A farmer and historian in Britain, one John Lewis-Stempel, has published an interesting article in Unherd where he argues that the rise of wheat as the most widely grown crop in the world has, over the millennia, enabled tyranny!
I was immediately caught by the opening paragraph:
“Beef & Liberty”. Such was the slogan of the 18th century London dining club, The Sublime Society of Beef Steaks. The carnivorous Regency gentlemen were sensible in associating the scoffing of sirloin with freedom and the rights of Britons. Food, like the personal, is political.
Being a political tragic it’s ironic that I don’t enjoy the fact that everything is now political, even food, but I can’t deny it when I read of things like actor James Cromwell supergluing his hand to a Starbucks counter so he could lecture customers and staff alike for ages about the iniquity over their surcharge for vegan milk.
Privileged dickhead! I must re-watch LA Confidential so I can see him get his just deserts by being shot in the back.
In Lewis-Stempel’s article he covers the tyranny of wheat, from forcing us into factory-like patterns of tilling, sowing, weeding and harvesting, to being an easy crop for the State to inspect and tax – and confiscate – compared to animals or root vegetables, all the way to the modern tyranny of Monsanto:
…the grains were developed for their ability to cope with a chemical product that Monsanto wanted to flog. So if the farmer buys Roundup Ready seed, then he or she buys the tied-in Roundup herbicid. And Monsanto cashes in twice.
He also goes into some detail about the other chemicals needed to grow wheat and it’s not a pretty picture. The article ends on a note that will be music to the ears of NZ grass farmers:
To save the planet, pastoralism is the intelligent solution. The brain is 60% fat, and omega-rich fat from grass-fed meat is excellent for mental health. The sine qua non of free thinking. Beef and liberty! More meat, less wheat!
Agree or disagree, it’s a fun article so read the whole thing.
No Minister 
How remarkable. Gluten intolerance is actually an act of political rebellion.
Excellent
Heh! That’s right in line with the articles winking approach to the subject.
Which is to say that, much as I appreciate the argument he puts forward, let’s just say it’s over-reaching a bit. After all, the world of crops he describes is what enabled humanity to escape all those predictions of starvation doom (Famine ’75) from the 1970’s even as the global population doubled.
Which is not to say there aren’t limits to this stuff and we may be approaching them.
Now I’m thinking of sirloin steak for dinner tonight. 😉
No, Monsanto doesn’t cash in twice. Roundup is off patent and generic glyphosate is half the price.
Tom
Try Sirloin a la Adolf
Buy a well marbled 2kg chunk of unsliced and aged sirloin steak. {$50/kg in these parts.)
Turn the barbecue grill plate on high.
Into a medium sized bowl, pour a large cup of red wine. Add a big slurp of tomato sauce and small slurps each of worcester sauce, soy sauce, oyster sauce, black bean sauce along with three large cloves of garlic and three medium sized chiilis fine chopped and copious ground black pepper.
Place the sirloin fat side down on the hot grill until the fat has been rendered. Turn down the heat and empty the fat tray. Turn the heat back up and grill each side and ends of the steak for half a minute. Continue grilling for one minute each side, basting as you go.
Take a generous sip of red wine after every second basting.
When the basting liquid runs out and the wine bottle is empty, turn off the gas and rest the meat under alfoil. Your sirloin will be black on the outside and nipple pink in the middle.
Go and have a sleep for half an hour.
Wake up, open another bottle of red, welcome your guests and slice the meat.
Bloody hell Adolf. Sounds a bit much for country boy like me but I’ll give it a crack one day.
Thus did I cater for a small gathering on the occasion of our 50th wedding anniversary on Good Friday.
50th? Congrats. We’re almost at 30 and it seems like only yesterday when we invited people over for our twentieth.
Congrats to the Golden ones.