" By 1951, the economist Erich Zimmermann noted that Britain had come closer than anywhere else on earth to presiding over the extinction of its own agriculture. This long history explains why Britain has fewer regional food varieties than its European neighbours. In 2005, Italy had 149 foods with protected geographical indication status, France 143, and Britain had only 29. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Britons ate beef from Argentina, butter from New Zealand, sugar from the West Indies, and bread from Ohio, but they did so with forks made in Sheffield, on plates made in Stoke-on-Trent, and in houses heated by burning coal from Northumberland.

According to Otter, if we want to understand the origins of our present system for growing and distributing food, we need to look at Britain rather than America, and to the nineteenth rather than the twentieth century. The extraordinary interconnected global system for growing, standardising, moving, and storing food developed by Britain differ only in degree rather than in kind from the food networks that structure our lives today."

https://tribunemag.co.uk/2021/04/how-the-british-empire-built-the-food-system-that-is-destroying-the-planet

"In an era defined by slow growth and flatlined productivity (if not outright economic stagnation) and marked by widening inequality and underemployment, “money” feels at once deadly serious and stupidly silly. Seen from this viewpoint, the pandemic economy isn’t an anomaly but a heightened version of one possible future: a world where money is abundant but safe long-term investments are rare and where “getting rich quick” is less an American pathology and more the best bet for a stable life — assuming you think such a thing is possible with ecological catastrophe looming. If you’re supposed to buy stocks as a bet on the future condition of a business, why would you buy stock in a brick-and-mortar retail video-game chain unless you didn’t really believe in any future at all? How different is the stock market from betting on soccer? What’s the point of investing safely when Elon Musk can create and destroy millions of dollars of value with a couple of tweets?"

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/04/nft-future-of-money.html