[HN Gopher] Against a Dystopian Farm-Free Future
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Against a Dystopian Farm-Free Future
Author : 23B1
Score : 10 points
Date : 2023-10-28 22:14 UTC (46 minutes ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theamericanconservative.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theamericanconservative.com)
| 23B1 wrote:
| _In an effort to make diets and agriculture "sustainable," urban
| bureaucrats make policy based on industrial agricultural data,
| completely ignoring experience and practices coming out of
| holistically managed operations._
| paulkrush wrote:
| I am not so sure "a farm-free future with food primarily
| manufactured via precision fermentation and other scientific
| processes" is going to feed the hungry masses.
| ben_w wrote:
| Why not? We already do a lot of processing even just to turn
| wheat into bread, all beer is fermented, and "other scientific
| processes" is what let us feed more than 790 million people
| worldwide. Feeding the masses this way seems at least
| _plausible_ to me, even if it might turn out too expensive to
| bother.
|
| (Of course, for something this important it makes a lot of
| sense to be slow to change so you can spot any mistakes before
| they're important; doing it fast and _only then_ finding out
| you made a huge mistake will make all the pandemic deaths seem
| like "the good old days" in comparison).
| 23B1 wrote:
| Like nearly all social engineering/behavioral economics
| _theories_ , they fail the moment they're exposed to reality.
| So while Monibot et. al. can make a fine caloric calculation,
| they fail to imagine what'd happen when you start telling
| cultures with millennia of food traditions what they can and
| can't eat.
|
| So you and I agree in that it'd be too expensive to bother -
| namely that you'd be attempting to erase some of the most
| important cultural traditions 'for the greater good'.
| 23B1 wrote:
| ...and history has shown that the hungry masses don't take too
| kindly to 'let them eat cake'.
| hotnfresh wrote:
| Ugh. Gross article. I hate SV dystopia-food dorks as much as
| anyone, but this sucks.
|
| > The holistic approach, typified by Savory, sees human beings as
| stewards of the Earth, a force for good when guided by the right
| principles.
|
| Where's The American Conservative stand on regulation to guide
| agribusiness by those "right principles"? Since, you know,
| otherwise they'll just keep doing whatever makes the most money.
| Any plans for dealing with the resulting higher costs for staple
| foods, using these approaches? What's the rate of voluntary
| adoption look like? On track to account for a majority of food
| production within the next couple decades, say?
|
| Yeah, that's what I thought.
|
| > Monbiot and his fellow Cartesian rationalists handicap their
| ability to understand complex ecological systems as soon as they
| make measurement of inert nature, out of context, a condition for
| understanding. In argument with advocates of holistic
| agriculture, this leads to all sorts of name-
| calling--"pseudoscience," "greenwash," "climate denial"
|
| OMG.
|
| Waste of ink/pixels.
| 23B1 wrote:
| > _Where 's The American Conservative stand on regulation to
| guide agribusiness by those "right principles"? Since, you
| know, otherwise they'll just keep doing whatever makes the most
| money._
|
| You seem to have seen the word 'conservative' in the URL and
| somehow drawn some conclusion that the author - having followed
| her work for some years now - actually has a wildly different
| perspective on.
|
| > _Monbiot and his fellow Cartesian rationalists handicap their
| ability to understand complex ecological systems as soon as
| they make measurement of inert nature, out of context, a
| condition for understanding._
|
| No, the article is a fair critique of Monibot et. al.'s
| behavior in the context of this topic, who often have fine
| theoretical frameworks that completely ignore the ideological,
| cultural, and otherwise vitally important social aspects
| inherent to food production and consumption.
|
| To wit, you're not going to get the population of, say, Mexico
| or France to eat fermented protein paste with out a) becoming a
| tyrant or b) erasing some of the most important traditions of
| the cultures in those countries.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| > In an effort to make diets and agriculture "sustainable," urban
| bureaucrats make policy based on industrial agricultural data,
| completely ignoring experience and practices coming out of
| holistically managed operations.
|
| A general irritation I have with conservatives, and this article
| is a perfect example, is when they don't know-- or pretend not to
| know-- who actually pulls the levers of power. American
| agricultural policy is set first by mega-agribusinesses, and
| second by politicians in Midwestern states cynically pandering to
| the dwindling number of family farms that still remain. The sorts
| of vegan activists this author is panicking about are
| concentrated in coastal states who have little to no ability to
| influence the Farm Bill. They simply don't matter.
|
| > Chief among these "farm-free" advocates is George Monbiot, a
| vegan activist and, naturally, a Guardian columnist.
|
| Come the fuck on. A Guardian columnist has about as much
| influence on American ag policy as my cat.
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