Agriculture and Fishing

Agriculture
It is often said that organic farming is not efficient. The first thing that I would say about this is that conventional agriculture is often not efficient either. Growing sugar beet to make sugar is not efficient because it is cheaper to import sugar made from sugar cane in tropical countries. This is in addition to the fact that sugar is not necessary to the diet and in fact it has a negative value in nutritional terms. Growing grain to feed to animals is an inefficient way to produce food (not to mention problems of antibiotics and cruelty).

As Colin Tudge writes in his book So Shall We Reap (page 78) Then, crops that human beings could perfectly well consume as they are, are grown expressly to feed livestock that is nutritionally superfluous, and indeed nutritionally pernicious. In particular, livestock consumes a third of the world's wheat, two-thirds of the maize, and at least three-quarters of the barley and soya.

Most British agriculture would not last five minutes without subsidies and trade barriers. And it harms third-world farmers. So when I hear farmers saying that organic farming can't 'feed the world', I'm not much impressed. If we are going to subsidize any food, let us subsidize healthy food. Let us subsidize orchards instead of grubbing them up and instead of subsidizing fatty meat. Decisions are made in the EU that are not made in the interests of the people of the EU.

During the war, Richmond Park was turned over to agriculture. At the end of the war it was made again into a park. Imagine if all the land between London and the south coast was made into a park like Richmond Park.

In the middle of England are upland areas where many rivers begin. Conventional agriculture causes problems with flooding. Overstocking can cause compaction of soil. Soils used for crops lack humus, making the ground less spongy. Rain runs off the land more quickly, carrying top soil with it and causing flooding downstream. The removal of trees adds to the problem. Water is contaminated with agricultural chemicals. A more sustainable form of agriculture should be tried, starting in these upland areas.

Acceptable and unacceptable inefficiencies
Agriculture has never been just about quantity of food produced, it is also about quality. The more of one of these you have, the less of the other you have. Farmers have always had to choose between producing the greatest quantity or less quantity and more quality. Seeking to produce quality introduces inefficiencies. This is true of any agricultural system, including conventional intensive agriculture. We have to accept some inefficiencies, but we need to decide which inefficiencies are acceptable and which are not.

Proponents of conventional intensive agriculture may say that there are few, if any, inefficiencies in their system, and that this is why it is superior. However, it is easy to see that this is just not true. Importing maize and soya and feeding it to cattle kept indoors all year round is an inefficient method of producing protein and calories. Growing sugar beet to produce sugar is less efficient than growing sugar cane in the tropics.

How should we decide which inefficiencies are acceptable and which are not? We should judge them on the basis of nutrition and gastronomy. Cattle fed on maize and soya produce meat and dairy produce. These are the main source of saturated fat which contributes to obesity, heart disease and strokes. Meat also encourages cancer of the gut and a major source of food poisoning. Sugar contributes towards obesity and diabetes.

The alternative is for people to eat more maize and soya themselves and feed less of it to animals. Animals should have more natural feed which increases their nutritional value. Cattle should eat mostly the grass that humans can not. Breeds of cattle that require more in the way of concentrates should not be used.

People who know what good food is know it is not burgers and shakes. A delicious cuisine cannot be based on the taste of fat, sugar and salt. People from Central America have been using maize inventively for thousands of years, and East Asian people have been using soya. Most chefs will agree that intensively-reared chicken is not as good in flavour as the alternatives.

Getting conned
Some people think that those who buy organic food or free range chicken are being conned. Obviously these are some farmers who produce food conventionally but pretend that it is organic or free range to make more money. Then there are farmers who cut corners more than is acceptable and have standards that are too low. Constant monitoring is necessary in order to ensure as far as is possible that standards are maintained.

Free range chicken may be more expensive per pound than conventionally produced chicken, but all is not as it seems. Conventional chicken is much fattier than free range. So you are buying more unhealthy fat and less healthy protein. Conventional chicken can be rotated in drums with water and additives to soak up water. This means even less protein per pound. All this means that if you calculate the amount of money you will pay to get each gram of protein, free range chicken no longer seems so much of an extravagance.

People often include chicken or other meat in their diet because they think they need the added protein. However, estimates of how much protein people need to eat were too high in the past. The scientific evidence is that people don't need to add protein in this way. Of course, manufacturers never tell us this, which is why I think there is a problem with nutritional information coming from manufacturers and their advertizers.

People ought to be eating chicken for the lovely taste it can have, and here the free range wins. If you knew someone who bought a car for a couple of hundred pounds but could not get it to go, would you say that they had a bargain or would you say that they had wasted their money? Tasteless chicken is not a bargain, it is a waste of money. French people are not taken in in this way, so what is wrong with the British and Americans?

People do not buy the cheapest cars. If they did, they would be buying Citroen 2CVs and Reliant Robins. Both of these cars are well engineered and value for money but people don't want to buy them. Even the poorest people do not buy the cheapest clothes or footwear, except for activities where the clothes will get dirty or worn out. So what is it about food that makes British and American people want to buy the cheapest all the time? Food is more important than cars, clothes or footwear. It is a more important pleasure in life and good food helps us to live longer and have better health.

I am not a vegetarian. I have no problem with people eating meat and genuinely enjoying it. I do so myself sometimes. What I have a problem with are the millions of people who eat chicken they don't enjoy. Animals in vast numbers suffer for this? Millions of tons of maize and soya used up for this? And most of the time the meat is covered in some kind of sauce anyway. I guess this is the only way to make conventional chicken taste acceptable. Often there are good meat substitutes but people don't want them because they say they are not vegetarians or they want they want the 'real thing'. Conventional chicken is not the 'real thing'.

Fishing
There could be a collapse in fish stocks due to overfishing. It has already happened off Canada. This is really killing the goose that lays the golden egg. Did you realize that the EU subsidizes the fishing industry? What will future generations think of us? Fish is such a healthy form of protein, providing health-giving oil instead of unhealthy saturated fat.