As The Guardian notes this morning:
More than 800,000 patients were admitted to hospital with malnutrition and nutritional deficiencies last year, a threefold increase on 10 years ago, according to NHS figures that have prompted warnings about the devastating health impact of food insecurity.
Hospital data for England and Wales, obtained by the Guardian, reveals a startling rise in diagnoses linked to poor diet in the past decade, with nearly half a million admissions of patients with iron deficiencies, hundreds of thousands suffering from vitamin deficiencies and more than 10,000 cases of malnutrition last year.
Senior doctors said the trend mirrored their clinical experiences, with a growing number of patients whose health problems are rooted in poverty.
How did we reach the point where our society has failed so badly that malnutrition is now a first world problem?
First, most politicians do not care about people. They only care about the wealth of a few.
Second, they have, as a result, sponsored and promoted deliberately callous false theories of economics to justify this indifference.
Third, based on those theories industries like big pharma and big sugar-based food production have been allowed to prosper. Superficially satisfying short-term sugar spikes have replaced vitamins and essential minerals in too many affordable diets.
Fourth, they have created methods of media consumption to promote those industries through mass advertising and subversive programming.
Fifth, they have underfunded the services that counter these destructive narratives, from Sure Start onwards.
Sixth, they have closed down the education that provides the necessary skills to create a balanced diet. Most people in this country cannot really cook, or even cook at all, which is shocking.
Seventh, our big food industry, from fast food vendors, to ultra-processed food manufacturers, to food retailers, have joined in a conspiracy to sell poor, sugar-based, diets whilst putting the blame for obesity on fat, where it does not belong.
So, how to solve this? The answer is straightforward. The requirement is regulation to demand better food whilst cutting sugar from diets. It could be done. But the resulting foods are not addictive, when sugar is. The result is there is less profit in them, because nothing is more addictive than hooking people on products destructive to their wellbeing.
Our current health secretary is, staggeringly, married to the Chair of British Sugar. She is also staggeringly incompetent. But so too is Labour's Wes Streeting, who sees it as his job to belittle NHS staff and talk about apps for hospital management without ever bothering his little head about the root cause of the problems besetting the NHS, of which sugar intake of approximately six times daily safe limits (on average) is by far the biggest.
And so demand for NHS services will continue to outstrip supply as the demand for short term food industry profit is met whilst real people go hungry and malnourished because the only things they can afford to eat are poisoning them.
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The age and regional breakdown is interesting.
In every region except one the prevalence of malnutrition was highest in the 80+ group and in every region except one the prevalence was lowest in the 0-10 age group.
The skew to the eldest is quite remarkable.
It’s not really a conspiracy between Big Pharma and Big Sugar to profit from people. It’s really just the fact that the raison d’atre of Big Industry is to make Big Profit without any care for outcomes as we are a capitalist country.
It should be the job of government to ameliorate that policy with laws against unhealthy food production and in favour of teaching nutrition in schools, but as we currently have a Tory government that only cares about increasing the wealth of the already wealthy, that isn’t happening.
As to the teaching of nutrition and cooking in school that’s not been taught very well for many years.
When my children were at secondary school (they’re in their thirties) cooking lessons were directed towards learning about production of fast food. For example, they had to design packaging and work out ways to make their ‘product’ more commercially viable. They weren’t expected to improve the nutritional value of their product at all.
Your last para was my son’s experience
I expected to see a skew to the elderly. There were 2.1 million pensioners living in poverty in 2020, with 22% of those over 85 and 19% of those 80-85.
If you live in poverty you can either afford food or heating, but not both at the same time.
A surprising number of canned/bottled foods contain sugar when you wouldn’t expect it.
For instance, when I make my own hot black bean sauce I never put sugar in it. However all the cheaper brands in the Chinese supermarket list it as an ingredient. I don’t think it can enhance the flavour in any way. So why do it if not to take advantage of the addictiveness of sugar?
Precisely
As another example, I accept a little sugar can go in a tomato soup. But, in many tinned ones it is a major ingredient.
As someone who has lived with diabetes for over 30 years I can confirm that sugar is a major ingredient in am astonishing number of packaged foods.
As a rule of thumb, anything that has sugar listed as one of the first 5 ingredients should be avoided
Worth mentioning that sugar can appear in food as several different, but related, substances. This allows manufacturers to mislead you. Rather than a food having “50% sugar” as the main ingredient, the sugar might show as “25% High-fructose corn syrup” and “25% glucose”, each ingredient appearing further down the list of ingredients. Also worth noting is that carbohydrates are broken down by the body into glucose sugar.
How sugars may appear listed in food ingredients
❌Agave nectar
❌Brown sugar
❌Evaporated cane juice
❌Malt syrup
❌Fructose
❌Maple syrup
❌Cane crystals
❌Fruit juice concentrate
❌Molasses
❌Cane sugar
❌Glucose
❌Raw sugar
❌Corn sweetener
❌High-fructose corn syrup
❌Sucrose
❌Corn syrup
❌Honey
❌Syrup
❌Crystalline fructose
❌Invert sugar
❌Dextrose
❌Maltose
Source: What to Know About Different Types of and Names for Sugar (2023)
https://www.webmd.com/diet/what-to-know-about-different-types-names-sugar
Thank you
Seed oils are another no-no, though not addictive as such, just bad for you. Just try finding a processed ‘food’ which doesn’t have rapeseed oil in it, for example. It can take a while…
Why is rapeseed oil a problem? I’d rather have that than coconut oil which is a saturated fat, like animal fat.
Rapeseed oil is low in saturates and high in unsaturated fat, with lots of omega-3, good for the heart.
Nothing wrong with saturated fat. It’s been demonised to encourage removal and replacement in processed foods with addictive sugar. Rapeseed oil? Well.. https://swansoneurope.com/blog/swanson-europe-the-hidden-hazards-of-rapeseed-oil.html Seed oils in general really.
There’s a lot wrong with saturated fat if you think that eating animals adds to climate change, which I do. The best way to remove carbon from the atmosphere is to stop eating animals, which includes animal fat. Saturated fat is a big risk factor in heart disease.
I believe that if you look at animals and their part in climate change, once you do some “double-entry bookkeeping” in the form of the “biogenic carbon cycle”, they are carbon neutral (unlike fossil fuel CO2). That kind of makes sense in the thousands of years before industrialisation, because if it wasn’t, then their mere presence would cause a runaway greenhouse effect.
See “The Biogenic Carbon Cycle and Cattle” (2020), University of California, Davis.
https://clear.ucdavis.edu/explainers/biogenic-carbon-cycle-and-cattle
Amazing Grazing: Why Grass-Fed Beef Isn’t to Blame in the Climate Change Debate, Russ Conser, Standard Soil
https://sustainabledish.com/beef-isnt-to-blame/
Ian, how much grass fed beef is there, and how much is fed on cattle feed made from soya? That’s why the Amazon rainforest is in trouble, because of trees being chopped down to grow soya to make into animal feed.
https://viva.org.uk/planet/the-issues/climate-crisis/
I only now eat Chicken, and then only occasionally
Soy feed would clearly have to be factored in. It does seem to be an issue on both sides of the debate as it is also related to criticisms of a vegan or vegetarian diet. I suspect that where soy is grown is the problem, not the meat or vegetarian diets.
See “What percentage of soy is fed to ‘livestock’ in the UK?” (22 Apr 2023) https://www.surgeactivism.org/articles/what-percentage-of-soy-is-fed-to-livestock-in-the-uk
Jenw; pastured cattle, the only sort you should be eating, won’t be being fed on soya. To learn about nutrition in general you should try reading anything by Weston Price (you won’t be concerned about satfat after that) and also and especially Deep Nutrition by Dr Cate Shanahan, probably the best book on the subject I’ve come across.
Bill, in the 70s I studied food and nutrition as part of my environmental science course which was part of my education degree.
That’s why I have been vegetarian for nearly 50 years, not touching animal or fish produce since. I try not to have dairy when out, have no dairy in the house, can’t remember the last time I bought an egg.
I will be having a vegan Christmas, with 8 family members all of whom do not eat meat or fish, and two of whom are vegans.
Yesterday I made some Yorkshire parkin, vegan, using apple as an egg replacer.
I use oat milk, oat yogurt, vegan cheeses.
While I agree that unnecessary sugar in processed food is an important public health issue, I am not sure that it is the main driver for these nutritional deficiencies. A more important factor is “austerity” which I take to be the reason why social care provision, especially for the elderly, is not keeping up with demographic changes.
The elderly (over 80) have been the main risk group for malnutrition going back many decades. Loneliness, plus the decline in organisational function and general apathy which are early dementia-related symptoms, means that there have always been old people who satisfy a feeling of hunger with a couple of biscuits or a piece of toast rather than prepare anything that looks like a balanced meal (even just heating a manufactured “ready meal”). It was what happened with my great-uncle 40 years ago; he was found collapsed by a neighbour and in hospital found to have vitamin B deficiencies, and medical colleagues at the time told me it was a common feature in elderly admissions to A&E.
As a known issue there is no reason why there shouldn’t be proactive social care provision for those who can easily be identified as vulnerable, but like so much else social care now only provides a service of last resort.
Austerity ensures only cheap, sugar laden, foods are available to those who need something better
I actually partly disagree with you on this one. It has more to do with people tastes and not knowing enough about food and also how to shop.
After regularly getting gout in my right toe at least once every couple of months (extremely painful, I’d be hopping on one foot for three or four days) in my late twenties and early thirties (first it took me a long time to go see my GP – I always thought I hurt my toe when cross country running, then GP thought the same and was sending me for X-rays and such – young, slim, sporty and never drank alcohol at all – not a typical gout candidate – finally right tests were done and I was diagnosed with gout), I had to either start taking medications or change my diet considerably.
I opted for diet and instead of taking certain items out at the time and seeing what happens, I decided to take all the meat and fish out (later I realised it was most likely oily fish that gave me gout as I always got it after having visited my parents who eat lots of it). My staples now are pulses. And they are incredibly cheap compared to meats. Ordinary types of vegetable such as kale or the ones in season will be cheap as well. Natural plain yoghurts will be cheaper than flavoured sugary ones. Eggs aren’t expensive. Nuts aren’t that expensive either. You can get a bag of no sugar added muesli for just over a pound in some places. Tin of chickpeas is 45-50p. Wonky fruit doesn’t cost much.
I’m spending less than half on food compared to what I used to before. I’m eating better and it doesn’t really take any more effort.
So – I am a bit sceptical when people say they eat unhealthy food because that’s all they can afford. It’s really the case of not knowing enough about the food, where to shop and how to cook easy things.
Gout is caused by excess sugar, apparently
Alcohol is full sugar – hence the association
The sugar gets brewed out https://www.google.com/search?q=how+much+sugar+is+there+in+alcohol%3F&client=opera&hs=iyB&sca_esv=593152110&sxsrf=AM9HkKkpXPvTh51YHUc2iWU23AbOTPmMvw%3A1703280017343&ei=kf2FZZvEFN6YhbIPkKOtkAw&ved=0ahUKEwjb0IvD_KODAxVeTEEAHZBRC8IQ4dUDCBA&uact=5&oq=how+much+sugar+is+there+in+alcohol%3F&gs_lp=Egxnd3Mtd2l6LXNlcnAiI2hvdyBtdWNoIHN1Z2FyIGlzIHRoZXJlIGluIGFsY29ob2w_MgYQABgHGB4yCBAAGAgYBxgeMggQABgIGAcYHjIEEAAYHjILEAAYgAQYigUYhgMyCxAAGIAEGIoFGIYDMgsQABiABBiKBRiGAzILEAAYgAQYigUYhgNIhzNQyg5YrStwAXgBkAEAmAFuoAGLB6oBAzkuMrgBA8gBAPgBAcICChAAGEcY1gQYsAPCAggQIRigARjDBMICBhAAGB4YDeIDBBgAIEGIBgGQBgg&sclient=gws-wiz-serp
Simwtimes
This is deeply shaming for this country.
I have believed for some time that the aim of the Tories is to take us back to pre WW1 times of market nirvana but I do wonder if they thought about stuff like this?
I don’t think they have or did.
We were supposed to live in an ‘elective dictatorship’.
It now it seems more like a ‘bought and sold’ elective dictatorshhip – given the money corporate food giants can give politicians so they no longer bother about attracting support from party members (Labour) or real business (Tories).
Cant see any real regulation coming in unless this corruption is stopped.
UK diet seems worse than any other country in Europe?
Political donations are a scandal. Does anyone believe that Labour’s U-turn on committing to a full public healthcare has nothing to do with Labour’s top team having received nearly £1-million in donations from private healthcare companies?
Source: This is how much Labour and Tory MPs get from private health firms, 5th June 2023, The National.
https://www.thenational.scot/news/uk-news/23568478.much-labour-tory-mps-get-private-health-firms/
I suspect our being an island has a lot to do with that. Informed social gossip which can spread over land borders can’t spread over the gap formed by bodies of water.
Having read a lot about nutrition over the last couple of years, I am now very cynical of all food nutrition claims. One of the red flags in a new “Food Compass metric”, was seeing Frosted Mini Wheats and chocolate covered almonds as “foods to be encouraged”, whereas eggs and cheese were not.
Having discovered that many peer-reviewed papers on nutrition are sponsored by Big Food, I now doubt their conclusions. We may be familiar with newspaper articles listing the “10 best breakfast cereals”, but that does not mean that cereals are the best option for breakfast. We could just as easily have an article listing the “10 best chocolate bars for breakfast”, and see that “best” may not be what it suggests here.
Likewise, adding vitamins to food and claiming health benefits, or promoting “natural” ingredients but ignoring chemical additives, is no different to trying to sugar-coat a turd.
Sources
❌Flawed Food Compass metric could misguide tax and investment decisions, March 23, 2022, Quota. https://quota.media/flawed-food-compass-could-misguide-tax-and-investment-decisions/
❌”Food Compass is a nutrient profiling system using expanded characteristics for assessing healthfulness of foods”, 14 October 2021, Mozaffarian, D. et al, Nature Food (2021) https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-021-00381-y
❌Breakfast cereals ranked best to worst, British Heart Foundation, https://www.bhf.org.uk/informationsupport/heart-matters-magazine/nutrition/breakfast-cereals-ranked-best-to-worst
This is why I go back to looking at actual ingredients and look to thsoe who have really understood the science.
The sugar scandal is as big as that by big tobacco
Very good points. I would emphasis ultraprocessed food rather than high sugar (there are plenty of healthy high sugar foods – alot of fruits for example).
The problem is when biotech companies begin deconstructing foods and destroy the structure of food itself (often high sugar fruits also have fiber, polyphenols, many other compounds we don’t understand)
Sweeteners such as sucralose also cause blood sugar spikes, and who knows what unknown effects emulsifiers, artificial flavourings and colours etc have, which are often extremely cheap for producers to use since they are usually byproducts of other industrial processes
I highly recommend Dr Tim Spector’s book “Spoonfed” on the subject. He even goes into the problem of finding funding for research and how usually you have to appeal to Nestle etc to get approved
Fruit is good, but not if turned into fruit juice. Then it is the devil’s work. The fibre content is essential.
Exactly! But then look at what happened with the demonisation of sugar which resulted in the sugar tax. Coca Cola reduced the sugar in their drinks (except the namesake beverage) and supplemented with sucralose, aspartame and ACE-K etc, which are low and behold proving to be as problematic if not more problematic than sugar itself. (One source: https://amp.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/dec/08/artificial-sweeteners-price-of-sugar-free-are-they-as-harmless-as-we-thought)
See also, the demonisation of fat which results in the healthy fat being removed from yogurts and replaced with additives. What’s next, low fat lard?
The solution is as simple as it is banal. The promotion of whole foods over the ultraprocessed.
Your solution is the right one
What is bizarre is that we have cats and used to keep chickens that live happily on ‘prepared’ food and have done for many years.
Armies and Navy’s have done a lot of work to ensure their soldiers and sailors get a healthy diet whatever circumstances they might find themselves in – trying to persuade a Marine to eat 7000 calories a day or keeping a Submarine Crew fed is a challenge.
But none of this work is ever used to help keep most of the population healthy.
Back in the 80’s I read a Socialist Health Association report, they pointed out quite rightly that in broad terms you can work out what the UK population should be eating for a healthy diet in terms of tons of grain, vegetables, etc and it would not be that difficult to get Farmers to produce it and get it to market.
Worth making the point of course that the biggest improvement in public health came during WW2 when it was a very high priority for Government and working out what food was needed and supplying it was centrally controlled.
Where is the 21st Century’s Lord Woolton (Minister of Food in WW2)?
Finally Issue 29 of The Land Magazine
https://www.thelandmagazine.org.uk/back-issues
Had a proposal for Community Restaurants, now I’m a great believer in keeping it simple but something rather like the local chippy providing an affordable and nutritious meal for eat in/take away/delivery/pensioners lunch club etc looks worth considering.
Aren’t community restaurants called foodbanks now?
Nothing worse than a photo of your local tory MP grinning while opening the latest foodbank.
I wrote to my MP a few weeks ago about child poverty.
He replied by telling me that the increase in the living wage,extra money from NI and the taper from universal credit means that families in work get an extra £2330 annually. He forgot to mention that two of those don’t come into being until next April, when every MP on £86000 will get a pay increase of £6000. He’s really concerned about child poverty and malnutrition, he says which is why he will continue to press the government to ensure families get the support they need with financial difficulties. Can’t think why I don’t believe him.
I think you could add that this is what happens when a bunch of right-wing political zealots who believe that no government has the right to interfere in personal choice and even less right if its actions may affect the profitability of big business, particularly if its principal leaders are party donors.
You may be interested in the attached from March of this year
https://www.thegrocer.co.uk/big-interview/in-his-own-words-henry-dimbleby-on-why-he-quit-government-health-role/677556.article
Andy, thanks for the link to a very revealing article. We’re all well acquainted with the UK Government’s “headless chicken” approach to strategy formulation, but perhaps the most revealing bit was this quote by Henry Dimbleby, the Government’s “Food Tsar” and author of its national food strategy : “The government has given up on any of their big promises. They have given up on public health” And not for the first time: in its rush to force its “shrink-the-state” ideology, it had seriously undermined the pre-existing public health system in England and, when Covid came along, there was no coherent test and trace system across England. The result was a lack of vital data on the spread of the virus which can only have impaired its containment and, instead of re-instating the pre-existing system, the Gov’s “solution” was to blow huge amounts of money on a start-from-scratch new system and appoint Tory Peer Dido Harding as its head. In true Tory-style ‘decisions were made in order to achieve target numbers, rather than effective disease control systems.’
Back in the 70’s or was it 1980’s, the Tories phased out free school milk. Mrs Thatcher known as milk snatcher.
Truly astonishing that we have people with vitamin and mineral deficiencies when as a supplement it would be so cheap and easy to produce. Probably be very cost effective to have free school milk and a daily vit/min for every child that wants/needs it, subject to the parents approval. Might improve the average height of British children which has been falling in recent years. Not a replacement or substitute for a good diet and better food of course, but there are some surprisingly simple answers that seem beyond the Tories. Add in Tory austerity, the cost of living crisis and the fact that while Sunak hails inflation falling, food inflation has been horrendous alongside the continuing greedflation in things we need. You can see why many people are cutting corners with the choices many are facing.
Children raised under UK austerity shorter than European peers, study finds
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jun/21/children-raised-under-uk-austerity-shorter-than-european-peers-study
The process started in the late 60s, under Labour. Edward Short, SoS for Education and Science, withdrew milk from over 11s in 1968. Thatcher took it further, she withdrew it from over 7s in 1971.
I remember it [Thatcher’s cutback] well. I was the youngest kid in my class, having started school at 4, as a result I was the only one who qualified for free milk that year. ⅓ of 1 imperial pint was duly delivered, usually warm, to me in a waxed card pyramid*. I had to drink it in front of everyone, initially to much muttering and glowering.
* I remember the dinky glass bottles from previous years.
I remember milk monitors 🙂
Kathleen DesMaisons’s book “Potatoes not Prozac” came out of her work on the diet of recovering alcoholics.
She has run extremely supportive online groups for many years to help people wean themselves off sugar.
It is not at all easy. It is hard even to recognise the addiction.
She is online at https://radiantrecovery.com/
Thank you
And meanwhile. it seems likely that, against all scientific, environmental and logical reason, an exemption permitting the use of the immensely damaging neonicotinoid, Cruiser SB, on sugar beet seed will be allowed in 2024 to ensure the profitability of our entirely superfluous to requirements sugar-beet industry and sod the damage to pollinators, the soil and our terrestrial water systems or the fact that that damage will inevitably limit our ability to produce healthy foodstuffs into the future or the damage to the human targets of the food industry.
It’s laughable to pretend that we have rigorous standards – we don’t: what we have is a deceptive fabric massively peppered with holes reflecting profitably opportunistic exclusions and exemptions, set against a backdrop of what could be rigorous standards, but for those holes, whose only “justification” is the satisfaction of unbounded, unthinking greed.
Don’t normally blow my own trumpet but think some of the contributors could do well to look at the website I tried to get used in schools – sadly couldn’t get funding or schools to subscribe to keep it going…
https://discovering-our-countryside.co.uk/index.php/food-stories/
I think ‘society’ would do well to be educated on how food is produced in this country and then buy and cook British produce and move away from processed food which I think is the main problem with all the ‘hidden’ ingredients: sugar, salt etc
A nice idea but food production would have to be ramped up considerably if we were all only going to eat British. It seems to be being cut back at the moment, something I’m not in favour of at all. Still, with lunatics in charge collapse is inevitable so the path we use to arrive there doesn’t matter too much, I suppose.
“The 300 processed food manufacturers (pp. 213, 220) “dominate the American diet” (p. xxx), with 60,000 products in the supermarkets (pp. 27, 98), relying on salt, sugar, and fat, which “override our dietary self-control” with foods “so perfectly engineered to compel overconsumption” (pp. xix, 253, 333, 346). Salt, sugar, and fat are “the three pillars of processed food” (pp. xiii, 22, 39, 70, 264, 281, 289, 293, 337). With sugar and fat intake, brain pleasure centers light up bright yellow in functional magnetic resonance imaging studies (pp. 148–149, 276), just as with cocaine (p. xxvii).”
The combination of sugar and salt is addictive…
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4059590/
Not so sure about the fat, it being a broad church. Weston Price has spoken in its favour at length https://www.google.com/search?client=opera&q=weston+price+saturated+fats&sourceid=opera&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
A search for the benefits of either Celtic or Himalayan salts, both laden with healthy and useful minerals, should remind us that salt, too, is a broad church. Sugar’s still bad though, and the book which exposed that is “Pure, White and Deadly” by John Yudkin.
I use stevia powder myself, in quantity, and lose weight on it which suggests it doesn’t raise my insulin levels. I don’t think it’s the same for everyone though, so your mileage may vary, objects in the mirror etc. No blaming me if you get fat over Christmas!
Food without some salt is not worth eating
I stress, some
The problem is that the thread is about malnutrition. Many of those in hospital with it cannot afford the solutions put on here, grass-fed beef, Himalayan salt, Stevia which costs ten times as much as sugar.
We seem to have got away from the fact that this thread is about malnutrition in hospital.
Those people will not be able to afford grass-fed beef, Himalayan salt or Stevia which costs ten times more than sugar.
We have a government which could subsidise the provision of such things if it wished.
I can think of better things for them to subsidise than premium beef and stevia.
If they sorted out the energy crisis people might be able to spend more of their money on foods and not suffer from malnutrition.
The course I did in the 70s mentioned the fact that there was enough food in the world to feed everybody providing we didn’t first feed animals then eat them, but rather ate the vegetables direct.
I don’t know how that stands now. Anyone know how stevia was discovered and why it costs so much?
Anyone know why we feed animals on foodstuff that humans could eat directly themselves?
Throwing a grenade in here – our local media reports speculative planning applications from a company for HUGE biodigesters. The company is getting tens of millions of pounds in subsidy – however they don’t have planning consent yet (one has been passed) and the company has already been sold to a Spanish company so that subsidy is going directly to Spain.
The food issue here is that thousands of acres of very good Midlands farmland is going to be turned over to easy production of ‘stuff’ to put in these digesters, along with animal waste, and also (I am told) wood chips, which is making logs for home heating much more expensive! So there will be less food produced.
Add to this many, many trips by diesel guzzling large tractors taking ‘stuff’ in to be processed, and more bringing the left-over ‘matter’ out – which one assumes will be spread on land.
And the bio-methane will have to be taken in trucks, by road, to a ‘hub’ in the middle of a nearby town.
Many locals are very angry that high quality farmland is being turned over to this as they believe food production is more important.
Under neo-liberalism, being able to make substantial profit is more important than being able to produce sustainable, environmentally-friend food. Profit before people.
One of my friends in Ottawa reports prime farmland is being given over to a battery gigafactory. Priorities, eh?
Have you not noticed that here?
The land then gets a dual use e.g. sheep grazing continues