That’s where my interest in the show kicked in, because the future of our food system is something that I’m a little obsessed with. I am haunted by the memory of those empty supermarket shelves during the Covid pandemic, which didn’t quite lead to a food panic, but sent chills through anyone thinking about food security. We learned then that our just-in-time food system wasn’t very resilient and seemed vulnerable to collapse if given a major shock. (Spoiler Alert: Covid is nowhere near the grim end of the scale for disaster planning.)

I began asking questions about food security during Covid, and like a loose thread in a jumper, the more I pulled the more my already weak faith in the current food system began to fray. What I learnt is frankly a little scary. It turns out it isn’t zombies that we should be afraid of, but how poorly prepared we are for the future.

A lot of people assume that somewhere in Britain there are sheds full of food that we’d distribute in a disaster. Surely there is a grain or butter mountain somewhere? Surely the UK government has a plan for such a crisis?

Nope. No sheds. No stores. No mountains of food. No plan.

All politicians say that food security matters, but no one admits that basically we don’t have it. Britain probably has less than a week of food supplies. The only food in the UK is what’s on the shelves of our supermarkets now, and what’s in their lorries on the way to the shops. Oh, and whatever you have in the fridge, plus a few crops growing on UK farms or stored in barns, and whatever is edible and roaming around in fields. And perhaps you could hunt or forage if you have a gun or a trap or two.

If a major crisis hits, then, you better get to Asda quick before everyone else — or else pray that the trucks deliver more food to the store. And if that logistical system breaks down, let’s say during a major oil or fuel crisis, you are suddenly going to be paying a lot more attention to local food producers within walking distance of your house, and you are going to wish you had a garden or an allotment, or that your community had them.

In such a crisis, you are going to curse your little fridge-freezer because it doesn’t hold enough food, and you will suddenly wish you had a pantry like your grandma had, full of preserved foodstuffs, and a deep freezer. We used to have much more food storage in our homes and communities, but we outsourced that to the supermarket shelf from around the Eighties.

You might expect the government to bring you food in an emergency, but frankly, they haven’t got any — and Covid proved that the extent of their strategy is “leave it to Tesco”. But supermarkets helped to create this mess; they aren’t our saviours.

Nor can we rely on neighbouring countries to feed us. World leaders from Trump to Putin to Xi are busy securing their own food supplies and openly putting their own needs first. The liberal peaceful global order is dead. And Britain has worse trading relationships than ever. In 2016, we left the EU, a massive source of food stability. Before the EU, we had an empire feeding us, but that’s long gone — our former subjects haven’t forgotten that we abandoned trading with them fairly when we joined the EU.

Since then, Britain has grown addicted to just-in-time supermarket corporate structures. And this could be our downfall. This may be something no one wants to hear, but we need to hear it in order to make it better.

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The answer is to be ready, with a more resilient and secure food system before something goes wrong. We need an inspired farming system that’s largely confined to our own island, and which we can rely upon in a crisis. There is no food security unless we can feed people locally in an emergency.

I spoke to Professor Tim Lang, a leading authority on food security and author of a forthcoming report for the National Preparedness Commission (NPC), about what the big “shocks” to our food supplies might be. Some are happening already, like climate change, and we have to adapt to be resilient to them. One in four UK homes is projected to flood by 2050. And our remaining fruit and vegetable production is concentrated in low plain places, like Lincolnshire, that are projected to flood with rising sea levels in the next century. According to Professor Lang, this means that we’ll have to move our horticulture “up the hill” in the years to come.

Climate change is also driving more extreme weather events globally that profoundly affect food supplies. This is already affecting crops in the fields and the availability of food staples. Twenty years ago, it would have been unthinkable that fruit and veg would be rationed in stores — but this has happened several times in the last few years. Whole areas overseas that feed us, like the greenhouses of Almeria in Spain, are becoming unviable as their water resources diminish. Production is moving further from home, often to Africa, increasing the risks.

Another potential shock is biodiversity loss, which can lead to ecosystem collapse that can wipe out crops from whole regions. The food industry is already worried about these risks. One 2024 report by the Institute of Grocery Distribution, “Resilience: A System Under Pressure”, highlights the risk inherent in our ageing farmer population. Labour is vital for production, and yet the average age of a UK farmer is 59 years old. The report also raises concerns that a botched roll-out of new farm support schemes might de-motivate farmers and discourage their investment in future production.

We can’t afford to ignore their warnings. The idea that we’d all be confined to our houses for months by a virus would have been considered science fiction prior to 2020, but now it’s a well understood scenario. Disaster planners have to model worse epidemics than Covid, and we need to be ready for them.

Perhaps the idea of being blockaded by submarines sounds a little unlikely, a strangely nostalgic fear left over from the Second World War. But war is far from over. There are three major conflicts affecting millions of people’s food supplies taking place right now.

The Israelis have used food supplies to try to bring their enemies to heel in Gaza, something that is illegal under international law. In Sudan, six million people are at risk of famine at present because of a civil war. And the Ukraine-Russia war has revolved heavily around food supplies — the Russians targeted Mariupol to gain control of Ukraine’s grain exports, and regularly target food markets to try to intimidate Ukrainians into ending their resistance. Britain is involved in the Ukraine conflict already, so it is not hard to imagine a scenario in which Russia sabotages Britain’s food system to punish us. Think less U-boats in the Atlantic, and more sabotage of computer software by bot-farms in Russia to collapse our logistics. A single electricity outage could crash our entire supermarket system overnight.

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The Ukraine war has taught us that our farms are often reliant upon hidden foreign inputs — synthetic fertilisers drive current crop yields, and imported feedstuffs prop up our milk, meat, and egg industries. The war doesn’t have to touch English soil for it to cut the yields of our fields by around 20-30%.

As we know, bad things never happen one at a time. Shocks can come from several directions at once and compound the damage of each other. Imagine a flooded city loses its electricity during a severe epidemic. Now imagine there is a war elsewhere in Europe that prevents food supplies coming to that city. Figuring out how we might find, move, cook and serve food for millions of people in such a scenario is a serious business.

There is an old saying that we are only three days away from anarchy, particularly with a food system breakdown. Yet Professor Lang is more optimistic. He says that what we often see in a crisis is not social collapse but instead people working together, finding ways to ration or share, displaying the best of human nature. But even with a lot of good will, people need a certain number of calories every day to stay alive.

It’s worth pointing out, as Professor Lang does, that access to nutritious food is not guaranteed in Britain even without a geopolitical crisis of the kind I am imagining. Millions of British people are suffering from food insecurity right now. In 2022-23, 11% of the UK population lived in a household experiencing food poverty — including 17% of all children. That same year, 2.3 million people lived in a household that used a food bank. So poor is the British diet that the average five-year-old is now shorter than they were 20 years ago.

Add to this the fact that many British people have very poor access to, or else cannot afford, nutritious foodstuffs. Our diet of processed foods, full of salt, fat and sugar, is making us sick. In his recent report “The False Economy of Big Food”, Professor Tim Jackson estimates that our failing food system costs us £268 billion a year.

We don’t need a meteor or a war or even zombies to screw up our food system. For millions of vulnerable people, it is already broken. And they will be the hardest hit by any future shocks.

There are many farmers who use the “food security” argument as a way to say that farming can’t change. Leave us alone or there will be less food — I get it, but it’s a bad argument. Due to the rise of supermarkets and industrial technologies, farming has become massively specialised and monocultural. What’s needed is a food system that’s far more diverse.

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We need lots more horticulture scattered all across the UK. We need orchards and urban farms. We need vast numbers of small and diverse food businesses to spread risks in the food system and avoid bottlenecks. And we need to support regenerative and nature-friendly farms that are less reliant upon imported inputs like synthetic fertilisers. Indeed, we need more farms not less, because giant simplified industrial farm systems are often the riskiest of all. Since they specialise in mass commodity production, they tend to grind to a halt when they can’t get rid of their pigs, chickens or milk because a processing plant stops working. They are also the most vulnerable to epidemics.

Furthermore, we need to create farms with closed nutrient cycles that utilise mixed livestock and cropping to restore soil and create resilience. We farmers can’t claim to be sustaining our food system’s future if we are degrading our soils — that strategy might produce cheap food right now, but only at the expense of our future. And no civilisation has ever survived that lets vital nutrients leak out of the food system. We need our waste to go back on our fields, rather than flushing it away.

Much of the farming we need, such as no-till organic horticulture, is human-intensive — it relies on human brains and skilled hands not magic bio-tech solutions. In order to make these changes, we’d need a whole new generation of brilliant farmers and some radical new thinking. Heaps of young people, including my daughter, want to farm, but the capital required to take on a giant industrial operation makes that a fantasy. We need starter farms, and opportunities for people from non-farming backgrounds to produce food and contribute.

If all this sounds fantastical and unlikely, just remember that our current food system is creating costs that are staggering. The status quo is not serving us. We can’t keep mindlessly copying a US food system that is fraught with costs and risks.

Change would require bold action and joined-up thinking across government departments. We seem to have lost faith in the government’s ability to solve problems. But remind yourself that we once rationed food to survive a wartime blockade. (Remarkably, the poorest 25% of the population were healthier under rationing than they had ever been before, with access to good food for the first time.) And remind yourself that we created the National Health Service. We can do hard things — and sometimes we have to.

Food system planning and delivery should be at the heart of progressive politics — a priority for investment, even in austerity. And it is an investment, not a subsidy. It will make us all healthier, happier, safer, and more affluent. It would benefit the poorest the most.

The current fight between the government and farmers about inheritance tax is staggeringly stupid. It is the wrong fight, with the wrong people, about the wrong issue, at the wrong time. It is terrible politics because the list of things we need from our farmers is long and growing. We need to help them, not undermine them, so they can invest to create the healthy real food production we need. After all, history is littered with civilisations that collapsed because they were unsustainable.

This whole shift requires a standard of political leadership that doesn’t exist at present. And leadership at the local level as much as in Westminster. We need to be more like the French and Italians, empowering local government and mayors to restrict the growth of supermarkets and fast-food outlets, and instead prioritising local and healthier real food growers and sellers.

The truth is we’ve gambled too long already on a risky and failing system. The world around us grows ever more hostile and we have chosen to be a stand-alone geopolitical unit. Whatever you think of how we got here, that’s our reality. We now need to do the work of building a strong and healthy food system for Britain.

“When they’re dried and ground into powder, it smells like a mixture of mushroom, soil and macadamia nut,” says Keiran Olivares Whitaker, 39, founder and CEO of Entocycle, the leading British tech company farming these larvae. “And when you taste it, it’s like pork scratchings.”

But you can’t taste Entocycle’s end product yet, because the sale of farmed insects for human consumption isn’t allowed in the UK (though several applications to the Food Standards Agency for black soldier fly protein to be allowed on sale, as a “novel” food, are expected to be approved soon). Instead, it is intended as a high-protein, low-carbon replacement for animal feeds currently based mainly on soya or fish meal, the sourcing of which is causing rampant deforestation and declining seafood populations.

The race to embrace insect farming has never seemed so urgent. According to the World Economic Forum and its post-Covid “Great Reset” initiative, insects are an overlooked source of protein whose consumption will help limit climate change. Last year, the global market for insect protein was worth around $1.5 billion — and, according to “Food Revolution”, a report by Barclays Research, it will grow to $8 billion by 2030.

Certainly, the environmental drivers for insect farming are powerful. Producing insect protein requires one-tenth of the feed, water and land needed for beef production, and it results in only 1% of the greenhouse gas emissions. This is because the food needed to produce all this sustainable insect protein could come largely from waste — the black soldier fly can live off almost anything — and we’ve never wasted more food.

So why not let insects use that waste and bring it back into the food chain? Well, because some scientists and animal welfare groups argue that farming insects could be cruel. And if it is, the sheer numbers of creatures affected by it would be enormous.

According to a paper authored by some of the world’s most prominent biologists and bioethicists published last year and entitled “Can insects feel pain?”, evidence is growing that some insect species (only a tiny fraction has yet been researched) are sentient, to a greater or lesser degree, and so can experience some feelings, including pain. And if they can, the argument goes that they should be brought into line with other farmed animals when it comes to welfare regulations governing the way they are reared and killed. At present, there is none.

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“All of the cows, chickens, turkeys, pigs and sheep slaughtered each year amount to about 80 billion animals, whereas there’s already well over a trillion insects being slaughtered every year,” says Dr Andrew Crump, one of the paper’s authors and a lecturer in animal cognition and welfare at the Royal Veterinary College. “There are 300 million beef cows slaughtered every year, but 300 billion mealworms. The numbers are huge, so the issue is that if we get it wrong with welfare, we’re leading to suffering on this absolutely gigantic scale. The problem is that the basic kind of welfare knowledge just isn’t there. With insect farming, we’re basically where we were with conventional farming more than 50 years ago.”

Determining whether an insect feels pain is not as easy as it may sound, because behaviour that might look as if a creature is experiencing it could be put down to a physiological reaction called nociception. The paper on insect pain, published last October in Advances in Insect Physiology, explains: “Nociception does not require pain: hand withdrawal from a hot stove is a nociceptive reflex controlled by neurons relaying signals from the nociceptors in the hand, to the spinal cord, and back again. All this happens before nerve impulses reach the brain (where pain is experienced). Thus, when animals display nociception, this does not necessarily demonstrate that they can feel pain.”

One experiment conducted by Dr Crump and his colleagues found clear evidence that bumblebees can feel pain. (There is no likelihood that bees will be farmed for food other than honey, but that doesn’t make the experiment any the less significant.) Describing the findings, the academics wrote: “We gave bumblebees four feeders: two heated and two unheated. Each feeder dispensed sugar water, which bumblebees love. When every feeder had the same concentration of sugar water, bees avoided the two heated feeders. But when the heated feeders dispensed sweeter sugar water than the unheated feeders, bumblebees often chose the heated feeders. Their love of sugar outweighed their hatred of heat. This suggests bees feel pain, because (like humans) their responses are more than just reflexes.”

They also concluded that flies could experience pain, again because of their reaction to heat. “Hungry flies are less likely to jump away from extreme heat than satiated flies,” they wrote. “Decapitated flies can still jump, but they do not display this difference, demonstrating their brain’s involvement in heat avoidance. Communication between the brain and the responsive body part is also consistent with pain.”

Last year, the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act included the first invertebrates to be given farming protections: decapod crustaceans, including crabs, lobsters and prawns, and cephalopods, including squid and octopuses. Their inclusion came largely as a result of a sentience framework drawn up by a team of researchers led by Dr Jonathan Birch, associate professor of philosophy at the London School of Economics and principal investigator on the university’s Foundations of Animal Sentience project.

The framework has eight criteria ranging from whether an animal has nociceptors and integrative brain regions to whether it can trade off threat of injury against opportunity for reward, or whether it responds to local anaesthetics or analgesics. No single criterion is proof that it can feel pain, but combinations of some of them may suggest that it can. Octopuses satisfied seven out of the eight criteria; squid and cuttlefish satisfied four; crabs five; and lobster three.

The “Can insects feel pain?” paper, of which Dr Birch was a co-author, concluded that flies and cockroaches satisfied six of the criteria, which amounts to “strong evidence” for pain. Other insects met fewer of the criteria, yet the researchers concluded that there was “substantial evidence” they could experience pain. Ants, wasps and bees met four criteria, and crickets, grasshoppers, butterflies and moths met three.

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Perhaps surprisingly, not all environmentally conscious and animal-friendly groups support insect farming, in spite of its many obvious advantages. When I asked People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) what they thought of it, they simply replied that we could get all the protein we needed from plants. Elsewhere, Phil Brooke, Compassion in World Farming’s research and education manager, argues that feeding animals protein from insects makes the food chain less efficient: “Less than 40% of the protein you feed to a chicken ends up in the meat you eat. If you feed a salmon, it’s only 28%. If you feed a pig or a trout, it’s just over 20%. And it can be lower for other species. It’s the simple law of ecology that at each stage in a food chain, you lose energy. So if you’re feeding flies on waste food, we think it would be better to simply feed that waste food directly to animals, like pigs, and miss out a layer.”

Back at Entocycle, tucked away in a railway arch a stone’s throw from London Bridge, I put all of these points to Olivares Whitaker, who has a degree in environmental design and conservation. He seems unfazed: “The phrase ‘plenty more fish in the sea’ is a complete fallacy. The latest data says we have exhausted more than 51% of all fish. We have destroyed the coral reefs, the nurseries of the ocean. By messing up the coral reefs, you mess up the juvenile fish populations, and if you mess up the juvenile fish populations, you mess up all the seabirds, you mess up the seabirds, you mess up the ecosystem.

“Our rainforests are being cut down for large monoculture crops. What most people don’t realise is that 90% of all soy that’s brought to the UK doesn’t go into your soy burger or your soy milk. It goes straight in to feed the cow, straight in to feed the pig, straight in to feed the chicken. And it’s really unhealthy for most animals to be eating this stuff. They’re being force-fed rations which are the lowest cost to the highest value.

“I couldn’t sit back and just watch that, so I began looking at insects. How do insects currently act in the food web? Because the rotting apple falls from the tree, the insect eats the apple, the bird eats the worm, and off we go up the food web. It’s just normal. Every single animal on this planet, including humans, has been eating insects for millions of years.”

While Entocycle used to farm larvae for the pet-food industry, its focus today is on designing insect farms that ensure the greatest ratio of “protein in” to “protein out” – and, yes, to achieve the highest levels of welfare based on the company’s own research. And, so far, this mission is selling well. It has, for instance, recently attracted £4.2 million in funding from US investors and £3.3 million from Innovate UK, a government-backed body that provides money and support to industry. Meanwhile, Olivares Whitaker’s team of 35 engineers, designers, computer specialists and entomologists have contracts to design facilities in the Middle East and the UK that will produce thousands of tonnes of protein each year. And, as a welcome by-product, almost half of each farmed larvae contains excrement that can be used as a rich fertiliser.

“We are now facing a fertiliser crunch,” Olivares Whitaker says. “People don’t realise that the fertiliser industry is screwed since the war in Ukraine, and prices have quadrupled. Here, we have a perfect, organic and sustainable way of producing high-quality fertiliser using black soldier flies feeding on waste.”

But what about welfare concerns, and the claim that farming insects is inefficient? “Waste isn’t perfect,” he says. “You can’t just feed any waste to animals — for example, we saw with cows and BSE what happened when we fed them waste derived from other animals. Farmers need to know exactly what is in the protein they are feeding their animals. You can’t just feed anything to, say, pigs. But black soldier flies could feed off anything and turn it into high-quality protein.”

At present, however, UK rules don’t allow flies to be farmed that have been fed on excrement, but they could be — and the end product would be perfectly safe for animals and even humans. In developing countries with sewage disposal and protein security problems, governments are already looking at the possibilities of farming with insects.

So, what about the welfare side of the argument? I direct Olivares Whitaker to a paper written by Dr Meghan Barrett, another co-author of “Can insects feel pain?”, entitled “Challenges in farmed insect welfare”, in which she argues that farmed black soldier flies are susceptible to five welfare issues: nutritional inadequacies, larval overcrowding and overheating, unmet needs for mating behaviour, starvation, and inhumane slaughter.

But he’s having none of it. “If you get any of those five requirements wrong, your farm simply won’t work. If you starve your flies, they’re not going to breed your next generation of larvae. If you don’t meet their needs for mating behaviour, you’ll have nothing to farm. The welfare of the insects goes hand in hand with how successful and productive your operation will be.”

What if the government legislated to include insects in farming welfare regulations — would the industry comply? “I personally would welcome welfare regulations,” says Olivares Whitaker. “If you didn’t care for every aspect of their needs, your farming system simply wouldn’t work and you’d be out of business.”

I asked the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs if it had any plans to bring insect farming into line with other types of animal farming welfare, but it didn’t reply. Perhaps ministers are concerned that the public isn’t ready for insects to be deserving of concern. That might be true, but it’s hard to argue in a protein-insecure world that Olivares Whitaker is wrong. And one day soon, it won’t just be animals being fed on insects — we’ll be eating them, too.

But for anyone who has studied the history of organic and local food movements (as I did while writing my book, Ending Hunger), their apparent endorsement by a far-Right conspiracy theorist might actually seem rather appropriate. For when you start to explore how they came about, things soon get surprisingly dark.

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Let’s start with today’s fashion for “eating local”, which conjures up images of idyllic farmers’ markets stacked high with beautifully fresh seasonal produce. The pervasive idea that food should be grown locally can be traced back to the Reverend Thomas Malthus. Perhaps better known for his false predictions of Victorian population catastrophe, Malthus was also instrumental in implementing the Corn Laws in 1815, protecting the price of grain by the imposition of strict tariffs on imported produce.

Like many at the time, Malthus believed that if foreign grain — particularly that being grown in the vast new farms across the Atlantic — came to the UK without restriction, British farmers would soon go out of business. And so Malthus believed that British agriculture must be protected. But the Corn Laws were also designed to protect the status quo for wealthy landowners: they artificially raised the price of basic foods, keeping rural workers in poverty while landowners counted their cash. By 1846, the devastating results were clear — food prices had risen and famine was tearing through Ireland — and the laws were repealed.

Yet in many ways, our desire for self-sufficiency has an even more unpalatable history, one rooted in the nationalism and fascism of the 1930s. It started with Mussolini’s infamous “Battle for Grain”, which was a drive to remove dependence on foreign imports. But it was really under the Nazis that buying local gained its firmest roots. For his part, Hitler had an almost visceral aversion to relying on imports, strongly believing that losing the home front in the First World War — thereby destroying Germany’s trade routes — was ultimately the reason his country lost.

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In Mein Kampf, Hitler outlined how foreign policy should centre on obtaining more land to grow food for the German people. Particularly in his sights were the extensive wheat-producing areas of Russia’s “bread basket”, the Ukraine. The Nazi ideal of “Blood and Soil’ was most explicitly teased out in a book by Richard Walther Darré, a Nazi physician who would later become Hitler’s minister of agriculture. As well as being a staunch eugenicist, Dr Darré was a local food enthusiast, arguing that only produce specifically grown on German soil was suitable for the German people. He claimed that the supposedly superior Aryan race had a deep connection with the landscape and produce of its homeland, and must be fed from there alone.

Key in Darré’s writing was an idolisation of German agricultural workers as the country’s backbone, something that tapped into a pervasive early 20th-century distrust of urban living. This is classic retrograde, appeal-to-nature bullshit, a theme that sadly persists in much environmental and food writing today. In Nazi Germany, the hatred of cities was often a coded reference for hatred of Jews, who throughout Europe had been prevented from buying land and so largely lived in urban areas. A mystical connection between the German people and their soil ran directly counter to the lives of nomadic Jewish and Romany populations.

And as we’ve seen in recent years, much of this rhetoric resonates in the far-Right today. In 2017, for example, at a “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Neo-Nazi groups were heard chanting “blood and soil”. It resurfaced again later the same year during the “White Lives Matter” march at Shelbyville. Then, in 2019, after the horrific Christchurch shooting in New Zealand, the perpetrator was found to have described himself as an ‘”ecofascist” in his manifesto.

Of course, many local food movements have emerged without poisonous political associations. But it is always worth questioning why we assign such fads a unity of virtues. A love of a country’s food, nature or produce can be a profound and beautiful thing. But it can also be the acceptable face of insular nationalism, leading otherwise reasonable people to sit on common ground with ideologies they despise.

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The truth is that we should produce the best food that we can within a given region, and trade with the rest of the world to ensure the optimum diet for all. Although many will consider this an affront to our national identity, the UK simply is not well suited for agriculture, with a shortage of high-quality land, unpredictable rainfall and a lack of sunlight. We have not been self-sufficient in food for the past two hundred years, and currently import around 40% of all the calories we consume.

Evidence that eating local produce is better for the planet is also surprisingly thin. Even at its highest, in countries such as the US and UK, transport generally only represents around 11% of the greenhouse emissions of food production. The energy required to heat local hothouses often vastly exceeds the energy required to ship produce from warmer countries, and minimising transport often does not minimise environmental impact.

A wider selection of foods from a more diverse area has also benefited people’s health. In many areas, deficiencies in the soil can lead to deficiencies in the diet if people are restricted to local produce. In Derbyshire, just a few miles from where I am writing, alkaline soils strongly bind iodine, stopping it from getting into plants. For hundreds of years, goitre, an enlarged thyroid gland caused by iodine deficiency, was known as ‘Derbyshire Neck’, such was its prevalence in the county.

But if the virtue assigned to eating locally is misplaced, surely Chansley — who calls himself Jake Angeli – is right to favour organic produce instead? Not quite. For this movement also has troubling associations with fascism. It dates back to the 1920s, when biodynamic farming — an early offshoot of the burgeoning organic movement — was pioneered by Rudolf Steiner. An Austrian anti-Semite who created a pseudoscientific theory of “root races” to justify ideas about Aryan superiority, Steiner also believed that the persecution of Jews was part of their “inner destiny”.

Towards the end of his life, in 1925, Steiner developed his theories of agricultural practice, still known today as “biodynamic”. Much of this was entirely sensible and ahead of its time, focusing on the importance of continued soil fertility rather than crop yields, and viewing the farm as an ecosystem rather than a food-growing medium.

Rudolf Hess was a particularly ardent fan, and many of the Third Reich leaders were strong advocates of biodynamic agriculture. Steiner’s thinking strongly influenced the so-called Green Wing of the Nazi Party, and a biodynamic plantation was set up at Dachau to produce materials for SS doctors carrying out ‘experiments’. Much of this early development information fails to make the websites of the various biodynamic associations around the world.

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But of course, if organic production actually reduces the environmental impact of food, most of us would probably forgive its disturbing past. From an environmental perspective, the evidence in favour doesn’t look great. Many studies have been conducted, and the balance seems to show that per unit of food, organic farming produces more greenhouse gases, uses more land, has higher rates of nutrient run-off and is worse for acidification of soil.

Yet there’s much about organic agriculture that is entirely sensible. As Chansley will no doubt tell you, it recognises the importance of soil health and looks at the farm as a system, rather than a hydroponic medium for plant growth. It also often finds new ways to control pests and weeds, many of which may help combat the increasing threat of pesticide resistance.

Too often, however, organic practice — just like the trend for buying local — is not based on the best available evidence, but on a toxic mix of cultural privilege, mysticism and a rejection of modernity. If there really are some benefits to these movements, they should resist the desire to return to an imagined past. After all, that past really isn’t something in which we should take pride.

Take food, for example. When we made a FutureProofing episode on the future of food, I drew the line at eating insects. Not because I’m squeamish: I eat pretty much anything except beetroot. My repugnance was not for the crunchy or squishy experience of invertebrate dining. It was the gleeful Schadenfreude of the “In future humans will all have to eat bugs because there will be too many of us and we won’t be able to eat meat or fish any more” brigade that made me sick.

Also, I simply didn’t believe it. We have defied repeated Malthusian warnings of human population outstripping the earth’s capacity to feed us, and are now feeding more people than ever, on less of the planet’s surface than before. Why are bug farms more likely than other improvements to the kind of agriculture that produces food people enjoy? Norman Borlaug didn’t try to persuade the population of India to switch to bugs, he engineered different forms of wheat.

But what about the meatless meat, the lab-grown animal cells, the Petri-Dish of The Day? Is that a dystopian punishment or a brilliant techno-solution that will put a steak on every plate with minimal impact on animals or planet?

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Jenny Kleeman’s book, Sex Robots & Vegan Meat, makes a refreshing change from the utopia/dystopia dyad. Steak-loving Kleeman is serially disappointed in her quest to taste the lab-grown meat of the future. Sometimes it’s a tiny snippet of ‘disgusting’ mush, sometimes it doesn’t exist at all except in the minds of potential investors. She brings her journalistic scepticism to San Francisco’s hipster Mission District, but she is sympathetic to the political or moral mission of veganism that underlies the vision of a world without factory farming.

I warmed to Mike, the scientist  and New York Communist, reluctantly relocated to the Bay Area, the vegan who doesn’t want to be associated with Vegans. He calls them “the most self-absorbed group of people… incredibly white… incredibly wealthy, incredibly privileged,” but he hopes “to make everybody vegan without changing their habits.”

Mike wants to replace the food we’re used to with something that looks, smells and tastes just as good, but comes from a lab, not the farm or the ocean. And, while lab-grown protein is some way off the industrial-scale production of appetising food, there’s nothing in principle to say we won’t get there.

So is Kleeman happy? Is she looking forward to technology squaring the circle — or the burger?

No. She thinks “the problem isn’t really animal agriculture, it’s human appetites”. And this is a recurring theme of the book: a deep ambivalence about technology rooted in ambivalence about human beings. Is the problem that technology promises to meet humans needs and desires, but doesn’t deliver — or is the problem that technology might, in fact, fulfil our desires?

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Do androids dream of electric sheets?

By Rowan Pelling

Kleeman’s book begins with sex robots, the pouty, silicon face of the hi-tech future, in a factory where the CEO gives his own face to male sex dolls, and his nephew enthusiastically demonstrates the superhuman flexibility of the RealDolls’ pelvic joints. But the ambitions of Abyss Creations go beyond “high-end masturbation” to a sex doll with integrated AI. Harmony is an artificial companion who will recognise your face, remember your sexual preferences, tell jokes and quote Shakespeare, be gloomy if you’re nasty to her, and simulate orgasm.

Kleeman raises many issues with sex robots, from the reinforcement of impossible, pornographic expectations of female anatomy to the data privacy implications of remotely-controlled sex tech. “Butt plugs gone rogue” is a phrase I will never forget. But a sex robot designed to give you the illusion of autonomy, of choosing to be with you and respond to your desires, opens a door to much bigger issues.

The market for sex robots is primarily male, and it’s about more than sexual curiosity, or frustration. It’s often driven by loneliness, and the perception that a relationship with a real human being is either unattainable, or too messy and complicated, or too risky emotionally. “It’s never just been about sex,” says DaveCat, an Abyss customer, of his sex doll companions: “70% of the relationship that I have with all the synthetic women in my life is about being able to come home to a non-empty home, to be able to share my life… It’s always been about companionship for me.”

I am reminded of my surreal encounter, at a robotics conference in Moscow, with the Russian roboticist who proudly announced that his robots were completely lifelike, with face, arms, legs and ‘wedding vegetables’ (the translators’ words, not his). He asserted that women would obviously prefer a robot husband to a real man who wanted to drink beer and watch football.

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Why humans can't help but love robots

By Graeme Archer

I am baffled and dismayed by the idea that an object, however cleverly engineered, could replace a relationship with another human being. Yes, even one who wants to drink beer and watch football. We might want to drink beer and watch football together. Or I might be able to tolerate somebody who is not merely a mirror to myself, who has their own life, their own thoughts and desires and insecurities.

Of course, other humans have as many flaws as I do myself. That’s one of the ways we learn about ourselves, and change for the better, to see ourselves reflected in another’s eyes and feelings, to feel empathy and realise we need to extend the same compassion to others that we want from them.

And of course we risk emotional pain whenever we open up to another person emotionally. That is, in fact, my main objection to sex robots, not that they are too dangerous, but that they’re not dangerous enough.

We learn to live with people by living with people. A simulacrum of a relationship with a companion who is “just there for your pleasure”, is nothing like a relationship with a person who exists in their own right, as an end in themselves, not as a means to your getting your end away.

*

The other two elements of the human condition that Kleeman explores are birth and death, our entry into this world, and our departure. How much do we want technology to insulate us from biology, from the uncaring laws of Nature?

Birth has already been changed. The introduction of IVF separated conception from sex, and genetic motherhood from carrying a foetus to birth as a baby. There is one stronghold of biology that resists replacement by machines, the womb in which a woman’s body gestates every human that has ever lived. But for how long?

The Biobag is one of several attempts to replace the uterus as a place of sustenance and protection for gestating lambs, now, and one day, human babies. Ectogenesis, as portrayed in Brave New World, is the separation of human reproduction from the female body.

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Why aren't women having more babies?

By Mary Harrington

The hope it offers for very premature babies is one of the most emotional points in the book. And it’s already a lightning rod for some very strange reactions: from the angry men who see it as a chance to render women obsolete, or from the bioethicist Anna Smajdor who argues that ectogenesis is a moral imperative to achieve full sexual equality, but then opines “that to create another human being is the height of hubris”.

To do what all our forebears have done, deliberately or accidentally, fulfilling social expectation or consciously putting a stake in the future, is now “the height of hubris”. I’m not sure whether it’s the arrogance of imposing another person on the long-suffering planet, or of assuming that the hoped-for child will want to exist, that so offends Smajdor’s 21^st-century sensibilities. Non-consensual conception may soon be added to a list of new crimes committed by parents against their offspring.

*

The fourth, and most disturbing, section of the book is about the desire to control death. Not by chasing immortality, but by planning and executing your own exit from the world, with some hi- or low-tech kit to remove another person from the consequences of killing you.

Kleeman meets people eager to use technology to this end, who are mostly, but not exclusively, suffering from degenerative or terminal conditions. Some regard it as an insurance policy that “takes away the fear of the future”. Others want to die because they are consuming resources, saying “I’ve come to my natural end of life, and I don’t want to be a burden on the planet.”

She is clearly saddened by many of the individual stories she hears, and troubled by the gap between shiny technology and its purpose. Kleeman doesn’t think we need a death machine and argues for a culture that accepts illness and death as part of life, for better palliative care, for support, dignity and reassurance, not death.

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The bright side of death

By Giles Fraser

But she also wants to legalise assisted dying. She never seeks out, or offers, a challenge to the desirability of hastening towards death. In earlier parts of the book, she finds critical voices, and does not flinch from the deeper social, philosophical and moral dimensions of birth, sex and even food. The anti-euthanasia group Care Not Killing, and Not Dead Yet, “a British alliance of disabled people opposed to the right to die”, get a single sentence between them.

After her eloquent defence of the human aspects of intimacy, of bearing children, of compassion for animals as we feed ourselves, I had hoped for a defence of human life as something with intrinsic value, right to the final breath.

Kleeman is right that technology is too often portrayed as a clean, simple solution to messy problems. Sex robots will not fix the atomisation of society, the growing avoidance of emotional pain, or the disruption of traditional gender roles that has left men, especially, feeling redundant, resentful and that whatever they do is wrong.

But a future that harnesses technology to meet human needs and, yes, desires, isn’t a dystopia. We already use contraception to sever the natural link between heterosexual sex and procreation. Without that, straight women would be forced to choose between active sex lives and careers. We use medicine and sanitation to prevent nature killing us in droves from infancy onwards. We use science and engineering to produce more food from less land, with side benefits for the natural environment.

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Don't blame Big Tech for society's problems

By timandra harkness

And yet, somehow Kleeman blames these applications of technology for the problems in her book. Industrial agriculture for making meat unsustainable, medicines for making disease and death more terrifying and pregnancy more medicalised, and the contraceptive pill for female independence that has left men lonely and frustrated.

Kleeman’s epilogue is not fatalistic. “We can use the time we still have, before these inventions go on the market, to examine why we think we need them in the first place. Then we can make the changes and sacrifices necessary to solve fundamental human problems, instead of turning to technology to paper over them.” But there’s the ambivalence again. “We will have to make sacrifices… we can’t have everything we want without any consequences, no matter what scientists and entrepreneurs may say.”

Is this a recognition of the imperfection of the world, and the hard choices humans always face? Or is it a masochistic version of the same schadenfreude that wants us all to eat insects because we deserve to be punished?

In Kleeman’s analysis, humans are the problem, with our appetites, our selfishness, and our unwillingness to be content with things as they are. She’s right, of course, that technology can’t resolve social, emotional or moral problems. But technology is merely a tool, designed and used by humans.

It doesn’t have to dehumanise and isolate us. It can connect us, free us from the constant life-or-death struggle with nature, and bring the benefits of civilisation within the reach of everyone. It can widen our horizons and the aspiration to keep pushing those horizons ever wider is a very human trait, and one worth celebrating.

I always imagined that the apocalypse would look a bit like the movie of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. But this valley seems oblivious to the crisis — it is all daffodils, snowdrops, birdsong, and trees bursting into leaf.

My flock is down in the valley bottom. The first lamb of the year was born today and is now lying with its mother. I come in from the fields and the TV news is like something from a science-fiction movie — they are building giant makeshift hospitals in the city centers. People are dying in their hundreds every day. But not far from the farmhouse a duck has made a nest by our pond and has laid thirteen pale green eggs in the midst of a perfect downy circle.

It is hard to connect the green fields where I work each day with the world of the virus. Hard to think it is the same world. But, of course it is. The virus has shown how connected we really are.

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How coronavirus exposes our fragility

By James Kirkup

Our elderly neighbours have locked themselves inside — we take them groceries and urge them to wash their hands and stay away from town. The schools have closed, so our children are helping us on the farm. And once a week, my wife travels to the local supermarket for supplies.

At first, she reported panic runs on face masks, disinfectant wipes, hand sanitiser, and toilet rolls; then it was staple foodstuffs, like rice, pasta, flour, and meat. Now, she describes the quiet (but very palpable) fear that has emerged about the robustness and resilience of our food supplies. The system doesn’t feel quite as permanent as it did.

It is because of that fear that people are hoarding. British people have a billion pounds’ worth more food in their homes than they did 10 days ago. Their panic and the subsequent spike in demand took stores — and Government — by surprise and we all need to calm down.

But the unexpected demand isn’t the whole story. The whole story is the fragility of our just-in-time food system, which the crisis has exposed.

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Why I fear isolation more than the virus

By Mary Kenny

It’s a logistically brilliant system — it has allowed us to shop whenever we want for whatever we want, regardless of season or whether harvests have been good or bad — but it isn’t nearly as robust as it might need to be. Like our banks, which we learnt in the 2007-8 banking crisis were “too big to fail”, we now have food systems that are so hyper-efficient that they have little slack capacity for a crisis.

And the crises are coming thick and fast — the Australian bush fires destroyed 140,000 sheep and cattle — and many orchards, vineyards and crops; the African swine fever in China has killed millions of pigs and is spreading. The farming systems we have created are vulnerable; the more specialised and monocultural and crowded they are, the greater the vulnerability.

The obsession with efficiency in our food economy has done its best to destroy a distributed local and diverse food economy — local abattoirs are now as rare as hen’s teeth, farmers markets have very limited capacity, and most areas are so specialised in their farming focus that they rarely produce the things that would give us a balanced diet.

Barely any of us know the fields that feed us or grow a significant share of what we eat. There is way too little local fruit and vegetable production in most areas, and there has been a general loss of the food culture that once existed to turn local products in to great meals.

The Herdwick lamb and mutton we produce was used to make countless different meals in the past, using the whole carcass. Today, we eat only the most expensive plastic-wrapped bits of a chicken, sheep, pig or cow; the lower value cuts are generally exported or processed. Such pickiness suddenly becomes a problem in a crisis, because if exports close down, or kebab places are in lockdown, the system backs up with products with no market. Last week, for example, sheep prices collapsed, because the system was suddenly frozen with confusion and log jams.

And after months of media noise about everyone going vegan, we can now see the reality laid bare in the supermarkets: people want the foodstuffs they have always eaten. The meat, milks, dairy and cheese shelves are noticeably empty, and the plant-based fake food shelves are remarkably well stocked and uncrowded — as my neighbour stated in the store, “No one really wants to eat that shit”.

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There's no such thing as a green vegan

By Mary Harrington

The argument has always been that we simply don’t need the old, mixed farming systems anymore — in which farms produce crops and raise livestock. But is that true?

Normally, we don’t all shop, eat or cook from these local sources, but a food system isn’t safe if it only works in the good times. Like sound healthcare systems, sound food systems need to have slack capacity for freak events. Britain produces about 60% of the food it eats; the other 40% is imported. It probably isn’t sensible to aim for 100% self-reliance (growing bananas in greenhouses in cold wet places in Britain is daft), but we need to be really careful about dropping too far from current capacity. It will make us vulnerable in times of crisis.

Norway has a deeply protectionist food system that supports its farmers as a matter of national strategic importance. Farmers there, for example, produce 80-90% of the national demand for beef and sheep meat. Since large areas of Norway aren’t globally competitive for agriculture, it doesn’t want to ‘outsource’ what food production it is capable of and put its rural communities — where family-run farms drive the local economy — at risk. It may turn out to be a very sensible policy. Ask yourself whether you trust Donald Trump to keep food supply lines to Britain open in a time of genuine food crisis? Or whether he might look after America’s interests first?

Many of us were politely pointing all this out as we headed into discussions about a free trade deal with America, which might reduce the share of Britain’s diet that is produced domestically, if the gates are opened for cheap food to flood in from North America.

No one was listening.

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The slow death of French cheese

By John Lichfield

Less than a month ago, a UK government advisor, Professor Tim Leunig, was quoted in leaked emails as saying we didn’t need farmers, because the value of their output was a tiny share of the UK economy and we could import all the food we needed, perhaps at lower prices.

And for the past decade, a virulent strain of anti-farming environmentalism, led by noisy hard-Left radicals such as George Monbiot, has argued for us to turn away from farming towards producing food in synthetic industrial ways (with the promised pay-off of freeing more land for wild nature). This ‘land-sparing’ obsession embraces the worst industrial farming and corporate food systems.

Coming, as it does, from both ends of the political spectrum, this end-of-farming narrative is deeply worrying. My farming neighbours were rolling their eyes in disbelief a month ago at the absurdity of it all.

The obvious truth is that it takes a lot of food to feed 65 million souls — a fact that is so easily forgotten in the good times. With a full belly, everyone knows better than farmers how to manage land, and how to care for the countryside.

The lunatic anti-farming voices are rather quiet at the moment, though. The national discussion is, instead, about empty shelves, whether our food supplies are secure, and discussing whether farmers and others in the food sector are classified as ‘key workers’. Suddenly, more measured experts are being given airtime, farmers are being listened to — and our value understood.

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The blight of farm suicides

By John Lewis-Stempel

Today, an estimated 8.4 million people are at risk of running short of food — and food banks won’t cope with that sort of demand. The closure of restaurants, pubs, cafes and bars hasn’t helped: we get something like 25% of our calories from these places nowadays. And the supermarkets are going to experience demand unlike anything they have ever known — with challenges that they aren’t used to coping with. Our fruit and vegetable farms often rely upon migrant seasonal workers who can now no longer travel to the work.

Professor Tim Lang, one food system expert, is now openly calling for the UK government to impose food rationing before we descend into a greater crisis. It’s no wonder people are panicking and behaving in ways we haven’t seen in generations.

There is public fear that our food system might not be up to it, but I think we probably can avoid a genuine food crisis in the developed world. Governments have responded relatively quickly to this virus, and it will be overcome. You shouldn’t read this piece and panic.

Instead, you should stay calm and shop sensibly. And you should eat what you buy: remember, we waste 40% of our food.

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There's no such thing as factory farming

By Peter Franklin

We do however need to think very carefully about how the nation feeds itself, because in the long run we will need a truly robust and resilient food system, with strong local food economies. This is our wake-up call to respect farming once more — not uncritically: we have an absolute right to want more nature on farmland, high welfare standards for farm animals, and safe and healthy food. But Britain must seek to understand and remember the value of farming and food production.

Things are going to get a whole lot worse if, after this is all over, we continue as though nothing has changed and throw British farmers to the mercy of global free trade and systems that are big, bad and ugly. We need to protect this key national resource so it is there for us through thick and thin.

Because if another disaster strikes — and it will — then I want a significant share of my diet to be available within walking distance of where I live. I want to know where I can source food for my family, and if that means I pay a bit more for food in the good times, then so be it. As one Twitter wag recently posted, the City of London may offer a better way to get rich than farming, but “You can’t eat credit default swaps, kids”.