Tag: Food

Home Growing is essential to achieving Food Security and the aim of the UK becoming Self-Sufficient in Food Production | The Grassroots Manifesto

Young children are now suffering health problems that just decades ago were likely only to be experienced by a much older and very unlucky few. Obesity not only affects a significant part of the population, but it is also being championed as if it is normal, and we are vilified for daring to speak openly about such a point of view.

Like the rise in so many different health related conditions that are seriously compromising far too many people’s quality of life, the biggest proportion of all of them would be no more than an afterthought, if we were to bring back healthy eating and balanced diets in the form of basic and essential foods.

Sadly, the belief that cheap, sweet, salty, easy to buy, quick to eat ‘food’ is healthy for us is a well-crafted and massively convincing lie. We have had this nonsense repackaged by advertisers and the media in the same way that we are being told that if everyone were to consume healthy, basic and unprocessed foods, it would be more expensive than it is for us to eat it as the apparently luxury we have been conditioned to believe that it has now become.

We have been encouraged to eat the way that we eat and to feed our families the way that we do, not because it will benefit any of us. But because the foods, drinks and treats that we have become addicted to make somebody somewhere VERY rich.

What many of us don’t even realise that all of these ‘wonderful’ foods – and even the takeaways that have become a staple diet for some rather than just being an irregular treat – will have travelled many miles and been constructed artificially using ingredients that themselves may have been made in many different factories. They have traveled across continents before the end product you recognise has even been made.

It’s all part of the con called globalisation. A lie we are told we must celebrate and embrace as the legitimised truth. Because globalisation is all about international trade – which is how wars are stopped and how good relationships between different countries are made.

What the Establishment salesmen never talked about, and their pet media ignored, was the reality that jobs and communities have been lost, as well as the livelihoods that went with them.

Stupidly, we never really questioned the whole process because we were taught to become obsessed with speed of delivery, availability and what we still believe to be the lowest cost.

The reprogramming of our buying habits has contributed to or given the excuse necessary for almost all hope of this Country being Self-Sustainable in Essential Food Production being destroyed.

Meanwhile, the equally destructive EU policies that were supposed to be good for our economy within a so-called single market, also represented an advanced politicised form of the globalisation franchise. EU doctrine on food production has progressively made UK Farms all but impossible to run.

Globalisation was good whilst it lasted. Or rather, that’s what the majority of us are still expected to believe.

However, because of many different reasons that only include government responses to Covid, to Brexit, The War in Ukraine and the idiocy of Free Markets and Neoliberalism in the way that everything has been run, the supply chains that crisscross the world are now collapsing.

Forced change and possible shortages too, are only a matter of time.

As part of the so-called Great Reset or Agenda 2030, the solution to this coming problem that the elites created themselves isn’t to go back to basics and focus on localised supply chains. Indeed, whilst they actively ignore the crisis within UK Farming and in other countries where their counterparts are actively taking steps to see highly productive farms destroyed, they are instead telling us that we will all be happy eating ground up crickets and foods that have been made in a lab.

There is no good or humane reason for People to be treated this way, other than it being part of a strategy or plan to ensure that those who hold power over us now, remove our ability to support ourselves in the future.

As the crisis the Elites have created takes deeper and deeper hold, the agenda they are pursuing will ensure they will have and be able to maintain their grip on power, and we will all be dependent to a dystopian system where these few have absolute control. Unless we use the opportunity, their stupidity and greed has created, to take our own power back.

As part of The Grassroots Revolution and the rejection of everything held dear by the leaders of this dying ‘old world’, we MUST embrace a return to the most localised forms of food production and supply chains.

Food production must focus on healthy, basic and essential food items, using the absolute minimum of additional ingredients, so that our basic diets are home-produced, and this system of production is prioritised over everything else, so that the food we need, will always be available to us all in the cheapest and most accessible form.

Regrettably, because UK Agriculture has been deliberately pointed in the wrong direction for a very long time, younger generations of farmers have no working experience of anything like a truly localised food growing-to-production-to-retail system in anything like the way it historically was and will be needed now.

This means that the process of change will take time and that for reasons outside of our control, certain foods may become short.

It is therefore essential that everyone who is able use gardens, allotments, window boxes and whatever form of growing space available to ‘grow your own’. So that there will be sufficient basic and healthy essential foods available, whilst we all get behind our Farmers and develop the resources and cooperatives that will be necessary in every area.

We must do this to ensure that we have Food Security for the UK and achieve the National Self Sufficiency that we would have long since had, if politicians had been doing their job, and the greed and self-interest of the few, hadn’t been allowed to flourish and lead instead.

I have covered the subject of Basic Foods and Home Growing in detail within Levelling Level, the first book in the series leading to The Grassroots Manifesto. Here are some of the relevant links:

Surviving The Great Reset: Grow Your Own Food – AND GET STARTED NOW!

Grow Your Own: Take control now. Whilst you can. Whilst resources are available.

Surviving The Great Reset: Basic Foods that YOU CAN GROW

Surviving The Great Reset | Grow your own | Use the wisdom of others

Surviving The Great Reset | Grow Your Own | Using Hydroponics

Levelling Level discusses the wider issues that we now face, how we got here and begins focusing on many of the things that we and our communities have the power to do.

All pages are free to read as blogs with an index to the right of the screen (Best viewed on PC) HERE. The whole book is also available on Amazon for Kindle HERE.

In Part 3 of The Grassroots Manifesto, a series of Public Policies have been suggested for a new people-centric age. This is one of a number that relate specifically to this issue:

The Grassroots Manifesto | Policy 4 | Food Production, Security & Supply | Home Growing | xviii

Self-sufficiency of people is essential to achieving the aim of the UK becoming self-sufficient in food production and providing the Community with Food Security.

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The absence of real values are the terminal flaw of our greed-driven Global Supply Chain

What is missing from the Global Economy. What has always been missing from this Globalised Economy are the real values that underpin stories of real, genuine human success. Experiences that are built on our care and consideration for others.

Where the Global Economy and the Global Supply Chain is concerned, their only values have been profit, advancement and greed. The Global Economy has only functioned because we have forgotten and actively been encouraged to forget who we really are.

There has been nothing about the creation of this ‘Global Economy’ in terms of care, consideration or love for our fellow man, that exists in the system we have today.

It has worked for as long as it has done, because it has played to the same self-interest that distracts everyone of us for as long as we believe we are benefitting, whist completely blinding those at the top for the care and responsibility that is required from privilege towards everyone.

Like the money that the Global Supply Chain and Economy has always been about, the whole thing is a house of cards, waiting to be blown down. The whole thing is a lie that only works for as long as enough people believe that the benefits to them of it existing and being used in the way that it is continue to outweigh the disadvantages – which have been for too long not talked about, or deliberately hidden from our view.

Surviving The Great Reset | Grow Your Own | Using Hydroponics

If the space you have available is limited, you don’t have a garden, window ledge or anywhere else you would immediately recognise as somewhere you could repurpose to grow your own food, Hydroponics could be the answer for you.

Hydroponics is basically growing things in a tray, trough or tank with flowing water, that contains all the nutrients that the plants, fruits and vegetables in them need to grow.

It is an amazingly efficient way to grow food, because of the limited space, energy and input that is required – once you are set up. And the great thing is that you can set up a Hydroponics system anywhere – often with only a very minimal requirement for energy or light.

In some ways Hydroponics is the most practical and most efficient way to grow your own food. Its just that the food that is actually the easiest to produce will not look as appetising as we might like it to be.

The important thing is that you and the people you care for can eat and get nutrition for however long the system and food supply chain change and related shortages might be.

When it comes down to the absolute nuts and bolts of not going hungry for any period of time, having a Hydroponics system working away in your home, might by the best bet you can make on yourself right now, today.

Please do a web search on ‘Hydroponics’, ‘Buy Hydroponics’, ‘Foods you can grow with Hydroponics’. There is plenty to see, read, learn from and buy online.

Once again, the time to be setting yourself up with a Hydroponics system at home is right now. When food is short, it might be short because the system of distribution has stopped or broken down. As most of the equipment you will need will be online, it won’t be any good to you, if you cant get to it or it can’t get to you!

Surviving The Great Reset | Grow Your Own | Using Window Boxes

If you don’t have a garden, you almost certainly have windows. These are great places to grow things you can eat – and they can behave a little like greenhouses do too.

Depending on the size of your window ledge, you may be able to place some trays or troughs along the ledge, or perhaps affix some brackets with a trough or trays just underneath – as long as there is nothing like a radiator or similar in the way.

Do a search on ‘window gardens’, ‘what to grow in a window garden’, ‘setting up a window garden’, to get some ideas of what will be involved.

If your window box is outdoors, you may need to make sure that it is secured against wind or bad weather.

If the only windows you have available look abut a public pathway or road, growing food outside may not be the best plan for you – as your produce could disappear overnight when others who might be desperate can see – and easily reach – what you have grown.

Surviving The Great Reset | Grow Your Own | Using Greenhouses & Glass Boxes

The easiest way to improve growth of vegetable that grow above the surface of the soil, is to grow them under cover of plastic sheets or glass.

If you have these available now, that’s great. If not, do have a look online, or go and visit one of the big DIY chains to get some ideas, and then go back online and find the most cost-effective versions of whatever you have been looking at.

Bigger greenhouses can be heated, and if you can heat a greenhouse cost-effectively when energy to do so is available, it will mean that you can grow some produce that would normally be seasonal, year-round.

However, the best use for glass or plastic coverings is to secure and keep your food safe from animals, insects or other pests – when you are growing outside.

Again, please do a web search using terms like ‘what to grow under glass’, ‘how to grow under glass’, or ’10 best foods to grow in my greenhouse’.

Surviving The Great Reset: Grow Your Own Food – AND GET STARTED NOW!

Of all the things you can do to help and provide for yourself and those around you during The Great Reset and then beyond it too, the most helpful will be growing your own food.

Even during the acute stages of the Great Reset, the chances that there are absolutely no basic foods available for any prolonged period of time should be thankfully very small.

But that doesn’t mean the choice of what could be available over weeks or possibly months, isn’t very limited. Or, of that which is available, specific foods are not available either as regularly or in the quantities that we have become used to, or that we would like them to be.

As you read this today, many and indeed most of the ‘fancy’ or rather the highly processed foods that you are probably telling yourself that you need will still be available. Either on supermarket shelves, in chillers or in a frozen form.

But that availability is already changing.

Items you normally buy each week might already be missing one week and then back the next.

The number of items you are experiencing this temporary shortage of is probably already increasing.

The next thing that could happen is you could go online or walk into your local supermarket and find that the deliveries of all the things that you consider to be important hasn’t come in for your next shop. Then it doesn’t appear for weeks.

This could happen at any time. And it will.

AND IT IS NOT JUST A MATTER OF WHAT YOU CAN OR WILL BE ABLE TO AFFORD.

Food: What we need

In reality, people need no more than two (2x) meals per day.

Clean eating may have become a recent fad. But clean eating is also prescient and a precursor of what necessarily lies ahead.

Contrary to what all the commercial and big money interests will keep telling us for as long as they can, we do not need rich, heavily processed foods in our diets. In fact, it would be much better for our own health if we did not.

A healthy adult requires no more than two (2x) meals per day. These should consist of basic foods of an origin that is as a rule, identifiable once prepared from its original form – i.e. you can see that a meal is made up of fish, meat, potatoes, carrots, greens or whatever, with only light-touch (manual or traditionally-based) production methods being used to provide ancillary foods such as butter, cheese and bread, which will clearly look different to what it would do in its original form.

Support local shops, farmers and suppliers today so they are there for you when other options no longer exist

If things about this new life we are living make you feel uneasy, you have good reason to be concerned.

Beneath the veneer of slogans, the false security given by social distancing and the Government’s big cash handout given with a manufactured smile that is meant to tell us it’ll all be alright, trouble is brewing on an unprecedented scale not just across the UK, but the whole World throughout.

Policies like the Job Retention Scheme are creating a false perception of the condition the UK’s economy and businesses are in.

There is a genuine belief that things will just go back to how they were up until the 23rd of March, as if the Prime Minister has a great big UK On/Off switch.

Regrettably, this picture has been echoed by political ineptitude across the World and if tackling the Coronavirus Pandemic the way they have chosen to really was the war that politicians like Boris would like it pictured to be, in hindsight, the Lockdown and all the Social Distancing measures will become known as the phoney bit.

What is only clear to very few today, is there has been no comparable event in history that gives anyone an idea of how any of this can now actually work and anything remain the same.

The Lockdown has set off a chain reaction that will not only break the back of many small businesses and destroy the jobs that they provide, it is also setting off asymmetrical reactions and consequences in supply chains and big businesses not only in the UK but right across the World.

Because we have for so long taken for granted that we can drive to Sainsbury’s, Tesco or Morrisons and that our milk, eggs and sausages will have simply materialised on the shelves along with petrol at the garage to fill our cars, we have forgotten to look into the processes that get them there and just how complicated the supply chains are that make it look and feel like only simplicity is involved.

Greed on an unimaginable scale has meant big is best and global is even better. We don’t question the fragility of a system that had already become so dangerously convoluted before the crisis, simply because everything in these shops appears to be so cheap.

In the coming weeks and months, the appearance of everything going on as normal is going to crash spectacularly to the floor. The real damage that the Lockdown has created is likely to mean that the experience we had with there being no toilet rolls on the shelves at the end of March will expand to include many other ‘essential items’. Yet this time the shortage will be very real because the manufacturers and suppliers that the Supermarkets buy from can’t get the things they need for production, or they themselves will no longer exist.

Nothing is too big to fail, as many of the big companies whose only focus has been on profit are about to find out.

So if you want to be sure that you can put food on the table and get access to supplies and services that you genuinely need when things begin to get really hard as they soon will, buy whatever you need from your local shops, farms and suppliers of every kind today so that they are there and able to serve you with the goods and services you need at a price you can still afford when you have neither the option nor the choice.

The supermarkets will be able to deliver more online if they simply tell people when they will deliver rather than letting customers decide

As someone who set up a successful distribution business by winning a contract with a large newspaper company and setting it up overnight, I’m well aware of how to make a delivery operation flow right for staff and customers in a time sensitive environment.

Of course, as a commercial provider to a business customer, my key considerations were very different to that of a supermarket supplying a weekly shop to a retail customer. Or rather they would have been in normal times.

One of the greatest inefficiencies of the way that supermarkets have been working, has been to give customers the freedom to choose their delivery time and fit the delivery of their online order around that specific requirement.

This in effect means that even with deliveries grouped as much as possible across the number of vans that any store has, they will be zigzagging across a district or suburban area most of the time, adding time and running costs to the journey which limit or short-change the extent of what the driver and vehicle can do.

With the landscape changing and the idea that the customer is always right having been exchanged for one where we will get what the supermarkets can give us at the location and time it is available, the retailers we use for food and essential goods have options to cover more ground in less time and extend their online delivery services during the Coronavirus Crisis in ways that at other times they never could.

It all boils down to just one thing. Telling customers when they will get their delivery rather than giving them options to choose in the way that they currently do.

People are working from home and not going far.

If customers want food and the goods that supermarkets can provide them they will be grateful to have them delivered during the crisis and won’t worry about what time.

By being able to group deliveries into the closest distances between a set of addresses in blocks over a few days, efficiency is certain to increase. Even one more customer per van per shift would help more people than the system currently is.

If the supermarkets start delivering around the clock on a 24hr basis – prioritising more social hours for the elderly, the vulnerable and reaching key workers between their shifts – the existing delivery system could be able to double deliveries and perhaps even more.

Yes, there will be a shortage of staff that needs to be filled. But there will also be many people willing to step into help where possible to do so. I for one would be happy to do a few shifts from a local store or even drive an artic from a nearby distribution centre to the supermarket back door if I can find a doctor to sign off the medical for my Heavy Goods Class 1 renewal once more.

In difficult and challenging times, business as well as politicians have to consider whats fair and best for EVERYONE. Not just those who pay, complain or can influence more.

But we ALL have an investment in the government, the public sector and the businesses working to keep us alive getting this right.

They cannot do it alone and need our support to get there – even if that means opening the door to an online supermarket delivery person at what feels like a very peculiar time.