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Sainsbury’s Britishness test
Joanna Blytheman, The Guardian
It was only in June that Sainsbury’s boss, Justin King, criticised campaigns encouraging shoppers to buy only British food as “simplistic”, so what are we to make of the chain’s announcement that it has decided to source nearly all the meat it uses in ready-meals from Britain?
Despite Mr King’s rousing summertime attack on the “food miles” critique of our globalised food chain, it seems that Sainsbury’s can’t resist scoring patriotic brownie points to give it a handy ethical edge over its rivals. To be fair, Sainsbury’s has done something it can legitimately brag about. Embarrassed by campaigners who have exposed our large food retailers’ willingness to dump UK suppliers at the drop of a hat for their overseas competitors, leading chains are tripping over each another to demonstrate their loyal support for British farming…
Guardian correspondent Joanna Blytheman is the author of two well-regarded exposes of the globalized food industry from a UK perspective, Shopped and The Food We Eat. KS
Revealed: the cruelty of UK’s pork suppliers
Martin Hickman, The Independent
Pigs so crazed by cramped and filthy conditions that they resort to gnawing at each other are being supplied by farmers to British shops, a European study by a respected animal charity shows.
Investigators from Compassion in World Farming found 80 per cent of farms across five European countries engaging in illegal practices such as barren pens and routine tail-docking…
(5 December 2008)
This article links in well with one that I posted yesterday about climate impacts of large factory farms. If compassion for the plight of these animals doesn’t call for ameliorating their living conditions, perhaps the effect of their greenhouse gases will? KS
No. Just no.
Sharon Astyk, Casaubon’s Book
http://www.commodityonline.com/news/Revolution-food-riots-in-America-by-…
Several people sent this to me this morning: Gerald Celente, the CEO of Trends Research Institute, is renowned for his accuracy in predicting future world and economic events, which will send a chill down your spine considering what he told Fox News this week.Celente says that by 2012 America will become an undeveloped nation, that there will be a revolution marked by food riots, squatter rebellions, tax revolts and job marches, and that holidays will be more about obtaining food, not gifts.
“We’re going to see the end of the retail Christmas….we’re going to see a fundamental shift take place….putting food on the table is going to be more important that putting gifts under the Christmas tree,” said Celente, adding that the situation would be “worse than the great depression”.
“America’s going to go through a transition the likes of which no one is prepared for,” said Celente, noting that people’s refusal to acknowledge that America was even in a recession highlights how big a problem denial is in being ready for the true scale of the crisis.
Celente, who successfully predicted the 1997 Asian Currency Crisis, the subprime mortgage collapse and the massive devaluation of the U.S. dollar, told UPI in November last year that the following year would be known as “The Panic of 2008,” adding that “giants (would) tumble to their deaths,” which is exactly what we have witnessed with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns and others. He also said that the dollar would eventually be devalued by as much as 90 percent.
Reading this, this morning, my reaction was a little different than my normal reaction to things that come into my “inbox of doom.” You see, I’ve just spent two years writing and revising a book about the food system that makes pretty much the same arguments that Celente is making – that both the economic and material realities of our food system are so fragile and subject to disruption that we’re facing hunger in our lifetimes. So you wouldn’t think this would bother me much…
(4 December 2008)
Yes. Just yes. Just read it and pass it on to everyone you can think of. KS
