Originally written and published in May 2021. Available at 21stcenturywire.com and republished elsewhere, including Humans Are Free.

Get Ready for the ‘Plate Reset’ – Blake Lovewell

The oft-overlooked ‘Food Security’ pillar of the Davos mafia’s ‘Great Reset’ agenda.

Imagine with me: a plate of food that fulfills all your nutritional needs, that is provided to you for free, that has a whole host of fancy labels declaring it, for example, carbon neutral and ‘fair trade.’ It is produced by a handful of global companies, who through thousands of experiments have produced this optimal super-food. There is genetically modified cauliflower that is rammed with extra vitamins, meat-free soya alternatives that provide protein and a ‘secret-sauce’ that makes everything taste amazing. It doesn’t sound too bad does it?

If somebody told you that there was a plan to revolutionise the global food system from the top down, would you believe them? Well perhaps after reading this article you will see that we are rapidly approaching that point today.

Food security is something that we in the West, for the most part, take for granted. There is affordable food in plentiful stock in shops in every town. The difficulty often is choosing from the plethora of worldly foods, which to eat for dinner – though it wasn’t ever thus. We humans have gone through periods of intense famine and great struggle for sustenance. Our bodies still have coping mechanisms for starvation and we are still driven by base urges for those sweet and fatty foods which would see us through Winters yore. It doesn’t seem like we will be returning to that hungerous state any time soon, surely not in this world of plenty.

In this world of plenty though it seems many have very little. Despite those shop-shelves being full, there are millions of families going hungry, even in those supposedly ‘economically advanced’ nations. It is one of the strongest indictments of modern society that in such relative abundance, so many must go without. It shouldn’t need to be explained but economic downturns and jumps in hunger go hand-in-hand. The 2008 economic crisis (whereby states funded big banks at the expense of the population) caused, two years later, a concurrent rise in food insecurity. One study of Mexican food expenditure shows that there’s a roughly two year lag time between the initial economic shock and an increase in food insecurity. It also informs us that the most vulnerable in society are disproportionately affected by an economic downturn.

A cursory glance at headlines tells us that the problem has got worse under the political reign of Coronavirus. Over 1 million (14%) of New Jersey residents are ‘food insecure’ as a result of COVID-19, says the Community Foodbank of New Jersey. There is clearly a growing problem and a need for some reform in the food sector: enter the Rockefeller Foundation.

Hopefully you have at least heard of ‘the Great Reset’ by now. It is the World Economic Forum’s designation for a massive shift in all spheres of society on the back of the great crisis of 2020. Its author, Klaus Schwab, destroys any hope for our old society when he says, “Many of us are wondering when things will return to normal. The short response is: never. The world as we knew it in the early months of 2020 is no more”.  The so-called ‘elites’, whom I like to think of as greedy sociopaths, have taken it upon themselves to re-order the whole of the world economy and society. Going by current trends this reset will benefit the billionaire class massively at the expense of the rest of us.

In July 2020, the Rockefeller Foundation released a paper entitled ‘Reset the Table: Meeting the Moment to Transform the U.S. Food System’. This outlines their wide-ranging plans for the global food system; from farm to mouth they have a plan to ‘Reset the table’ (although I prefer our moniker – The Plate Reset). I encourage you to give it a look, though it is more than a mealy mouthful to try and digest. Let us look through the main aims; they call each of them a ‘Shift’ perhaps a testament to the ‘nudge’ theory of psychological manipulation that is the main tool of government today, whereby wholesale change is achieved by imperceptible small changes.

As I surmise them, these shifts are:

1. To Integrate the ‘food system’ under one political aegis
2. To Collectivise and centralise control of the supply of food
3. To engender ‘Prosperity’ – i.e. to enrich the stakeholders

Integrate the Food System

Some of the proposals here will appeal to your average voter. They offer us talk of making every dollar go farther; to boost nutrition and better feed the kids. Those of us who are more sceptical of political claims can see through the fog.

Having a regionalised plan whereby food is grown and sold within a local area for example, is a good answer to the wasteful international system at present. Although I would prefer it to be a grassroots co-ordinated affair, it seems that the plan is to introduce regional schema from on high. Part of the trouble with these wide-ranging edicts is that they have a bad track record. The document published by the Rockefeller Foundation even admits to these faults. Their previous attempts at shifting the food paradigm, known to them as the ‘green revolution’ lead to an “overemphasis of staple grains at the expense of more nutrient-rich foods, reliance on chemical fertilizers that deplete the soil, and overuse of water.” What makes them think that they will do better on the second bite of the cherry?

As part of this shift, the ever-wise Davos gang want us to see healthy food as a right. This is similar to moves being made to define a stable income as a right through Universal Basic Income. Food as a right has been pushed by Prince Charles since at least 2012 – see this puff piece from The Atlantic declaring that Charles is on the side of the little guy against corporate power. As an aside we must note that Prince Charles was present and gave a speech at the launch of the Great Reset, it seems these agendas move in small circles.

On the face of it, having access to good food as a right seems logical – it should ensure that more people receive adequate food. However, as we go on examining the machinations of this novel system, that ‘right’ may be far from liberating to the world’s hungry.

Part of the plan is to re-organise how food is distributed. They wish to place schools at the center of this distributive mechanism – this would ensure that all school kids have a chance at getting a good diet, who could argue with that? With the campaign of the Manchester United footballer Marcus Rashford there is now a concerted effort to put the responsibility for distributing food onto the schools. It has been presented in the media as a pitched battle between the Tories in the high castle and the peasants below but there is full co-operation from the government to build a scheme of food distribution in schools.

Food as ‘Medicine’

The next step is one of the most interesting, to declare food as medicine. We all know that healthy eating is better than any preventative medicine and that diet has a huge impact on health. So it isn’t much of a leap to think of food as medicine. But what the Plate Reset has in store for us is so much more than just nutrition. There are plans to genetically modify plants to provide all of the basic nutrients we need, probably a good thing. However having food defined as medicine by the state makes it possible to outlaw unhealthy foods, or to tightly regulate our very diet, which could become a bad thing. It has already been announced that the government can monitor COVID through the inspection of sewage wastewater. Biobot Analytics is one large company that has government contracts for ‘wastewater surveillance’, we don’t yet know how far this surveillance technology can go. If the powers running the food system wish to control you in this way, there is little chance of escaping such a deep level of insitutionalisation.

We can also look forward to Silicon Valley’s corporate stooges getting their slice of the pie too. FoodID is a joint project between big-tech conglomerates such as Facebook and Google, to provide certification for food; whether it’s medicinal, sourced responsibly and interestingly to ensure “compliance”. If your local small farmer can’t afford to keep up with the latest shift in regulations, then they will likely be made illegal.

One facet of the ‘food as medicine’ agenda worth digging into is the prospect for an edible vaccine. The idea is fairly simple. Through the magic of gene editing, scientists purportedly will insert genetic material from a virus into a foodstuff in such a way that when it is eaten, it will engender an immune response and thus cause an immunity to the virus. An edible COVID vaccine is already being touted in experiments using a micro-algae, it may not be appetising but it could be a game-changer. Furthermore it has been successfully achieved in vaccinating against Hepatitis B by editing the genes of a tobacco plant. Perhaps this is a good thing for those needle-phobes among us, but it does raise some ethical questions about how far the gene-editing snowball will roll.

Centralise Control of Food

This section is more about creating institutions and instruments than to support the farming industry.

Again they acknowledge that the current system treats poorer communities unfairly, but the resolution they offer is to simply surveil the recipients of government aid in more detail. Indeed lip-service is given to “small and medium farmers” but they are quickly sidelined with talk of “more agile and diverse regional food chains”.

It is this subtle creep of corporate power that actually threatens our food security yet they continue to dress themselves in garments of a saviour. By re-allocating funds, creating government stimulus plans and creating regional food hubs they detail their plan to centralise the system of food procurement. They already claim to have the power to “Direct the purchasing power of large institutions along a values-based supply chain”.

I ask that, given their drive for profit at any cost, what ethics are these values actually beholden to?

Prosperity

Step one of ensuring prosperity for the few is mandatory regulation. With the alleged aim of keeping people “safe”, these regulations are clearly aimed at eliminating all competition. Much as a targeted herbicide can kill all plant life other than the required crop, and create super weeds which end up threatening the very food you’re intending to harvest, these policies will regulate small farmers all the way to an increasingly long bread-line. Again this claim of ‘safety’ is merely a palliative facade included to soften the blow of the globalized financialisation of the food system. The facade quickly drops when we read that:

“While in some cases direct costs associated with the food system might go up, health care costs and the externalized costs of climate and environmental harms should come down.” [Emphasis added] – To roughly translate: “Food will become more expensive for you but if you pay us we’ll save the world … probably.”

The bogus nature of their externalities calculations are laid bare. Any claims to lessen the amount of Carbon Dioxide produced, or costs saved to healthcare are purely hypothetical, and presented without proof. Yet these are the golden rules, supposedly the moral compass that is guiding the policy package. We have also witnessed the top oil companies jumping on board the green eco-bandwagon, so it should be no surprise that corporate giants would hold these tiny fig leaves up to cover their ransacking of nature through the Plate Reset too.

As we go through this section we find it is much standard fare for the corporate world. They salivate over the $18 billion dollar “market” that is school dinners. They would like those tax dollars to be “injected” into their regional hubs who will funnel it to “good food” vendors – we can only presume those are the ones that the Rockefellers et al have shares in. One Rockefeller institution is YieldWise: “YieldWise will reduce reliance of farmers on volatile prices in the market by finding large anchor buyers—both multinationals like Coca Cola, Unilever and local ones mainly in Sub Saharan Africa”. Yes that’s right, Coca Cola is saving the starving Africans through institutional investment frameworks, we can all now sleep well at night.

Of course, as with any social paradigm shift roll-out we need a parallel system of big-tech surveillance. They propose to “modernise” the agricultural system – they can’t let all that juicy data go to waste. This will feed into “real-time” systems of aggregated data analysis allowing producers to see where demand is growing and act accordingly. It sounds like a viable plan, though it quickly turns Orwellian: State agencies should systematically leverage data they collect on households—such as income—to facilitate enrollment. By bringing together unemployment, household income, and other census and survey data…”. So that’s every shred of information about every citizen’s every move being vacuumed up into a nebulous global system of corporate food production. And there was me enjoying the old normal.

Make no mistake; this agenda is coming down the road, possibly in as little as just two years away, undoubtedly fast-tracked by the perceived Covid crisis. However we have a set of eliding conditions which lead to a worrisome picture. There is a global shortage of seeds, such that the alternative to the Plate Reset, namely small-scale anarcho-agriculture, is left floundering. Even if your country has enough seeds, they can easily be declared as “non-essential” as happened in the UK in March of this year.

There are other foreboding Black Swans looming at our horizon. Ukraine and Russia, seen as the breadbasket of Europe and Asia, have seen a 20% drop in grain production, this is mirrored in other crops and countries. The USA has seen its lowest acreage of wheat since the dust bowl of last century. Potatoes and corn are faring similarly poorly. One reason put forth for this decline in crop production is the approaching Grand Solar Minimum. This is the weakening of the Sun’s heating power, based on well documented Milankovitch cycles.

If we are to enter a long period of global cooling, with a weakening Sun, then it is imperative that we have the tools to feed ourselves. The traditional method of using a wide range of heirloom varieties seems to be a good tactic. The ancient civilisation based around Lake Titicaca, for example, grew about 3,800 species of potato, many of which grace our plates over 4,000 years later.

We can share seeds, and learn to germinate them ourselves. We can develop community-based farming practices very easily, the information is readily accessible. These are not the tips you will find in the billionaires’ Great Reset agenda, because they do not generate long-term profit for a select few investors. However, those of us who value our human relationship with nature, and understand the follies of centralised corporate power should find great recourse to them.

I leave you with a poem from Emily Dickinson, written in 1924, that seems to be very apt today:

I had been hungry, all the Years –
My Noon had Come – to dine –
I trembling drew the Table near –
And touched the Curious Wine –

’Twas this on Tables I had seen –
When turning, hungry, Home
I looked in Windows, for the Wealth
I could not hope – for Mine –

I did not know the ample Bread –
’Twas so unlike the Crumb
The Birds and I, had often shared
In Nature’s – Dining Room –

The Plenty hurt me – ’twas so new –
Myself felt ill – and odd –
As Berry – of a Mountain Bush –
Transplanted – to a Road –

Nor was I hungry – so I found
That Hunger – was a way
Of Persons outside Windows –
The Entering – takes away –

***

References

Study of Mexican food expenditure
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4534333/

Community Foodbank of New Jersey
https://cfbnj.org/covidimpact/

Great Reset and New Normal
https://europeanbusinessmagazine.com/technology/great-reset-world-economic-forum-suggests-different-post-covid-future-world/

Reset the Table: Meeting the Moment to Transform the U.S. Food System
https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/report/reset-the-table-meeting-the-moment-to-transform-the-u-s-food-system/

Nudge Theory
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/13/why-is-the-government-relying-on-nudge-theory-to-tackle-coronavirus

Prince Charles on Food Rights
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/02/access-to-good-healthy-food-should-be-a-basic-human-right/253349/

School Meal Distribution
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2020/oct/24/tory-led-council-in-pms-constituency-helps-marcus-rashfords-school-meals-campaign

COVID Wastewater Surveillance
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/25/hhs-wants-to-test-30percent-of-us-wastewater-for-the-coronavirus.html

FoodID
https://www.foodid.com/

Bill & Melinda Gates support an edible vaccine
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1934445/

Edible Vaccine using a micro-algae
https://allianceforscience.cornell.edu/blog/2020/06/italy-and-israel-bet-on-gm-microalgae-to-develop-edible-covid-vaccine/

Disease Prevention: An Opportunity to Expand Edible Plant-Based Vaccines?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5492011/

Corporate Green Washing
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/02/08/greenwashing-the-climate-catastrophe/

YieldWise
https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/initiative/yieldwise/

Global Seed Shortage
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/08/coronavirus-gardening-boom-overwhelms-seed-suppliers-in-new-zealand-and-australia

Why Roundup Ready Crops Have Lost their Allure
https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2015/roundup-ready-crops/

Garden Centres are no longer ‘essential’
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/garden-centre-refusing-to-close-0qth8wfcl

Wheat crop failures
https://electroverse.net/this-years-cold-and-wet-spring-sinks-u-s-wheat-acreage-to-its-lowest-levels-since-usda-records-began/

Grand Solar Minimum
https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/news-articles/solar-minimum-is-coming

Milankovitch Cycles
https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2948/milankovitch-orbital-cycles-and-their-role-in-earths-climate/

Ancient Food Varieties
https://www.limaeasy.com/peruvian-food-guide/typical-potatoes