100
If all food trade ended, only Guyana would be able to fully sustain its population's nutritional needs
(farmingdale-observer.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2025
100 points (100.0% liked)
news
24109 readers
790 users here now
Welcome to c/news! Please read the Hexbear Code of Conduct and remember... we're all comrades here.
Rules:
-- PLEASE KEEP POST TITLES INFORMATIVE --
-- Overly editorialized titles, particularly if they link to opinion pieces, may get your post removed. --
-- All posts must include a link to their source. Screenshots are fine IF you include the link in the post body. --
-- If you are citing a twitter post as news please include not just the twitter.com in your links but also nitter.net (or another Nitter instance). There is also a Firefox extension that can redirect Twitter links to a Nitter instance: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/ or archive them as you would any other reactionary source using e.g. https://archive.today . Twitter screenshots still need to be sourced or they will be removed --
-- Mass tagging comm moderators across multiple posts like a broken markov chain bot will result in a comm ban--
-- Repeated consecutive posting of reactionary sources, fake news, misleading / outdated news, false alarms over ghoul deaths, and/or shitposts will result in a comm ban.--
-- Neglecting to use content warnings or NSFW when dealing with disturbing content will be removed until in compliance. Users who are consecutively reported due to failing to use content warnings or NSFW tags when commenting on or posting disturbing content will result in the user being banned. --
-- Using April 1st as an excuse to post fake headlines, like the resurrection of Kissinger while he is still fortunately dead, will result in the poster being thrown in the gamer gulag and be sentenced to play and beat trashy mobile games like 'Raid: Shadow Legends' in order to be rehabilitated back into general society. --
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
This is a false premise from the get go, and it comes from an uninformed perspective on Food History. Food trade and mobility have been a part of nutrition and food systems throughout recorded history. Gastronomic autarchy stems from a fascist misunderstanding of the way food systems work, it's a fiction that only serves chauvinistic, parochial, short sighted aims.
The problem with food trade isn't the fact that it exists. The problem is that the global food system is geared toward profit and extraction rather than feeding people healthy, nutritious, culturally-relevant food, grown and/or produced without exploiting people, poisoning the soil, and decimating biodiversity.
The solution isn't shutting down trade, the solution is food sovereignty and justice, and just trade between equals, aware of the mechanisms and lies of neocolonialism and imperialism.
Even during the stone age there was trading. Several species now considered essentially central/northern european are indigenous to the Mediterranean region.
Yeah, I wanted to include prehistory, too, but as we don't have definite certainty on food trade before writing was invented, I chose to leave it out. Ethnobotany does point to active migration and mobility of animal and plant species following human flows for as long as there have been humans around. .
What happens to the global food exchange when the price of fossil fuels corrects to what it should be? Food items either have a high weight-to-price ratio, or are perishable, or both. Most of the "food mobility throughout history" that you're talking about is luxury foods, with some lighter non-perishables like nuts and oils and dried herbs and dried fruits.
For the average person eating 2400 calories a day prior to coal-powered shipping, less than 300 of those would come from trans-regional exchange. It's just not reasonable to suggest that any large fraction would be like that. You can reason for local greenhouses producing things, but ultimately the world is going to have to simplify back to a radius of less than 300 miles for sourcing food; 3000+ mile shipping is not compatible with food sovereignty, food justice, or climate justice.
You can't just "do the same thing but take capitalism out of the equation". If you grow fresh vegetables for consumption more than 1000 miles away, it's going to be prohibitively expensive. If it's affordable, this comes at a cost either to the workers, or to the environment, or both.
There's a reason why Cuba, North Korea, and Vietnam practice gastronomic autarchy, and it's not because of a "fascist misunderstanding of how the way food systems work". They understand food systems better than treat junkies in the West.