As regular readers of alloporus will know, posts on food appear quite often on this blog.
Not new recipes for banoffee pie [can be too bananary] or salted caramel tart [delicious with just the right amount of salt] but more about how we are going to consistently grow enough of food to feed the growing and increasingly fussy global human population, not to mention their pets.
Food security | A food security challenge | What we eat
Recently I asked a question in my confused Confucius series on the article site Hubpages to see if food security was something people thought about.
Being confused Confucius the question was just a tad lateral: Would you be prepared to pay more for your food if it meant food supply was secure? [The link takes you to the answers and comments] and there is also a summary Hub
Turns out that there were three main objections
- Could not pay more because it was already a struggle to cover the food bill
- Paying more would not solve anything
- We already pay
Social media is a great tool to canvas opinion but, unlike answers to exam questions from my long-suffering undergraduates, answers to questions are often oblique.
Not being able to pay is fair enough and no doubt very real for many people all around the world.
Paying more not solving anything did not really answer the question by making the assumption that it was not possible to pay for security. Bit of a dodge I think and quite common I suspect in our thinking. We jump onto the polemic in order to avoid searching ourselves for what we truly think.
The ‘we already pay’ because our production system is riddled with externalities, also didn’t really answer the question.
I guess all I was asking is if we would pay to be secure, pay more for our current food to know that we would always have enough food in the future.
So far the answer seems to be either ‘no’ or ‘not something I want to answer thanks’. This I find both curious and just a little disturbing.
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