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By Root 605 0

March 2008. ‘I don’t want to see asparagus on menus in the middle of December. I don’t want to see strawberries from Kenya in the middle of March. I want to see it home grown,’ said Gordon Ramsey on 9 May 2008. (See ‘Ramsey orders seasonal-only menu’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7390959.stm.) Apart from the increased emissions, imagine the terrible monotony of the British diet under these proposals. There would be no coffee or tea, no bananas or mangoes, no rice or curry powder, there would be strawberries only in June and July and no lettuce in winter. You would eat an awful lot of potatoes. The rich would heat their greenhouses and plant orange trees in them, or travel to foreign parts and smuggle papayas in their luggage. Meat would become a luxury only available to the professor and his fellow rich folk – for to grow a lamb chop requires ten times as much land as to grow a piece of bread of equivalent calories. There are no combine harvester factories in Britain, so unless the prof wants us hypocritically to import combines but not flour, we would all have to take our turn in the fields with sickles in August. These are no doubt mere inconveniences that the professor would sort out with some laws and some food police. The real problem lies elsewhere, conveniently out of sight in the developing world. The growers of coffee, tea, bananas, mangoes, rice and turmeric would all suffer. They would have to stop growing cash crops and start being more self-sufficient. Sounds charming, but self-sufficiency is the very definition of poverty. Unable to sell their cash crops, they would have to eat what they grow. As we in the north munched our potatoes and bread, so they in the tropics would be growing heartily sick of an endless diet of mangoes and turmeric. The cash economy enables me to eat mangoes and them to eat bread, thank goodness.

p. 149 ‘again the acreage under the plough will have to balloon’. Or, to put the point in academic-ese: ‘The additional harvest of 4–7 Pg C/yr needed to achieve this level of bioenergy use would almost double the present biomass harvest and generate substantial additional pressure on ecosystems.’ Haberl, H. et al. 2007. Quantifying and mapping the human appropriation of net primary production in earth’s terrestrial ecosystems. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104:12942–7.

p. 149 ‘each needs little more than a thousand square metres, a tenth of a hectare’. Smil, V. 2000. Feeding the World. MIT Press.

p. 150 ‘Organic farming is low-yield, whether you like it or not’. Avery, A. 2006. The Truth about Organic Foods. Henderson Communications. See also Goulding, K.W.T. and Trewavas, A.J. 2009. Can organic feed the world? AgBioview Special Paper 23 June 2009. http://www.agbioworld.org/newsletter_wm/index.php?caseid=archive&newsid=2894.

p. 150 ‘With such help a particular organic plot can match non-organic yields, but only by using extra land elsewhere to grow the legumes and feed the cattle’. A recent study claimed that organic yields can be higher than those of conventional farming (http://www.ns.umich.edu/htdocs/releases/story.php?id=5936), but only by an extremely selective and biased misuse of the statistics (see http://www.cgfi.org/2007/09/06/organic-abundance-report-fatally-flawed/).

p. 150 ‘a pound of organic lettuce, grown without synthetic fertilisers or pesticides in California, and containing eighty calories, requires 4,600 fossil-fuel calories to get it to a customer’s plate’. Pollan, M. 2006 The Omnivore’s Dilemma: the Search for the Perfect Meal in a Fast Food World. Bloomsbury.

p. 150 ‘when a technology came along that promised to make organic farming both competitive and efficient, the organic movement promptly rejected it’. Ronald, P. and Adamchak, R.W. 2008. Tomorrow’s Table: Organic Farming, Genetics and the Future of Food. Oxford University Press.

p. 152 ‘a near-doubling of yield and a halving of insecticide use’. ISAAA 2009. The Dawn of a New Era: Biotech Crops in India. ISAAA Brief 39, 2009: http://www.isaaa.org/resources/publications/downloads/The-Dawn-of-a-New-Era.pdf.