From the WEF, November 24:
- Weeds can be nutritious and tasty, if we know which ones to pick.
- As the global population grows, they can be a reliable food source.
- Their ability to capture carbon can help tackle climate change.
- Weeds can also assist farmers by identifying soil problems to boost yields.
A “plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered” was how the 19th-century American poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, described a weed – and he may have been on to something.
Finding new plant-based foods is becoming increasingly urgent with the world’s population forecast to grow by two billion in the next 30 years. While farming animals for meat generates 14.5% of total global greenhouse emissions, weeds capture carbon from the atmosphere and can therefore help to control climate change.
Of course, not all wild plants are safe to consume – some are poisonous. You should always check with a reliable source before eating them. Many countries also have laws against harvesting some wild plants, so the best advice is to check before you pick.
The World Economic Forum’s recent virtual event, Bold Actions for Food as a Force for Good, was asking how food systems can be improved to feed the extra mouths, including looking at alternative food sources.
Here, we highlight five reasons why weeds could be the future of food.
1. They’re easy to grow
Weeds thrive in harsh conditions and are more resilient than garden or crop plants. Take Kochia, or ‘field caviar’, which can survive in a wide range of temperatures and do without moisture, yet produces 50,000 seeds per plant which are used to make a garnish in Japan.....
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Winter Oak is a not-for-profit organisation with a serious aversion to industrial capitalism and a commitment to social justice. Since 2013, we have published a number of books and we produce an online information bulletin, The Acorn. You can follow us on Twitter here and catch up with our quote for the day here. We can be contacted via winteroak(at)greenmail(dot)net
Klaus Schwab and his great fascist reset
Born in Ravensburg in 1938, Klaus Schwab is a child of Adolf Hitler’s Germany, a police-state regime built on fear and violence, on brainwashing and control, on propaganda and lies, on industrialism and eugenics, on dehumanisation and “disinfection”, on a chilling and grandiose vision of a “new order” that would last a thousand years.
Schwab seems to have dedicated his life to reinventing that nightmare and to trying to turn it into a reality not just for Germany but for the whole world.
Worse still, as his own words confirm time and time again, his technocratic fascist vision is also a twisted transhumanist one, which will merge humans with machines in “curious mixes of digital-and-analog life”, which will infect our bodies with “Smart Dust” and in which the police will apparently be able to read our brains.
And, as we will see, he and his accomplices are using the Covid-19 crisis to bypass democratic accountability, to override opposition, to accelerate their agenda and to impose it on the rest of humankind against our will in what he terms a “Great Reset“.
Schwab is not, of course, a Nazi in the classic sense, being neither a nationalist nor an anti-semite, as testified by the $1 million Dan David Prize he was awarded by Israel in 2004.
But 21st century fascism has found different political forms through which to continue its core project of reshaping humanity to suit capitalism through blatantly authoritarian means.
This new fascism is today being advanced in the guise of global governance, biosecurity, the “New Normal”, the “New Deal for Nature” and the “Fourth Industrial Revolution”.
Schwab, the octogenarian founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, sits at the centre of this matrix like a spider on a giant web.
The original fascist project, in Italy and Germany, was all about a merger of state and business.
While communism envisages the take-over of business and industry by the government, which – theoretically! – acts in the interests of the people, fascism was all about using the state to protect and advance the interests of the wealthy elite.
Schwab was continuing this approach in a denazified post-WW2 context, when in 1971 he founded the European Management Forum, which held annual meetings at Davos in Switzerland....
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Ya gotta love it, they bring Hitler into the mix in the first sentence.
