Engineering Abundance How fear (and later greed) built the modern food system

It feels particularly appropriate to be finalising and publishing this article the day after I went to both the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum with my children, where we enjoyed the thought provoking exhibit at the science musem on 'The Future of Food'.

Not only that but today is the celebration of Lammas in the northern hemisphere, the festival that celebrates 'first harvest'. If you'd like my meditation for today, it's available for puurchase and download here The First Harvest

There is a particular kind of anxiety that has shaped more of the modern world than almost any other, and it's rarely talked about. It is the fear of not having enough to eat. Not the personal fear of a skipped meal, but the civilisational one: the dread, sitting under the floorboards of every government and every empire, that the mouths will outrun the harvest. Almost everything about how we grow, process, and sell food today can be traced back to that fear and the extraordinary, brilliant, and sometimes catastrophic things we did to make it go away.

We tend to tell the story of food as a story of progress; a straight line from scarcity to plenty. It is a better story than that. It is a story of a bargain we struck without fully reading the terms, and of the slow, dawning realisation that the bill has come due. It is worth telling properly, because we are now at the point where we get to decide what the next chapter looks like, and that decision reaches all the way down to what any of us chooses to plant in the ground this spring.

The mathematics of dread

The fear has a patron saint, and his name was Thomas Malthus. In 1798 the English clergyman published his gloomy little theorem: population grows geometrically, food grows arithmetically, and therefore hunger, disease, and misery are not accidents of history but its permanent architecture. Populations, he argued, would always breed themselves back to the edge of starvation.

For most of the nineteenth century this looked less like a prophecy and more like a description. The Irish famine, the recurring hungers of India and China, the sheer precariousness of the harvest, all of it seemed to confirm that humanity lived one bad season away from catastrophe. And then the numbers got worse. World population, which had taken all of human history to reach one billion around 1800, hit two billion by 1927 and showed every sign of accelerating. To the planners and scientists of the early twentieth century, the arithmetic was terrifying. There were simply going to be more people than the land, farmed as it had always been farmed, could feed.

This is the emotional engine of everything that follows. Not greed, at least not at first. Fear. The food system we inherited was built by people trying, with real conviction, to prevent a famine they could see coming.

The chemistry that answered the fear

The first and most consequential answer came out of a laboratory, not a field. Plants need nitrogen to grow, and although the air is nearly four-fifths nitrogen gas, plants cannot use it in that form. For all of agricultural history, farmers had been dependent on the slow biological alchemy of manure, legumes, and decomposition to return nitrogen to the soil, or, by the nineteenth century, on mining bird droppings from Peruvian islands and shipping them across the world.

Then, in the years before the First World War, the German chemist Fritz Haber worked out how to pull nitrogen straight out of the air and fix it into ammonia, and Carl Bosch industrialised the process so it could be done at continental scale. The Haber-Bosch process is one of the most important inventions in human history, and almost nobody outside of chemistry has heard of it. It is estimated that synthetic nitrogen fertiliser now feeds roughly half the people alive. If you are reading this, there is a decent statistical chance that the nitrogen in your body passed through a Haber-Bosch reactor. Malthus was, in a narrow sense, defeated by a machine that makes fertiliser out of thin air.

But the same chemistry industries that learned to feed plants also learned to kill them, and to kill the insects and fungi that competed for the harvest. The line between the two is disturbingly thin. Some of the earliest pesticides were repurposed from chemical weapons research; the companies that made the tools of the trenches often became the companies that made the tools of the farm. Through the twentieth century, agriculture became a chemistry set: synthetic fertilisers to force growth, herbicides to kill weeds, insecticides and fungicides to defend the crop. Yields climbed. The fear receded.

No product captures THIS transformation better than glyphosate, sold most famously as Roundup, which arrived in the 1970s from Monsanto and became the best-selling weedkiller on earth. Its genius was in its pairing: engineer crops; soy, corn, cotton; to survive it, then spray the whole field, killing everything green except the crop. Farming became almost frictionless. It also became almost totally dependent on a single molecule sold by a single company, and that dependency is the point. The chemistry did not just change how we farmed; it changed who OWNED farming.

That story has a long, litigious tail that is still whipping today. Bayer bought Monsanto in 2018 for around $63 billion and inherited tens of thousands of lawsuits from people alleging that glyphosate exposure gave them cancer; a claim regulators and the courts have spent years fighting over, with the company insisting the science is on its side. In June 2026 the US Supreme Court handed Bayer a major win, ruling that federal pesticide law shields the company from many state-level "failure to warn" claims, even as Bayer has set aside billions to settle the cases already filed. Whichever way you read the science, the sheer scale of the fight tells you something: we built a food system so reliant on industrial chemistry that unwinding even one molecule of it became a decade-long battle worth tens of billions of dollars.

Borlaug, and the double edged sword

If Haber-Bosch was the invisible revolution, the Green Revolution was the visible one, and it had a hero. Norman Borlaug, an American plant scientist working in Mexico and then across Asia, spent decades breeding wheat varieties that were short, sturdy, disease-resistant, and staggeringly productive. Dwarf strains that could carry heavy heads of grain without falling over, and that responded to fertiliser and irrigation by yielding two or three times what traditional varieties could.

In the 1960s, with famine forecast for India and Pakistan and doom-mongers predicting that hundreds of millions would starve within the decade, Borlaug's wheat, planted at scale, simply erased the prophecy. India went from importing grain to feeding itself. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, and he is often, with some justice, credited with saving more human lives than any other person who has ever lived, over a billion, by some estimates.

This is the part of the story where we are supposed to cheer, and we absolutely should. It is a genuine triumph of human ingenuity and compassion, and anyone who sneers at it should be made to explain which billion people they would have preferred to let die.

And yet. The Green Revolution was a double-edged sword, and the second edge took decades to reveal itself. The new high-yield varieties were not free gifts; they were the centre of a package. They only performed with heavy irrigation, synthetic fertiliser, and pesticides; inputs that had to be bought, year after year, often on credit. Farmers who had once saved their own seed and worked within local ecological limits were drawn into a global market they did not control, dependent on inputs whose prices they could not set. The revolution favoured those with capital and land, and often left the smallest and poorest farmers further behind. It narrowed the astonishing genetic diversity of traditional agriculture - thousands of local grain varieties, each adapted to its own soil and season down to a handful of commercially optimised champions, monocultures stretching to the horizon, magnificent and fragile.

Borlaug himself understood the trap better than his admirers did. He argued that the Green Revolution had bought humanity time, not a reprieve - perhaps thirty years - and that if we did not use that time to stabilise population and reform how we farmed, we would find ourselves back at the edge of the cliff, only with more people standing on it. We used the time to grow, and to build a food system that treated the bought decades as if they were permanent. The bill for that assumption is what the rest of this essay is really about.

The hidden ledger

Every triumph in that food system was booked as a gain and paid for out of an account nobody was auditing: the living systems of the planet. Let's start with water. The Green Revolution ran on irrigation, and much of that irrigation ran on groundwater, ancient aquifers, filled over millennia, pumped out in decades. Across the grain baskets of India, Pakistan, the American High Plains, and northern China, water tables have been falling for a generation. The Ogallala Aquifer under the American Midwest, which turned a semi-arid plain into one of the most productive farming regions on earth, is being drawn down far faster than rain can refill it. We have, in effect, been eating water that took ten thousand years to accumulate, and telling ourselves it was rain.

Then there is what the chemistry does downstream. Synthetic fertiliser is wonderfully effective and horribly leaky: much of the nitrogen and phosphorus we spread runs off the fields and into rivers, lakes, and coastlines, where it feeds explosions of algae that then die, rot, and suck the oxygen out of the water. The result is dead zones; vast patches of ocean, like the one at the mouth of the Mississippi, where almost nothing can live. We fixed nitrogen out of the air to feed people, and in doing so we drowned parts of the sea.

And there is the soil itself, the substance on which all of it depends, and the one we have treated with the least respect. Industrial agriculture tends to treat soil as an inert medium, a sponge to be soaked with inputs and drained of outputs, rather than as the living, breathing ecosystem it actually is. Ploughing, monoculture, and chemical dependence strip soil of its organic matter, its structure, and the immense invisible community of bacteria, fungi, and invertebrates that make it fertile. Soil that took centuries to build has been eroded and exhausted in decades. There is a genuinely frightening statistic that circulates among agronomists: that at current rates of degradation, the world may have only a few dozen harvests of topsoil left in some regions. Whether or not the precise number holds, the direction is not in dispute. We have been mining the ground we stand on.

The industrialisation of fat

Meanwhile, the fear of scarcity was quietly mutating into something else: the pursuit of cheapness so that large multinational food companies could continue to return double digit growth to their investors in wall street. And nowhere is this clearer than in the strange history of fats (bear with me).

Margarine is a wonderful emblem of the whole logic. It was invented in the 1860s in France, reportedly in response to a competition set by Napoleon III for a cheap butter substitute to feed the army and the poor. A chemist named Mège-Mouriès obliged, and a new category of food was born: not something grown or raised, but something formulated - a substitute, engineered to hit a price point. Through the twentieth century, food scientists learned to take cheap vegetable oils and, through a process called hydrogenation, turn them solid and spreadable, creating the trans fats that we now know were quietly damaging millions of hearts for decades before anyone connected the dots. The substitution logic; replace the expensive natural thing with the cheap engineered thing, and worry about the consequences later; gradually became the default operating system of the food industry.

Palm oil is the same logic written at devastating planetary scale. When trans fats were finally recognised as dangerous and pushed out, the industry needed a cheap, solid, shelf-stable fat to replace them, and palm oil, extraordinarily productive per hectare, endlessly versatile was the answer. It is now in roughly half the packaged products on a supermarket shelf, from biscuits to shampoo. And its production has driven the clearance of vast tracts of tropical rainforest across Indonesia and Malaysia, the incineration of carbon-rich peatlands, and the pushing of orangutans and countless other species toward the edge. The bitter irony is exact: palm oil was adopted as the responsible alternative to a health disaster, and became an ecological one. This is what happens when you optimise relentlessly for a single variable (financial cost) while treating everything else as an externality. You solve each problem by creating the next one somewhere out of sight.

The ultra-processed endpoint

Follow this logic to its conclusion and you arrive at the ultra-processed food that now makes up more than half the calories in the average British or American diet. These are not really foods in the traditional sense; they are formulations - substances assembled from industrial ingredients you would never find in a domestic kitchen, engineered by teams of scientists to be irresistibly palatable, cheap to produce, and durable on a shelf.

The genius of ultra-processed food, from the industry's point of view, is that it completes the journey the whole system has been on. It decouples eating almost entirely from farming, from seasons, from place, from cooking, from culture. It takes the cheapest possible commodity crops; corn, soy, wheat, palm and, through refining and reformulation, spins them into thousands of branded products with enormous margins.

And it works on us at a level below conscious choice: engineered combinations of fat, sugar, salt, and texture that override the body's ancient signals of fullness and keep us reaching for more.

The consequences are now impossible to ignore. The same species that spent its entire history terrified of not getting enough to eat has, in the space of a couple of generations, engineered its way into an epidemic of diet-related disease; obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, driven substantially by the very abundance the system was built to create.

We conquered scarcity so thoroughly that we invented a new category of harm on the other side of it. This is the deepest irony of the whole story: the food system did exactly what it was designed to do, and in succeeding, it revealed that feeding people and nourishing them are not the same thing.

The reckoning

Somewhere in the last couple of decades, the mood changed. It is hard to date precisely, but you can feel it: the growing recognition, across science, farming, medicine, and the wider culture, that the bargain we struck was never sustainable, and that we are living through the moment the terms come due.

The evidence stacked up from every direction at once. Climate scientists pointed out that the food system is responsible for roughly a quarter to a third of all greenhouse gas emissions; from fertiliser manufacture, from deforestation, from the methane of the world's enormous herds of cattle. Ecologists documented the collapse of insect populations, the emptying of farmland of its birds and wildflowers. Doctors traced the rise of chronic disease back to the plate. Agronomists watched the topsoil blow away and the aquifers fall. And a quieter, more human recognition took hold too: that in gaining cheap abundance, we had lost something; the knowledge of how to grow and cook, the connection to season and place, the simple competence of feeding ourselves.

None of this means the achievements were fake. The billion lives Borlaug saved were real lives. The point of a reckoning is not to renounce the past but to grow up about it; to stop treating the food system as a finished triumph and start treating it as an unfinished, and increasingly unstable, work in progress.

New frontiers

What is exhilarating about this moment is that the reckoning has produced not just despair but invention. There are more genuinely new ideas in food today than at any time since Borlaug, and they pull in two fascinatingly different directions.

One direction is high-tech and centralising: the attempt to out-engineer the problems that engineering created. The headline example is cultivated meat; beef, chicken, and fish grown from animal cells in steel bioreactors, without the animal, the land, the methane, or the slaughterhouse. It has moved from science fiction to regulatory reality remarkably fast. Singapore approved the first sale in 2020; the United States followed in 2023; and by 2026 a handful of cultivated products have cleared the regulatory pathway there, with approvals granted or pending across Israel, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Japan, the UK and beyond. The technology is real. Whether it can ever scale down in cost and up in volume enough to matter is genuinely unknown, and the politics are fierce - several US states have moved to ban it outright, in a revealing collision between agricultural incumbents and technological disruptors. Alongside it sits precision fermentation, which uses engineered microbes to brew proteins, fats, and flavours; the same basic trick as brewing beer, pointed at making dairy without cows. This, it could be argued, is the food system trying to solve its ecological crisis by getting even cleverer.

The other direction is almost the opposite: not more technology but more biology, not centralisation but distribution. This is the world of regenerative agriculture, and it is, quietly, a revolution in reverse. Instead of treating soil as inert and forcing it with inputs, regenerative farming treats soil as a living ecosystem to be rebuilt through cover crops that keep the ground clothed, through minimal ploughing that leaves the soil's structure intact, through rotating animals across pasture in ways that mimic the wild herds that once built the world's great grasslands, through hedgerows and diversity and the deliberate cultivation of underground life. The astonishing thing about healthy soil is that it does the work industrial agriculture pays for: it fixes its own nitrogen, holds its own water, resists its own pests, and crucially pulls carbon out of the atmosphere and locks it underground. Soil, properly cared for, is one of the largest carbon sinks available to us, and it happens to double as the foundation of all our food. The regenerative bet is that the answer to the damage done by chemistry is not more chemistry but more life.

And running alongside both of these is something smaller and more human: the reweaving of the social fabric of food. Community fridges and seed libraries. Neighbourhood soup swaps, where people cook batches and trade them, turning a solitary chore into something shared. Community-supported agriculture schemes that reconnect a town to a specific nearby farm. Allotment waiting lists that stretch for years. Composting collectives turning a street's food waste back into fertility. None of these will feed a nation on their own. But they are doing something the industrial system deliberately engineered out: they are putting knowledge, relationship, and a measure of control back into ordinary hands.

Bringing it home

Which brings us, finally, back to the garden, and to the question of whether any of this connects to what you or I might do with a patch of ground and a packet of seeds.

Let me be straight about the limits. No amount of home growing is going to feed nine or ten billion people. The scale is simply not there; a nation cannot be fed from its window boxes, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling a fantasy. If your garden's purpose is to make you calorie-independent from the global food system, it will fail, and you will feel foolish in August when the slugs have won.

But food security was never only about calories, and this is the thing the whole grand history above should teach us. The industrial system delivered calories in overwhelming abundance and, in doing so, hollowed out almost everything else; the knowledge, the resilience, the connection to soil and season, the diversity, the community, the simple sovereignty of being able to feed yourself something you grew. Those are the things that a garden actually restores, and they are not trivial. They are precisely the things the system is short of.

Growing even a fraction of your own food does something quietly subversive. It rebuilds the competence that industrialisation deliberately took from us; the practical, hand-in-the-dirt knowledge of how a tomato actually comes to be, which is the first defence against a food system that thrives on our ignorance. It rebuilds soil, if you compost and mulch and refuse to spray, turning your own small plot into one of the millions of tiny carbon sinks and wildlife refuges that, in aggregate, genuinely matter; a suburban garden, managed for life rather than for tidiness, is a more productive ecosystem than an equivalent patch of intensive farmland. It rebuilds diversity, because home growers can keep alive the strange heritage varieties that the commercial system abandoned for being insufficiently uniform. And it rebuilds resilience - not the fantasy of total self-sufficiency, but the real and valuable thing of not being one hundred percent dependent, of having a skill and a source that does not run through a global supply chain you cannot influence.

Most of all, a garden reconnects the two things the whole history above tore apart: the eater and the ecosystem.

Every problem in this essay, the exhausted soil, the drained aquifers, the cleared forests, the engineered food that makes us sick, flows from the same original error, which was to treat food as a commodity extracted from a machine rather than as a relationship with a living world.

You cannot fix that at planetary scale from your back garden. But you can heal it, completely and immediately, on the few square metres you can reach. And there is something to the idea that a civilisation relearns big truths the same way a person does: not all at once, from the top down, but slowly, from the ground up, one small act of tending at a time.

The fear that built the food system was real, and the people who answered it were, mostly, originally, trying to do good, and often succeeded. We should honour that. But the system they built mistook a temporary solution for a permanent one, and optimised so ferociously for a single number - 'cheap calories' - that it forgot to count everything else.

The task of our moment is not to tear it all down in a fit of romantic nostalgia; billions of lives still depend on it. The task is to grow the alternative up through the cracks; both in the labs and on the regenerative farms, yes, but also in the allotments and the soup swaps and the composting bins and the window boxes. To rebuild, in a thousand small places at once, the relationship with food and soil that a century of engineered abundance persuaded us we could live without.

References

Malthus and the population fear

• Malthus, T.R. (1798). An Essay on the Principle of Population. J. Johnson, London.

• United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, and Our World in Data (Roser et al.), "World Population Growth," for the milestones (roughly one billion around 1800, two billion by 1927).

Haber-Bosch and synthetic fertiliser

• Erisman, J.W., Sutton, M.A., Galloway, J., Klimont, Z. & Winiwarter, W. (2008). "How a century of ammonia synthesis changed the world." Nature Geoscience, 1, 636 to 639. This is the source for synthetic nitrogen now feeding roughly half of humanity.

• Smil, V. (2001). Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food Production. MIT Press.

Pesticides, Roundup, Bayer and Monsanto

• Russell, E. (2001). War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring. Cambridge University Press, on the wartime-chemistry-to-agrochemical link.

• Benbrook, C.M. (2016). "Trends in glyphosate herbicide use in the United States and globally." Environmental Sciences Europe, 28:3, for glyphosate as the most widely used herbicide.

• On the acquisition and litigation: Bayer bought Roundup maker Monsanto in 2018, and on 25 June 2026 the US Supreme Court ruled 7 to 2 that Bayer cannot be sued over state-level failure-to-warn claims on glyphosate. The ruling held that the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act preempts such state-law claims where the EPA has made a determination on product safety. Bayer has set aside roughly $16 billion for Roundup litigation, and a Missouri judge granted preliminary approval to a proposed $7.25 billion settlement. Sources: CNBC (cnbc.com), Bayer (bayer.com/en/managing-the-roundup-litigation), Lawsuit Information Center. CNBC + 4

Borlaug and the Green Revolution

• Borlaug, N.E. (1970). Nobel Peace Prize lecture, "The Green Revolution, Peace, and Humanity," Oslo. This is the source for his warning that the revolution had bought only a few decades of "breathing space."

• Pingali, P.L. (2012). "Green Revolution: Impacts, limits, and the path ahead." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(31), 12302 to 12308. A balanced account of both the yield gains and the costs (input dependence, inequality, narrowed crop diversity).

• The estimate that Borlaug's work saved on the order of a billion lives is widely cited in his Nobel biography and in obituaries (for example, the 2009 coverage in The Atlantic and The New York Times); treat it as a frequently quoted estimate rather than a precise figure.

Water, soil, and the hidden costs

• Steward, D.R. et al. (2013). "Tapping unsustainable groundwater stores... High Plains Aquifer." PNAS, and the US Geological Survey High Plains (Ogallala) Aquifer reports, on aquifer depletion.

• National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) hypoxia reports, and Rabalais, N.N. et al., on the Gulf of Mexico "dead zone" and fertiliser runoff.

• On soil degradation and the widely repeated "sixty harvests left" claim: this specific number is usually traced to a 2014 FAO statement and is contested, though the underlying degradation is not. See Evans, D.L. et al. (2020), "Soil lifespans and how they can be extended by land use and management change," Environmental Research Letters, for a critical assessment. I deliberately hedged this figure in the piece for that reason.

Food-system emissions

• Crippa, M. et al. (2021). "Food systems are responsible for a third of global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions." Nature Food, 2, 198 to 209.

• Poore, J. & Nemecek, T. (2018). "Reducing food's environmental impacts through producers and consumers." Science, 360, 987 to 992.

Margarine, hydrogenation, and trans fats

• On the 1869 invention by Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès, in response to a prize offered during the reign of Napoleon III: standard food-history references (for example, the Oxford Companion to Food).

• World Health Organization, REPLACE trans fat action package (2018), and Mozaffarian, D. et al. (2006), "Trans fatty acids and cardiovascular disease," New England Journal of Medicine, on the health harms.

Palm oil

• WWF palm oil resources (wwf.org.uk and worldwildlife.org), for palm oil appearing in roughly half of packaged supermarket products and its role in tropical deforestation.

• Vijay, V. et al. (2016). "The impacts of oil palm on recent deforestation and biodiversity loss." PLOS ONE, 11(7).

Ultra-processed food

• Monteiro, C.A. et al. (2019). "Ultra-processed foods: what they are and how to identify them." Public Health Nutrition, on the NOVA classification.

• Share of the diet: Rauber, F. et al. (2019) for the UK (around 57% of dietary energy), and Steele, E.M. et al. (2016), BMJ Open, for the US (around 58%).

• Health links: Hall, K.D. et al. (2019), "Ultra-processed diets cause excess calorie intake and weight gain," Cell Metabolism (the controlled feeding trial), and Elizabeth, L. et al. (2020), "Ultra-processed foods and health outcomes: a narrative review," Nutrients.

New frontiers: cultivated meat and fermentation

• Singapore was the first country to approve the sale of cultivated meat in 2020, and in 2023 US regulators cleared cultivated chicken from UPSIDE Foods and GOOD Meat. By early 2026 five cultivated products had cleared the joint FDA and USDA pathway, covering chicken, salmon, pork fat and poultry. By mid-2026 approval had also been granted in Israel, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Japan, with applications pending in the UK, Canada and Australia. Several US states, including Florida and Alabama, passed bans on cultivated meat beginning in 2024. Sources: Congress.gov (CRS report R47697), lilsipper.com, SciencesTimes, CSG Midwest. Lilsipper + 4

• The Good Food Institute (gfi.org) publishes annual state-of-the-industry reports on cultivated meat and precision fermentation.

Regenerative agriculture and soil carbon

• Lal, R. (2004). "Soil carbon sequestration impacts on global climate change and food security." Science, 304, 1623 to 1627.

• LaCanne, C.E. & Lundgren, J.G. (2018). "Regenerative agriculture: merging farming and natural resource conservation profitably." PeerJ, 6:e4428. See also the Rodale Institute Farming Systems Trial.

Community food initiatives

• The soup swaps, seed libraries, community fridges and community-supported agriculture mentioned near the end are illustrative rather than drawn from a single study; UK-relevant documentation is available from the Soil Association and local food network reports (for example Sustain, the alliance for better food and farming).