Andrew Simms (Tescopoly) has written an excellent commentary in The Guardian about the fragility of global supply chains: about how Britain can no longer power and heat itself without using energy imports, and how dependent we are upon other nations for our food supply.

Looking back to the fuel protests of 2000, which I remember well as I watched them from a slight dislocate by means of a foreign hotel’s TV, he explains the seriousness of the situation. It was apparently much worse than any of us thought:

This year is the 10th anniversary of the fuel protests, when supermarket bosses sat with ministers and civil servants in Whitehall warning that there were just three days of food left. We were, in effect, nine meals from anarchy. Suddenly, the apocalyptic visions of novelists and film-makers seemed less preposterous. Civilisation’s veneer may be much thinner than we like to think. (Source: Nine Meals from Anarchy, Guardian)

What would have happened if it had come to that: no more food for the nation?

I know that our little plot in the back garden would be far from sufficient to feed us through the slim months – particularly in winter. Right now we only have potatoes in bags and parsnips in the ground, both of which have probably been ruined by weeks of snow and ice.

The chickens? Well, they’re giving us roughly an egg a day. It’s a long time since we’ve had a day of three (or even two, come to that) and one egg between two grown adults doesn’t go a long way. That leaves what we have in the freezer, what we’ve preserved from last summer’s harvest, and the pantry.

If this isn’t proof positive that Britain needs to get growing again, I don’t know what is. We have lost our Blitz spirit, and we no longer work the land, because it’s easier to import pineapples from the Maldives and grapes from the Middle East than to hoe a trench for carrots and keep butterflies off our home-grown sprouts. Surely that’s wrong.

Seasonal eating is now the exception, not the rule. So is growing your own. With troubled times ahead, those two approaches are dangerous folly.

It seems almost unthinkable that your local supermarket should run out of food, but what if it did. Could you cope?

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Peter Barron is the editor of Newsnight, BBC2′s flagship daily news programme, fronted by the famously no-nonsense Jeremy Paxman.

Writing on the BBC Editors blog this week, Barron asked how green the BBC ought to be, and whether it has a duty to try and green up its viewers. His conclusions, rather predictably, were that while it should try and cover green issues in a balanced manner, which means largely following scientific opinion that the warming of our planet is caused by human activities, the BBC should not and must not become a campaigning organisation in its own right on this issue.

He was spurred by Paxman’s comments about BBC hypocrisy on the issue. Writing in an internal BBC publication, Ariel, Paxman had pointed out that:

The BBC’s environment correspondents, even the makers of series like Planet Earth, are trapped in a bizarre arrangement in which they travel the globe to tell the audience of the dangers of climate change while leaving a vapour trail which will make the problem even worse… It strikes me as very odd indeed that an organisation which affects such a high moral tone cannot be more environmentally responsible. [souce: This is London]

But really the BBC is in a it of a wedge here, for it has a duty to dispatch its reporters to bring us these stories. Further, it could be argued that sending one crew off to the Amazon delta to bring the issue of deforestation to a potential audience of millions means that the opportunity for us viewers to offset the carbon footprint of that trip by amending our daily lies is increased. These trips, polluting though they may be, could actually be highly environmentally profitable for the world as a whole.

It would further be wholly wrong for the BBC, as a publicly-funded body, to spend license-payers’ money on carbon offsets. That’s not what the license is for, and spending it in this way would be a betrayal of the trust between the BBC and its public, regardless of that fact that I would personally be more than happy to see some of my contribution spent that way.

Increasingly this looks like a no-win situation for the BBC, which has been forced into an impossible position by the comments of one of its most high-profile employees.

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1. Green Charles, red Queen
2. Easy Green Tomato Chutney Recipe
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