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increasingly affluent Indians develop a taste for meat, even the flesh of cows, which are considered sacred in Hinduism.

Bharatiya Janata Party, one of the country’s two major political parties, has demanded that laws against cow slaughter be strengthened.

The thieves can usually fit about 10 cows on a truck, and each fetches 5,000 rupees — about $94

“The social and religious status of cows has been under attack in India,”

in some of capitalism’s most rarefied circles including Harvard Business School, where last fall Seth Klarman, a highly influential billionaire investor, delivered what he described as a “plaintive wail” to the business community to fix capitalism before it was too late.

“It’s a choice to maintain pleasant working conditions . . . or harsh ones; to offer good benefits or paltry ones.” If business leaders didn’t “ask hard questions about capitalism,” he warned that they would be asked by “ideologues seeking to point fingers, assign blame and make reckless changes to the system.

Leading politicians, such as Trump, Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), were advocating positions on tariffs, wealth taxes and changes in corporate governance that would have been unthinkable a few years ago.

One of the most popular classes at Harvard Business School, home to the next generation of Fortune 500 executives, was a class on “reimagining capitalism.” Seven years ago, the elective started with 28 students. Now there were nearly 300 taking it

“Winners Take All,” a book by Anand Giridharadas, a journalist and former McKinsey consultant, that had hit the bestseller list and was provoking heated arguments in places like Silicon Valley, Davos and Harvard Business School. Giridharadas’s book was a withering attack on America’s billionaire class and the notion that America’s iconic capitalists could use their wealth and creativity to solve big social and economic problems that have eluded a plodding and divided government.

For many of the students, schooled in the notion that business could make a profit while making the world a better place, Giridharadas’s ideas were both energizing and disorienting. Erika Uyterhoeven, a second-year student, recalled one of her fellow classmates turning to her when Giridharadas was finished. “So, what should we do?” her colleague asked. “Is he saying we shouldn’t go into banking or consulting?

Added another student: “There was a palpable sense of personal desperation.”

“The best thing that happened to me was that I lost my 2014 election,” he said. “Had I won . . . maybe I would’ve been a traditional neoliberal. It really forced my self-reflection and it pointed out every weakness I ever had.”

Mixed in with the valley’s usual frothy optimism about disruption and inventing the future was a growing sense that the tech economy had somehow broken capitalism. The digital revolution had allowed tech entrepreneurs to build massive global companies without the big job-producing factories or large workforces of the industrial era. The result was more and more wealth concentrated in fewer hands.

some feared things were only going to get worse. Robots were eliminating much factory work; online commerce was decimating retail; and self-driving cars were on the verge of phasing out truck drivers. The next step was computers that could learn and think.

thinking computers might be able to diagnose diseases better than doctors by drawing on superhuman amounts of clinical research, said Brockman, 30. They could displace a large number of office jobs. Eventually, he said, the job shortages would force the government to pay people to pursue their passions or simply live

To Brockman, a future without work seemed just as likely as one without meat, a possibility that many in the valley viewed as a near certainty. “Once we have meat substitutes as good as the real thing, my expectation is that we’re going to look back at eating meat as this terrible, immoral thing,”

The same could be true of work in a future in an era of advanced artificial intelligence. “We’ll look back and say, ‘Wow, that was so crazy and almost immoral that people were forced to go and labor in order to be able to survive,’ ” he said

Khanna had a different view. He saw the country’s problems primarily as the product of growing income inequality and a lack of opportunity.

it is entirely possible to grow food that’s better for us and grow it in ways that are better for the land. Better land management techniques include limiting the use of fertilizers that contribute to emissions and planting crops that add carbon to the soil.

The way forward, they point out, requires reducing planet-warming emissions, removing carbon from the atmosphere by storing it in trees or soil, and changing diets, especially among the world’s wealthy.

it also requires a hard look at who gets to eat what

when it comes to land use, better forest management has the “largest potential for reducing emissions.”

“Farming must work with nature, not against it,

“The I.P.C.C.’s land report puts a big question mark on the future of industrial agriculture.”

Scientists often refer to these as “natural climate solutions,” and they point out that sequestering carbon in the soil not only helps slow down climate change, it can also make the soil hardier to deal with extreme weather events and ultimately increase crop yields.

The world’s forests are under intense threat, though, especially in the tropics. They are cleared for things we consume, including soy, palm oil and beef cattle

Nowhere is that more stark than in the world’s largest rain forest, the Amazon. Its destruction has increased drastically since Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, took power with a promise to further open the forest to commercial exploitation.

Livestock can be raised on lands that are too arid to grow crops, they can be fed differently so they produce lower methane emissions and they produce manure that can fertilize soil.

animal protein is vital nourishment for a hungry child and raising animals has been part of the culture and livelihood for millions of people around the world.

But if the heaviest meat eaters in places like the United States and Australia cut back on meat, especially red meat, it would make a big difference.

It is entirely possible to eat well without depriving ourselves. There are tips we can borrow from many traditional cuisines.

Taken together, the amount of food that is wasted and unused accounts for close to a 10th of global emissions.

Curbing food waste is arguably the single most effective thing that can be done at an individual or household level to slow down climate change.

The culture accelerated with the appearance of Homo erectus (1.9 million years ago), whose larger brain and shorter digestive system reflected the increased consumption of meat

the Neanderthals (400,000 to 40,000 years ago), who developed more sophisticated technology.

It also spanned most of the existence of Homo sapiens, dating from the first anatomically modern humans 200,000 years ago, to the transition to permanent agricultural communities around 10,000 B.C.

sharpened stones were used for cutting before hand-axes were developed, marking the onset of Acheulean technology about 1.6 million years ago.

Use of hearths dates back almost 800,000 years ago, and other findings point to controlled heating as far back as 1 million years ago.

Fire enabled hunter-gatherers to stay warm in colder temperatures, cook their food (preventing some diseases caused by consumption of raw foods like meat), and scare wild animals that might otherwise take their food or attack their camps.

These more specialized tools enabled them to widen their diet and create more effective clothing and shelter as they moved about in search of food.

From their earliest days, the hunter-gatherer diet included various grasses, tubers, fruits, seeds and nuts. Lacking the means to kill larger animals, they procured meat from smaller game or through scavenging.

Modern humans were cooking shellfish by 160,000 years ago, and by 90,000 years ago they were developing the specialized fishing tools that enabled them to haul in larger aquatic life.

With limited resources, these groups were egalitarian by nature, scraping up enough food to survive and fashioning basic shelter for all.

Physiological evolution also led to changes, with the bigger brains of more recent ancestors leading to longer periods of childhood and adolescence.

By the time of the Neanderthals, hunter-gatherers were displaying such “human” characteristics as burying their dead and creating ornamental objects

By 50,000 years ago, huts made from wood, rock and bone were becoming more common,

Modern-day hunter-gatherers endure in various pockets around the globe. Among the more famous groups are the San, a.k.a. the Bushmen, of southern Africa,

Donald Trump is a “con artist,” says Marco Rubio — who has promised to enact giant tax cuts, undertake a huge military buildup and balance the budget without any cuts in benefits to Americans over 55.

“There can be no evasion and no games,” thunders Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House — whose much-hyped budgets are completely reliant on “mystery meat,” that is, it claims trillions of dollars in revenue can be collected by closing unspecified tax loopholes and trillions more saved through unspecified spending cuts.

Oh, and it’s Ted Cruz, not Mr. Trump, who seems eager to “carpet bomb” people, without appearing to know what that means

Yes, he’s a con man, but they all are. So why is this con job different from any other? The answer, I’d suggest, is that the establishment’s problem with Mr. Trump isn’t the con he brings; it’s the cons he disrupts.

First, there’s the con Republicans usually manage to pull off in national elections — the one where they pose as a serious, grown-up party honestly trying to grapple with America’s problems. The truth is that that party died a long time ago, that these days it’s voodoo economics and neocon fantasies all the way down.

Equally important, the Trump phenomenon threatens the con the G.O.P. establishment has been playing on its own base. I’m talking about the bait and switch in which white voters are induced to hate big government by dog whistles about Those People, but actual policies are all about rewarding the donor class.

I find the prospect of a Trump administration terrifying, and so should you. But you should also be terrified by the prospect of a President Rubio, sitting in the White House with his circle of warmongers, or a President Cruz, whom one suspects would love to bring back the Spanish Inquisition.

we should actually welcome Mr. Trump’s ascent. Yes, he’s a con man, but he is also effectively acting as a whistle-blower on other people’s cons. That is, believe it or not, a step forward in these weird, troubled times.

Climate change will make those threats even worse, as floods, drought, storms and other types of extreme weather threaten to disrupt, and over time shrink, the global food supply

food shortages could lead to an increase in cross-border migration.

A particular danger is that food crises could develop on several continents at once

“The potential risk of multi-breadbasket failure is increasing,” she said. “All of these things are happening at the same time.”

The report also offered a measure of hope, laying out pathways to addressing the looming food crisis, though they would require a major re-evaluation of land use and agriculture worldwide as well as consumer behavior

Proposals include increasing the productivity of land, wasting less food and persuading more people to shift their diets away from cattle and other types of meat.

“People’s lives will be affected by a massive pressure for migration,” said Pete Smith, a professor of plant and soil science at the University of Aberdeen and one of the report’s lead authors. “People don’t stay and die where they are. People migrate.”

activities such as draining wetlands — as has happened in Indonesia and Malaysia to create palm oil plantations, for example — is particularly damaging. When drained, peatlands, which store between 530 and 694 billion tons of carbon dioxide globally, release that carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere.

Between 2010 and 2015 the number of migrants from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras showing up at the United States’ border with Mexico increased fivefold, coinciding with a dry period that left many with not enough food and was so unusual that scientists suggested it bears the signal of climate change

As a warming atmosphere intensifies the world’s droughts, flooding, heat waves, wildfires and other weather patterns, it is speeding up the rate of soil loss and land degradation, the report concludes.

Higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere

will also reduce food’s nutritional quality, even as rising temperatures cut crop yields and harm livestock

In some cases, the report says, a changing climate is boosting food production because, for example, warmer temperatures will mean greater yields of some crops at higher latitudes. But on the whole, the report finds that climate change is already hurting the availability of food because of decreased yields and lost land from erosion, desertification and rising seas

Overall if emissions of greenhouse gases continue to rise, so will food costs, according to the report, affecting people around the world.

“You’re sort of reaching a breaking point with land itself and its ability to grow food and sustain us,”

agriculture itself is also exacerbating climate change.

the window to address the threat is closing rapidly

Every 2.5 acres of peatlands release the carbon dioxide equivalent of burning 6,000 gallons of gasoline

And the emissions of carbon dioxide continues long after the peatlands are drained. Of the five gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions that are released each year from deforestation and other land-use changes, “One gigaton comes from the ongoing degradation of peatlands that are already drained,”

(By comparison, the fossil fuel industry emitted about 37 gigatons of carbon dioxide last year, according to the institute.)

cattle are significant producers of methane, another powerful greenhouse gas, and an increase in global demand for beef and other meats has fueled their numbers and increased deforestation in critical forest systems like the Amazon

each year, the amount of forested land that is cleared — much of that propelled by demand for pasture land for cattle — releases the emissions equivalent of driving 600 million cars

The authors urge changes in how food is produced and distributed, including better soil management, crop diversification and fewer restrictions on trade

They also call for shifts in consumer behavior, noting that at least one-quarter of all food worldwide is wasted

But protecting the food supply and cutting greenhouse emissions can also come into conflict with each other, forcing hard choices. For instance, the widespread use of strategies such as bioenergy — like growing corn to produce ethanol — could lead to the creation of new deserts or other land degradation

The report also calls for institutional changes, including better access to credit for farmers in developing countries and stronger property rights

Planting as many trees as possible would reduce the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere by about nine gigatons each year

But it would also increase food prices as much as 80 percent by 2050.

“We cannot plant trees to get ourselves out of the problem that we’re in,

“The trade-offs that would keep us below 1.5 degrees, we’re not talking about them. We’re not ready to confront them yet.”

Preventing global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius is likely to require both the widespread planting of trees as well as “substantial” bioenergy to help reduce the use of fossil fuels

“Above 2 degrees of global warming there could be an increase of 100 million or more of the population at risk of hunger,” Edouard Davin, a researcher at ETH Zurich and an author of the report, said by email. “We need to act quickly

The same is true for planting large numbers of trees (something often cited as a powerful strategy to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere), which can push crops and livestock onto less productive land

“Agricultural practices that include indigenous and local knowledge can contribute to overcoming the combined challenges of climate change, food security, biodiversity conservation, and combating desertification and land degradation,”

an average of three people were killed per week defending their land in 2018, with more than half of them killed in Latin America.

the longer policymakers wait, the harder it will be to prevent a global crisis. “Acting now may avert or reduce risks and losses, and generate benefits to society,” the authors wrote. Waiting to cut emissions, on the other hand, risks “irreversible loss in land ecosystem functions and services required for food, health, habitable settlements and production.”

Mike Barry, director of sustainable business at Marks & Spencer, said: “The signals are [fashion is] on the same trajectory as plastics and forests and alternatives to meat. These were all underlying concerns that got through to the mainstream consumer.

The government-backed sustainable clothing action plan, whose signatories include Next, M&S, Ted Baker, Primark and Asos, has committed nine major retailers to reducing waste being sent to landfill, water use and carbon footprint by 15% by 2020.

“We have only got 12 years to tackle damaging climate change,” she says. “We as consumers have to ask questions of brands. Brands have to make it part of what they do. These are massive companies run by some of the world’s richest men. Someone is doing OK out of it.”

Creagh adds that cheap fashion comes with a social as well as an environmental cost – with low-paid workers overseas unable to provide for their families. “We are not saying to people on a low income you can’t buy cheap clothes. We are saying it is time that the cost should reflect the true cost of the minimum wage and decent working conditions and growing stuff without pesticides. It needs to be sustainable from top to bottom and we don’t think the true cost is a £5 dress. That price is not being paid by us, it is being paid by someone else and the environment.”

Environmental campaigners say people who want to be more sustainable should choose quality clothes and make them last as long as possible by learning to repair or rework them. Buying secondhand or vintage clothing, considering renting outfits rather than buying, and washing garments less often at lower temperatures in a full machine can all help.

Sumner says: “The more you process and play with them the worse they are and the quality reduces. “Recycled fibres through traditional routes are poor quality.”

"America is at a tipping point, finely balanced between truth and lies, hope and hate, civility and nastiness. Many vital aspects of American public life are in play – the Supreme Court, abortion rights, climate policy, wealth inequality, Big Tech and much more. The stakes could hardly be higher. As that choice nears, the Guardian, as it has done for 200 years, and with your continued support, will continue to argue for the values we hold dear – facts, science, diversity, equality and fairness." – US editor, John Mulholland

as with climate change, the powers that be in this country are doing very little to head off the potentially disastrous results of expanding obesity, obesity specialists say.

Well-intentioned efforts like limiting access to huge portions of sugar-sweetened soda, the scientists note, are effectively thwarted by well-heeled industrie

With rare exceptions, the sugar and beverage industries have blocked nearly every attempt to add an excise tax to sugar-sweetened beverages.

Claims that such a tax is regressive and unfairly targets low-income people is shortsighted

“What people would save in health care costs would dwarf the extra money paid as taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages,” he said in an interview.

in a city like Philadelphia, where a soda tax of 1.5 cents an ounce took effect three years ago, total purchases declined by 38 percent even after accounting for beverages people bought outside the city

piecemeal changes like this are not enough to make a significant difference in the obesity forecast for the country

nationwide changes are needed in the ubiquitous food environment that has fostered a steady climb toward a weight-and-health disaster.

Americans weren’t always this fat; since 1990, the prevalence of obesity in this country has doubled.

Our genetics haven’t changed in the last 30 years. Rather, what has changed is the environment in which our genes now function.

“Food is very cheap in the United States, and super easy to access,”

We eat out more, consuming more foods that are high in fat, sugar and salt, and our portion sizes are bigger.

“You don’t even have to leave home to eat restaurant-prepared food — just call and it will be delivered.

As a society, we also snack more, a habit that starts as soon as toddlers can feed themselves.

“People are snacking throughout the day,” Mr. Ward said. “Snacking is the normal thing to do in the United States. In France, you never see anyone eating on a bus.”

We also eat more highly processed foods, which have been shown to foster weight gain, thanks to their usually high levels of calories, sugar and fat.

even when controlling for weight, consuming lots of processed foods raises the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes.

“Through marketing, we’re constantly being sold on foods we didn’t even know we wanted. We’re all about immediate rewards. We’re not thinking about the future, which is why we’re going to see more than half the population obese in 10 years.”

Unless something is done to reverse this trend, Mr. Ward said, “Obesity will be the new normal in this country. We’re living in an obesogenic environment.”

“if I could wave a magic wand, I’d make a tax on beverages a federal mandate because they’re the largest source of added sugar in the diet and are strongly linked to weight gain and health problems.

the link between beverage consumption and greater intake of calories may also apply to drinks flavored with no-calorie or low-calorie sweeteners.

prompting restaurants to gradually, surreptitiously reduce the amount of fat, sugar and calories in the meals they serve could help put the brakes on societal weight gain. “Menus could make healthier, lower-calorie meals the default option,

Controlling portion sizes is another critically important step. “Big portions are especially motivating for low-income people who reasonably want to get more calories for their dollar,”

Another policy-based approach that could reverse rising obesity projections might be to partner with climate control advocates, Dr. Bleich suggested. “If we pull more meat out of the American diet, it would help both the environment and weight loss,

“prevention is the way to go. Children aren’t born obese, but we can already see excessive weight gain as early as age 2. Changes in the food environment are needed at every level — local, state and federal. It’s hard for individuals to voluntarily change their behavior.”

health-promoting changes in the food packages provided to low-income women, infants and children since 2009 have helped to reverse or stabilize obesity in the preschool children who receive them.

Local farmers have also proven more reliable in a crisis than the industrial food supply chain. The longer the outbreak continues, the more likely consumers will have to reckon with diminishing agricultural supply, particularly for imported products and those processed in large plants with hundreds of on-the-floor workers who are unable to practice social distancing effectively.

The pandemic has emphasized how valuable robust local food systems are. Supporting yours right now can start with contacting your community’s CSA and placing an order.

A supply chain reliant on a relatively small number of large factories to process and package food is a fragile one. Decentralized and localized systems are more resilient in the face of disruption – meaning more small-scale farms producing more food could be just what we need to protect our communities against future crises.

Food waste in general has emerged as a major issue during the pandemic. At the same time that demand for groceries has surged, vast quantities of food produced by the service sector for now-closed restaurant chains, hotels and cafeterias are being discarded.

Fresh farm produce is healthy and delicious. Most of the time, that’s reason enough to sign up for a community-supported agriculture program (CSA), a system in which one pays to regularly receive goodie bags of whatever happens to be flourishing in nearby farmers’ fields, often along with optional local meat and dairy add-ons. Now, during the Covid-19 pandemic, bolstering local food systems is especially urgent – and there’s more at stake than just really good tomatoes.

On Tuesday, Australia's Minister for Agriculture, Drought and Emergency Management David Littleproud tweeted about the JBS cyberattack, saying the company is working closely with law enforcement agencies and in Australia and overseas to get operations back up and running and "to bring those responsible to account."

Later in May, Microsoft said it believed the hackers responsible for last year's SolarWinds attack targeted 3,000 email accounts at various organizations — most of which were in the United States.

Speaking frankly, it’s a lie,” says Liang Yong, a gruff villager. The official investigation of Ziyun’s economy was, he says, perfunctory.

Provincial leaders popped into his village, rendered their verdict that it had left poverty behind and then sped off. “It’s a show. In our hearts we all know the truth,”

Pork is pricey these days, so he eats meat just a couple of times a week. After paying his two children’s school fees, he has little money left.

He is poorer than many others in China, especially in its cities.

But the ability to scrape enough together for meat, education and heating marks Mr Liang as someone who has in fact left extreme poverty

Sceptics understandably ask whether China fiddled its numbers in order to win what it calls the “battle against poverty”.

It has regularly raised the official poverty line, which, accounting for living costs, is about $2.30 a day at prices prevailing in 2011.

Poverty lines in rich countries are much higher: the equivalent line in America is about $72 a day for a four-member household at 2020 prices.)

In 1978, shortly after Mao’s death, nearly 98% of those in the countryside lived in extreme poverty, by China’s current standards. By 2016 that was down to less than 5%

It decollectivised agriculture, giving farmers an incentive to produce more. It allowed people to move around the country to find work. It gave more freedom to entrepreneurs. It helped by building roads, investing in education and courting foreign investors. Its goal was to boost the economy;

The government’s approach changed in 2015 when Xi Jinping, its leader, vowed to eradicate the last vestiges of extreme poverty by the end of 2020.

tried to encourage personal initiative by rewarding poor people who found ways of bettering their lot

They spent public money widely.

I

n 2020 the allocation per head was more than 26,000 yuan

One of the biggest challenges has been the terrain where the poor live.

about 30% of the country’s total—that were designated as poverty-stricken when Mr Xi began his anti-poverty campaign were all mainly rural. Most were mountainous or on inhospitable land

to introduce industry

mostly modern agriculture.

government created a 25-hectare zone for growing and processing shiitake mushrooms

the shiitake are a cash crop, letting them earn about 80 yuan a day, a decent wage.

In the 1980s China broke up communal farms, letting people strike out on their own. Now the government wants them to pool their resources again

turning farmers into “shareholders”

Residents get stakes in new rural enterprises, which, all going well, will pay dividends.

The Luomai shiitake farm is run by China Southern Power Grid, a state-owned firm. But there is a risk that as the anti-poverty campaign fades away, some projects will fizzle.

The second approach to helping hard-up villages was more radical: moving inhabitants to better-connected areas.

2016 and 2020 officials relocated about 10m people.

The government concluded that it was too costly to provide necessary services, from roads to health care, to the most remote villages

A frequent problem after moving people into such housing is finding work for them.

the government called on local officials to arrange jobs for at least one member of each household.

with her new surroundings. There is a good school just across the street, which is far better for her child.

A bigger challenge is relative deprivation, a problem abundantly evident to anyone who has travelled between the glitzy coastal cities and the drabber towns of the hinterland.

recent study by Chinese economists concluded that the “subjective poverty line” in rural areas was about 23 yuan per day, nearly twice the amount below which a person would be officially classified as poor.

namely setting the relative poverty line at half the median income level. It suggests that about a third of rural Chinese still see themselves as poor.

If poverty is calculated this way it becomes almost impossible to eliminate,

China does not count any poverty in its cities because welfare safeguards supposedly help those without money.

But workers who have moved from the countryside lack the right documentation for ready access to urban welfare.

And for any city-dweller, support is meagre. In relative terms about a fifth of China’s urban residents can be classified as poor,

To reduce relative poverty, China needs different tactics from the ones used in its campaign against extreme poverty.

policies for which it has shown little eagerness.

On the streets of Guiyang, the booming capital of Guizhou, hardship is still a common sight.

Zhou Weifu, a porter in his 50s, scoffs at the suggestion that poverty is over. “What kind of work is this? I can barely make any money,”

the tradition served “as a kind of safety valve that contained class resentments within clearly defined limits,” and thus, ultimately reinforced the hierarchy.

Christmas misrule was largely tolerated. After all, the birth of Jesus had been tacked onto pagan traditions that had existed for centuries.

So a period of gorging and resting was almost written into the stars, and most pagan European cultures had a holiday for this. In fact, Romans had been celebrating Saturnalia — a similar celebration of social inversion and orgiastic gluttony — for much longer before that.

December meant three things in early Europe: The work of harvesting the year’s crops was done, the beer and wine they’d been brewing was ready to drink, and it was cold enough to slaughter animals without the meat going immediately bad. December was often the only time of year when people got to eat fresh meat.

Puritans were fully aware of the non-Christian roots of Christmas, and unlike the Anglican church, they were having none of it

During Puritan rule of England in the mid-1600s, they attempted to make it illegal, scheduling Parliament to meet on Dec. 25 and ordering a day of fasting and repentance. They were met with riots and insurrection.

The Puritan ban on Christmas lasted much longer in New England, on paper from 1659 to 1681. But even after English authorities overturned the ban, it was still culturally taboo for well over a century afterward.

The effects of rising food prices have been felt unevenly around the world. Asia has been largely spared because of a plentiful rice crop. But parts of Africa, the Middle East and Latin America that are more dependent on imported food are struggling.

Joseph Siegle, the director of research at National Defense University’s Africa Center for Strategic Studies, estimated that 106 million people on the continent are facing food insecurity, double the number since 2018.

In the United States, food prices rose 6.3 percent in December compared with a year ago, while the price of restaurant meals rose 6.0 percent and the price of meat, poultry, fish and eggs jumped 12.5 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But economists and agricultural experts say that while these efforts help at the margin, there may be little the government can do to combat a phenomenon that is both complex and global.

Overloaded shipping companies have been refusing to send their steel boxes to the Midwest to pick up agricultural products, instead preferring to ship them back to Asia to carry more lucrative cargo.

With both their costs and their sales prices increasing, many farmers are making similar margins to what they earned before, Mr. Edgington said. But “huge swings” in the price of corn, soybeans and fertilizer were still putting their finances at risk.

World War II forced transformative market changes when supplies from Europe and elsewhere were cut off. Many companies expanded and moved across the Hudson to set up new factories

In nature, flavor comes as a sophisticated mix of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of chemicals, each with its own unique taste and smell. Using early-20th-century chemistry tools, scientists could hope to identify perhaps a handful of these in any given plant

Coupled with mass spectrometers, which identify what’s been isolated, this technology opened up a vast world of possibilities, allowing for a much more thorough (though still incomplete) map of nature’s aromas. The number of flavor chemicals known in orange peels, for instance, has gone from nine in 1948 to 207 today. In spearmint leaves, it’s leapt from 6 to 100, and in black peppercorns, from seven to 273.

One of the newer breakthroughs to come along in the science of flavor is called taste modulation. About a decade ago, a biologist at the University of California at San Diego named Charles Zuker isolated, for the first time, the receptors on the tongue that are responsible for our perception of taste. He did this using tastebud cells from laboratory mice. What he found was that each cell was incredibly specific, containing receptors for just one taste — either sweet, sour, salty, bitter or savory (also called umami

Some of the demand for flavoring is related to how plants and animals are grown and raised. Wright urged me to try a taste test at home if I was so inclined. Take three different whole chickens, she said — an average, low-priced frozen one from the supermarket; a mass-produced organic version like Bell and Evans; and what she termed a “happy chicken.” This was a bird that had spent its life outside running around and eating an evolutionary diet of grass, seeds, bugs and worms. Roast them in your kitchen and note the taste. The cheap chicken, she said, will have minimal flavor, thanks to its short life span, lack of sunlight and monotonous diet of corn and soy. The Bell and Evans will have a few “roast notes and fatty notes,” and the happy chicken will be “incomparable,” with a deep, succulent, nutty taste. Wright, as you might imagine, prefers consuming chickens of the happy variety, which her husband, who is also a flavorist (he works from home as a consultant), is generally the one to cook.

the mouth feel of soda and many other food items, especially those high in fat, is second only to the bliss point in its ability to predict how much craving a product will induce.

He organized focus-group sessions with the people most responsible for buying bologna — mothers — and as they talked, he realized the most pressing issue for them was time. Working moms strove to provide healthful food, of course, but they spoke with real passion and at length about the morning crush, that nightmarish dash to get breakfast on the table and lunch packed and kids out the door.

as the focus swung toward kids, Saturday-morning cartoons started carrying an ad that offered a different message: “All day, you gotta do what they say,” the ads said. “But lunchtime is all yours.”

When it came to Lunchables, they did try to add more healthful ingredients. Back at the start, Drane experimented with fresh carrots but quickly gave up on that, since fresh components didn’t work within the constraints of the processed-food system, which typically required weeks or months of transport and storage before the food arrived at the grocery store. Later, a low-fat version of the trays was developed, using meats and cheese and crackers that were formulated with less fat, but it tasted inferior, sold poorly and was quickly scrapped.

One of the company’s responses to criticism is that kids don’t eat the Lunchables every day — on top of which, when it came to trying to feed them more healthful foods, kids themselves were unreliable. When their parents packed fresh carrots, apples and water, they couldn’t be trusted to eat them. Once in school, they often trashed the healthful stuff in their brown bags to get right to the sweets.

This idea — that kids are in control — would become a key concept in the evolving marketing campaigns for the trays. In what would prove to be their greatest achievement of all, the Lunchables team would delve into adolescent psychology to discover that it wasn’t the food in the trays that excited the kids; it was the feeling of power it brought to their lives.

The prevailing attitude among the company’s food managers — through the 1990s, at least, before obesity became a more pressing concern — was one of supply and demand. “People could point to these things and say, ‘They’ve got too much sugar, they’ve got too much salt,’ ” Bible said. “Well, that’s what the consumer wants, and we’re not putting a gun to their head to eat it. That’s what they want. If we give them less, they’ll buy less, and the competitor will get our market. So you’re sort of trapped.”

at last count, including sales in Britain, they were approaching the $1 billion mark. Lunchables was more than a hit; it was now its own category

he holds the entire industry accountable. “What do University of Wisconsin M.B.A.’s learn about how to succeed in marketing?” his presentation to the med students asks. “Discover what consumers want to buy and give it to them with both barrels. Sell more, keep your job! How do marketers often translate these ‘rules’ into action on food? Our limbic brains love sugar, fat, salt. . . . So formulate products to deliver these. Perhaps add low-cost ingredients to boost profit margins. Then ‘supersize’ to sell more. . . . And advertise/promote to lock in ‘heavy users.’ Plenty of guilt to go around here!”

men in the eastern part of Finland had the highest rate of fatal cardiovascular disease in the world. Research showed that this plague was not just a quirk of genetics or a result of a sedentary lifestyle — it was also owing to processed foods. So when Finnish authorities moved to address the problem, they went right after the manufacturers. (The Finnish response worked. Every grocery item that was heavy in salt would come to be marked prominently with the warning “High Salt Content.” By 2007, Finland’s per capita consumption of salt had dropped by a third, and this shift — along with improved medical care — was accompanied by a 75 percent to 80 percent decline in the number of deaths from strokes and heart disease.)

I tracked Lin down in Irvine, Calif., where we spent several days going through the internal company memos, strategy papers and handwritten notes he had kept. The documents were evidence of the concern that Lin had for consumers and of the company’s intent on using science not to address the health concerns but to thwart them. While at Frito-Lay, Lin and other company scientists spoke openly about the country’s excessive consumption of sodium and the fact that, as Lin said to me on more than one occasion, “people get addicted to salt

the marketing team was joined by Dwight Riskey, an expert on cravings who had been a fellow at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, where he was part of a team of scientists that found that people could beat their salt habits simply by refraining from salty foods long enough for their taste buds to return to a normal level of sensitivity. He had also done work on the bliss point, showing how a product’s allure is contextual, shaped partly by the other foods a person is eating, and that it changes as people age. This seemed to help explain why Frito-Lay was having so much trouble selling new snacks. The largest single block of customers, the baby boomers, had begun hitting middle age. According to the research, this suggested that their liking for salty snacks — both in the concentration of salt and how much they ate — would be tapering off.

Riskey realized that he and his colleagues had been misreading things all along. They had been measuring the snacking habits of different age groups and were seeing what they expected to see, that older consumers ate less than those in their 20s. But what they weren’t measuring, Riskey realized, is how those snacking habits of the boomers compared to themselves when they were in their 20s. When he called up a new set of sales data and performed what’s called a cohort study, following a single group over time, a far more encouraging picture — for Frito-Lay, anyway — emerged. The baby boomers were not eating fewer salty snacks as they aged. “In fact, as those people aged, their consumption of all those segments — the cookies, the crackers, the candy, the chips — was going up,” Riskey said. “They were not only eating what they ate when they were younger, they were eating more of it.” In fact, everyone in the country, on average, was eating more salty snacks than they used to. The rate of consumption was edging up about one-third of a pound every year, with the average intake of snacks like chips and cheese crackers pushing past 12 pounds a year

Riskey had a theory about what caused this surge: Eating real meals had become a thing of the past.

“We looked at this behavior, and said, ‘Oh, my gosh, people were skipping meals right and left,’ ” Riskey told me. “It was amazing.” This led to the next realization, that baby boomers did not represent “a category that is mature, with no growth. This is a category that has huge growth potential.”

The food technicians stopped worrying about inventing new products and instead embraced the industry’s most reliable method for getting consumers to buy more: the line extension.

He zeroed right in on the Cheetos. “This,” Witherly said, “is one of the most marvelously constructed foods on the planet, in terms of pure pleasure.” He ticked off a dozen attributes of the Cheetos that make the brain say more. But the one he focused on most was the puff’s uncanny ability to melt in the mouth. “It’s called vanishing caloric density,” Witherly said. “If something melts down quickly, your brain thinks that there’s no calories in it . . . you can just keep eating it forever.”

Frito-Lay acquired Stacy’s Pita Chip Company, which was started by a Massachusetts couple who made food-cart sandwiches and started serving pita chips to their customers in the mid-1990s. In Frito-Lay’s hands, the pita chips averaged 270 milligrams of sodium — nearly one-fifth a whole day’s recommended maximum for most American adults — and were a huge hit among boomers.

There’s a paradox at work here. On the one hand, reduction of sodium in snack foods is commendable. On the other, these changes may well result in consumers eating more. “The big thing that will happen here is removing the barriers for boomers and giving them permission to snack,” Carey said. The prospects for lower-salt snacks were so amazing, he added, that the company had set its sights on using the designer salt to conquer the toughest market of all for snacks: schools

The company’s chips, he wrote, were not selling as well as they could for one simple reason: “While people like and enjoy potato chips, they feel guilty about liking them. . . . Unconsciously, people expect to be punished for ‘letting themselves go’ and enjoying them.” Dichter listed seven “fears and resistances” to the chips: “You can’t stop eating them; they’re fattening; they’re not good for you; they’re greasy and messy to eat; they’re too expensive; it’s hard to store the leftovers; and they’re bad for children.” He spent the rest of his memo laying out his prescriptions, which in time would become widely used not just by Frito-Lay but also by the entire industry.

Dichter advised Frito-Lay to move its chips out of the realm of between-meals snacking and turn them into an ever-present item in the American diet. “The increased use of potato chips and other Lay’s products as a part of the regular fare served by restaurants and sandwich bars should be encouraged in a concentrated way,”

the largest weight-inducing food was the potato chip. The coating of salt, the fat content that rewards the brain with instant feelings of pleasure, the sugar that exists not as an additive but in the starch of the potato itself — all of this combines to make it the perfect addictive food. “The starch is readily absorbed,” Eric Rimm, an associate professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health and one of the study’s authors, told me. “More quickly even than a similar amount of sugar. The starch, in turn, causes the glucose levels in the blood to spike” — which can result in a craving for more.

If Americans snacked only occasionally, and in small amounts, this would not present the enormous problem that it does. But because so much money and effort has been invested over decades in engineering and then relentlessly selling these products, the effects are seemingly impossible to unwind.

Todd Putman, who worked at Coca-Cola from 1997 to 2001, said the goal became much larger than merely beating the rival brands; Coca-Cola strove to outsell every other thing people drank, including milk and water. The marketing division’s efforts boiled down to one question, Putman said: “How can we drive more ounces into more bodies more often?”

The joy he takes in humiliating women is not something he even bothers to disguise. He told the journalist Timothy L. O’Brien, “My favorite part [of the movie Pulp Fiction] is when Sam has his gun out in the diner and he tells the guy to tell his girlfriend to shut up. Tell that bitch to be cool. Say: ‘Bitch be cool.’ I love those lines.” Or as he elegantly summed up his view to New York magazine in the early ’90s, “Women, you have to treat them like shit.”

Women labor under a cloud of Trump’s distrust. “I have seen women manipulate men with just a twitch of their eye—or perhaps another body part,” he wrote in Trump: The Art of the Comeback. Working moms are particularly lacking in loyalty, he believes, and thus do not make for good employees. “She’s not giving me 100 percent. She’s giving me 84 percent, and 16 percent is going towards taking care of children,

This is one reason that evangelicals, both men and women, gravitate to Trump, despite his obvious lack of interest in religion and blatantly loose morals. He represents the possibility of a return to patriarchy, to a time when men were men, and didn’t have to apologize for it

In 1989, Trump had returned home from a painful scalp-reduction surgery, intended to remove a bald spot. His ex-wife Ivana had suggested the doctor—and he blamed her for his suffering. He held her arms and began pulling hair from her scalp, then tore off her clothes. Hurt writes: “Then he jams his penis inside her for the first time in more than sixteen months. Ivana is terrified … It is a violent assault. According to versions she repeats to some of her closest confidantes, ‘he raped me.’ ” When the story resurfaced last summer, Trump’s campaign disavowed it. When Hurt was writing his book, Trump’s lawyers forced the author to include a statement from Ivana in the book, “A Note to Readers,” which softens the account but doesn’t disavow it: “As a woman, I felt violated, as the love and tenderness, which he normally exhibited towards me, was absent. I referred to this as a ‘rape,’ but I do not want my words to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense.”

The scene offers a graphic summation of Trump’s retrograde beliefs and real brutality. What’s worse, the same spirit informs his politics—the rampant cruelty, the violent impulses, the thirst for revenge, the absence of compassion. Misogyny isn’t an incidental part of Donald Trump. It’s who he is.

During his first week in office, Mr. Trump reiterated the unfounded charge that millions of people had voted illegally. When challenged on the evident falsehood, Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, seemed to argue that Mr. Trump’s belief that something was true qualified as evidence. The press secretary also declined to answer a straightforward question about the unemployment rate, suggesting that the number will henceforth be whatever the Trump administration wants it to be.

Unfortunately, that also means that the more the fact-based media tries to debunk the president’s falsehoods, the further it will entrench the battle lines.

The news media’s spectacular failure to get the election right has made it only easier for many conservatives to ignore anything that happens outside the right’s bubble and for the Trump White House to fabricate facts with little fear of alienating its base.

The relationship appears to be symbiotic, as Mr. Trump often seems to pick up on talking points from Fox News and has tweeted out links from websites notorious for their casual relationship to the truth, including sites like Gateway Pundit, a hoax-peddling site that announced, shortly after the inauguration, that it would have a White House correspondent.

In a stunning demonstration of the power and resiliency of our new post-factual political culture, Mr. Trump and his allies in the right media have already turned the term “fake news” against its critics, essentially draining it of any meaning

now any news deemed to be biased, annoying or negative can be labeled “fake news.”

Even as he continues to attack the “dishonest media,” Mr. Trump and his allies are empowering this alt-reality media, providing White House access to Breitbart and other post-factual outlets that are already morphing into fierce defenders of the administration.

He can do this because members of the Trump administration feel confident that the alternative-reality media will provide air cover, even if they are caught fabricating facts or twisting words (like claiming that the “ban” on Muslim immigrants wasn’t really a “ban”). Indeed, they believe they have shifted the paradigm of media coverage, replacing the traditional media with their own.

All administrations lie, but what we are seeing here is an attack on credibility itself.

The Russian dissident and chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov drew upon long familiarity with that process when he tweeted: “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”

the real threat is not merely that a large number of Americans have become accustomed to rejecting factual information, or even that they have become habituated to believing hoaxes. The real danger is that, inundated with “alternative facts,” many voters will simply shrug, asking, “What is truth?” — and not wait for an answer.

In that world, the leader becomes the only reliable source of truth; a familiar phenomenon in an authoritarian state, but a radical departure from the norms of a democratic society. The battle over truth is now central to our politics.

as George Orwell said: “The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.”

Trump and company seem to be betting that much of the electorate will not care if the president tells demonstrable lies, and will pick and choose whatever “alternative facts” confirm their views.

If we want to restore respect for facts and break through the intellectual ghettos on both the right and left, the mainstream media will have to be aggressive without being hysterical and adversarial without being unduly oppositional.

it will be incumbent on conservative media outlets to push back as well. Conservatism should be a reality-based philosophy, and the movement will be better off if it recognizes that facts really do matter.

The conservative media ecosystem — like the rest of us — has to recognize how critical, but also how fragile, credibility is in the Orwellian age of Donald Trump.