To agree that Indians should keep their rice.

[orangeleavesinautumn]

Of course Indians should not be going hungry while the rest of the world eats the rice they have grown- that is madness.

They should keep and eat their own rice, and the rest of the world should eat something else - we have other cheap food in the UK, carrots, potatoes, bread, etc - we absolutely do not need to be eating Indian rice while Indians have nothing to eat.

I understand there is a problem where other populations rely on cheap rice imports, but we don't so I can't understand why anyone in the UK feels hard done by missing out on non premium rice

The NHS was created in 1948 because of the appalling state of the heath of the workforce. I would be unsurprised if claims about a well-nourished nation was a piece of government propaganda.

I've visited Dutch tulip fields but not their paddy fields. Some or all of the rice imported from the Netherlands may well have come from India.

Yep! 🙄

Evidence? Because you seem to be confusing World War II and the creation of the NHS with World War I and the creation of the Ministry of Health.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/57a08d91e5274a31e000192c/The-history-and-development-of-the-UK-NHS.pdf

1946 The National health Service Act
1948 NHS begins, July 5th

Evidence supplied. I hope your confusion lifts. You're welcome.

No the land can’t be used to grow food, not without slash and burn or logging to deforest it first. Which would eliminate a carbon sink plus impoverish hHe country as cocoa and coffee are great cash crops to sell and then buy lots of food to import.

You can’t just grow anything anywhere you know. There is a reason why coffee beans and cocoa beans can be grown where they are grown.

Coffee is grown interspersed within a forest and cocoa bean trees are in the lower part of a rain forest. So it’s a bush or tree that grows in the shade under larger trees. You can’t grow any staple crops like wheat, corn, barley, potatos, rice, etc in the lower part of a forest or rain forest.

No we can’t.
69% of the land is currently being used for agriculture and using modern farming techniques that only feeds 1/3rd of the population. (There is zero % of land sitting vacant that can be used for agriculture.)

Simple maths would tell you that we would need the U.K. to more than double its entire land mass to feed 100% of the population.

But with rising sea levels, our land mass is shrinking, not expanding.

Think too, of that 69% of land used for agriculture, only 1/3rd is arable meaning it can be used to grow plant crops. 2/3rds is not arable and can only be used as grassland to feed grazing livestock. So we cannot even grow more crops.

I'd always assumed that Brexit was heavily promoted by people who noticed that our USP was the moat. When food gets really expensive and scarce, we'll exploit that.

I read a PhD paper once about the UK being self sufficient. Apparently it is just about possible if we all like peas. At my allotment, I'm looking at the warmish but really wet weather and thinking blight, never mind we have the jerusalem artichokes to fall back on.

Unfortunately, that report says nothing in its brief history of the founding of the NHS about any appalling state of health of the workforce.

I'd always assumed that Brexit was heavily promoted by people who noticed that our USP was the moat. When food gets really expensive and scarce, we'll exploit that

That has been a thought here too.

Have you mentioned this to the National Farmers Union? Because they seem to be under the impression we produce about 60% of our food supply, not 30%. We managed about 80% in the 1980s.

I think you may be mixing England and Scotland together. Yes, 69% of England is agricultural land. But to get ‘only 1/3 is arable’ you have to include Scotland, where about 80% of the land is agricultural, but most of it is only suitable for livestock.

Utilised Agricultural Land doesn’t mean it’s being used for food crops, btw. About 20% is under ‘temporary grass’. That is, it can be used for food crops, but it’s currently banked.

Google the nutritional value of food. We produce more but the nutritional value has dropped as a result.

www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/environment-and-conservation/2022/05/fruits-and-vegetables-are-less-nutritious-than-they-used-to-be

www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/environment-and-conservation/2022/05/fruits-and-vegetables-are-less-nutritious-than-they-used-to-be

No problem with me if the Indian Govt prefers to ensure that it feeds its own population with its own home-grown rice rather than leave them starving in poverty.

No ifs, buts, or maybes - it's a very sensible thing to do.

Actually, the majority of the banned rice goes to Bangladesh, China, Benin, and Nepal; with substantial amounts also going to other African countries. Most of what the UK imports is Basmati, which isn't part of the ban. Whilst the ban on export of non-basmati rice will possibly help India's poor, the destination of most of that rice goes to other countries where people will have no alternative staple or markets, so someone else will starve. Food poverty can't be solved by a single country - it just shifts the problem somewhere else.

People are not starving. They had record breaking rains this summer, destroying many crops. So the government has banned non basamati varieties of rice to be exported as the rice crops were also damaged by heavy rains.

Not just now, been going on a long time...
Ireland
The Indian peninsula

food my grandmother would recognise?

White bread and jam or dripping; tea with five sugars in it; had never eaten fish that wasn’t out of a tin; pasta in a tin.

Cant bear the middle-class revisionism of this phrase.

But that is not all you would eat, fruit, vegetables and fish were never rationed. There were also 'British restaurants' that were not rationed and work place and school canteens.

Also there were extra rations for those working more physical work, pregnant women and new mothers.

You could keep chickens and rabbits for food and anything you grew yourself. You could also swap some items eg if you had a couple of chickens you could swap out your weekly egg for a different protein.

Working class people actually started to eat more calories and more protein.

There were also 'special' ration goods eg at one point my grandmother got something like 2 Lb of sugar, but it was to make jam and preserves with not to be put in tea.

It's a simple idea but is quite a complex system that emerged.

Sorry for the de tour - it's something I have an interest in.

"But that is not all you would eat, fruit, vegetables and fish were never rationed."

But people couldn't just pop down to the greengrocer or fishmonger and buy whatever they wanted. They could only buy what was available, and only if they had the money to afford to do so and actually had access to these products, which was not a given in wartime Britain. The logistics of moving food around the country at a time when there were shortages of vehicles, fuel and drivers meant that there was no steady flow of goods to the shops that we take for granted today.

Tinned fish (snoek) was available, as was whale meat - but nobody wanted to eat these, even when food was rationed.

Imported fruit like oranges and lemons were all but impossible to find - a generation of children born 1935-45 grew up without ever seeing a banana. There are plenty of post-war newsreel films of kids being given a banana and having no idea that it had to be peeled. Fruit and veg supplies were seasonal - once the current season's crop and stored produce had been consumed, that was it until the next harvest.

Fishing was badly affected - either because the experienced crews were called up and serving in the navy and the merchant navy (and many boats were being used by the military), or because enemy forces were trying to sink the trawlers.

"You could keep chickens and rabbits for food and anything you grew yourself."

Living conditions in the slums of the industrial cities were not conducive to keeping chickens and rabbits, and few working-class city-dwellers living in back-to-back terraces had gardens.

Of course I’m combining England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, I literally wrote sentences about the arable land in “the U.K.” and the U.K. isn’t just England.

Because they seem to be under the impression we produce about 60% of our food supply, not 30%. We managed about 80% in the 1980s.

Er, that’s not quite right, 1/3rd is 33% btw not 30% and must be thinking of this comment:
“Domestically we produce 60% by value of all the food we need, rising to 74% of food which we can grow or rear in the UK.”

The 60% isn’t 60% of what we need to eat in terms of calorie needs or quantity of food, it’s we produce 60% of the £ value or cost of the food we eat. Bit of sleight of hand that.

“The UK is largely self-sufficient in wheat, most meats, eggs, and some sectors of vegetable production. Sectors like soft fruit have seen a trend towards greater self-sufficiency in recent years with an extended UK season displacing imports. Overall, for the foods that we can produce in the UK, we produce around 75% of what we consume.”

For the foods we CAN produce, we produce 75% of what we consume. There’s still an awful lot of food we CANNOT produce.

About 20% is under ‘temporary grass’. That is, it can be used for food crops, but it’s currently banked.
It’s not banked so much as in the resting phase of crop rotation. We will always have to have 20% or so under temporary grass, ie fallow unless we want to turn all our agricultural land into a desert. We can’t ever have an extra 20% with food crops without ruining the sustainability of our farming for future generations.

So, here is an article regarding how much of what we eat is imported. We produce enough to feed 33%, but after exports, we are down to enough for 20% and then we import 80% of our food.
https://www.businessinsider.com/no-deal-brexit-percentage-british-food-imported-shortages-2019-1?op=1&r=US&IR=T

@MissTrip82 Oh come on, not everything is about being middle class (and what's actually wrong with being middle class anyway?) - what he meant was eat things that are unprocessed, so no fruit leather, pot noodles, cheese string etc etc). He also says shop around the edges of the supermarket if that is more manageable for your aversion to middle class sensibilities?

@Havanananana I quite aware there were shortages, I was just pointing out that what you see when you are told 'this is a ration for a week' isn't all you could get.

Food that could be preserved was eg eggs were powdered to allow more people to have access to egg protein rather than fresh eggs that only last a couple of weeks at the most.

Also people would collect berries berries in the wild, and yes berries do grow in built up areas.