How not to feed the world

It’s a hoary old topic on this site, I know, but in this post I’m going to trail an article I’ve just published on the appropriately named GM Watch site called How not to feed the world: five questions for George Monbiot. I won’t repeat here what I say there. Instead, I’m just going to fill out a few points, hopefully in an interesting way despite the familiarity of the issue. First, some background for the uninitiated. In his 2022 book Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet, the prominent British journalist and environmentalist George Monbiot championed an industrial process for making edible protein from bacteria via a technique that he (wrongly) calls ‘precision fermentation’. In doing so, he got the energy costs of this process wrong, greatly underestimating them. I pointed this error out in my own book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future, a rejoinder to Regenesis, and the error has now been confirmed in the scientific literature. The error matters, because unless…

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