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On this page I keep a running brief of debates, commentaries and links associated with my book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future that go beyond the straightforward reviews you’ll find on the book page.
A large part of my book involves a critique of George Monbiot’s own book Regenesis. George responded to my book with this essay, entitled ‘The cruel fantasies of well-fed people: the astonishing story of how a movement’s quest for rural simplicity drifted into a formula for mass death’. I responded to his essay in turn here. I wrote more specifically about the issue of poverty, hunger and food prices that George raises in his response here.
In the aftermath of this exchange I (finally) succeeded in getting George to reveal his source for the energy costs of bacterial protein, which is one point of contention in our respective analyses, and I think I’ve now shown that the figure he gives in Regenesis is incorrect. I explain the details here, and highlight the muddy waters of George’s responses on Twitter/X here. Stop press: more recently, this article in Nature Communications gives definitive industry data on the energy costs of the process similar to the ones I calculated. So now we have conclusive evidence that the figure in George’s book is wrong, which is quite a big deal in terms of the plausibility of the process as a mass food approach.
Food systems analyst Jim Thomas wrote this commentary about the to-and-fro between me and George, as well as digging into and critiquing some of the research George cites purportedly to prove that local food systems can’t feed the world. Here, I’ve linked the repost of Jim’s commentary from GM Watch, which comes with an interesting introduction underlining the links George has forged with Mark Lynas and others from the ecomodernist fold. GM Watch have also published an excellent overview of the problems with ‘techno-food’, which draws on the analyses of several people including me. GM Watch also report here on the rather cavalier approach to regulatory approval being taken with these foods.
The Land Magazine published George’s letter of complaint about its coverage of relevant issues, along with responses from editors Mike Hannis and Simon Fairlie. These are viewable here. If you download the link from that page you can also read my related article in The Land ‘Seven fantasies of manufactured food’.
Rob Dietz of the Post Carbon Institute wrote this article on the Resilience website (which is run by the PCI), filling in some of the backstory of the debate and the politics around the media outlets which have (or haven’t) run commentaries by George and by me, a story that maybe I’ll tell in more detail someday. The Ecologist published this article by me, responding briefly to George’s ‘Cruel fantasies…’ piece that they’d replicated.
Dougald Hine wrote a characteristically stylish and thoughtful essay that touched in passing on my dispute with Monbiot. In it, he observed “those of us on the other side of the fault line are not the cruel, innumerate romantics Monbiot will no doubt continue making us out to be. Rather, in Chris’s case and that of many of the other thinkers I drew on in my book, what you find is highly numerate people who believe in the importance of treating data with care, rather than waving it around as a rhetorical bludgeon, and who are alert to the limits of what numbers can and can’t tell us about the world and the possibilities for acting within it.” Thank you, Dougald and quite so.
Million Belay, Co-ordinator of the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa has also written this interesting commentary bearing on Monbiot’s arguments.
Civil Eats published this article/interview with me about the book by Nhatt Nicholls.
My article ‘Doppelganger: me and George Monbiot in the Mirror World’, which I intend to be my last significant comment on the issue, reflects on some of the wider political implications in these strange times.
This article by Taras Grescoe is also worth a read.
I’ll keep this page updated as and when any other material comes to my attention.