15th February 2021 | Food | Supremes
The coming food crisis; the invention of Black glamour
Welcome to Just Two Things, which I try to publish daily, five days a week. Some links may also appear on my blog from time to time. Links to the main articles are in cross-heads as well as the story.
#1: Averting the coming food crisis
Since I started writing this newsletter, I have become a little more optimistic about the prospects for climate change—and a lot more despondent about the impact of biodiversity loss. As if to bear this out, here comes a dismaying report on the global food system from the UK-based thinktank Chatham House.
They spell out their argument in one stark line at the start of the report:
Biodiversity, crucial to human and planetary health, is declining faster than at any time in human history. Agriculture is driving this trend, making food system reform an urgent priority.
The impact of animal farming on the earth is prodigious:
Instead of wild animals, a small number of farmed animal species (mainly cows and pigs) now dominate global biomass. Together, they account for 60 per cent of all mammal species by mass, compared to 4 per cent for wild mammals and 36 per cent for humans. Farmed chickens now account for 57 per cent of all bird species by mass, whereas wild birds make up 29 per cent of the total. Animal farming now occupies 78 per cent of agricultural land globally… According to the ‘Red List’ maintained by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), agriculture is an identified threat to 24,000 of the 28,000 species so far documented by IUCN as at risk of extinction.
There’s a handy systems diagram to emphasise the point.
(Source: Chatham House)
The report proposes three levers that could change this situation. The three are interlocking:
Redesign the food system to change diets, so as to reduce overall demand for food, and thus reduce demand for the use of land that supports its production.
Create a more biodiversity-supporting food system, by setting aside land specifically for the conservation and proliferation of habitats and wildlife. Biodiversity is highest in areas of unconverted land.
Adopt more biodiversity-supporting modes of food production, and change farming methods. There are three routes to this:
decreasing the volume of inputs, for example through precision agriculture;
substituting certain inputs or practices for more sustainable alternatives, such as using chemical and synthetic inputs as little as possible and instead using ecological processes to manage soil fertility;
switching to modes of production that utilize land and other natural resources in different ways, for example replacing conventional agriculture with agroforestry.
#2: Mary Wilson and the rise of black glamour
(Source: V&A Museum)
Diana Ross was made famous by the Motown group the Supremes, but Mary Wilson, who died last week, was its beating heart. From the distance of 2021, when the songs of Motown are just a rich part of our cultural mix, it’s easy to forget what a big step it was for three young women from the Detroit housing projects to become—quite quickly—the biggest selling girl group in the world, at a time when segregation was still rife in the United States.
To mark her death, the New York radio station WNRC re-ran a 2019 interview with Mary Wilson (19 minutes), when the then 75-year old singer was competing in the US Strictly show Dancing With The Stars (her professional dance partner pops up to say some respectful words). She suggests in the interview that while the Supremes followed in the steps of pioneering 1950s Black women performers, their image was an integral part of their success. It was, as she told the V&A for an exhibition in 2008, “the style, the class, the look, the sound”. It allowed them to be treated as equals, to make their claim to public space in places like the Ed Sullivan Show. The rapid growth of television in the late ‘50s and ‘60s helped in this as well.
But there’s more to this story. The management thinker Peter Drucker used to write about “the future that has already happened”. The first example he gave, in the early 60s, was to note that Black American household incomes had doubled since 1945. This created a new Black middle class and led to, for example, a new advertising market which supported a wave of Black-audience radio stations. Drucker’s observation was that in the wake of this economic transformation cultural and political change would follow.
This isn’t to say that the success of the Supremes was inevitable, just that by the early 1960s the world was primed for a group like The Supremes, and the new mass media (TV, singles) would amplify a group that got noticed. The success of Motown was to make sure that it was their groups that got this attention.
There’s a good obituary of Mary Wilson at the LA Times. And here’s a clip from a Supremes’ TV performance on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1966.
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