The Abundance of Nature Our Daily Bread 01
Gathering enough wheat to eat probably wasn’t all that difficult.
Gathering enough wheat to eat probably wasn’t all that difficult.
It’s magic, I know. First a pretty ordinary grass becomes the main source of sustenance for most of the people alive on Earth. Then they learn how to turn the seeds of that grass into the food of the gods.
In 1946 Geoffrey Pyke, an eminently sane scientist, put forward the idea of using what little coal there was to refine sugar rather than feeding it to locomotives. Human muscles would make far better use of the energy than steam engines. The problem Pyke tried to tackle remains essentially unsolved: where is the power for food production to come from?
How do farmers’ markets and concentrated food industries that depend on long food chains stack up when it comes to food-borne illness? Truth is, nobody really knows.
The number of firms that own the food brands you see is much smaller than you think. That’s not good for consumers or suppliers.