Farmers, Food Halls and Phobias

Food halls, food courts, whatever you call them where you come from, scare the shit out of me! Not because of any type of claustrophobia, or agoraphobia, or even that rather rare condition cibophobia (who knew?!?), but more to do with the whole business of what goes into filling them with, well, food.

We’ve all heard the term ‘from the paddock to the plate’ and kind of like the idea that there is a farmer out there, somewhere, producing this thing called food, that magically ends up diced and sliced and ready to go in a never ending variety of ways, for the consumptive pleasure of the sheeple (love that term) during the hour or so of freedom from serfdom that we call a lunch break these days.

But when you stand back in a food court, in a capital city or a country town, and watch the amount of protein and carbohydrate that is being consumed, animals and plants in other words, and then you extrapolate that out in a global sense, and then you think that cities are getting bigger and bigger and more and more people are eating and eating and more and more stuff is being produced and killed and cut up and, and…….well, that is why they scare the shit out of me! It just can’t be sustainable. And I’m not just thinking about the food, here either. All those plastic forks and containers that are destined for landfill the moment they are produced on an assembly line ‘somewhere else’, and all the electricity being used to cook and light and clean and heat and cool and it is all so bloody terrifying when you really stop and think about it that it is enough to make one go and live in a cave for a little while just to regroup…

Don’t get me wrong, I’m no luddite (well, maybe a little bit) and it’s not that I don’t like people generally (well, I don’t really, especially when they are in a state of mass consumption without even the slightest thought as to how lunch appeared in front of them), it is just that all this stuff is basically the fertility from a paddock on a plate, and perhaps that’s not such a good thing when we are talking about high intensity production like this, that shows no signs of slowing down at all. 

You might not know this, but a food crisis was averted mid-last century by what was called the Green Revolution. Not the kind of Green Revolution some folks want to see these days (that is, environment and sustainability), but a revolution in agriculture that saw a radical increase in production globally. It was hinged on the use of new and improved fertilizers and has been both a blessing and a curse. Synthetic and mined fertilizers are not really doing that much good to the land they get into, and while synthetics are a product of fossil fuels, the mined ones have problems all of their own, land degradation springs to mind. The thwarted Malthusians must be waiting with baited breath to see what happens next as the global population, fuelled literally by the fruits (and grains, and meats) of our own ingenuity, clamber up the aspirational ladder to an evermore crowded middle class mezzanine, start banging their plastic forks on the food court tables and start chanting “we want more, we want more….”.

So, without wanting to even try and offer any solutions to this ever increasing drain on our poor old planet, let me just say again, without the slightest twinge of embarrassment, that food halls, food courts, or whatever you call them where you come from, really do scare the shit out of me!

And, in an attempt to sum up my fear in a nice little package, I have come up with a new phobia that I hope doesn’t get in under your skin like a bot fly larvae (I’ll spare you a link to that particular horror but feel free to investigate it):

Claciboagophobia – the fear of being stuck in an enclosed food hall with a bunch of people who haven’t a clue.

Apparently there is no cure.