"I used to work a lot on food issues and every time somebody predicted that production would be inadequate they got egg on their face a year or two later"
About this Quote
Food doom has a way of humiliating its prophets, and Susan George twists the knife with a kitchen-table punchline: “egg on their face.” The line lands because it’s a small, vivid image attached to a big, recurring political drama. She’s not offering a neutral observation about agriculture; she’s indicting a habit of elite forecasting that treats hunger as a production problem, then gets rescued by reality’s inconvenient flexibility.
George’s intent is tactical. By invoking her past work “on food issues,” she claims credibility while also framing the argument as learned experience, not abstract theory. The subtext is sharper: scarcity rhetoric often functions as an alibi. If people are starving, the story goes, it must be because there isn’t enough to go around. George points to a pattern where predictions of inadequate production fail “a year or two later,” suggesting that technology, farmer adaptation, market shifts, and policy responses routinely expand output. The real battlefield, implied but not spelled out, is distribution, access, power, and who can afford what gets produced.
Context matters: post-Green Revolution agriculture repeatedly proved capable of raising yields, while hunger persisted anyway. That mismatch fuels George’s activist critique of Malthusian narratives and the institutions that recycle them. Her phrasing also signals impatience with pundit certainty. It’s not just that they’re wrong; it’s that their wrongness keeps getting repeated, because the scarcity frame is politically useful. The joke makes the accusation stick.
George’s intent is tactical. By invoking her past work “on food issues,” she claims credibility while also framing the argument as learned experience, not abstract theory. The subtext is sharper: scarcity rhetoric often functions as an alibi. If people are starving, the story goes, it must be because there isn’t enough to go around. George points to a pattern where predictions of inadequate production fail “a year or two later,” suggesting that technology, farmer adaptation, market shifts, and policy responses routinely expand output. The real battlefield, implied but not spelled out, is distribution, access, power, and who can afford what gets produced.
Context matters: post-Green Revolution agriculture repeatedly proved capable of raising yields, while hunger persisted anyway. That mismatch fuels George’s activist critique of Malthusian narratives and the institutions that recycle them. Her phrasing also signals impatience with pundit certainty. It’s not just that they’re wrong; it’s that their wrongness keeps getting repeated, because the scarcity frame is politically useful. The joke makes the accusation stick.
Quote Details
| Topic | Food |
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