My Introduction to

September 17th sees the release of the first in a series of

…The steady and relentless erosion of the idea that food is something that grows near where you live, by someone you have some kind of a relationship with, and that you actually cook yourself, began after the Second World War and accelerated during the 1960s and 1970s. New subsidies and international trade agreements, accompanied by the rise of the supermarket and the dazzling idea that you could now have whatever food you wanted from anywhere in the world, meant that it became, perversely, cheaper and easier to buy food grown many hundreds of miles away than food grown up the road. Farmers and growers went out of business with their land absorbed into larger farms. Orchards were grubbed out, our lives became saturated with processed foods and our waistlines started to bulge. The illusion of plenty came at a cost, as we discarded into the recycling bin of history a complex, highly skilled, adaptable and place-specific system that could be dismantled in a day but would take far, far longer to rebuild once it had gone.

Energy Bulletin