YouSaid · the spoken record

George Monbiot

lines on the record: 65
first: 2022-06-10
most recent: 2022-06-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Well, comment. That's right. I know it is an amazing ecosystem to explore and you will see more of the major branches of the animal kingdom in a handful of soil than on a weak safari in the Serengeti.”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“nutrient gap by bringing in conventional miniature from conventional farms, bringing manure from other farms which aren't organic. So in other words, you can use artificial nitrogen as long as it's been through someone else's animals first.”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“a thirty seven percent greater than those from artificial fertilizer. Now artificial fertilizer is bad enough. You're losing more than 50% of the nitrogen that you put on the land. But manure is even worse. And the reason is that it's not synchronized with the plant growth cycle. It releases its minerals slowly, which you'd think would be a good thing, but that means you have to put it on the land long before the plants are ready to absorb it, and it carries on releasing long after the plants have been harvested. And so it keeps leaking and leaking and leaking. And you think, well, in that case, how do you sustain an organic system? Because the whole idea about organic farming is meant to be that you close the nutrient loop. And so I went and looked at the soil association organic standards. I was profoundly shocked. It turns out that you can plug that”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are sincere. There's an awful lot of bullshit involved as well. When people talk about, you know, we should eat less and better meat, if that was the only meat which was being produced, which seems to be the sort of foodie agenda, you know, that this is the only meat we should eat, then rich people would eat it every day, right? It would be phenomenally expensive, but millionaires would be able to eat it whenever they liked. Nobody else would be able to eat it. And so it sort of posing as a universal solution, it's not by any means. It would mean that basically everyone went vegan except the 1% and they would be able to continue eating meat. So it's not really a solution to anything. Now, as for the issue of manure, it's very interesting. So one of the papers I read suggests that the nitrogen losses from”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, on another part of their farm, they're now doing. But then what they have to do there is to raise the yield, and that means you reduce the wildlife value. And so you constantly got that payoff. So cattle and sheep, or, I mean, sheep really aren't compatible with anything in this country, but cattle, it can only be compatible with a really rich living system if their numbers are really tiny. And that means you can feed hardly anyone. So if the whole of the UK, all the farmland in the UK were turned into NEP, we'd produce 75 calories of meat per person per day, which is about one-thirtieth of our calorific requirement, and nothing else. And when people talk about this whole lesson better agenda of so-called regenerative grazing, which formerly known as grazing in most cases, it's just been rebranded, you know, this is tobacco industry tactics, which the livestock industry is using in most cases.”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I've read James's books, and they're very well written. They're quite beautiful, really. But I don't think they make any useful contribution to helping us find a way out of this dilemma. And the reason is they've got no numbers in them at all. It's like there's no figures for how much food he's producing or how much his system can produce. And generally the yields of systems like that are extremely low. And the more you green them, the lower those yields become, which means the more land you must occupy and all that's land which could otherwise be occupied by rich, thriving living systems. Now you could go really, really low, like NEP does, that the famous rewilding project, Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell have in Sussex, which has got fantastic wildlife, but it's got almost no production.”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The annual sunflowers and the perennials just sailed through it, no trouble at all. So I think so. So what I'm trying to say is you've asked a huge question because there's lots and lots of different things that we need to be doing. And it's going to be different in every case.”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“without having to dig it up and start all over again the following year. And the one that's now fully commercialized is a variety of rice and in Yunnan province in China they've had six consecutive harvests from the same plants and the yield is still the same as from annual rice and it means much less soil erosion. It means less fertilizer, less establishment difficulty altogether much less labor for the farmers which makes it very attractive to them and I think and also these perennial plants are almost certain to be far more climate resilient because they have much bigger roots, deeper roots and much stronger structures above ground and so they're less likely to be susceptible to climate shocks and indeed the land institute it's been growing its perennial sunflowers alongside annual sunflowers and one year there was a drought which completely wiped out”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, that's a very big question because what I'm looking at is a whole load of different techniques and approaches in this book. I mean, one thing I haven't mentioned yet is... And at the moment nearly all our grain crops come from annual plants, which are plants that live and die within one year. And annual plants, large areas covered by them, are very rare in nature. They generally happen only in the wake of a disaster, like a fire or a landslide or a volcanic eruption. To grow our annual crops, we have to create a disaster every year and we have to plough the land or spray the land and kill everything that lives there and then use lots of fertilizer to establish the plants and the rest of it. And there's been a dream of scientists for over a century now, which is to grow perennial grain crops. And finally, at last, that dream has now been realized. And a group called the Land Institute in Kansas is developing a whole range of perennial grain crops where you can harvest the same plant year after year.”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All of that, and so I just don't trust the promises at all. And the great thing about the bacteria by contrast is that they don't need a growing medium. They don't need to feed on any photosynthetic products. We don't have to grow anything for them to live on. They just combine hydrogen and oxygen and carbon dioxide and they make their own body mass from those. It's a process which is analogous to photosynthesis, but it's much more efficient than photosynthesis.”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, really, just I mean, you kill them by biting, but anyway, I'm not advocating this as a general program for feeding the world. I mean, the problem with insects is that the whole story is that, oh, well, insects can eat our waste products and then we can eat the insects. But it never works like that. With everything we were told was going to be fed on waste products like biodiesel and biogas and biomass and bioethanol. In every single case, they use the idea of using waste to get their foot in the door and then they produce dedicated crops for that production. And that's because it's a lot easier to get consistent products, a lot cheaper with dedicated crops. You don't have all the difficulties of gathering waste from different sources and it's going to be really inconsistent.”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, just playing. You had to sort of bite them quite quick so the pincers don't pinch the inside of your mouth. But no, they're great. Is that because you won't kill?”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I mean, the tastiest of all, and this is going to sound very weird. So occasionally we've had infestations of them in the orchard. And I'm quite prepared to put a lot of labor into this orchard. We don't use any pesticides or any fertilizers or anything like that. So I will pick off pests by hand. And the tastiest of them of all, because the best way of disposing of them is to eat them are earwigs. Earwigs are delicious. And when we got a massive earwig, I mean, I wouldn't eat them, you know, if there's not loads of them, but when you've got massive earwig infestation, when there's an earwig in every flower, then I'll go around eating them. And they're a great meal. You don't need to dip them.”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh no, I've been eating insects for a very long time. In fact, I've eaten many, many species of insects experimentally. So which is your favorite?”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which would allow small businesses everywhere to set up their own breweries on the edge of a town wherever they are, you know, and especially in poorer nations which have a lot of sunlight because you need the sunlight to produce the hydrogen in which the bacteria feed, which could totally transform food security, food sovereignty, food justice, everything, that people would suddenly have access to this tremendously rich source of food, which could be turned into any product to meet local markets. But that potential would be destroyed if we allow the big corporations to take over. And so now we're right at the beginning of this, we need to mobilize to ensure that this really important technology, potentially the most important of all environmental technologies, is not captured by big business. Corporate intellectual property is a threat to the world, and if we don't destroy it, it will”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Their behavior is synchronized, shocks get easily transmitted through the system, the world has polarized between super exporters and super importers, and this makes the whole system really fragile and vulnerable. And Katarina is absolutely right we must not replicate that, or indeed all the other dysfunctions of the food system with these new technologies. Now, precision fermentation, this new kind of brewing, is a great gift to the world which comes along just as we need it because we can use it to replace the really devastating impacts of livestock farming and indeed of certain kinds of arable production as well. But if it gets captured by big corporations and if they impose intellectual property rights over it and use it as a form of corporate concentration, that gift will be stolen from us and the enormous potential.”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a really good question, and it's absolutely fundamental here. So at the moment, we already have this massive corporate concentration in the food chain, and it's tremendously dangerous. On one estimate, four corporations control 90% of the global grain trade. And the most frightening papers, I read an awful lot of frightening. I mean, I read over 5,000 papers while researching this book, but the scariest of all were those going back 10 years or so with scientists saying the global farm system or the global food system looks a bit like the global financial system in the years approaching 2008, and no one paid any attention to them. And what we're seeing with Ukraine, Ukraine, Russia's invasion of Ukraine didn't create the food crisis. It's exposed the food crisis. But as these papers were showing, it's been there all along. And part of the problem is these corporations are now too big to fail.”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“in Africa and it was the By having a maggot in my head, which lived in it. I was very proud of my parasites as a child. Exactly.”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's really quite magical, amazing the things, but you have to get the conditions right. So you can't tell up in the middle of winter or during a drought and take a lens to the soil and expect to see very much. But if you do it in the right conditions, this lens I use, I'll just show you here.”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, no, that's a lovely question. And I would so love to see that happening, not least because everyone has access to it. There's a couple of words of warning that there's only certain conditions under which you're going to see a huge profusion of life because it's very seasonal and a really good time is this time of year as long as it's damp and warm because that's what soil life really loves and so it sort of comes and goes you know when when the conditions are right you'll get a massive proliferation of life and you'll see something in every speck of soil something amazing which is just sort of hard to believe you're seeing because half the time it's like i don't even know which phylum this is in you know it's like sort of really really bizarre life forms it's got 12 pairs of legs what has 12 pairs of legs it seems to have two antennas sticking out the back and two at the front what in the”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Activities, which is livestock farming, but also for soya, and for palm oil and coconut and these other products which are also tremendously damaging to the living planet, not as damaging as livestock, not least because livestock eat a lot of them and so it sort of doubles damage, but still very damaging and it would be lovely to eliminate them as well. But you can use this bacterial flower to create almost anything which is similar to what we eat today, but also a whole new cuisine that we can't even imagine at the moment, just as the first farmers in the Neolithic who caught a wild cow weren't thinking of Caminber.”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, so yes, I was the first person on earth outside the lab to eat a pancake made from bacterial flour, a small flip for man. And it remarkably tasted identical to a pancake. I really in a blind tasting could not have told the difference because basically what you're doing with a pancake is you're mixing carbohydrate with a source of protein and fat, you add your egg and milk to wheat flour. In this case, because the bacterial flour which comes out the end of this brewing process is about 60% protein and 30% fat also, you have to dilute it with wheat flour, otherwise you'd make an omelet. But basically it's the same process. But we're not just trying to make pancakes here. We're trying to change the whole diet. And you could eliminate the need for this most damaging of all our”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is another element that people worry about. Yeah. No, please don't call it synthetic. I mean, it's like this is cultured food in the same way that everything we eat is cultured except for wild stuff you might gather. We've bred our plants to produce certain kinds of grain and certain kinds of nutritional characteristics. We've turned wild boars into these massive long white pigs with huge bodies and we turned jungle fowl into these chickens which mature in five weeks. And I want us to turn soil bacteria into the bases of our protein and fat supply. It's beginning to happen already.”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, we should definitely be seeing a switch towards a plant based diet, but producing food in productive places as effectively as we can. And we definitely should be concentrating on high yields, but with the lowest possible inputs required to achieve those yields, and that's where the new soil science comes in.”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is, no, it is true. Well, no, dinosaurs weren't destructive. They were the ecosystem or part of it. So you would lose almost nothing in terms of food production. In fact, you would gain far more in terms of ecological restoration than you'd lose in food production if you take the outdoor livestock out of the equation. As for the indoor livestock, they don't contribute to our food security at all because they're entirely dependent on feed, most of which is imported from elsewhere. And so people say, oh, look, we got some local pork or some local chicken. And you say, yeah, but that local pork or local chicken is fed from soya from Brazil. So is it really local? No, I don't think so. You know, you just put that soya through a pig and then you call it local. So we actually damage our food security by that dependency on animal feed from elsewhere. So what we should be focusing on is producing”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the first thing to say is that extensive livestock farming is astonishingly unproductive. So you lose almost no food if you stop doing extensive, in other words, pasture fed beef and lamb. And organic pasture-fed beef and lamb, incidentally, are the most damaging major farm products on Earth. They're the worst things you can possibly do because of the enormous land take and the huge ecological opportunity cost of that and the huge carbon opportunity cost.”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I don't want to get rid of them at all. I want them to do something different. And what I want them to do is to be employed by us for ecological restoration. I mean, given that all extension and pay farmers instead for ecological restoration. And in fact, there's quite a lot of work now showing that a nature-based economy tends to employ more people and generate better incomes than the traditional agricultural industries that it replaces. And so the offer would be to farmers, right, we're not going to pay you to denude the hills anymore and ensure that all the baby trees are nibbled out so that when the old ones die there aren't any to replace them. We're going to pay you to do the opposite. We're going to pay you to bring back trees, to take down the fences, to block up the drainage ditches, to restore rich, vibrant habitats full of wildlife, abundant and diverse. And you'll have to do less work than you're doing at the moment chasing sheep over rain sodden hills. What's not to like?”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the first thing to say is that I'm not trying to bring all farmers around to my side. I mean, when it comes to livestock, it's similar to the oil industry. You know, I'm not trying to win the fossil fuel companies over to the vision of leaving all the fossil fuels in the ground. I'm trying to help trigger societal change, which ensures that fossil fuels are left in the ground. And I'm never going to persuade livestock farmers that an end to livestock farming is a good thing”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It'd be quite nice to know what's going on on the surface of our own planet. And we know so little about the state and condition of soil at any one time that we might as well be exploring the surface of Mars for all we know. And let's spend some billions improving our knowledge on this planet because actually it might be a little bit more habitable than a planet without an atmosphere and oxygen and those other luxuries which make life quite pleasant.”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the good thing about horticulture is that everyone who does it is an obsessive and you kind of have to be because the returns really are not great. The whole economics of agriculture is crocked one way or another. And you just have to be completely obsessed with growing vegetables to be in that business because otherwise you wouldn't bother. And so certainly among the organic growers I meet, Tolly is God. They all want to be Tolly and they're all trying to replicate his techniques with varying degrees of success. We don't quite know why it seems to work very well in some places and less well in other places and it could be that we just don't know enough about what's going on under the soil. One of the things I call for in the book is an earth rover program. We got this Mars rover program, right? We're spending billions of pounds finding out what's going on in the surface of a different planet.”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just alter that relationship a little bit sufficient to completely transform the way that his soil works and to become this highly productive grower on the most unpromising land.”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As one of the destinations of effective agriculture, which is to get the bacteria and the fungi to deliver just the nutrients that the plant needs because the plant can't gather the nutrients itself from the soil, it has to, they have to go through bacteria and fungi to get to the plant, and then lock up those nutrients when they're not needed. And that locking up called immobilization is just as important as the delivery of nutrients, which is called mineralization, because unless you immobilize nutrients, they will wash off the land. And he's found that by keeping the soil water tight, in other words, by keeping it covered at all times, that plants growing all the time and not exposing bare soil to the sun and the wind and the rain, and by adding a tiny amount of wood chip at certain key points in the rotation, he's managed to”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are growing on good land it's the most extraordinary thing and what he's done is to anticipate the new developments in soil ecology which show that as I was saying fertility is as much a product of soil biology as it is of the chemistry and he appears to have tweaked the relationship between plants bacteria and fungi in the soil by very subtly altering the carbon content because aerated agricultural soils being complex systems they're in an equilibrium state unless you completely destroy them and one aspect of that equilibrium state is a carbon to nitrogen ratio of 12 to 1 and it seems if you can keep them in that zone then you can get them to do what really I see”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Manure that he liked the look of. He thought it was all contaminated and nasty and he was right actually because the sources that were available were you wouldn't want to put it on your land. And so he thought, what are other people doing? He looked at a Chinese system and thought, well, maybe I can use green manures to draw up nutrients from the subsoil. And he gradually experimented and his experiments have now lasted 34 years. And every year he tried something new and a little bit new and a little bit new. And astonishingly throughout that whole period, he's added no fertilizer and no manure to his soil. And having cracked the technique, his fertility has just risen and risen and his productivity has risen and risen. He's a vegetable and fruit grower. These are considered very hungry crops to need a lot of manure or fertilizer, but he's got none at all. And his yields have now hit the lower bound of what conventional producers”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, well, the classic case of this is this remarkable man, Ian Tollhurst, or Tolly, as everyone calls him. He left school when he was 15, no qualifications, no money. He scratched around trying to make a living. He was desperate to get into farming. His sole interest was growing stuff and trees, those were his two interests, and eventually managed to rent at a reduced below market rent seven hectares of land in South Oxfordshire, which was really poor land, considered very poor. It was grade 3B, which most people would say is only good for pasture. 40% stone. It's very noisy soil, you know, because when you work it, it's like clatter, clatter, clatter because of all the stone in it. And astonishingly, he sort of, well, first of all, he couldn't find any.”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm not going to eat its products anymore. And given the enormous harm that both dairy and egg production is doing, I think vegetarianism makes no sense. to have an environmentally benign diet, you've got to go the whole hog. Oh, no, gotta get away from the whole hog and go towards a plant-based diet.”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I'd taken photos and I wrote it up for The Guardian, and it caused a stink commensurate with the stink in the river. And then two weeks later, I phoned them up and said, so what's going on? They said, well, we've decided not to enforce because it's not a serious case. I said, what do you mean it's not a serious case? They've killed two miles a river. And they said, well, sir, we found no evidence of a fish kill. Of course you found no evidence of a bleeding fish kill. There aren't any fish left to kill. They've been pouring this stuff in the river for six months. Everything died ages ago. Well, thanks very much for your concern, sir. Goodbye. And it's like, so I read another article saying, what does a farmer have to do to get prosecuted? Detonate an atom bomb. And in response to that, I had two whistleblowers from the Environment Agency get hold of me and said, we've been instructed from the top not to enforce against dairy farms. That's what's going on here. And I thought, okay, if you're not going to regulate this industry.”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“watching wildlife but when I turned up there was a stretch I came to explore about two miles long was just a sewer the only thing living in it was sewage fungus and I traced that to a pipe which was pouring into the river this disgusting brown sludge I followed that up the hill and found that the pipe was leading out of a pair of slurry lagoons it had been deliberately constructed to spill the overspill into the river attached to a dairy unit where there were lots of cows when I looked at Google Earth I saw that the dairy unit had been doubled in size but the slurry lagoons were the same size instead of going to the expensive expanding the slurry lagoons they just were tipping it in the river so I did what any good citizen would do and I phoned the environment agency pollution hotline and I said I found this horrendous case of pollution well thanks very much sir well we'll go and take a look”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, I'm really guardian. I horribly woke diet, but actually not because I'm necessarily that way inclined. I mean, I am very greedy, but I just don't like sweet stuff, which is incredibly fortunate. It's just happens to be that way. However, I should, before I sound too virtuous, I should say that I really resisted a plant-based diet for a long time. And I came up with all sorts of excuses for doing so. But what triggered it eventually was that I was down in Devon on the river Kulm. I don't know if you know it, with some friends, which is meant to be the most beautiful river. It's meant to have salmon running up it, brook lampries, wild trout, mayflies, kingfishers, otters, everything. It's meant to be a really great place.”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think there are several issues here. On the issue of obesity, it is overwhelmingly a disease of poverty and it's a communicable disease whose vectors are corporations. And you have the junk food manufacturers which go to enormous lengths to formulate food, which is very hard to resist once you start eating it. You want to eat more because they work with chemists and neuroscientists to trigger those impulses in our brain and override our appetite control.”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Many people, even in this country, the fifth or sixth richest country on earth, now can't afford to eat well. As the UNFAO says, food and agriculture organization, a good diet costs five times as much as one that's merely adequate in terms of calories. And even in countries like the UK, there are millions of people who can't afford a good diet. So it's not really that food is too cheap, it's that good food is too expensive, but more importantly that we're all trying to eat the kind of food which imposes a massive burden on the planet, which is primarily animal products, and the planet can't afford it. And you're vegan yourself.”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm quite sceptical of this cheap food argument. And I think a lot of the time when we talk about cheap food, we're actually covering over issues rather than exposing them. And I hear some wonderful rivers campaigners talking about cheap food, and I'm going to have a word with one or two of them, because actually what they're talking about is meat. It's not so much the price of stuff, it's what it is. What are we eating here? I mean, if you have a plant-based diet, you massively reduce the impact of your diet, not just the greenhouse gas impact, the amount of land you use, the amount of chemicals that are used, the amount of processing machinery. I mean, just about everything, you reduce your impacts. And so a lot of the time, we're actually talking about the components of the diet, not how cheap or expensive they are. And let's not forget that.”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And when it comes to issues like these chicken units, they're about the only profitable kind of farming that you can pursue in the Y Valley or at least of livestock farming because the sheep and the cattle are completely unprofitable, massively lost making farmers there are solely dependent on subsidies and the subsidies are keeping the hills bare with their own disastrous impacts. And so farmers want to make money. They strike a contract with one of the big multinationals which have set up processing plants in the region and they build these huge chicken factories. And the problem lies in the fact that the county councils and the environment But also, it's the supermarkets, isn't it?”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In fact, in some cases, they raise the price of food and they are almost entirely stimulating environmental destruction. In fact, in the UK and Europe, you can't claim your so-called basic payments unless the land is in what's called agricultural condition. You don't actually have to produce anything on that land. It just has to look as if it's farmland. And that means it can't host what are called permanent ineligible features that you and I know as wildlife habitat. And so it provides this massive perverse incentive to clear wildlife habitat. And across Europe as a whole, it's one of the most destructive forces on earth. It's led to the destruction of hundreds of thousands of hectares of really beautiful and amazing places just so people can claim these subsidies. So it's like if you are trying as a farmer to do the right thing, you have to swim against”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But farmers are very resilient and resourceful and adaptable, and they will follow the financial incentives wherever they take them, and at the moment the financial incentives aren't pushing farmers in the right direction, you know, and are not blaming the individual farmers. I mean, I think the farmers' unions, like the National Farmers Union, have a lot to answer for with their very powerful and almost entirely destructive lobbying efforts. But the individual farmers, you know, they're just trying to make a living. But unfortunately, the whole sector is just regulated all wrong and stimulated all wrong. So, for instance, worldwide, we spend half a trillion dollars on farm subsidies, $500 billion poured into farm subsidies. And those subsidies are almost entirely perverse. The great majority go to the biggest, richest landowners. They do almost nothing to reduce the price of food.”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“sludge and while they produce oxygen during the day when they respire at night they draw the oxygen out of the water column fish can asphyxiate the insects can asphyxiate just as bad because of the clouding of the water almost all the water crowfoot this beautiful flowing weed which lives in the river has died because it can't get enough light to photosynthesize now water crowfoot is for rivers like the Wy what mangroves are to tropical seas it's the breeding ground and the nursery and the shelter for a huge range of its life the the little creatures and the fish and so many of the species there and you lose that you lose the anchor of the ecosystem and almost all of it has now gone and so it's it's sort of there's this agricultural exceptionalism because these huge factories you know if they were”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“for the plants to use. And so a huge amount of the minerals in that dung, they wash off into the river Y and its tributaries. And the result has been the remarkably rapid transformation of that stunning, treasured, highly protected river into little more than an open sewer. I mean at the height of summer, July and August, it stinks. I mean, it really stinks. And if you swim in it, you come out, it feels like your skin is covered in liquid snot. It's disgusting. I mean, I'm never swimming in it again after that horrible experience. And it's because of all this chicken poo and the minerals in it washing off the land into the river. They cause these blooms of single-celled algae floating in the water, which sometimes just turn the whole river into this completely opaque.”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the Y Valley is a very good example because in a Pois and Herefordshire alone in the catchment of the River Wye, the councils have given permission for chicken factories. I mean, they call them barns, but they're actually huge great steel factories with tens of thousands of chickens crammed into each one, housing twenty million birds. And there's lots of problems with them. But the big problem as far as rivers are concerned is that those birds poo. They eat a huge amount of feed, which comes generally from the other side of the world, soya, from cleared land in Brazil, for example. And that contains a lot of minerals. And the majority of those minerals are excreted by the chickens. And then the dung is spread on the fields. And the farmers say, well, we're fertilizing the fields, but there's far too much dung for the fields to absorb.”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's surrounded by this sort of force field, this moral force field where we might criticize industry, but we don't apply the same standards to farming.”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so it's like, well, all that is land, which could otherwise have been used to hold forests and wetlands and savannahs and wild grasslands. The ecosystems on which a great majority of life on earth depends and in which the entire earth system depends. And in fact, we threaten our own lives as well as most of the life on Earth by eating away at that Earth system and using so much of it for our own agricultural sprawl. And farming partly as a result of that is the biggest cause of habitat destruction, the biggest cause of species loss, the biggest cause of extinction, the biggest cause of soil loss, biggest cause of water use, one of the biggest causes of climate breakdown, of water pollution, even of air pollution. And yet somehow it's...”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT