We've Run Out Of Vegetables

AND, NO, THERE WAS NO POOR HARVEST IN THE SOUTH

It was a casual trip to my local Sainsbury's to grab some vegetables. I was shocked to find empty shelves in the vegetable isle. It wasn't completely empty - there were a couple of cucumbers and one bunch of broccoli. I needed some broccoli too, so I grabbed the one bunch there but couldn't see a "best before" date on it. Hmm.

I tried ASDA next, which was a bit of a walk away in a different neighbourhood. Same situation. It was then I remembered a tweet I saw about shortages of food in the UK due to "bad weather affecting harvest in southern Europe" or something like that.

Looking further into it, it appears to be something entirely different. On social media, people in Europe are posting videos and photos of very full vegetable isles. There's a particularly funny video from Denmark, a country as "northern" as we are, if not more so, having no problems at all. It goes without saying that there are zero issues in the south itself; Italy, Spain and Greece. Well, not vegetable issues anyway. In a way, those guys have bigger fish to fry.

I always knew, unlike some delusional people on this island, that we are quite vulnerable. It's quite easy to cut us off from some lifeblood stuff like food and energy. Some people don't seem to realise that we are only "great" due to our position in a global network system. Being cut off from this network leads to a catastrophic downfall.

Over the years we have been systematically cutting ourselves off from our lifelines. It's quite weird to watch it all happen. There were some changes that need to be made for sure. One of them is immigration. There are too many people arriving here, that's undoubtably true. The country is small and the infrastructure is starting to buckle under the stress of the sheer numbers. However, a major way to drastically reduce the numbers is to stop meddling with other people's countries affairs and creating refugees in the first place. We are always "shoulder to shoulder" with the United States in destabilising countries either by stealth or outright open aggression, delivering "freedom and democracy" to countries that didn't ask, all at massive tax payer expense. The only true beneficiary is the so-called military industrial complex.

Anyway, I dream of world peace and prosperity. I understand that this current empire - the United States, which is kind of the tail end of the British Empire (in the same way the Roman Catholic Church and Byzantine Empire were tail ends of the Roman Empire), is in decline and will eventually fall. I hope the next empire is one characterised by world peace, but I doubt it.

Peace & Love,

Adé