Report: Meat must be rationed to four portions a week to fight climate change

The Guardian | Sep 30, 2008

By Juliette Jowit

People will have to be rationed to four modest portions of meat and one litre of milk a week if the world is to avoid run-away climate change, a major new report warns.

The report, by the Food Climate Research Network, based at the University of Surrey, also says total food consumption should be reduced, especially “low nutritional value” treats such as alcohol, sweets and chocolates.

It urges people to return to habits their mothers or grandmothers would have been familiar with: buying locally in-season products, cooking in bulk and in pots with lids or pressure cookers, avoiding waste and walking to the shops - alongside more modern tips such as using the microwave and internet shopping.

The report goes much further than any previous advice after mounting concern about the impact of the livestock industry on greenhouse gases and rising food prices. It follows a four-year study of the impact of food on climate change and is thought to be the most thorough study of its kind.

Tara Garnett, the report’s author, warned that campaigns encouraging people to change their habits voluntarily were doomed to fail and urged the government to use caps on greenhouse gas emissions and carbon pricing to ensure changes were made. “Food is important to us in a great many cultural and symbolic ways, and our food choices are affected by cost, time, habit and other influences,” the report says. “Study upon study has shown that awareness-raising campaigns alone are unlikely to work, particularly when it comes to more difficult changes.”

The report’s findings are in line with an investigation by the October edition of the Ecologist magazine, which found that arguments for people to go vegetarian or vegan to stop climate change and reduce pressure on rising food prices were exaggerated and would damage the developing world in particular, where many people depend on animals for essential food, other products such as leather and wool, and for manure and help in tilling fields to grow other crops.

Instead, it recommended cutting meat consumption by at least half and making sure animals were fed as much as possible on grass and food waste which could not be eaten by humans.

“The notion that cows and sheep are four-legged weapons of mass destruction has become something of a distraction from the real issues in both climate change and food production,” said Pat Thomas, the Ecologist’s editor.

The head of the United Nations intergovernmental panel on climate change, Rajendra Pachauri, also sparked global debate this month when he urged people to have at least one meat-free day a week.

The Food Climate Research Network found that measured by production, the UK food sector produces greenhouse gases equivalent to 33m tonnes of carbon. Measured by consumption - including imports - the total rises to 43.3m tonnes. Both figures work out at under one fifth of UK emissions, but they exclude the indirect impacts of actions such as clearing rainforest for cattle and crops, which other studies estimate would add up to 5% to 20% of global emissions.

The report found the meat and dairy sectors together accounted for just over half of those emissions; potatoes, fruit and vegetables for 15%; drinks and other products with sugar for another 15%; and bread, pastry and flour for 13%.

It also revealed which parts of the food chain were the most polluting. Although packaging has had a lot of media and political attention, it only ranked fifth in importance behind agriculture - especially the methane produced by livestock burping - manufacturing, transport, and cooking and refrigeration at home.

The report calls for meat and dairy consumption to be cut in developed countries so that global production remains stable as the population grows to an estimated 9bn by 2050.

At the same time emissions from farms, transport, manufacturing and retail could be cut, with improvements including more efficient use of fertilisers, feed and energy, changed diets for livestock, and more renewable fuels - leading to a total reduction in emissions from the sector of 50% to 67%, it says.

The UN and other bodies recommend that developed countries should reduce total emissions by 80% by 2050.

However, the National Farmers’ Union warned that its own study, with other industry players, published last year, found net emissions from agriculture could only be cut by up to 50% if the carbon savings from building renewable energy sources on farms were taken into account.

The NFU also called for government incentives to help farmers make the changes. “Farmers aren’t going to do this out of the goodness of their hearts, because farmers don’t have that luxury; many of our members are very hard pressed at the moment,” said Jonathan Scurlock, the NFU’s chief adviser on renewable energy and climate change.

More “Frankenfoods” heading toward American dinner tables

Environmentally-friendly pigs, fast-growing fish and super chickens could be heading towards American dinner tables after the US government unveiled new rules for regulating genetically-engineered animals.

Consumers may be alarmed by the idea of eating GM meat

Telegraph | Sep 18, 2008

Genetically-engineered animals could lead to ‘Frankenfoods’

By Tom Leonard in New York

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a proposed legal framework which is expected to open the market to meat and milk produced from modified animals, which detractors have already termed “Frankenfood”.

Such creatures, which could include new hen breeds capable of laying healthier eggs and cows that are immune to mad cow disease, have been developed already.

But producers have been discouraged from marketing their creations by the absence of clear rules governing such a controversial issue.

The government wants the guidelines to resolve questions such as as whether altered animals are safe for human consumption or whether they pose a risk to the environment.

“Genetic engineering of animals is here and has been here for some time,” said Larisa Rudenko, a science policy adviser with the FDA’s veterinary medicine centre.

“We intend to provide a rigorous, risk-based regulatory path for developers to follow to help ensure public health and the health of animals.”

Consumer groups welcomed plans to regulate the area but were alarmed by apparent gaps in the proposals.

They pointed out that the FDA does not, for example, plan to insist that all such meat, fish and poultry be labeled as genetically-engineered.

“They are talking about pigs that are going to have mouse genes in them, and this is not going to be labeled,” said Jean Halloran, director of food policy for Consumers Union. “We are close to speechless on this.”

The FDA has already ruled that cloned animals - which are not the same - are safe to eat.

The agency will continue to exempt genetically-altered animals that pose little risk, such as aquarium fish that were recently changed so they would glow in the dark.

Genetically-engineered animals, which are created by the insertion of a gene from one species of animal into the DNA of another, could fulfil a similar role in food production to GM plants.

Genetic engineering is already widely used in agriculture to produce higher-yielding or disease-resistant crops. However, all sides are aware that consumers may be rather more alarmed by the idea of eating GM meat.

Scientists create species-jumping hybrid prions

Science A Go Go | Sep 9, 2008

In research with profound implications for public health, scientists have created entirely new strains of infectious prions in the laboratory by simply mixing infectious prions from one species with the normal prion proteins of another species. According to the scientists’ report in Cell, the new prions produced symptoms in laboratory animals that differ from any known prion strain found in nature.

Prion diseases, also known as transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs), are infectious neurodegenerative diseases affecting the brain. Unlike conventional infectious microorganisms, the infectious agent in the case of prion diseases consists exclusively of a misfolded form of the prion protein. Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) is the most common prion disease in humans, along with scrapie in sheep and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, aka mad cow) in cattle.

In this new work, the researchers found that prion strains produced by combining normal hamster proteins with infectious mouse proteins can infect hamsters and vice versa. Although they are both rodents, prions from one of the two species normally don’t readily infect the other, a common phenomenon amongst prions known as a species barrier, the researchers explained.

“We are forcing the system by putting everything together, but this suggests that the variety of possible prions is really very large,” said Claudio Soto of the University of Texas Medical Branch. “We shouldn’t be surprised if new barriers are crossed and new prions arise. There is the potential for a large variety of new infectious prions — some of which may have dramatic effects.”

The same research team had previously reported the generation of infectious prions by amplification of prion misfolding in the test tube. In those experiments, they used a technology called protein misfolding cyclic amplification (PMCA) that mimics some of the fundamental steps involved in the replication of infectious prions in living animals, but at an accelerated rate. The method involves placing small quantities of infectious prions with large quantities of the normal protein from the same species together, allowing the infectious form to imprint on the normal form and thereby replicate itself.

Now, they have shown that the same method can generate new strains when infectious prions from one species are mixed with normal prion proteins from another species. The finding provides strong evidence that the imprinting of disease-causing prions on normal forms can overcome species barriers, and doesn’t require any other infectious agent.

This new work has profound implications for public health, says Soto. “One of the scariest medical problems of the last decades has been the emergence of a new and fatal human prion disease - variant CJD - originated by cross-species transmission of BSE from cattle. Our findings suggest that the universe of possible prions is not restricted to those currently known but that likely many unique infectious foldings of the prion protein may be produced and that one of the sources for this is cross-species transmission.”

UN: Start cutting down on meat to fight global warming

Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (seen here in May), told The Observer that people should start to help combat climate change by having one meat-free day per week then cut back further.  (DDP/AFP/File/Sebastian Willnow)

Eat less meat to fight climate change: UN expert

AFP | Sep 6, 2008

LONDON (AFP) - People should cut their consumption of meat to help combat climate change, a top United Nations expert told a British Sunday newspaper.

Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), told The Observer that people should start by having one meat-free day per week then cut back further.

The 68-year-old Indian economist, who is a vegetarian, said diet change was important in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and environmental problems associated with rearing cattle and other animals.

“Give up meat for one day (per week) initially, and decrease it from there,” he said.

“In terms of immediacy of action and the feasibility of bringing about reductions in a short period of time, it clearly is the most attractive opportunity.”

Other small-scale lifestyle changes would also help to combat climate change, he said without elaborating.

“That’s what I want to emphasise: we really have to bring about reductions in every sector of the economy.”

Pachauri is due to give a speech in London on Monday under the title: “Global Warning: the impact of meat production and consumption on climate change”.

Pachauri, who was re-elected for a second term six-year term as IPCC chairman last week, has headed the organisation since 2002 and oversaw its seminal assessment report in 2007 which gave graphic forecasts of the risks posed by global warming.

The IPCC warned then that without action the planet’s rising temperatures could unleash potentially catastrophic change to earth’s climate system, leading to hunger, drought, storms and massive species loss.

The organisation also won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 along with former US vice president Al Gore.

Clones’ offspring “may have” entered the US food supply

Reuters | Sep 2, 2008

By Christopher Doering

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Food and milk from the offspring of cloned animals may have entered the U.S. food supply, the U.S. government said on Tuesday, but it would be impossible to know because there is no difference between cloned and conventional products [according to the FDA].

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said in January meat and milk from cloned cattle, swine and goats and their offspring were as safe as products from traditional animals. Before then, farmers and ranchers had followed a voluntary moratorium on the sale of clones and their offspring.

While the FDA evaluated the safety of food from clones and their offspring, the U.S. Agriculture Department was in charge of managing the transition of these animals into the food supply.

“It is theoretically possible” offspring from clones are in the food supply, said Siobhan DeLancey, an FDA spokeswoman.

Cloning animals involves taking the nuclei of cells from adults and fusing them into egg cells that are implanted into a surrogate mother. There are an estimated 600 cloned animals in the United States.

Proponents, including the Biotechnology Industry Organization, say cloning is a way to create more disease-resistant animals that produce more milk and better meat. The cloning industry and the FDA say cloned animals and their offspring are as safe as their traditional counterparts.

Critics contend not enough is known about the technology to ensure it is safe, and they also say the FDA needs to address concerns over animal cruelty and ethical issues.

“It worries me that this technology is out of control in so many ways,” said Charles Margulis, a spokesman with the Center for Environmental Health. The possibility of offspring being in the food supply “is just another element of that,” he said.

Continued…

Agenda 21 – The UN Blueprint for the 21st Century

“Effective execution of Agenda 21 will require a profound reorientation of all human society, unlike anything the world has ever experienced a major shift in the priorities of both governments and individuals and an unprecedented redeployment of human and financial resources. This shift will demand that a concern for the environmental consequences of every human action be integrated into individual and collective decision-making at every level.”

- excerpt, UN Agenda 21

Wise Up Journal | Aug 20, 2008

Agenda 21 Enforcement

As described in my previous article on Sustainable Development, Agenda 21 was the main outcome of the United Nation’s Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Agenda 21 outlines, in detail, the UN’s vision for a centrally managed global society. This contract binds governments around the world to the United Nation’s plan for controlling the way we live, eat, learn, move and communicate - all under the noble banner of saving the earth. If fully implemented, Agenda 21 would have the government involved in every aspect of life of every human on earth.

Agenda 21 spreads it tentacles from Governments, to federal and local authorities, and right down to community groups. Chapter 28 of Agenda 21 specifically calls for each community to formulate its own Local Agenda 21: ”Each local authority should enter into a dialogue with its citizens, local organizations, and private enterprises and formulate ‘a Local Agenda 21.’ Through consultation and consensus-building, local authorities would learn from citizens and from local, civic, community, business and industrial organizations and acquire the information needed for formulating the best strategies.” - Agenda 21, Chapter 28, sec 1.3

Interestingly, in April 1991, fourteen months before Earth Summit, Prince Charles held a private two day international conference aboard the royal yacht Britannia, moored off the coast of Brazil. His goal was to bring together key international figures in an attempt to achieve a degree of harmony between the various countries that would gather at the Summit. Al Gore was present, along with senior officials from the United Nations and the World Bank.

At the summit 179 nations officially signed Agenda 21 and many more have followed since. Nearly 12,000 local and federal authorities have legally committed themselves to the Agenda. In practice this means that all their plans and policies must begin with an assessment of how the plan or policy meets the requirements of Agenda 21, and no plans or policies are allowed to contradict any part of the Agenda. Local authorities are audited by UN inspectors and the results of the audits are placed on the UN website. You can see how many local authorities in your country were bound by Agenda 21 in 2001 here. The number has increased significantly since then.

The official opening ceremony was conducted by the Dalai Lama and centered around a Viking long-ship that was constructed to celebrate the summit and sailed to Rio from Norway. The ship was appropriately named Gaia. A huge mural of a beauiful woman holding the earth within her hands adorned the entrance to the summit. Al Gore lead the US delegation where he was joined by 110 Heads of State, and representatives of more than 800 NGO’s.

Maurice Strong, Club of Rome member, devout Bahai, founder and first Secretary General of UNEP, has been the driving force behind the birth and imposition of Agenda 21. While he chaired the Earth Summit, outside his wife Hanne and 300 followers called the Wisdom-Keepers, continuously beat drums, chanted prayers to Gaia, and trended scared flames in order to “establish and hold the energy field” for the duration of the summit.

Full Story

India’s poor encouraged to eat rats

This is not the first time that the department secretary has come out with such an innovative idea.

Earlier, he proposed to recruit eunuchs as security guards to maternity wards in hospitals.

BBC News | Aug 13, 2008

An official in the Indian state of Bihar has come up with a new idea to encourage low caste poor people to cope with food shortages - rat meat.

The Principal Secretary of the state’s Welfare Department, Vijay Prakash, said that he was advancing his proposal after “much survey and ground work”.

Bihar’s extremely poor Musahar community are rat-eaters by tradition.

The Musahar are on the bottom strata of the caste system with the lowest literacy rate and per capita income.

Less than one percent of their 2.3 million population in Bihar is literate and 98% are landless.

Delicacy

Mr Prakash says his proposals to popularise rat meat eating are intended to uplift their social-economic condition.

“There are twin advantages of this proposal. First, we can save about half of our food grain stocks by catching and eating rats and secondly we can improve the economic condition of the Musahar community,” he told the BBC.

According to Mr Prakash, about 50% of total food grain stocks in the country are eaten away by rodents.

He argues that by promoting rat eating more grain will be preserved while hunger among the Musahar community will be reduced.

He said that rat meat is not only a delicacy but a protein-enriched food, widely popular in Thailand and France.

“Rats have almost no bones and are quite rich in nutrition. People at large don’t know this cuisine fact but gradually they are catching up.”

However he may find it difficult to popularise such a strategy in a conservative society like Bihar and other north Indian states.

Mr Prakash says that he has recipes to make rat eating a delicacy, which he now wants to distribute to all the hotels in Bihar.

He also wants to encourage rat farming in the same way that poultry is farmed.

While eating rat meat is still stigmatised in urban areas of the country, Mr Prakash says that his research has revealed that it is a popular food item in some parts of Bihar where it is known at roadside hotels by the name of “patal-bageri”.

This is not the first time that the department secretary has come out with such an innovative idea.

Earlier, he proposed to recruit eunuchs as security guards to maternity wards in hospitals.

“Yes, that proposal is in its advance stage and we’ll very soon engage them in various social activities of our department,” he said.

And the welfare secretary’s next plan?

“I’ll make snake catching popular for the economic value of its venom,” he said.

Prince Charles warns GM crops risk causing the “biggest environmental disaster of all time”

“The classic way of ensuring there is no food in the future.”

Telegraph | Aug 12, 2008

The mass development of genetically modified crops risks causing the world’s worst environmental disaster, The Prince of Wales has warned.

In his most outspoken intervention on the issue of GM food, the Prince said that multi-national companies were conducting an experiment with nature which had gone “seriously wrong”.

The Prince, in an exclusive interview with the Daily Telegraph, also expressed the fear that food would run out because of the damage being wreaked on the earth’s soil by scientists’ research.

He accused firms of conducting a “gigantic experiment I think with nature and the whole of humanity which has gone seriously wrong”.

“Why else are we facing all these challenges, climate change and everything?”.

Relying on “gigantic corporations” for food, he said, would result in “absolute disaster”.

“That would be the absolute destruction of everything… and the classic way of ensuring there is no food in the future,” he said.

“What we should be talking about is food security not food production - that is what matters and that is what people will not understand.

“And if they think its somehow going to work because they are going to have one form of clever genetic engineering after another then again count me out, because that will be guaranteed to cause the biggest disaster environmentally of all time.”

Small farmers, in particular, would be the victims of “gigantic corporations” taking over the mass production of food.

“I think it’s heading for real disaster,” he said.

“If they think this is the way to go….we [will] end up with millions of small farmers all over the world being driven off their land into unsustainable, unmanageable, degraded and dysfunctional conurbations of unmentionable awfulness.”

The Prince of Wales’s forthright comments will reopen the whole debate about GM food.

They will put him on a collision course with the international scientific community and Downing Street - which has allowed 54 GM crop trials in Britain since 2000.

His intervention comes at a critical time. There is intense pressure for more GM products, not fewer, because of soaring food costs and widespread shortages.

Many scientists believe GM research is the only way to guarantee food for the world’s growing population as the planet is affected by climate change.

They will be dismayed by such a high profile and controversial contribution from the Prince of Wales at such a sensitive time.

The Prince will be braced for the biggest outpouring of criticism from scientists since he accused genetic engineers of taking us into “realms that belong to God and God alone” in an article in the Daily Telegraph in 1998.

In the interview the Prince, who has an organic farm on his Highgrove estate, held out the hope of the British agricultural system encouraging more and more family run co-operative farms.

When challenged over whether he was trying to turn back the clock, he said: “I think not. I’m terribly sorry. It’s not going backwards. It is actually recognising that we are with nature, not against it. We have gone working against nature for too long.”

The Prince of Wales cited the widespread environmental damage in India caused by the rush to mass produce GM food.

“Look at India’s Green Revolution. It worked for a short time but now the price is being paid.

“I have been to the Punjab where you have seen the disasters that have taken place as result of the over demand on irrigation because of the hybrid seeds and grains that have been produced which demand huge amounts of water.

“[The] water table has disappeared. They have huge problems with water level, with pesticide problems, and complications which are now coming home to roost.

“Look at western Australia. Huge salinisation problems. I have been there. Seen it. Some of the excessive approaches to modern forms of agriculture.”

He said that the scientists were putting too much pressure on nature.

“If you are not working with natural assistance you cause untold problems. which become very expensive and very difficult to undo.

It places impossible burdens on nature and leads to accumulating problems which become more difficult to sort out.”

In a keynote speech last year the Prince of Wales warned that the world faces a series of natural disasters within 18 months unless a £15 billion action plan is agreed to save the world’s rain forests.

He has set up his own rain forest project with 15 of the world’s largest companies, environmental and economic experts, to try to find ways to stop their destruction.

Only two weeks ago British GM researchers lobbied ministers for their crops to be kept in high-security facilities or in fields at secret locations across the country to prevent them from being attacked and destroyed.

They spoke out after protesters ripped up crops in one of only two GM trials to be approved in Britain this year.

Scientists claim the repeated attacks on their trials are stifling vital research to evaluate whether GM crops can reduce the cost and environmental impact of farming and whether they will grow better in harsh environments where droughts have devastated harvests.

Political elite enjoy lavish fine dining as they push for food frugality

The most powerful bellies in the world were last night compelled to stave off the great Hokkaido Hunger by fortifying themselves with an eight-course, 19-dish dinner prepared by 25 chefs.

Related: Britain urging return to wartime food frugality

Guardian | Jul 8, 2008

Just two of the 19 dishes on the dinner menu at the G8 food shortages summit

By Patrick Wintour and Patrick Barkham

As the food crisis began to bite, the rumblings of discontent grew louder. Finally, after a day of discussing food shortages and soaring prices, the famished stomachs of the G8 leaders could bear it no longer.

The most powerful bellies in the world were last night compelled to stave off the great Hokkaido Hunger by fortifying themselves with an eight-course, 19-dish dinner prepared by 25 chefs. This multi-pronged attack was launched after earlier emergency lunch measures - four courses washed down with Château-Grillet 2005 - had failed to quell appetites enlarged by agonising over feeding the world’s poor.

The G8 gathering had been seen as a “world food shortages summit” as leaders sought to combat spiralling prices of basic foodstuffs in the developed world, and starvation in the developing world.

But not since Marie Antoinette was supposed to have leaned from a Versailles palace window and suggested that the breadless peasants eat cake can leaders have demonstrated such insensitivity to daily hardship than at the luxury Windsor hotel on the Japanese island of Hokkaido.

After discussing famine in Africa, the peckish politicians and five spouses took on four bite-sized amuse-bouche to tickle their palates. The price of staple foods may be soaring, but thankfully caviar and sea urchin are within the purchasing power of leaders and their taxpayers - the amuse-bouche featured corn stuffed with caviar, smoked salmon and sea urchin, hot onion tart and winter lily bulb.

Guests at the summit, which is costing £238m, were then able to pick items from a tray modelled on a fan and decorated with bamboo grasses, including diced fatty tuna fish, avocado and jellied soy sauce, and pickled conger eel with soy sauce.

Hairy crab Kegani bisque-style soup was another treat in a meal prepared by the Michelin-starred chef Katsuhiro Nakamura, the grand chef at Hotel Metropolitan Edmont in Tokyo, alongside salt-grilled bighand thornyhead (a small, red Pacific fish) with a vinegary water pepper sauce.

They have told their people to tighten their belts for lean times ahead, but you feared for presidential and prime ministerial girdles after the chance to tuck into further dishes including milk-fed lamb, roasted lamb with cepes, and black truffle with emulsion sauce. Finally there was a “fantasy” dessert, a special cheese selection accompanied by lavender honey and caramelised nuts, while coffee came with candied fruits and vegetables.

Leaders cleverly skated around global water shortages by choosing from five different wines and liqueurs.

Earlier, the heads of state had restricted themselves to a light lunch of asparagus and truffle soup, crab and supreme of chicken served with nuts and beetroot foam, followed by a cheese selection, peach compote, milk ice-cream and coffee with petits fours.

Fresh from instructing his population to waste less food, it can only be hoped that Gordon Brown polished off every single morsel on his plate.

Andrew Mitchell, the shadow secretary of state for international development, said: “The G8 have made a bad start to their summit, with excessive cost and lavish consumption. Surely it is not unreasonable for each leader to give a guarantee that they will stand by their solemn pledges of three years ago at Gleneagles to help the world’s poor. All of us are watching, waiting and listening.”

Britain urging return to wartime food frugality

It’s not back to ration books, “victory gardens” or squirrel-tail soup … yet

Related: Political elite enjoy lavish fine dining as they push for food frugality

AP | Jul 11, 2008

By DAVID STRINGER

Evoking an era of World War II austerity, British families are being urged to cut food waste and use leftovers in a nationwide effort to fight sharply rising global food prices.

It’s not back to ration books, “victory gardens” or squirrel-tail soup yet, but warning bells are being rung by experts at all levels of Britain’s government as well as from the World Food Program.

With food and energy prices soaring around the world, a constant supply of high-quality, affordable food is no longer guaranteed, the officials are warning Britons. That could mean an era of scarcity like Britain’s 1940-54 food rationing, during the war and its aftermath.

“Well, of course, in the war years it was not only immoral to waste food — this was one of our slogans then — it also was illegal,” said Marguerite Patten, 92, who worked at the Ministry of Food during World War II and urges a return to those more thrifty days.

“I know it’s old fashioned, but some old fashioned things are worth doing,” she said.

During the war, Nazi Germany’s U-boats crippled the flow of ships carrying food to Britain. Diets were tightly controlled by rationing. Bananas and pineapples became exotic treats, and enterprising housewives traded recipes for baked hedgehog and carrot fudge.

The experts say the postwar era of cheap food has ended — squeezed by the demands of a growing world population, a greater appetite for meat among emerging middle classes in China and India and the pressure on agricultural land from biofuel production.

“Recent food price rises are a powerful reminder that access to ever more affordable food cannot be taken for granted,” Prime Minister Gordon Brown said in a foreword to a bleak new report by Britain’s Cabinet Office.
The report says the task of feeding a larger, richer world population — while simultaneously tackling climate change — is far greater than imagined. The World Bank estimates the cost of food staples has risen 83 percent in three years.

Tim Lang, professor of food policy at London’s City University, said junk food will remain readily available, but good quality, nutritious produce could become scarce worldwide.

“There has been 60 years of silence on this issue,” he said. “We haven’t had any sort of overview of food policy since the end of the Second World War. I think we need to accept that food is once again in a wartime state.”
Some Britons might find it a tad galling to take advice on food frugality from the prime minister, who along with fellow Group of Eight leaders dined on sumptuous feasts during their summit this week.

But the government says the public might find one solution by looking into their garbage pail. Britons throw out 4.5 million tons of edible food a year, or about $830 worth per home — wastefulness the government says contributes substantially to rising prices.

Brown wants Britons to store their fruit and vegetables better to avoid waste and plan their meals more carefully. Some municipal authorities want to go further and increase taxes on those who throw away the most rubbish.

“If I throw away food I feel guilty — even if it’s just a little bit,” said Tania Carbonare, a 45-year-old jewelry seller at the Camden Lock market in London.

Those who remember Britain’s 1940s “Dig for Victory” campaign to turn home gardens and soccer fields into vegetable patches say the past holds lessons for any food crisis.

Eggs, butter, meat and cheese were all strictly rationed, prompting an adventurous few to turn to squirrels or horses for protein.

“We didn’t live very grandly, but we learned to make do with what we’d got,” said Helen Trevena, 82, who recalled sweetening her tea with jam when sugar was scarce.

Britain’s Women’s Institute, launched in 1915 to help cut waste and encourage thrift during World War I, is once again offering classes on cutting food waste and livening up leftovers.

“People want those skills,” said Ruth Bond, an institute stalwart from Cambridge in southern England. “Apart from anything else, it helps them save money.”