The phrase ‘nine meals from anarchy’ sounds more like the title of a bad Hollywood movie than any genuine threat.
But that was the expression coined by Lord Cameron of Dillington, a farmer who was the first head of the Countryside Agency - the quango set up by Tony Blair in the days when he pretended to care about the countryside - to describe just how perilous Britain’s food supply actually is.Long before many others, Cameron saw the potential of a real food crisis striking not just the poor of the Third World, but us, here in Britain, in the 21st Century.The scenario goes like this. Imagine a sudden shutdown of oil supplies; a sudden collapse in the petrol that streams steadily through the pumps and so into the engines of the lorries which deliver our food around the country, stocking up the supermarket shelves as soon as any item runs out.If the trucks stopped moving, we’d start to worry and we’d head out to the shops, cking up our larders. By the end of Day One, if there was still no petrol, the shelves would be looking pretty thin. Imagine, then, Day Two: your fourth, fifth and sixth meal. We’d be in a panic. Day three: still no petrol.What then? With hunger pangs kicking in, and no notion of how long it might take for the supermarkets to restock, how long before those who hadn’t stocked up began stealing from their neighbours? Or looting what they could get their hands on?There might be 11 million gardeners in Britain, but your delicious summer peas won’t go far when your kids are hungry and the baked beans have run out.It was Lord Cameron’s estimation that it would take just nine meals - three full days without food on supermarket shelves - before law and order started to break down, and British streets descended into chaos.A far-fetched warning for a First World nation like Britain? Hardly. Because that’s exactly what happened in the U.S. in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. People looted in order to feed themselves and their families.Read more I don’t think it’s 9, closer to 6. JB Thank You JB~Cannibalism (from Spanish canibal, in connection with cannibalism among the Antillean Caribs) is the act or practice of humans eating other humans. The eating of human flesh is also known as anthropophagy, from Greek: anthropos, ”human being”; and phagein, ”to eat”.While taken as a synonym for human cannibalism, this term also applies when a non-human life-form consumes human flesh.In zoology, the term cannibalism is extended to refer to any species consuming members of its own kind.The term is further extended outside of biological fields and used in a metaphorical sense, such as in aircraft maintenance when parts are “cannibalized” from an already broken plane in order to fix another plane.Neanderthals are believed to have practiced cannibalism. Among modern humans it has been practiced by various groups. In the past in Europe, Africa, South America, New Zealand,North America, Australia, Solomon Islands, New Caledonia, New Guinea, India, Sumatra, and Fiji, usually in rituals connected to tribal warfare. Fiji was once known as the ‘Cannibal Isles’. Evidence of cannibalism has been found in the Chaco Canyon ruins of the Anasazi culture.The reasons for cannibalism may be as follows:As sanctioned by a cultural norm
- By necessity in extreme situations of famine
- Caused by insanity or social deviancy. MORE
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