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Feeding People Is Easy

(Paperback) by Colin Tudge (Author) The message of "Feeding People is Easy" is the most important that can be conceived. We can feed ourselves forever - without cruelty to livestock and without wrecking the rest of the world. If we do the job properly, we will create human societies that are truly agreeable, co-operative and at peace in which all manner of people with all kinds of beliefs and aspirations can be personally fulfilled. "Feeding People is Easy" homes in, from the onset, on the positives. It shows what each of us can do to help put things right.

Bring back common sense
Bring back common sense.(animal husbandry techniques). Author/s: Colin
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The Fight To Save Our Food
... meat. In an exclusive essay adapted from his new book, Colin Tudge
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December 10 2007 ~"Industry experts are said to believe that the public has become immune to food scare stories"

So says the Telegraph in an article today reporting increased demand for turkeys. The executive officer of the British Poultry Council, said: "In the main, everyone understands there is going to be no problem sourcing the 10 million turkeys eaten by the public this Christmas."
It rather depends how you define "problem".
Scares tend to pick on the wrong target. (See article here about the new book "Scared to Death- From BSE To Global Warming - Why Scares Are Costing Us The Earth" - Amazon link)
People who buy meat should indeed be concerned, not first by the possibility of catching disease but at the way our species exploits some animals - and poultry in particular - in a way that encourages disease to thrive in the first place. In his book, Colin Tudge writes, "If modern livestock production had been designed by a crack team of pathogens, they could scarecely have done the job better....even people who can see the horrors and absurdity of the present-day food supply chain are apt to make excuses for it. Doesn't it provide us with cheap food - at least in the West? Wouldn't food be more expensive if run along more enlightened lines? In an age in which routine mendacity is merely a tactic, this is still the most pernicious of all lies."

December 8 2007 ~ £270m dairy price-fixing scandal. Supermarkets accused of “corporate greed”.

The Daily Post says, "Retailers such as Asda and Sainsbury’s and a number of major dairies yesterday agreed to pay combined fines of more than £116m after admitting fixing the price of milk, cheese and butter following a probe by the Office of Fair Trading (OFT). The Farmers Union of Wales believes something similar is now happening in the UK lamb market...."
As Colin Tudge writes in his book "Feeding People is Easy"
"We should question the sanctimonious argument that food must be cheap for the sake of the poor....The antidote to poverty is to give a damn and create economies with fairer shares. The answer is not to be cruel to animals, or to screw farmers into the ground, or to fell forests and pollute rivers. These are the methods of the scoundrel..."
Farming is in deep crisis. If - as many politicians (and the forces of corporate darkness that inspire them) seem to want - Britain gives up the ability to feed itself and depends more and more on cheap food from abroad, disaster awaits. We cannot recommend Colin Tudge's book too highly (see also below) - except on his ignorance of the efficacy of modern FMD vaccines. He has accepted the official line that vaccination is unreliable because it "can mask latent infection", which is a great pity for a book likely to be so influential. The risk is negligable and what is more, by testing the vaccinated animals for antibodies against non-structural virus proteins (a-NSP tests) to demonstrate the absence of infection, this risk, if it exists at all, can be reduced even further.

December 1 2007 ~ "In hyper-'efficient' Britain, policy makers continue to urge that we should abandon farming altogether.."

Highly and urgently recommended is a book by Colin Tudge; "Feeding People is Easy" He says we need a renaissance world-wide in which - contrary to the pressures exerted by the powerful - small, mixed, labour-intensive farms are the norm, the default position.
"As John Maynard Keynes pointed out 70 years ago, there is no relationship between the Gross National Product and human wellbeing...In hyper-'efficient' Britain, policy makers continue to urge (I have heard them doing so) that we should abandon farming altogether and buy from abroad, which these days largely means Brazil and Africa. Yet the money we spend in those countries does the population little or no good - merely speeding their exodus from traditional farms...we cannot allow the people who have the most influence in the world ...and all their attendant battalions of bureaucrats, economists and scientists - to perpetuate a system that is clearly based on nonsense and is threatening our entire survival.."
Colin Tudge applauds the many signs of renaissance already from farmers' markets to 'transition towns' like Totnes and Stroud setting out to run their own affairs differently. Anything short of a renaissance - fiddling with the CAP, trying to get Tesco's or Sainsbury's to stock half a shelf of local produce - is a waste of time.