Sublime

One of the most poignant aspects of our industrialised food industry is the occasional glimpse the television camera affords us of what goes on behind the scenes, like the mournful gaze of that beast in the cattle truck I saw a few days ago.

Had a brand of animal cleverness, the kind you see in pigs sometimes.

advocated intensive farming on limited land in order to allow more land “to evolve entirely free of human interference.” Indeed, wouldn’t it be better if the land was never cleared in the first place? Can humans possibly do any better than nature in promoting biodiversity?

The secret, it turns out, lies in wildly overtaxing their resources.

Every discipline discovers its own ecology in time, as it shifts inexorably from the walled gardens of specialized research towards a greater engagement with the wider world. As we expand our field of view, we come to realize that everything impacts everything else – and we find meaning in these interrelationships. Much of this book will be concern

politics and anticorporate angst as on the realistic achievement of a more sensible system of food production.

which provides food for men and animals:

Like a good academic, I thought books were for answers.

Farming enabled populations to increase so radically and rapidly that no complex agricultural society could ever again sustain itself if it returned to hunting and gathering.