The “What’s for Dinner” column of a national newspaper, January 2024.
“At no period of the world’s history have the demands upon agriculture been so exacting than they are now . . . Let farmers’ institutes be organized, and all the methods of nature study be brought down to the every-day life and language of the masses. Let us become familiar with the commonest thing about us.”
George Washington Carver, pioneering black plant scientist and agricultural liberation educator
Sometimes, to remind myself of the miracles of the modern age, I pop to the local Sainsbury’s for a quick shop. Up and down the isles I stroll, and look at the glitzy plastic packages in their dazzling colours. For what (in this economy) really isn’t that much money I can get cuts of pork, noodles, freshly packaged vegetables, custard creams, an endless panoply of food goods to satisfy my every craving. In one place, even! Then I buy my triple chocolate muffins and my pringles and sit in my room in goblin mode. (Did I use it correctly? Am I cool?)
My chosen occupation, if you can even call it that, is one of ridiculous privilege. Not only in the Anton-Ego-negative-criticism-is-fun-to-write-and-to-read sense, but simply in the fact that I can eat from promising restaurants more than a few times a month, write about them, and get paid. It is, if I’m being perfectly honest, somewhat spine-chilling to imagine what the revolutionaries will do to my body when they get to me. But one of the benefits of this ludicrous job is that sometimes there’s a dull week and the restaurants are merely passable, not good or terrible, and I get a column to myself to write about whatever the damn hell I want. So this is it: food security.
Being in this job means that you talk to a lot of restauranteurs, and their managers, chefs, and wait staff. And the one thing that comes up over and over again is supply. To manage a restaurant is a terrifying workload in the best of times, but a problem that comes up more and more for restaurants that aren’t owned by corporate entities with money to airlift A5 Wagyu in from Japan (and, indeed, some restaurants that are) is how to ensure that the dozens of ingredients required for each dinner service arrive on time, unspoiled, and at the quality you expect. It’s easy to think of sourcing as a sort of liberal exercise in virtue-signalling, British free-range chicken and grain-fed beef, but the sad reality is that (much like a modern war) restaurants are much more exercises in logistics and consistency than some romantic idea of an individual genius honing their craft in a lonely test kitchen. And the exercise is getting harder with every passing year.
Let’s give a basic example: It seems likely now that the production of rice, a staple part of the diet of billions, will come under serious threat in the next thirty years. The world’s fifth largest rice producer, Vietnam, will see almost 20 million people displaced and its southern territories underwater, with most of Ho Chi Minh city to follow suit. The second largest rice producer, India, already struggles under the threat of increasingly deadly and long-lasting heat waves which affect not only the lives of its citizens but also its food production. China, Indonesia, and Bangladesh will also not be spared from sweltering summers and rising waters, especially with Indonesia’s precarious geographical constitution as an island chain. And even where rice can be produced, transporting it around the globe in the quantities we are used to will also become more difficult, as extreme weather disrupts the shipping industry and global logistics. I’d give a few more examples, but in short: The fallow years are coming, and the state of exception will not be going away.
There is no “return to normal”, and there never again will be.