Discover and read the best of Twitter Threads about #regenesisfact
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#RegenesisFact 17: Monosodium glutamate is bad for you, right? Or so many people think. But the claim arose not from a scientific study, but a deliberate hoax in 1968 by a US prankster called Howard Steel.🧵
Glutamate is a very common amino acid, present in many of the foods we eat. So how did we become so afraid of it?
Steel was bet $10 by a colleague that he couldn’t publish a spoof letter in the New England Journal of Medicine. He thought it would be funny to invent something he called Chinese Restaurant Syndrome, a set of imaginary symptoms "experienced" after eating a Chinese meal.
#RegenesisFact 16: Probably as a result of a disastrous combination of extreme inequality and the failure to regulate the food industry effectively, 5-year old boys in the UK are on average shorter than those in any comparable nation. 🧵 
Girls in the UK are the second shortest. Put crudely, our kids are stunted.
Height is a good proxy for health and life outcomes. Our children are in a bad state, and are likely to stay that way, by comparison to their peers elsewhere, for life. This is an entirely amendable issue, but successive governments have chosen to neglect it.
#RegenesisFact 15: How many chickens do you reckon are killed every year in the UK?
1 million? No.
10 million? No.
100 million? No.
1 billion.
Yes. 1 billion.
And even this meets only 75% of our demand. The rest are imported.
1 million? No.
10 million? No.
100 million? No.
1 billion.
Yes. 1 billion.
And even this meets only 75% of our demand. The rest are imported.
The number slaughtered in this country has risen by 300 milllion since 2003.
And how do you reckon they’re produced? Like this? No.
#RegenesisFact 14: In the UK, fruit and vegetables are out of the reach of millions – they’re just too expensive. Remember, from a previous thread: a healthy diet costs five times as much as one that’s merely adequate in terms of calories.
So what do we do about it? 🧵
So what do we do about it? 🧵
Clearly, we need a much better distribution of wealth, rent controls to ensure people have more money to spend on food, and other major shifts. But also, and immediately? The best proposal I’ve heard is also the simplest: subsidise the price of fruit and veg at the point of sale.
Where did this proposal come from? An eminent commission? A scientific journal? No, from the administrator of my local food bank, the wonderful Fran Gardner, who features in Regenesis. I think she’s onto something.
13. #RegenesisFact 13: The Cambrian Dead Zone should be a nationally-infamous disaster area. It’s the biggest terrestrial dead zone in the UK and probably in western Europe. But, amazingly, it’s almost unknown to us, despite the fact that it covers roughly 300km2. 🧵
It’s an astonishing and horrifying phenomenon. So why don’t we know about it? Largely, I think, because it’s an agricultural, rather than an industrial, disaster zone. Farming, in my experience, is surrounded by a kind of moral forcefield.
We seem to accept the idea that there's a No Trespassing sign in front of the topic, beyond which we cannot pass. So we fail to apply the same standards and critique that we apply to other industries. If a chemicals plant had done this, we would be horrified.
#RegenesisFact 12. Perhaps the most common of all the proposed solutions for shrinking the impact of the food system is reducing food waste. Of course we should reduce waste. But both the potential for doing so and the impact of doing so have been greatly exaggerated. 🧵
I’ve heard people claim that because roughly one-third of the world’s food is wasted, salvaging it could feed all those who go hungry today, while saving vast tracts of farmland and much of the fertiliser, pesticide and water farmers use.
But the majority is not recoverable.
But the majority is not recoverable.
In the UK, for example, of the two million tonnes a year that’s wasted, a standard industry estimate is that only 250,000 tonnes (one eighth) can be rescued. Organisations like @FareShareUK, using clever interventions, have been able to stretch that a little.
#RegenesisFact 11: Across 7 years, the UK government spent £6 billion in foreign aid supporting farming overseas. NOT ONE PENNY of this money was spent on projects whose main focus was the development or promotion of agroecology. 🧵
In fact, no money was spent on organic farming of any kind: it was all poured into the kind of agriculture the private sector already promotes, consolidating the rise of the Global Standard Farm. This, the researchers found, was typical of the aid disbursements by rich nations.
While organic farming and agroecology are not always a formula for good practice, and can have major problems of their own, unless we can shift farming towards a low-impact, high-yield model (of the kind I explore in Regenesis), it's hard to see how we'll sustain our food supply.
#RegenesisFact 10: A survey published in The Lancet discovered that over 90% of policymakers believe “personal motivation” is “a strong or very strong influence on the rise of obesity.” They have yet to explain how 2/3rds of us rapidly and simultaneously lost our willpower. 🧵
In reality, obesity is strongly associated with:
- Poverty
- Stress, anxiety and depression associated with low social status
- Time poverty
- Junk food formulation, designed to bypass our natural mechanisms of appetite control
- Junk food marketing
- Food deserts
- Poverty
- Stress, anxiety and depression associated with low social status
- Time poverty
- Junk food formulation, designed to bypass our natural mechanisms of appetite control
- Junk food marketing
- Food deserts
Obesity is often associated with malnutrition. Bad food tends to be obesogenic. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, a good diet costs five times as much as one that’s merely adequate in terms of calories.
#RegenesisFact 8: Tomas Linder, associate professor of agricultural sciences, has compared the land area needed to grow protein through precision fermentation to the most efficient agricultural method, US soybean farming. The results are astonishing: 🧵
In a typical year, soybeans occupy 36.5m ha of the US, an area greater than Italy. The land required to produce the same amount of protein by growing bacteria is 21,000 ha: the size of the city of Cleveland, Ohio. In other words, you’d need 1,700 times less land to grow it.
The land-use ratio is even greater when you compare it to animal products, as you can see from this chart.
Chicken needs roughly 5,000x as much land as microbial protein
Pork 8,000x
Beef 126,000x
Lamb 142,000x
Chicken needs roughly 5,000x as much land as microbial protein
Pork 8,000x
Beef 126,000x
Lamb 142,000x
#RegenesisFact 7: A perennial rice variety developed by @NatureAsMeasure and Yunnan University is now on sale, fulfilling a dream scientists have pursued for a century. It has been harvested 6 times without resowing, with the same yields as annual rice. 🧵
Almost all the grain we eat comes from annual plants, that live and die within one year. Large areas dominated by annual plants are rare in nature. They tend to colonise ground in the wake of catastrophe: fire, flood, landslide or volcanic eruption that exposes bare rock or soil.
In growing annuals, we must keep the land in the catastrophic state they prefer. Every year, we must clear the soil of competing plants, puncture or turn it, and plaster it with the nutrients required to raise a crop from seed to maturity in a few months.
#RegenesisFact 6: When neonicotinoid pesticides were first used on the farmland surrounding Lake Shinji in Japan, from one year to the next the weight of animal plankton in the lake fell by 83%. The fishing community’s catch then fell by more than 90%.🧵
These pesticides would be better described as biocides, as they can be devastating to entire ecosystems. Unless this trend is stopped, far worse is to come: the global use of pesticides is expected to *triple* across the first 50 years of this century.
Already, one study suggests, mostly as a result of the shift to neonicotinoids, farmland in the US has become 48 times more toxic to bees across 25 years.
#RegenesisFact 5: When healthy soil is air-dried, the relative humidity inside the tiny clumps made by its microbes and small animals remains at 98%. In other words, these clumps are more or less impervious to desiccation: a property that at first sight looks like magic. 🧵
It’s not magic, but nor is it accidental. The vast internal surface area that makes it possible is a feature of biological construction. The little clumps (called aggregates by soil scientists) are not just made within the soil. They are the soil. Without them, it would collapse.
Just as corals and other species are reef-builders, bacteria, fungi and small animals are soil-builders. In making homes for themselves, they build the ecosystem on which almost all terrestrial life depends.
#RegenesisFact 4. This one will come as a shock to many people. Unless I’ve missed something, there is no major farm product as environmentally damaging as organic, pasture-fed beef.
Here’s the reasoning: 🧵
Here’s the reasoning: 🧵
i. Arguably the most important of all environmental metrics is the amount of land we use. Land used for extractive industries is land that cannot be used for wild ecosystems such as forests, wetlands and savannahs, on which the great majority of terrestrial species depend.
ii. By far the greatest use of land by people is for grazing by livestock – ie pasture. While human habitation occupies 1% of the planet’s surface, and crops occupy 12%, livestock grazing occupies 28%.
This represents a truly massive *ecological opportunity cost*.
This represents a truly massive *ecological opportunity cost*.
#RegenesisFact 3: Around 95% of US citizens eat meat.
But, according to one survey, 47% of them want to ban slaughterhouses.
But, according to one survey, 47% of them want to ban slaughterhouses.
Our benign perception of animal farming is sustained by a remarkable ignorance of what it involves. When livestock farmers complain that people would be more sympathetic towards their industry if they knew more about it, I suspect the opposite is true.
As very young children, we are constantly exposed to benign visions of the livestock farm, which bear no relation to reality.
#RegenesisFact 2. Sargassum is a floating seaweed once found mostly in the Sargasso Sea. But now, for 6 months in most years, it forms a continuous belt from the Gulf of Mexico, down the South American coast, across the Atlantic and all the way to the shores of West Africa.🧵
In other words, in most years since 2011, a 9000-kilometre blanket of floating weed now forms. That’s almost a quarter of the circumference of the Earth. The cause, scientists believe, is “increased deforestation and fertilizer use in Brazil”.
As Brazil has become a global supplier of animal feed (mostly soy), huge areas have been cleared and fertilised. Fertiliser and minerals released from the soil wash from the fields and pour down the TapajĂłs, Xingu, Tocantins and other rivers.
For the next few weeks, I’ll post a daily #RegenesisFact: an astonishing thing I learnt while researching the book. Here’s #1.
Up to 40% of the rain in parts of East Africa seems to be caused by farmers watering their fields in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, 4000-6000 km away.🧵
Up to 40% of the rain in parts of East Africa seems to be caused by farmers watering their fields in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, 4000-6000 km away.🧵
When farmers pump water out of a river or the ground, then spread it across their fields, they greatly increase its surface area. Evaporation and transpiration from their crop plants cause a vast release of water vapour.
From Feb to April, the vapour released from the irrigated fields is picked up by the prevailing winds, blowing SW across the Arabian Sea. After travelling 000s of kilometres, this air hits the coast of Africa, rises and cools. The vapour condenses, and some of it falls as rain.
