctic and Amazon rainforests is the plan....but car companies are developing non fossil fuel vehicles and quiet, studious science types are also developing alternatives. We have to do it ourselves and force the old law of supply and demand through......the governments will listen if the people act en-masse.....if demand for fossil fuels dries up, they'll change their tune sharpish. There are too many vested interests in oil and gas for it to be put aside like that, but if people stop using it.....
penguin coz they don't like oil platforms
Most families I know can't afford waste and recycle as much as they can in the current overpriced sloppy council collection system. As for wastage the government actively support supermarkets business models which is a combination of cheap and cheerful plastic wrapped crap and if not bought its then thrown out. If the government wan't to change things tax the supermarkets for every ton wasted or not recycled or not given to homeless who need the food. Then we might be able to start recycling properly. Its so completely half assed at the moment.
I'm going back to my tesco's dumpster now.
http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/food/story/0,,2149304,00.html
Brown is spot-on. By reducing food demand, by eliminating unnecessary food waste, one reduces the overall equilibrium price of food - at a sensitive point along its supply curve which we're experiencing now.
Energy for machines, though intertwined as an issue, is at base not as important as eating. It's easier to make your economy work around energy scarcity, than it is around food scarcity. Pint at the 'local', anyone?
Food security is going to be a key phrase when allocation of resources for agriculture etc are presided over by our governments. Note the 'food NATO' rightly being proposed by Gordon at the G8.
Brown and his stooges are finished, he knows it, everyone knows it, so he's just clutching at straws. It's funny how the high price of oil is suddenly the catch all for all that is wrong with the world. Brown claims that he cannot do anything about it, so we just need to put up and shut up. Well, he might not be able to directly dictate the price of a barrel of crude oil, but he can reduce VAT and other taxes on fuel at the pump. Perhaps we need another war to resolve the issue. We could invade China to liberate the paddy fields, but we'd probably get our arses kicked, so let's go for someone smaller like Thailand. The UK is a bursting point. Soon we will be unable to sustain the population. Perhaps a cull of everyone over 40. What's the movie where people of a certain age are killed? Is it Solent Green?
I have to give it to them.
Instead of recycling the traditional 'food shortages looming' - 'mass starvation on the way' they have managed to load global climate change into the mantra.
Ever since I was knee-high to a mastodon I've heard the never ending story of how things were going to get bad in a hurry.
From the 'one chinese per square unit' in 'choose your short term value in years' to the 'critical shortage of commodity X' that will cause global calamity in 'choose your short term value in years' - My assessment is: it's all a load of bollocks.
None of the doomsayers have been right on any time scale. The probability of them being right diminishes each and every time they get it wrong (There is a whole raft of mathematical and statistical theory about this)
May I strongly recommend "Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Mackay" - especially the "Popular follies of great cities " Read it at http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/24518
"We cannot deal with higher food prices in the UK in isolation from higher prices around the world," added the PM."
This very same govenment has been pushing 'Globalisation' for years and years. How come this wasn't obvious as a direct knock-on effect - even I could see it coming.
<gets coat whilst leaving doomed country>
A while ago there was a piece on food waste on Today on Radio 4. They had some academic from the University of Nowhere and a woman who remembered WWII when wasting food was illegal apparently. Both got terribly excited as she recalled a woman in her street who was fined for throwing bread crusts away. This time round it'll probably be a jail term.
Er .......El Reg does what pretty much what it says on the tin - 'bites the hand that feeds IT'.
A purely technical journal is a tribal comfort zone. IT does not exist in a vacuum & personally I'd rather have a 'Reg' that does relate to the real world, especially on significant issues that may affect our lives. I dont have to (and dont) agree with all the positions it takes but I'd rather it provoked than that it churned out endless tech pap without comment.
The UK has never fed itself in your lifetime. I don't care if you are an octogenarian sucking your gums through your badly fitting dentures, muttering about the way the worlds gone to pot since you last looked round (Woohooo lookit them new fanangled motor ve-hicles).
Globilisation has put cheap food on your plate, whilst subsidies have kept our farmers with their crap productivity in business. We have been able to preserve (as in vinegar) the country way of life, luxuries like set aside and green spaces. Of which we still have a fair bit outside of the SE.
So, whats your problem with globilisation and how it relates to food in the UK ? You are on the easy living side of the fence, and are unlikely to miss even one ready meal/Maccy D's, though maybe you should.
"When I give food to the poor, they call me saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist". Hélder Pessoa Câmara
"Only the poor starve" Karl Marxs
"Perhaps a cull of everyone over 40. What's the movie where people of a certain age are killed? Is it Solent Green?"
Logan's Run - life ended at 30.
Were it not for the fact that even dying costs a friggin' fortune in this godforsaken dungheap of a country it would almost be an attractive proposition.
From way back we fed waste food to pigs and got a good return. Pigswill was always boiled. Then, the government (naturally to save fuel) lowered the temperature that needed to be used and lo and behold we had foot and mouth that cost milions of pounds more than the fuel that would have killed it. Typical government thinking, but the trouble they caused means that we longer use pigswill, so it goes into landfill.
Bio fuel is no new thing either. 100-120 years ago one third of the country's agriculture was devoted to it. Then the horses were superceded.
It's a long time since I worked in food retailing but the assessment back then was that, of all food passing through the production cycle and on to the consumer, about one third the whole was wasted at various stages of the process, ie; harvesting, transportation, packaging, transportation and storage. This waste occurs long before goes into the end consumer's bin.
I doubt very much that things have changed in this process besides the introduction of Information Systems providing business advantage, like "Just in Time Deliveries". Which basically means that the end consumer now receives the food products just before they expire. The "holder" has longer to play with their food - when they feel it to be fiscally expedient, before passing it on at the "right time" to receive the "business advantage opportunities" that these systems bring.
So modern European and American shoppers must scoff as much as possible in the short time available, before the grub is fit for the bin only. Err sorry compost heap.
If companies like T***o weren't so cynical about their customers and single minded about their bottom line, we might have a chance to change the trend. However, the trend is towards customers soaking up marketing devices like, four cans and some cardboard in exchange for the traditional bottle of Pimms. Hic !
Who's wasted now ?
3% energy saving is a good thing, not trivial nor to be ignored.
We demand too much food because we consume too much food, we're overweight and have the wrong balance of foods in our diets, cut down on consumption and the problem just vanishes.
Soylent green is not a solution either, do you know how much energy goes in to create the raw product? it's worse than cattle.
Personally (and just to make people irate) I blame the farmers, they want to suck the life out of the ground to make the maximum profit, get huge subsidies (sometimes for non existant land), pump huge quantities of chemicals into the food chain, kill foxes, badgers, rabbits or anything else that might pose a natural risk to their unnatural steriod filled mutant livestock. Oh, and btw, I love some farmers (more than I want to disclose!) organic, high quality in lower quantities for a lower consuming society is the way forward, not high yeild poor quality for the GM unaware overconsumers.
Brown has it half right, throwing away the amount of food we do is wrong, but attempting to consume that much in the first place is the actual problem.
... in fact I read it again and agreed even more - which makes as much sense as Nob Broon ever did.
James - Fife (my home kingdom) has got some of the finest most productive arable land in the entire world mate, not just in the UK.
MahatmaCoat - I believe Scotland has seen the biggest increase in obesity, but that the US still holds the record for body fat w/w per head of the population by some considerable margin (or is that margerine).
Ashley Pomeroy - Woah there mate... When the England-based government stops pulling *NORTH* North Sea oil and West *Irish/Welsh* sea oil for boosting its Summer cash flow (you can keep your flaming gas) and stops benefitting from Scottish and Welsh HydroElectric... THEN and only then can you moan about Scotland benefitting from anything English. Oh, and that Nobend Broon has NO fellow countrymen... we rejoiced that the stupid fat tw@ went South to sponge off you - although I must admit now to a little twang of guilt.
Simon Ward - "peak oil" as a "mental construct" is indeed seeping into the consciousnes of the general public. The *validity* of the construct is not the issue, merely the fact that the general population are now increasingly thinking in those terms - if you say something often enough, people will believe you. Gordon Brown, for example, is a stupid fat tw@.
Charley - nice idea - but for half the number of devices and 4 times the effectiveness, how about we drop one inside the M25? There's one particular useless lump of lard that I have in mind.
GalaxyBob - Logan's Run mate ;o) There was also a really good episode of StarTrek TNG where they found a planet that had a similar approach at an older age.
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And finally, my 2p worth... I think El-Reg commentators, myself included, should stop all this berating of the government and especially of Gordon Brown. He is not an environmentalist, or a scientist, or a farmer, or IT literate. In fact his only real skill and discernable quality is his insane drive for power and his steadfast resolve to ignore everything and everyone that stands in his way. it must be terrible to be such a big fat useless tw@. Fortunately he has his army of liars, backstabbers and cheats to help keep him in the lifestyle to which he has become accustomed during a decade raping the financial reserves of the country. So please, readers, lay off the sponging, manipulative, misinformed, bully and let him get on with the important job of screwing us all out of every last form of wealth that we have ever known.
Well said mate; this is no longer about your Politics (I voted Broon's predecessor in...gnrgh!), or your nationality (British is fine, thank you) or your general leanings....not time to take pot shots at your least favourite section of society but to focus on the REAL problem, and that is this government, taking away people's rights faster than we can see it, or people can report it.
people of all stripes and so forths should stand together on this
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