xenocyon

(Incidentally, at least in my opinion his three novels are his finest work, but they seem to attract much less popular attention than his short stories and novellas.)

Strangely enough, this is a good reason for preferring cast iron over Teflon! Cast iron is close to indestructible, whereas with PTFE or other non-stick coatings one is constantly worried about scratching.

Indian Railways is a state owned enterprise - a very large one. Until recently, India's central government released two annual financial statements (budgets) each year: one for railways, and the second for everything else.

One way to look at it is that people of a certain generation eschew spaces because the tools of their formative years simply couldn't handle spaces - but another is that the olds have learned that generally erring on the side of KISS ("Keep it simple, stupid!") isn't a bad idea.

So does this mean we should be trucking tomatoes long distance? Not at all. People should eat whatever fresh produce grows locally, and supplement with canned or fermented foods that capture the benefits of faraway and out-of-season crops without the downside of wastage and shelf-life optimization.

We have this technology already. It's called "trees". Whether we choose to use it is a different matter.

Environmental sustainability - like most hard problems in the world today - is not so much a technological challenge as a political one. I do believe technological progress in the future is a certainty, and will bring many good things with it, but it will not do the hard work of encouraging humans to do the right thing. That is something we have to do for ourselves.

That's the bad news. The good news is that this work is something we can do immediately, right now, without waiting for the hope of our utopian Star Trek future to become reality.

Background: India went from colonialism-induced massive serial famines to self-sufficiency and then some, while entirely eschewing GM foods. (NB: this doesn't mean there is no malnutrition in India, where inequalities are rife, but it means that the country as a whole is able to produce more than needed. The causes of hunger are non-intuitive; for e.g. the dumping of cheap foods is more likely to cause hunger than solve it, as hunger stems from poverty which stems from economic disablement - which is caused by dumping cheap foods.)

Now, the Green Revolution did result in a loss of biodiversity (among other problems) but without creating the kind of monocultures you see in the US. For example, there are still numerous varieties of rice in India, especially locally variated.

Despite this, the Indian government has been increasingly warming over recent years to introducing GM foods (which is largely a solution in search of a problem, in the Indian context). The threat from GM foods is almost always misunderstood. It is not about the individual health effects of eating GM foods; it is about the largescale replacement of a system where farmers own their biodiverse seed, with a top down monocultural approach that essentially makes farmers franchisees of a massive corporate behemoth and eliminates biodiversity, putting all eggs in one basket.