2y ago

Waitrose hit by middle-class vegetable shortage

www.telegraph.co.uk /business/2023/08/24/waitrose-middle-class-veg-shortage-tomatoes-artichokes/

24 comments

What the hell is a middle class vegetable? Is this some slight at the Irish and potatoes?
- Anything that appears in more than three episodes of come dine with me
- Hands off my Pak Choi
- It's the next rung down on the Social Class Idiocy Food Analogue Scale after Gammon.
  
  I became very defensive over gammon when it became a slur - it's one of my favourite joints of meat to cook. Inexpensive and goes with just about anything too.
  Also keeps in the fridge for yonks. Can't say that about chicken now can you, eh?
- Bloody private schooled onions.
I love me some good class warfare clickbait.
"a scarcity of artichokes at Waitrose could reignite panic"
Yes. Public unrest, again due to no artichokes.
- I can just see the riots on the streets now...
Liz Webster, head of campaign group Save British Farming, told The Telegraph in February: “We live on an island in a particularly difficult climate with a very short growing season. If we don’t have any food security in a world which is chaotic, we know what happens because it happened in the last two World Wars – we are exposed to a food crisis.”
You can trade for food. You are part of the wealthy world and can outbid just about anyone else. Even in the event of a global famine, it's not gonna be the UK at the bottom of the food chain.
But the World Wars!
You were blockaded then.
Who is able and willing to blockade the UK today? That'd require a hot war. And what is the kind of insane scenario one can produce in the present world where the UK would be need to be facing down a blockade, and can then militarily pull out ahead after doing so?
The UK is one of the more potent naval powers in the world. Trying to cut the UK off from the ocean is something that only a few countries could even realistically attempt.
The UK is in NATO. Virtually all of the world's major naval powers are in NATO. NATO Article 6 explicitly covers attacks on the ships of member states in the North Atlantic as being in NATO's scope. You'd have to have at minimum NATO breaking up for this to even be conceivable.
The UK is a couple miles offshore of France and even absent the Royal Navy, the UK has extensive ability to do anti-submarine warfare, knock enemy warships out of the area, shoot down aircraft in the area, and generally keep the English Channel open. So at least mainland Europe is going to have to be in opposition, since it's very dubious that anyone is going to have an easy time interposing themselves between the UK and mainland Europe.
Even absent the entire rest of NATO and absent the entire Royal Navy, the UK and the US are allied. As things stand today, the US would reasonably be expected to win a naval war against the rest of the world combined. China is the closest thing to a peer today, and trying to fight a naval war against the UK and US concurrently in the Atlantic (a) sounds pretty unlikely and (b) probably one of the worst battlefields that China could possibly choose for something like that.
The UK is a nuclear power with second-strike capability. Nobody, absolutely nobody -- and I include the US -- is going to try to wage an all-in war against the UK where the aim is to starve the British population without asking some very serious questions about the risk of a nuclear war.
So, what is the scenario that one is trying to hedge against? A scenario in which NATO has broken up and the UK is concurrently fighting France and the US at least? Because that scenario really seems like one where there would be rather larger military concerns than running low on food. I also think that if that is a realistic concern, then the UK would probably not be doing the military collaborations that the UK does with either, for starters.
But then why would the head of the campaign group Save British Farming say such a thing?
Well, maybe because they're an industry advocacy group, and it's in their interest not to be competing with agriculture from abroad?
Let's hypothetically say that there is an actual, real national security threat involving food shortages. Okay. Let me suggest a few things:
Probably a lot of the UK's military strategy needs to be redone, since it is probably improperly relying on alliances if it's needing to hedge against this route. If the UK has a serious concern about fighting a conventional war against France and the US concurrently, then it needs to do a lot of things differently.
Second, I'd want to understand what combination of enemies the UK is going to be facing that can impose a blockade on the UK but cannot otherwise defeat the UK militarily.
[continued in child]
- You can trade for food. You are part of the wealthy world and can outbid just about anyone else.
  Yeh. Didn't help with us with tomatoes etc this spring when tehy and other salad crops were in short supply. Much simpler for Spanish syppliers to sell into the EU
  
  It wasn't that it was simpler for them, it's that your average Brit is a tightfisted cunt and won't pay more for a tomato what they think it's worth.
  Supermarkets knew this so stopped buying certain veg when the price went up, because they knew their average customer is so tight they squeak when they walk
  There was no shortage whatsoever
- [continued from parent]
  Third, I'd ask why British farmers are permitted to do things like raise meat. If there is truly an overriding concern about the population starving due to lack of ability to trade, then one wants to maximize the caloric output of existing British farmland, and one of the most-effective way to do that is to produce grain rather than meat; producing meat requires a lot of wasted potential calories. I remember once reading a statistic that if the US did nothing other than become vegetarian, that the surplus generated alone could feed all of Europe. Similarly, maximizing the ability of British agriculture to feed the British public involves shifting over fully to grain -- and more-generally, plant production. One could obtain meat from abroad, and meat would be a pleasant, but unnecessary luxury that could be readily foregone in the event of our highly-implausible blockade. Now, I guarantee you that British agricultural associations are not going to like that approach at all, because it will make British beef farmers unhappy, but if there truly is the danger that Save British Farming is proposing, then that is a more-effective solution than the one that they are proposing.But maybe Save British Farming is just grain farmers? Let's look at their website. Ooop, it's complaining about the Australia-UK trade agreement. And looks like they've got pictures of sheep next to their "being flooded by foreign cheap food" bit. And Australia is a huge sheepmeat producer. And it looks like the major concern about that trade agreement was from beef and sheep farmers: "The National Farmers' Union (NFU) has warned that freeing up the UK-Australian trade in meat will lead to hundreds of British cow and sheep breeders going out of business."The woman complaining is Liz Webster. If we look at her Twitter (well, X) feed, she's complaining about competition for British beef producers: "Wonder why Australian beef is cheaper than British beef? The video on the left is 🇦🇺 govt funded feedlot houses 70,000 animals fed only grain to fatten quicker. Our British cattle on the right graze across acres with plenty of trees for shade. Each has a passport."
  She's not worried about British food security. She might be worried about the economic viability of her business, but that's a different matter.
  EDIT: Okay, there's one more possible scenario. I'm not totally being fair. It is hypothetically possible that if a sufficiently-large chunk of the world's food producers decided to embargo the UK, to simply voluntarily refuse to trade with the UK, and then maybe put economic pressure on all the other countries sufficient to keep them from doing so, then they hypothetically could starve out the UK. Even in cases where sanctions have been imposed, food is generally allowed in, like with Iran. And food is a commodity, not easy to do that, but hypothetically, it could indeed happen.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foodpower
  In international politics, food power is the use of agriculture as a means of political control whereby one nation or group of nations offers or withholds commodities from another nation or group of nations in order to manipulate behavior. Its potential use as a weapon was recognised after OPEC’s earlier use of oil as a political weapon.
  So, maybe that could be a concern. But...one significant caveat:
  The four main nations that export enough agriculture to be able to exert food power are the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.[1]
  So, basically, the UK's closest allies, the rest of Five Eyes, would have to collectively decide that they were going to go and starve the UK and then set off to try to get the rest of the world to go along with it.
  EDIT2: And let me add one more, final point. The UK today is a net food importer. About a third of British food is imported. If the aim is to domestically produce all food required, then -- going back up to the question of why British farmers are permitted to produce meat today -- I would ask why the pre-existing situation, one about which said farming groups have been quite happy, has not been producing complaints of "food security".
  
  Who would embargo Britain? Let me tell you: People with vested interests inside Britain. They then choose the most ideal scapegoat at the time in order to try to make the people think a certain way in order to further the agenda of the embargo creators.
  Sometimes those with vested interests cock things up completely rather than achieve their goal, but it doesn't matter much to those of us outside that club.
  Things go missing, sideways, backwards or get more expensive regardless.
  
  Third, I'd ask why British farmers are permitted to do things like raise meat.
  Because British consumers rather like buying British meat and we aren't in a centrally planned economy.
  
  Farmers would rather there was some amount of food scarcity, that way they could fulfill as much as possible for as high a price as possible.
- @tal @Mex
  One can trade, if one has something others want as much as what they have that we want.
  If the food supply in the world becomes insufficient for the people in the world, then yes, some may eat and others may starve. Solutions which avoid that have more merit than those that rearrange the queue.
  Note that considerable of the food production in the UK is dependent on the Gulf Stream.
Artichokes and aubergines at the ready.... fight!
Let them eat cake!

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