Last updated
05 February 2012
Quest for the Good Life 
Welcome to the philosophy pages of the Quest for the Good life site. This simply touches on some of the areas that give us concern and perhaps will become issues for the future generations and even the world.
Issues:-
- Supermarket domination
- Intensive farming
- Dependence on oil
- Population pressures
Supermarket domination
We all use the supermarket to greater or lesser degrees. It many respects we have no choice, but then we perhaps have more choice than we think. It’s convenient to drive to the store, get all your weekly shopping in one go and forget about it until next time.
We all know how the supermarkets also use their buying power to drive down prices. Always “sold” as a good thing, giving us more savings and helping the lower incomes go further. If you believe that then you’ll believe anything!. The truth is they are businesses. The role of a PLC is to make a profit so it can pay a dividend to it’s shareholders. The supermarket makes a profit by buying goods and the lowest price possible and selling it for the highest price the market will tolerate. With intense competition between stores to deliver the perception that they are the cheapest, selling prices tend to be lower so the only way you can make the profit you need is to squeeze the other end. The supplier. This could be the farmer, the baker or the chocolate manufacturer. The more business the supermarkets do, the more they can call the shots to these suppliers.
Then surely that’s the suppliers problem, not ours? Yes it is, but the suppliers also have to make their profit margins, if they are giving it to the supermarket then their accounts will suffer. What has happened over the last 20 years or so is the gradual reduction in the quality of food and the emergence of ready made foods. With these the consumer has no control over ingredients and quality. Trust has to be the biggest ingredient and that’s where it falls down badly. We have lost our trust in the retail supply of food through the supermarkets. You see the change in individual products like cakes. Who has ever eaten a supermarket scone and survived! The chicken issues, intensive birds and the “two for £5.50” chickens which if you saw them alive you would never eat in a million years.
This driving down of suppliers prices has resulted in the suppliers driving down the ingredients and quality of their products. This means the nutritional value of these foods has also been reduced.
We are paying less for food and definitely getting less.
Spend half a day and make yourself a Victoria sponge cake or a batch of home made scones. Taste them. Then try the commercial equivalent. Then you can tell in one word exactly what has been lost, quality.
We try to make our own bread, cakes and pies. Growing as much fruit and veg as possible and looking at other ways to take processed foods out of our shopping altogether. Does it cost more? Not financially, but it does need more time in the kitchen. With cooking skills on the decline, the nation is in danger of becoming more dependent on factories making our food for us. What goes into it and how nutritious it is can be questionable. This makes us all vulnerable to the pressures of business and has nothing to do with good food.
Make your own bread, bake a cake or some shortbread. Grow a few veg. Have a few chickens for some fresh eggs.
Taste the difference. Get back some say in what you eat!
Intensive farming
Producing food for the hungry world cheaply. Have we succeeded? No.
Intensive farming has been driven by the commercial pressures of the supermarket. Eye catching price points and catchy offers are there to serve their own commercial objectives. Food waste going out the back door could feed considerable numbers of hungry people. Instead it goes to landfill.
Chicken farming for fast food and cheap offers means 150,000 birds per farm. The types reared are fast growing. In 35/39 days they are slaughtered. They are kept indoors at a fixed temperature and humidity on bedding that is never cleaned out, just added to over their lifetime.
As they grow so fast and get no exercise, their leg muscles cannot hold their weight.
They sit about a lot and rest on the backs of their legs. The ammonia from the bedding burns the leg tissues so it is red and sore. Considerable numbers die before their miserable 35 days is up. As they get bigger, the crowding becomes intense and movement is restricted. If disease strikes, antibiotics are pumped into the whole flock, even the healthy ones.
At the end of the time, foreign workers clear the sheds grabbing the birds and packing them into crates. They are loaded onto lorries and sent on the short journey to the slaughter house. Any left behind suffer trauma until it is their turn.
We find this distasteful. It is not fiction either. We have seen it first hand and heard it from people involved in it. It is disgusting that humans can treat other animals like that all in the name of cheap food. Shame on the supermarkets and high street fast food outlets that promote it. May your profits suffer the same fate!
They are now trying to get milking herds of cows to become intensive as well.
Instead of an average of 70-
All in the name of cheap milk. What about the cows? Do we really want to go the same way with them?
Intensive farming is about maximising yields for maximum profit. Price pressures
from the supermarkets squeezes profits so the animals have to pay the price. Despite
all of the hype and literature these business provide about the care and management
of the animals, it’s quite obvious that it is not natural, these system operate under
considerable pressure and stress has to be a factor. Do we gain? Well we get cheap
food that is not worth eating, animals that have been kept in un-
Agriculture is much more specialist now. Farms tend to grow not just either arable or dairy, but even more refined into particular crops. This create large mono crop fields which rely heavily on the chemical companies and seed breeders to produce better yields from each acre. These pressures seem to ignore the role the soil plays in all this. Years ago more farms were mixed arable and animal. The waste from the animals went on the land, some of the food went to feed the animals. A simple but sustainable cycle.
Now specialist crops need inputs of fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides. The outputs are moved away by fleets of oil hungry lorries. The farm equipment is massive and the number of workers few. The seed breeders are looking to produce something from nothing and genetic modification is pushing it’s way through the door. All of these efforts are shifting farms further away from what is sustainable and ecological. The soil can only grow with the help of chemicals. What if we push it too far? The destructive nature of agriculture means the balance is being altered. Key species are being threatened. New pesticides (neonicotinoids) are having knock on effects in the eco system. We have not really seen the full effects yet and I fear the worst when we do.
GM crops are about. Once they spread these human engineered changes into the natural population nobody can know the outcome. Genetic change has been normal in the history of life, these changes are usually slow and “tested” by natural selection pressures over thousands of years. Only the best one’s survive, being kept in check and balance by resources and other species. With mankind releasing them in relatively large quantities over a small time period, the only selection pressures are what we want, not what the environment can tolerate. We simply do not know if there will be interactions with existing species that could have some real negative effects.
Oh, by then it’s too late, you can’t go and fetch it back!
Dependence on oil
The economy of the UK, and indeed the world, is driven by profits and powered by oil. Lorries and aeroplanes bringing goods from around the world to be sold in out of town shopping centres are all part of daily life. Accessed by vehicles, particularly the car, shops have moved out of urban areas to retail parks near busy roads. They are supplied by massive fleets of lorries delivering from distribution centres miles away. All owe their existence to oil. Without fuel to move these goods, the supermarket could not have beans from Kenya, apples from China and blueberries from Guatemala. The availability of foods out of season is “sold” as consumer choice. In fact food produced out of season in Africa or Asia is cheap and highly profitable. The problem is that producing beans is Kenya uses valuable water that they need to drink, not grow vegetables for us. This mismanagement of resources is once again done under the name of choice. Who’s, Kenyans or the house wife? Whilst some fair trade schemes perhaps do add something to third world economies, they are not really creating their own wealth. They are just slaves for the global economy.
So what happens when the oil becomes scarce? We already hear reports that the world
has past “peak oil” production. That means it’s drying up gradually. With less
new reserves to be found, increasing demand through wider car ownership and cheap
air travel. Developing ex-
We seem to be content in this country with importing a lot of our food. There is a difficult dilemma. To grow more of our own food we need farm land. This competes with needs for housing. With targets for new house building, land is being consumed. This is taken out of food production. Take this to the extreme and fill the UK with houses, there will be no where to grow food. Will we import all of our increased need for food from other countries? What happens when their population grows as well and they hit the same problem. There will be no room left to grow food.
The extreme vision here is one of global starvation.
The imaginations can go wild and talk of growing food in tower blocks or under the sea but there is a finite number of people that can live in this world. When that number is met, no more can fit on the planet.
Population pressures
This is probably the single most difficult area to discuss. Politically, no one
talks about controlling birth rate. In reality we are extending life at both ends.
More babies survive through the most difficult conditions, more serious diseases
are controlled or cured and at the other end people are living longer. When you
look at that, it has to be un-
It is most likely that population pressures will result in wars. The widespread use of antibiotics will contribute to resistant strains of germs appearing. Some of these could have the power to kill many people.
You can only suppose that the more people there are, the greater the pressure of space, food and quality of life, the more likely there will be war and disease to take its toll.
If we regulated populations then many of these extreme situations would not happen. But dare we do it?
John Seymour, who wrote the Complete Book of Self Sufficiency way back in 1976, could
see the effect we were having and the difficulties we might face in the near future.
To quote some of his words about oil, resources and the planet:-
“We are utterly dependant on cheap fossil fuels, so any interruption in supply would bring disaster. Imagine trying to feed and service our huge cities if the fuel ran out! It is now urgently necessary to dismantle the whole fabric of world trade and replace it with a far less fuel hungry, less polluting, less dangerous arrangement”
He goes on to say:-
“To allow ourselves to be dependant on some vast thing created by the Merchants of
Greed is madness. It is time to cut out what we do not need so we can live more
simply and happily. Good food, comfortable clothes, serviceable housing and true
culture -