The farm, also the organic one, is false romance. According to writer and zoologist George Monbiot, neither animals nor crops can continue to feed humanity. We need to start growing artificial food.

Agriculture is the world's biggest cause of environmental destruction — and what we're least willing to talk about. We criticize urban expansion, but agriculture spans thirty times more land. We've ploughed, fenced and grazed large parts of the planet, cut down forests, killed wildlife, and poisoned rivers and oceans to feed ourselves. Yet millions are still starving. Now the food system itself is starting to falter. But as George Monbiot shows us in this brilliant, invigorating original new book, we can solve the biggest of our dilemmas and feed the world without devouring the planet.

Regenesis is a breathtaking vision of a new future for food and for humanity. Based on amazing advances in soil ecology, Monbiot reveals how our changing understanding of the world beneath our feet could enable us to grow more food with less agriculture. He meets the people who are unlocking these methods, from the fruit and vegetable grower who is revolutionizing our understanding of fertility; by growers of perennial grains, freeing the country from ploughs and poisons; to the scientists who are inventing new ways to produce proteins and to grow fats. Together, they show how the smallest forms of life can help us make peace with the planet, restore its living systems, and replace the era of extinction with an era of regeneration.

The growth in the number of animals in the factory is our biggest problem, says George Monbiot. According to writer and zoologist George Monbiot, neither animals nor crops can continue to feed humanity. We need to start growing artificial food. The farm, also the organic one, is false romance.In Mark Rutte's Netherlands, it is not difficult to find strategically used elements of this idyll (laughing pigs or small talk) on livestock trucks, cheese and cold cuts packaging and billboards of butchers and cheese shops. Or in petting farms and picture books that imprint the bucolic story about farmers (from an early age), found in the peasant protests that plague the country.

The narrative of appealing middlemen who are ground by an unreliable state, who have the best interest in mind for animals and nature and provide us with beautiful, healthy and sustainable food can count on sympathy among many Dutch people. And that's not just because people share the aversion to politics, for whatever reason, with the peasant movement. But also because this narrative resonates with the deep-seated cultural clichés with which we experience farming.

We think we see traditional, almost natural activities. We don't realize that we're looking at cutting-edge, heavily debt-funded industrial activity that is part of global production chains that, in turn, are dominated by multinationals where it's all about profit maximization, and which is therefore alien to what we have the soul of could name nature. In the fog that the global food system spreads so lavishly, it then becomes possible to hide the reality of the bio-industry from view and let the arcadian idyll of our collective consciousness do its work.

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