Food production

Tuesday

Lara Prendergast

With Brett Graham

30 min listen

Brett Graham is the man behind the Michelin-starred The Ledbury in Notting Hill, which is celebrating 20 years this year. He’s also the director of The Harwood Arms in Fulham, London’s only pub with a Michelin star. On the podcast, Brett tells hosts Lara Prendergast and Olivia Potts about why being in the kitchen is like being in the army, what it was like for The Ledbury to receive its third Michelin star and the trials and tribulations of learning food production – including ending up with 127 piglets.

Wednesday

Ashley Colby

Stop ignoring the real environmentalists

From our US edition

What does throwing soup on a piece of art have to do with the environment? When we hear the word environmentalist, what comes to mind is something like an Extinction Rebellion or JustStopOil activist: young, urban, progressive, with an expressly political agenda. But what if there are other categories of environmentalists that are expressly ignored, that may have the insights we need to solve the very real environmental problems we face? In my PhD research, I spoke with people who produced a significant amount of food for their own consumption in and around Chicago. Many of them were were disaffected by the focus on climate change and the obsession with consumption as activism.

environmentalists

Thursday

Gilbert T. Sewall

Four vectors of danger for America and the West

From our US edition

Fifty years ago, everything seemed to be breaking down, kind of like it is now. In fact, it can feel like the 1970s redux. Searing issues of war, ecology, race, and “malaise” have never really disappeared. A silent majority, political schism, limits to growth, and price inflation — all are here. Yet there are new uncertainties too. Even to optimists, debt-induced fragility clouds the economic horizon. Investor Charles Munger notes that bitcoin actively undermines the Federal Reserve System; any gain comes from trading, not from creating products, crops or rents. As fantastic as non-binary sexuality, cryptocurrency points to additional contemporary follies.