Jeremy Clarkson is right about food prices

Letters to the editor: our readers share their views. Please send your letters to letters@independent.co.uk

Jeremy Clarkson isn’t wrong when he says we need to pay more for food (PA Media)

Jeremy Clarkson isn’t wrong when he says we need to pay more for food. Demand for items such as cheap meat is stripping humanity from global food and farming systems and fostering unfettered capitalism, which is causing people to adopt diets divorced from ethics, local growing conditions and seasonality.

At the same time, people are diverging and looking for natural, healthy food but also looking for solutions to the climate crisis by putting forward alternatives to natural healthy food.

However, many of these “solutions” – such as emerging technologies – produce ultra-processed products with fewer nutrients. And, wouldn’t you rather put more trust in a million years of nature than a scientist creating something in a lab?

A solution lies in regenerative organic farming. Food produced in a natural, healthy way – by harnessing the power of nature, and working with it rather than against it – does sometimes come with a higher price than ultra-processed food.

But rather than thinking “higher price”, think “right price”. Think more nutrients, seasonality, looking after the land in a way that’s been done for hundreds of years and a solution to the climate crisis. Surely, you can’t put a price on that?

Tim Mead, Owner of Yeo Valley Organic

David Baddiel and prejudice

Victoria Richards is right to question the sincerity of David Baddiel’s sudden and opportunistic apology for his past racist actions against ex-footballer Jason Lee.

From what I have seen, history suggests Baddiel is a self-important serial abuser. This is a man who in his punchline “forget the jelly babies, what about some anal intercourse?” joked about coercing 14-year-old old girls into sex.  He mocked the Down’s syndrome cast of Truly Madly Deeply with a despicable disability impression and punchline: “London is a bit strapped for nutters.”

He has referred to Gypsy Roma people as “pikey(s)”. His painted Blackface and invention of slurs like “pineapple head” resulted in the abuse of a generation of Black school children.

In my view, his attempts to pass himself off as a credible voice on issues of prejudice often involve culturally appropriating the Black experience.

For example, the representational codes of Blackface come from the slave-era practice of dressing house slaves up as if they were domesticated pets. The codes of representational deference of Blackface come from the violent disciplinary practices of the slave plantation, and the protracted tortures of lynching. To me, pretending these specific phenomena are a West-European, white ethnic Jewish experience that he labels “Jewface” is offensive in the extreme.

Why did his publishers even allow this cultural appropriation to go forward into print?

Dr Gavin Lewis

Manchester

Russia and Iran

History has many lessons to teach us. But we reliably fail to learn them. One of the most important is that conflicts are nearly always started by rather pathetic little men – and they generally have been, and still are, men – who need to prove their worth to others as well as themselves.

And in the pursuit of that end, they have no compunction about ruining countless lives, not only of their opponents but also of those allegedly on their side who have the misfortune to be coerced or indoctrinated into supporting them.

Putin and the Iranian ayatollahs are current, prominent and extreme examples of this phenomenon. But recent former leaders of the UK and the US have exhibited symptoms of the same mindset. They, fortunately, caused no violence, or relatively little.

Power is a dangerous commodity which causes delusions in its possessors and enables them to seduce their followers. Control-seekers increase their domination gradually. Societies that aspire to democracy need systems that curb the ambitions of individuals at an early stage.

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The world must learn the lesson provided by Russia and Iran, and be very afraid.

Susan Alexander

South Gloucestershire

Leave Liz Truss alone

I grew up in North Devon, where it was understood that you don’t kick someone when they’re down.

I never wanted a Tory government and certainly didn’t want Liz Truss as PM, but I am depressed by the educated journalists and commentators who couldn’t stop kicking her when she was down.

She resigned – that was enough – there is no need to keep kicking and humiliating her. She is a human being and has feelings.

S J Frost

Croyde