For no extra money I will even consult on which hobby farm will give him a sense of real, embodied life, and I will help him acquire five (5) sheep.

The interesting part was that no matter what I said a number of them still believed some rando on instagram instead of a farmer who knows a lot of other farmers and would hear if such a program was being implemented.

Sorry if you've written about this elsewhere, but have you seen good evidence about the method(s) of transmission between herds?

Reading the excerpt in The Cut I was struck by how profoundly incurious the author seemed about the nature of her marriage, which made me wonder why she wrote a whole book about it. Maybe they should have gone with some of her cultural criticism, but I guess it wouldn't have got the clicks.

The introductory essay is free and well worth your time, especially if you are interested in changing things for the better. www.thenewatlantis.com/publications...

which would risk undermining the substrate upon which modern life is built. Food security is a miracle. Famine being a political problem instead of a production problem is a miracle. It is absolutely imperative that those of us interested in improving things do not take it for granted.

I used to think I knew precise radical reforms that would fix the environmental, welfare, and nutritional issues with the food system. I still see all those problems, but I have become far humbler about my ability to recognize which reforms would improve things and..

Because the systems that support our secure way of life are largely invisible, it's easy to take them for granted. We see the food on the shelf every time we walk into the supermarket, but we do not see the intricate chains of production and distribution that puts it there every single day.

It's easy to take pot shots at the global food system (it's one of my favorite hobbies!) but I never quite understood how a decentralized food system would necessarily be more resilient. It seems like it could just make regional shortages much more common and harder to address.

A big part of my love for less concentrated ag is that I think it makes for healthier rural communities apart from animal welfare.

Though it varies with species, I think medium sized operations can use practices that are unavailable to the biggest farms, but there is nothing inherently more humane about them. Giant farms with high welfare standards would be better than unregulated smaller operations.

I think there really is a happy middle ground on a lot of this stuff, with operations that are big enough to achieve decent economies of scale but small enough to blunt the problems with extreme concentration. But the middle ground is never going to be as cheap as maximally concentrated farming.

If you were in charge is there a specific aspect of childhood nutrition you would prioritize studying?

The real reason so many of them homeschool.

I do think effective weight loss drugs will be net beneficial for health at the population level, though managing cost remains an open question. I am even a bit hopeful that they will shift our collective diet away from Ultra-Processed Food. But we've also ended up in a dystopian situation.

It's good that the role of the food system plays in shaping diet and health is getting more attention, even if none of the participants have a remotely plausible plan for what to do about it aside from hoping novel weight loss drugs live up to their promise.

I have some significant disagreements with your piece, which I might write up, but I absolutely agree that richer countries paying poorer countries to directly and robustly protect remaining wilderness should be much more of a focus than trying to change global dietary patterns.