What happens to the global food exchange when the price of fossil fuels corrects to what it should be? Food items either have a high weight-to-price ratio, or are perishable, or both. Most of the “food mobility throughout history” that you’re talking about is luxury foods, with some lighter non-perishables like nuts and oils and dried herbs and dried fruits.
For the average person eating 2400 calories a day prior to coal-powered shipping, less than 300 of those would come from trans-regional exchange. It’s just not reasonable to suggest that any large fraction would be like that. You can reason for local greenhouses producing things, but ultimately the world is going to have to simplify back to a radius of less than 300 miles for sourcing food; 3000+ mile shipping is not compatible with food sovereignty, food justice, or climate justice.
You can’t just “do the same thing but take capitalism out of the equation”. If you grow fresh vegetables for consumption more than 1000 miles away, it’s going to be prohibitively expensive. If it’s affordable, this comes at a cost either to the workers, or to the environment, or both.
There’s a reason why Cuba, North Korea, and Vietnam practice gastronomic autarchy, and it’s not because of a “fascist misunderstanding of how the way food systems work”. They understand food systems better than treat junkies in the West.
What happens to the global food exchange when the price of fossil fuels corrects to what it should be? Food items either have a high weight-to-price ratio, or are perishable, or both. Most of the “food mobility throughout history” that you’re talking about is luxury foods, with some lighter non-perishables like nuts and oils and dried herbs and dried fruits.
For the average person eating 2400 calories a day prior to coal-powered shipping, less than 300 of those would come from trans-regional exchange. It’s just not reasonable to suggest that any large fraction would be like that. You can reason for local greenhouses producing things, but ultimately the world is going to have to simplify back to a radius of less than 300 miles for sourcing food; 3000+ mile shipping is not compatible with food sovereignty, food justice, or climate justice.
You can’t just “do the same thing but take capitalism out of the equation”. If you grow fresh vegetables for consumption more than 1000 miles away, it’s going to be prohibitively expensive. If it’s affordable, this comes at a cost either to the workers, or to the environment, or both.
There’s a reason why Cuba, North Korea, and Vietnam practice gastronomic autarchy, and it’s not because of a “fascist misunderstanding of how the way food systems work”. They understand food systems better than treat junkies in the West.