The Rise of the "Mega Farm"

I agree Nfk, sadly it's the rise of the Supermarket that has encouraged this cheap food culture. And look where it's all heading. Do you know that diabetes costs the NHS £1,000,000 per HOUR?????? No wonder it's collapsing and this is 90% preventable.

I agree that animal welfare should be a farming priority.

aka, is it?

Do you mean Type 1 Diabetes (probably not) or Type 2? Please tell me where you found out that diabetes is 100% preventable.

Sorry. 90%.

My mistake. I guess you are excluding Type 1 diabetes as being preventable. But I didn't know Type 2 was 90% preventable. Citations, please.

Bags not sure if your suggested fruit and nut diet was tongue in cheek. I am not vegetarian, I enjoy meat but am horrified at the waste and the proposed method of production. People, I think lose sight of what they are eating. I buy most of my meat from a local farm where it is raised and slaughtered. I have to drive a distance to do that and the meat costs more so, for many people it wouldn't be a viable option.

We have adopted US food habits here - I presume we're going to have to adopt their methods of production to keep up with demand.

Actually, even eating fruit and nuts you have to be careful that you plant the seeds properly afterwards. After all, in the case of fruit, you,ve just deprived the seeds of their natural and best food. Tut tut. And nuts are seeds. Oh dear oh dear oh dear. Really, if one values life, one shouldn't eat anything at all because all food is a form of life.

In anticipation of objectiions that animals have feelings and plants don't, I wish to mention that it has been discovered recently that plants have communication systems.

sel . As you say, that option isn't available to everyone.

I agree wholeheartedly with there being compassion in world farming, but for all the bad stuff about modern farming, they proportion of human beings starving has fallen in modern times. Like most big issues, it's not a case of one approach being right and another being wrong. We can each only do what we think best to keep improving things in the world.

So you and Prince Charles do have something in common Bags

Factory farms in this country are not doing anything to reduce world hunger, just feeding an insatiable appetite for crap food.

How do you plan to plant the seeds properly after you've eaten strawberries or raspberries for example. One second thoughts don't answer that

Aka yup, could be too much information.

aka That's probably one of the best ways, actually. It's what birds do.

Farms producing vegetation crops have been 'industrial' factory farms for quite a while. It works on the same principle – trying to produce as much food as possible in the smallest possible space. It is working. Globally, less land is needed to grow food to feed today's world population than was needed to feed a much smaller population a generation or so ago.

I'm not arguing in favour of treating animals badly. I'm just trying to see the big picture.

Vegetables are not sentient beings and when factory farming vegetables means dowsing them with chemicals because the concentrated nature of their cultivation means they are exceptionally prone to plant disease and pests, then I grow my own or buy organic.

I'd rather eat pesticide-sprayed food than starve. We who have a choice should thank our lucky stars.

Surely most of the extra food produced has contributed to the increasing girths of people in developed countries? Those in under developed countries are, I believe, still existing on very basic, monotonous, and largely meat-free diets.

Big farms? - no thanks. It will destroy our countryside.

The idea of just eating the breast meat from a chicken is quite horrifying! Ours lasts several days: hot roast breast meat for Sunday, cold for Monday, curry or pasta dish for Tuesday and soup on Wednesday. We're a miserly lot!!

I think food production in India and China has grown a great deal in efficiency over the last couple of decades. This is good because it needed to.

Some people may only eat breast of chicken, but someone else will eat the rest, surely? It will go into things like pies, pressed meat, etc. Not to mention soup stock.

It's processed food that contributes to the increasing girths of people in developed countries.

Bags I think Mishap may be referring to one of my earlier posts when I recalled a documentary discussing food waste where they showed a woman taking a roast chicken out of the oven, carving off the white breast meat and then throwing the rest in the bin because she said her family only liked breast meat.

Oh, I see. Well, I expect the programme had to hunt for someone quite so ridiculous as that and who was willing for the ridiculousness to be seen on TV.

Please tell me people are not that ridiculous as a rule!

Nothing wrong with chicken pie! It's good food! You can even make it at home with leftover chicken. That's 'processing' the food as well, as is all cooking.

Yeah, yeah, I know what you mean. But really, there's processed and processed. Not all 'processed' food is bad.

You'd think that Bags wouldn't you. I have a neighbour who buys cheap Tesco chicken because she says they can't afford proper chicken but admits it only does one meal. (That's for two adults and two under four)

Bags Enormous amounts of food are wasted or thrown away. I don't do it, you don't do it, but a significant number of people must be.

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7389351.stm

Hugh Fearnley- Whittingstall's programme about chicken a couple of years ago showed that buying a chicken for Sunday lunch and then throwing the rest away was a quite normal practice.

About 30 years ago my aunt visited a new friend for a meal and was absolutely shaken when after a Sunday lunch of roast beef what was left of the joint was put in the bin, which was full of ham sandwiches. The lady concerned always made her husband two rounds of ham sandwiches in the evening after supper in case he got hungry watching television. He rarely did so the sandwiches went into the bin