'The conspiracy theorist is generally dismissed as an irrational animal.' Jeff Pachoud/AFP/Getty Images
In the twilight of Joe Biden’s presidency, ex-rock star turned MAGA maven Ted Nugent posted an ominous message: “They are not ‘predicting’ food shortages. They are planning them.”
At around the same time, shit-posting Disney action hero and mixed martial artist Gina Carano spotted a grand historical pattern: “Mao attacked farmers. Stalin attacked farmers. Now, world governments are attacking farmers. Same group throughout history. It’s a playbook, it’s not a chance happening. Wake up.” Then Wide Awake Media posted an image of thousands of acres of “prime agricultural land” squandered by solar panels, captioned with a rhetorical question: “is this one of the reasons for the globalist war on agriculture?”
The global famine conspiracists lurk on X and Facebook and YouTube. They are the ones who repeatedly remind us that Henry Kissinger said “control foods and you control the people”, despite the fact he never said such a thing. They will try to convince you that lab-grown meat and red dye 3 and bird flu are all part of the same plan, and that the best defence against a cosmopolitan elite intent on confiscating your farm and foisting crushed beetles down your throat is a gun.
The conspiracy theorist is generally dismissed as an irrational animal, yet the preachers of global famine are obsessed with logic and reason. Their dystopian vision emerges from a complex yet idiosyncratic understanding of history that ranges from Joseph in Egypt to the German multi-national Bayer, engineers of genetically modified Roundup Ready wheat that can only be grown with the aid of their own patented Roundup Ready insecticides — thereby guaranteeing corporate control of the world’s bagels and buns.
Lately, their cup of evidence has runneth over: spiking commodity prices of coffee and cocoa, the mass death of bees, and the fact that a dozen companies own more than 500 consumer brands. Why else would the World Economic Forum force us to consume insects if they were not plotting to make farmers obsolete? Then there’s Tucker Carlson, who registered his famine fears during the Netherlands farmer protests in 2022: “Messing with the food supply tends to cause food crises, and then famine,” he surmised. “We should be worried with the big things. And the food supply is the biggest thing.”
One might be tempted to dismiss all this as the latest chapter of a longstanding story that historian Richard Hofstadter dubbed the “The Paranoid Style in American History”, a narrative that lays all our woes at the feet of covert operations. Yet when it comes to global famine, the theorists and their longstanding nemesis — the CIA — are on the same page, along with another unlikely ally, the United States Department of Defense. They all agree on one thing: how fast civil society can crumble when starvation knocks.
The espionage professional knows two truths about hunger: the first is that people do not starve because there is not enough food, but — as Nobel Prize laureate Amartya Sen has proven over and over again, from the Bengal famine of 1943 to Bangladesh in 1974 to Somalia and Sudan several times over — they starve because they cannot afford the price of food. In his groundbreaking work, Poverty and Famines, Sen showed that during the worst period of the Irish famine of the 1840s, ships packed with wheat, oats, cattle, hogs, eggs, and butter sailed south from the hardest hit areas to the markets of London. Similarly, during the worst of the Ethiopian famine of 1973, the country’s food production did not decline. The problem was that the food that could have saved famine-struck regions like the Wollo province and Tigray went to more affluent purchasers in Addis Ababa instead. Such food “counter-movements” led Sen to conclude that famines had as much to do with money and politics as with agricultural output, which in turn indicated that direct cash supplements, for instance, could help solve the problem. No matter how many poor people starved, the rich never lost their most basic entitlement: a full stomach.
The second truth is that one of the quickest paths to massive popular demonstrations — and even regime change — is food inflation, hashtag the 2011 uprisings and conflicts throughout Syria, Iraq, Libya, Tunisia, and Yemen, collectively known as the “Arab Spring”.
These ideas have defined American government policy. After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the newly formed United States Department of Homeland Security defined the food sector as one of 17 federally recognised “critical infrastructures”. War games ensued, such as the “Silent Farmland” exercise in North Carolina, the “Silent Prairie” exercise in Washington, and “Exercise High Stakes” in Kansas. “Food defence” became a term of art, closely followed by a stream of white papers that introduced the idea of “agroterrorism” — that is, chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear threats to the food supply chain. Such concerns gained credence in 2018 when swine flu swept China, the home of around 400 million pigs — half the world’s supply.
That same year, an eclectic group of academics from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (in other words, the CIA), the United States War College, the Department of Defense, Los Alamos, and NASA’s Earth Observation for Security and Agriculture Consortium published an in-depth study on the risks of catastrophic failure. “Consolidation has become a defining characteristic of the evolution of the global food system,” noted the report. “Capturing any individual concentrated node within the global food system can have widespread and lasting ramifications.”
The way to strengthen the system was clear: build a more complex and resilient web of supply chains, originating from a widespread network of farms. Buying produce from your local green market had become as valuable an asset as signal intelligence from the Mossad. No one noticed the irony that the DOD had come around to the same set of social imperatives as the radical Left La Via Campesina, aka, the Global Peasant Movement: support local farmers.
All of a sudden, everyone agreed — from the tinfoil-hat basement dwellers to cloak-and-dagger spooks to the overalls and pick-up crowd. And today, as American food prices ratchet up hand in hand with Trump tariffs levied against Canada, Europe, Mexico, and just about any food importer anywhere, food security has become an even bigger unifier.
For the person who benefits the most from unaffordable guacamole on Super Bowl Sunday is Vladimir Putin, a man who has made it his life’s work to study the dynamics of regime change — and has now put it in action. As a recent white paper from the Center for Strategic & International Studies noted: “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has caused the greatest military-related increase in global food insecurity in at least a century.” The Russian president has repeatedly targeted Ukraine’s agricultural infrastructure — its farms, fields, food processing facilities, and agricultural labour force — causing more than $40 billion in losses. The CSIS report concluded that the ensuing trade tensions “undermine European support for Ukraine”.
All this means that food security has become a hot topic in the mainstream media. The faux populists at The New York Post have been all over the food inflation story, noting that since the first of this year, egg and poultry price gouging reports were up more than 840%. The New York Times delivered its inimitable bourgeois version of the crisis, mapping the rising price of beef bourguignon at Le Bouillon Chartier in Paris, thereby revealing the untold story of buttered carrots (the price of the root vegetable has skyrocketed 20% in the last five years, and butter 30%).
Trump isn’t helping the matter. Already, his USDA has cancelled one-billion dollars’ worth of funding for local food purchasing for schools — that is, money to buy produce from nearby farms. Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s DOGE has attempted to defund the World Food Program. And Trump’s new head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lee Zeldin, is doing his best to stop lawsuits against Bayer for their Roundup-induced cancers. If hunger spreads because people can’t afford the price of food, why is the Trump administration tinkering with social security benefits and the SNAP programme for school breakfast and lunch, both of which are now in the sights of the DOGE minions?
Yet, for once, the conspiracists don’t want to hear it. At a time when food security talk consumes the mainstream media — with The New York Times headlining famine in Sudan and Gaza, and even the staid Economist writing of “The coming food catastrophe” — the global famine conspiracy theorists have gone silent. Since Trump came to office, Ted Nugent has been content to hock 50th-anniversary autographed Stranglehold t-shirts. Wide Awake Media is back to analysing the hidden truth bombs dropped by internet paint-by-numbers phenomenon, Bob Ross, RIP. Illuminatibot has reverted to publicising the evils of Frazzledrip — the “elites drug of choice”.
Concerned that after 5,000 years the global hunger conspiracy might have gone silent, I dropped into the DMs of my old friend, Jacob Angeli-Chansley, aka the Q-Anon Shaman (the tattooed young man who wore horns to the January 6 insurrection, then went on hunger strike until he was provided with organic prison food), with whom I had spent some quality time in Phoenix last April. I was gratified to learn he had recently acquired his own cryptocurrency, $haman. Perhaps this was a hedge on food inflation?
I wanted to know how long the MAGA mafia could continue to harness the social media machine before the price of bacon and eggs took down the administration. After all — and just as the Department of Defense and Ted Nugent predicted — it was food inflation (plus a shot or two of senility) that took down Biden.
As usual, Jake was happy to provide the media with true facts: “Whether it’s to make people obese and die early or deathly thin and die early, hunger is the weapon used by tyrants and psychopaths to get their way, when all other means have exhausted themselves.”
Of course, after Trump pardoned him, the Shaman’s first move was to trade in his bullhorn and spear for something far more effective when it comes to protecting his daily bread. As is his wont, he posted it:
“NOW I AM GONNA BUY SOME MOTHA F— GUNS!!!”
Frederick Kaufman is a contributing editor at Harper’s magazine and a professor of English and Journalism at the College of Staten Island. His next project is a book about the world’s first political reactionary.
FredericKaufman 
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SubscribeProgressives prioritize metro votes to buy, commodities are produced in rural jurisdictions.
They need free trade to make sure they don’t have to buy votes from the rednecks.
I sure hope this costs them in the fullness of time.
The article read well until the author told us that he went to consult some weirdo who wears a horned hat about the underlying issues. I stopped reading after that.
I’m as triggered by a misattributed quote as the next pedant, but “Kissinger didn’t say it” is a bad take. Whoever coined it, “control food, control people” is terrifyingly true.
The mocking tone throughout this article is unworthy of UnHerd.
It is insane to cover agricultural land with solar panels.
Efforts to promote lab-grown “meat” and insects as food are sinister.
We should be wary of government efforts to undermine family farms.
Interesting that conspiracy theorists stick to thinks like food (they are poisoning it), vaccines (they have chips in them) etc.
Ignoring the one product that really does have a homunculus within that does not have your interests at heart – software.
Conspiracy theorist here
A wide range of views are dismissed under the conspiracy banner.
I haven’t seen convincing evidence for nanobots in vaccines, but there clearly has been a conspiracy to privatise profits and socialise risks, to push vaccines on low-risk groups (particularly for COVID, Hepatitis and HPV) and to exaggerate vaccine safety and efficacy.
What about food? There clearly has been a conspiracy to subsidise and promote unhealthy foods, especially in the US. Does the ruling class want us to eat addictive junk so that we’ll be unhealthy, infertile, and reliant on medical interventions? Or are those just happy side effects of a policy that’s mostly about maximising food revenue? Either way, corporations manipulate the government, and the government manipulates the people.
I see plenty of scepticism of Big Tech in conspiracy circles. There’s nothing inherently wrong with software; it’s as good or bad as the people who write it. Linus Torvalds and Eric S. Raymond have almost certainly done more good than harm; Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, probably the opposite. AI is inherently risky, but it’s especially dangerous in the hands of bad people.
What do the Coincidence Theorists and Incompetence Theorists make of all this?
If the aim of the WEF’s Agenda 2030 is that by the end of the decade we should own nothing (and be happy), then it’s only a small step to remove all our access to food. Then we can truly be replaced by a robotic army of workers driven precisely by the solar energy cells that are taking the land from the farmers.
It’s time for specialists to emerge as experts on the best bugs for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Sow bugs and heads of locust for example, okay for lunch but you wouldn’t want them by candlelight in an expensive restaurant. You would want ladybugs or slugs au gratin.
Well, why not? “They” didn’t predict a “Pandemic”, they planned and created one.
Oh. A progressive hit job.
Furthermore, the quote from Gina Carano, whoever she is, is trenchant and appropriate: “Mao attacked farmers. Stalin attacked farmers. Now, world governments are attacking farmers. Same group throughout history. It’s a playbook, it’s not a chance happening.”
There are too many things being foisted on us for reasons that are non-sensical, at best, to continue to simply dismiss the “conspiracy theories”. World War III, NetZero, open borders, the “next” pandemic, speech restrictions….
We deserve some answers.
Regarding welfare cuts, cuts to drug rehabilitation programmes, cuts to local food procurement and cuts to the world food program, the twin reasoning is to cut dependency on the State and encourage personal responsibility and to give States more financial control over procurement, both with the aim of slowing down national debt growth and releasing Federal funds to support any emerging domestic faultlines in the wake of his international economic reordering.
The reason why conspiracy groups are silent on this is an unknown other than, like the rest of us, we are waiting to see how the bigger picture unfolds. Similarly I imagine they have been somewhat placated by recent JD Vance interjections regarding the perceived tensions between MAGA populism and techno futurist libertarianism.
Food was exported from Ireland during the Famine but not from the congested districts of the West, the areas hit hardest from the famine and from which my own family fled to England – too poor to get to America. The Irish famine was not a case of market pricing out of the poor as was the case in Bengal, where the absence of imports from Burma and Churchill’s racist intransigence were also in play. It was a natural socio-ecological disaster and to be blunt more are coming. This is stupid article which displays no understanding of the vulnerability of food systems to over reliance on a limited crop base, shortage of key inputs notably phosphates, and the potential impact of global warming. David Byrne
Under Peel famine relief kept the population alive in Ireland. Under Russell, rigid laissez-faire orthodoxy saw a million die. HMG did spend 7 million on famine relief. They spent 20 million compensating slave owners in the Caribbean.
Famine and famine-related diseases have been the primary cause of civilian death in scorched-earth warfare for centuries, famously in the Hunger Plan of World War Two.
It was an accepted facet of warfare during the European wars of religion. If you could control your supply lines while destroying those of your enemy, you could lose every tactical battle and still retain strategic supremacy.
In Ireland between 10% and 40% of local populations were killed in military campaigns from the 1580s through much of the 17th century.
The accounts of decent English soldiers during the 9 Years War are fascinating, reflecting anguish at the suffering they were imposing on civilians while insisting it was a strategic imperative. One Captain Trevor even launched a campaign against cannibalism, executing old women who had killed and eaten children. It would have been all the more laudable if they hadn’t destroyed the food supply in the first place.
The irony is that this article is full of mockery of people out finds credulous. Sure these people are credulous in a way that is easy to mock, but their concerns are oriented towards a issue that it’s critical as even the author concedes. But the author’s thinking is the most credulous of all in a truly foolish and naive way – “they are cutting budgets for food program X!” – thinking that a program’s name represent what it actually does. I can assure you, in America virtually no school is buying local farm produce and cooking and putting it on plates in any meaningful way. But there is an initiative whose name suggests that, so you’re all twisted up about it.
What this really represents is left-brain thinking (mocking author who superficially grasps and thinks he knows it’s all) thinking it’s superior to right-brain thinking (embarrassing cranks who intuit that there are fundamental problems). Thank you Ian McGilchrist for showing how this underlies major human issues.
A contributing editor at Harper’s magazine and a professor of English and Journalism. Do you need to know any more?