The news cycle just keeps spinning in the murky, corporate-fuelled spaces of the alt-meat and political influencing industries, so although I signalled my intention in my last post to move on from my critique of ecomodernism, I think a quick news bulletin is in order before I pause and take stock in the latter part of this post.
First, reports are in that one of the major players in the US microbial food industry, Motif Foodworks, has lost an ‘incredibly bitter’ dispute with Impossible Foods over patents for a genetically-engineered (and so-called ‘precision fermented’) protein called heme. After the court case, the companies issued a joint statement saying, “This resolution affirms Impossible Foods’ category leadership and the strength of its product portfolio related to heme.” There’s always a case for brevity in writing (I know, I know, a lesson I could better take to heart myself), so let me suggest a single word to replace ‘category leadership’ and ‘strength of product portfolio’: monopoly.
Shortly after the resolution was issued, Motif announced its closure.
Impossible Foods reportedly holds more than half of all the plant-based meat related patents in both the US and the EU.
I’ve warned in my previous writing on this topic – and it’s a fairly obvious point – that it’s easier to create corporate monopolies around manufactured plant-based or microbe-based proteins than it is around agricultural products.
Even some of the environmentalists who’ve latched onto microbial food because of its supposed, though really quite threadbare, eco-credentials are alive to the danger of corporate monopoly. One of them, for example, has spoken of the need for strong anti-trust laws and weak intellectual property rights. Quite so, although the track record of global governance on that isn’t great. Diverting the juggernaut of corporate intellectual property monopoly from its course is a difficult political task. It becomes slightly easier when people kick up a fuss about events like the Impossible/Motif case. I hope some of the environmentalists who’ve backed microbial food will do so, but it’s looking a bit quiet on that front at the moment.
Meanwhile, it’s been reported that a hedge fund based in the tax haven of the Cayman Islands donated £4 million to the Labour Party here in the UK in the one-week window after the recent general election was called where contemporaneous reporting of political donations was not required. This same fund, Quadrature Capital – with investments among other things in fossil fuels and the arms trade – has also reportedly provided most of the finance via its Quadrature Climate Foundation for the campaigning organisation WePlanet (formerly RePlanet), with its high profile push for manufactured food and ‘precision fermentation’ backed by several prominent environmentalists.
All perfectly legal, above board and transparent-ish, of course. But there’s a lot to be said for ‘following the money’ and querying the motives behind the largesse of funds like Quadrature. In the words of Fran Boait from Positive Money “Labour should be looking at how to weaken the power of big finance in our democracy and economy. Right now it seems they are doing the opposite.”
Who knows how all this will play out in our politics, and in the food system specifically? But imagine if Quadrature had bankrolled, say, La Via Campesina instead of WePlanet. Somehow, it’s hard to imagine that happening – partly because I doubt LVC would accept it, but also because there’s no corporate advantage to bankrolling small fry agrarians. Whereas in the case of microbial food…
Anyway, enough. In relation to the debate about microbial food as a meat alternative, I think I’ve now shown beyond doubt that its enormous, and previously underreported, energetic cost rules it out as a mass food technology. The mixture of silence (mostly) and bluster (sometimes) from my critics on this front tells its own story.
But for sure we’ve got to do something different to avert the present suicidal and ecocidal course of our food system. I’ve made the case in my two recent books for agrarian localism as the best something different option. That case rests on four main claims:
- It’s unlikely that we can achieve an adequate near-term energy transition out of fossil fuels and into renewables or other low-carbon forms of energy that’s able to keep funding the existing global political economy without jeopardising Earth and natural systems, so we will need to develop lower-energy kinds of society (I discuss this here, with further insights available on this point here, with thanks to John for drawing my attention to it)…
- …which means that existing levels of urbanism are unlikely to persist worldwide (I discuss this here, among other places).
- Climate change excepted, there’s no reason to assume that agrarian localism can’t feed future populations (I confess ‘climate change excepted’ is a big exception, but it applies a fortiori to every other way of feeding future populations. Frankly, I don’t have brilliant arguments against those who say ‘we’re screwed all ends up’, but I do have some pretty good ones against those who say ‘we’re screwed all ends up except for ecomodernism’). I discuss food localism and ‘feeding the world’ here.
- …and all that aside, there are inherent failings in the structure of the global political economy and the contemporary politics we’ve built around it that are likely to devolve to agrarian localism anyway. I discuss some aspects of this here.
My discussions of these four points are far from comprehensive. There’s always more to say and debate, and I daresay I’ll come back to them. But each one contains potentially endless rabbit holes, and I’ve completed the discussion at least to my own satisfaction for now. In relation to the urbanism point, Steve compiled this useful compendium of studies under my last post – my thanks to him for some characteristically effective digging. But of course each of those studies in turn raises all sorts of questions and talking points, so – note to self – It. Is. Time. To. Move. On.
Likewise in relation to agrarian localism feeding the world, and the overheated pushback that this is a formula for mass death. Generally, I don’t think people realise the extent of the ecocidal overproduction of arable grain crops worldwide (and thence the overproduction of livestock, mostly as a result of fossil fuelled arable overproduction), nor the amazing and diverse productivity of local agrarian systems, nor the real causes of famine (which aren’t about small-scale local agrarianism). But – with a hat tip to Glenn Davis Stone’s wonderful book on these topics – It. Is. Time. To. Move. On.
But let me start building the thing I’m moving on to out of the one I’m leaving behind.
I showed in Saying NO… that as a mass industrial food product, microbial protein doesn’t stack up energetically against soy. If we’re going to eat alt-meats, it makes far more sense for them to be based on farmed legumes like soy than on bacteria. But I agree with the ecomodernists that livestock is not generally a sustainable mass source of protein, and that the mass global livestock industry is an abomination. The main case for raising livestock is local and contextual, based in the role of livestock in wider renewable agroecosystems and the material livelihoods they can provide, not as a source of protein. So I haven’t computed how existing global livestock production compares energetically to microbial manufactured food as sources of protein, because it’s not relevant. Neither of the above, please.
What is relevant is creating those wider renewable agroecosystems, and that’s what I’ll be focusing on in future work. One aspect of this that I guess does relate back to my previous critiques of ecomodernism is the so-called ‘land sparing/sharing’ debate, and I’ll be writing about that soon, before moving on to a wider analysis of peopled local agroecosystems.
One of the pushbacks I got online as a result of writing Saying NO… was kind of a funny ad hominem one about how I was a sociologist, so what did I know about sustainable food and earth systems? It led me to muse a bit about how we define ourselves and others. I spent about five years studying social sciences in my youth, and I’ve spent about twenty-five years since then practicing, thinking, reading and discussing sustainable food and earth systems. Yet perhaps there’s a certain truth that we’re stamped with the impress of what we learn in our earlier and most impressionable years. Happily, effecting a turn toward renewable agroecosystems from the ecocidal present is largely a matter of politics and society, where my expertise allegedly lies. Cometh the hour, cometh the man!
But the hour may have to wait. Currently, I’m engaged in a major writing project behind the scenes … not to mention my ongoing farming and woodland project, and this gives me little time for writing this blog just now. I’ll say more about that project soon, but for now new material here may be a bit sporadic. In the meantime, I’m lining up a few guest posts and will generally be around and responsive on this little corner of cyberspace, so hopefully it’s more a case of auf wiedersehen than adios. And if you’re keen to hear my dulcet tones trying my best to answer off the cuff questions from podcasters, you could tune in to me talking about energy futures with Jason Snyder, or to me talking with Tom Widdicombe on his … er … talking with the hippies podcast.
Current reading: Sophie Yeo Nature’s Ghosts; Arthur Penty Distributism: A Manifesto.
