Alex Renton has deeply muddle-headed piece in the Graun today. His theme is food waste, but he simply doesn't know what he's talking about.
the British food economy is not healthy today and we've only begun to feel the first tremors of world food shortages. We import 52% of our food; the figure seems likely to rise since, as the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) figures state, 63% of our 300,000 farms are essentially not economically viable.
If they are not economically viable, it's because there's oversupply of food, so presumably there is no sign of Mr Renton's food shortages yet. If it does happen in the future, guess what will happen? That's right, food prices will go up and all those farms will be economic again. It's like magic isn't it?
We bring lamb and butter from the other side of the world and most of our bacon from Europe, not because it tastes better but because it is marginally cheaper.
And your problem with this is what exactly? We want to use fewer resources, yes?
A mixed salad illustrates the absurdity. We must have fresh salad all year, so we import 60% of it.
The thing about growing seasons is that we get a surplus at some times of year and a shortage at others. But we can overcome this problem by sending food from areas of plenty to areas of shortage. With this ingenious insight we discover that we can feed more people. A good thing, most would agree.
Processors and retailers throw away on average 40% of what they eventually sell, because of the problems in forecasting demand.
If you can come up with a way of predicting the future, we'd like to hear it.
Most of these statistics come from a fascinating exercise in dissecting the nation's rubbish bins, carried out by the Defra-funded Waste & Resources Action Programme (Wrap). It found that, in total, British households throw away 6.7m tonnes of food, at a value of £10bn, 30% of Britain's food wasted.
Yes, but everyone knows that study was a fiddle. What WRAP calls food, you and I would call waste - potato peelings, chicken carcasses and so on.
Wrap has got some commitments from retailers: extra advice on packets, rationalisation of sell-by dates and fewer buy one get one free offers.
What a fool! BOGOFs are specifically intended to deal with overstocks. All this will do is to increase the amount of food thrown away by supermarkets.
Tim Lang, professor of food policy at City University, is an adviser on food security and sustainability to government. He says that attitudes are changing fast from a time, quite recently, when politicians would privately ask if there was any need for farming in the UK at all and food policy was best described as "leave it to Tesco". "But we haven't got a coherent policy. Are we raising production or are we relying on world food markets? Which? Because we've got to get on with it."
Hmm. Central planning of the food supply chain being hinted at there. Now I'm worried. The result is usually starvation.