Final part of my food guilt blog.
1) http://www.thoughts.com/rose22/blog/the-politics-of-food-par t-1-gordon-ramsay-94914/ 
2) http://www.thoughts.com/rose22/blog/the-politics-of-food-par t-2-gm-and-food-prices-94915/
3) http://www.thoughts.com/rose22/blog/the-politics-of-food-par t-3-throwing-it-out-94935/
4) Part of the looming food crisis might be being caused by the shift to producing crops for biofuels http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7186380.stm  

So I've tried to show that there's a lot of ethical dilemmas around food, and I've not even covered whether farmers are being paid a fair wage for their produce. It's insane that in the UK it costs more to raise a pig or a lamb than the farmer can receive for it as food.
The farmers are the unseen victims of the drive by supermarkets to compete on price, but even when food prices are rising the farmers are not receiving a comparable higher price for their produce. ~The thing is that the price of the raw materials (rice, wheat etc.) are increasing worldwide, and this means animal feed costs are also rising, but the prices paid to farmers are not. Is all the extra money consumers are paying going to the supermarket shareholders?

But my final thoughts on food guilt... it's long been known that agriculture affects the environment.
In mediaeval times land was subdivided according to the number of sons a family had and what they could grow was affected.
Later collectivisation of farmland led to the stripping of hedgerows, affecting biodiversity.
Legumes need to be rotated with other crops to ensure there are enough nutirents in the soil to allow crops to grow properly.
Now we're spraying on pesticides to maximise the yield, but the pesticides can affect human health (from a kind of MS through to birth defects in the children of grapepickers in Chile).
Almost every human activity affects the land and the environment.

Ironically the latest is biofuels.
In order to try to cut the harmful emissions from oil-based fuels, European legislation was agreed by the 27 EU Member States (NOT imposed by Brussels as the press would sometimes had it) to increase the amount of biofuels used in cars.
Reports from around the world said that the drive to use greater amounts of this less environmentally polluting fuel was actually resulting in higher food prices as land used for food was given over to more profitable production of crops for biofuels, while the rainforests which are essentially the lungs of the planet were also being cut down for land for biofuel.
As the spokesperson from the International Institute for Environment and Development's Forestry and Land Use Programme put it, in reality, policy decisions about biofuels involve difficult trade-offs:
- carbon benefits versus other environmental benefits;
- food security versus export development;
- efficient large-scale production versus smaller-scale or mixed production systems that deliver more equitable rural development.

I've said before that the reality of most issues is that they are complex. Well, that's certainly the case for biofuels. While they looked like the saviour of the motor industry a few years ago the reality is that they have such a potential to cause environmental and social problems that we really need to think through the consequences more carefully.
But what are they doing in my food guilt blog? 

Transport is intimately linked with food. 
The logistics chain for food delivery is complicated - from air freighting the beans Gordon Ramsay wants banned in from Kenya to shipping non-perishables halfway around the world in container ships, the demand for all foods whenever we want them is a massive contributor to environmental damage.   
When it comes to road transport, the biofuel debate comes into play.  Even your drive home from the supermarket needs to be taken into account.
If we don't use biofuels, we continue to damage the environment through carbon emissions from our vehicles.  If we do, we cause a whole raft of other problems.

There are people paid to think about these things, to come up with ways to make sure we don't starve or kill the planet.   Good to know they are there, isn't it?  You can keep your head down, grumble about the nanny state and leap in the car to go to Tesco for a pint of milk.  Carry on as normal.
These are real problems though, and we should care. I'm not sure we think about it all enough.