"The question is not only what is grown but what it's used for. There's not going to be a mass transformation of dietary habits in rich countries-on the contrary, the first thing people do when they become more prosperous is to buy more meat"
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George’s line reads like a polite rebuke that quickly turns into an indictment. She refuses the comforting framing of food as a simple supply problem - grow more, hunger goes away - and drags the spotlight to demand and power. “Not only what is grown but what it’s used for” is a quiet pivot from agronomy to politics: land, grain, and water aren’t neutral resources, they’re routed through markets that reward certain appetites and punish certain lives.
The second sentence lands the harder truth: prosperity doesn’t automatically civilize consumption; it often intensifies it. Meat is her shorthand for the entire high-income model of eating: resource-heavy, status-coded, and subsidized in ways consumers barely notice. Subtext: if you’re waiting for rich-country diets to “evolve” voluntarily toward restraint, you’re waiting for a miracle while the system keeps converting calories into luxury. Grain becomes feed, feed becomes beef, and the arithmetic of inefficiency gets laundered as lifestyle.
Context matters. George is writing from the activist tradition that challenged the Green Revolution’s triumphalism and the development-world trope that hunger is caused by scarcity rather than distribution. By naming meat as the first purchase of newfound prosperity, she also anticipates today’s climate-food debates: rising middle classes are told to emulate the West, then scolded when that emulation stresses ecosystems. Her intent isn’t to shame eaters so much as to expose the structural trap: “choice” is real, but it’s curated by policy, corporate supply chains, and the prestige economy.
The second sentence lands the harder truth: prosperity doesn’t automatically civilize consumption; it often intensifies it. Meat is her shorthand for the entire high-income model of eating: resource-heavy, status-coded, and subsidized in ways consumers barely notice. Subtext: if you’re waiting for rich-country diets to “evolve” voluntarily toward restraint, you’re waiting for a miracle while the system keeps converting calories into luxury. Grain becomes feed, feed becomes beef, and the arithmetic of inefficiency gets laundered as lifestyle.
Context matters. George is writing from the activist tradition that challenged the Green Revolution’s triumphalism and the development-world trope that hunger is caused by scarcity rather than distribution. By naming meat as the first purchase of newfound prosperity, she also anticipates today’s climate-food debates: rising middle classes are told to emulate the West, then scolded when that emulation stresses ecosystems. Her intent isn’t to shame eaters so much as to expose the structural trap: “choice” is real, but it’s curated by policy, corporate supply chains, and the prestige economy.
Quote Details
| Topic | Food |
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