Pod Insights The Blindboy Podcast What the history of Onions can tell us about Trumps tariff war About this episode Episode 400. What the history of Onions can tell us about Trumps tariff war Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript 11,037 words · 9 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:04 Blindboy Boatclub? Swerve past the pervert's gerbil, you useless Susans. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. All country's got a queer throat. I've got a queer throat this week. I've been hovering up the strepsils, but I caught myself some type of Southern Hemisphere Tansillitis on an airplane to Australia. The dry air, the dry air, and the flight must have vandalized my gullet and left me croaking like an anxious hawk, a bereaved hawk. A hawk, a hawk with a dead wife.
1:42 Blindboy Boatclub? Croaking from its nest, that's what I sound like, a hawk with a dead wife. I don't know why that's funny. It's really sad, because hawks are endangered. I'm just imagining, I'm imagining a pair of hawks getting married, you know? They're just, they're very expressive faces. Hawks have a lot of expression in their eyes and their beaks, and I think they'd look very funny in a little tuxedo or a dress. No disrespect to the hawks out there, wonderful birds.
2:15 Blindboy Boatclub? Close relation to the buzzard, almost went extinct. Buzzards almost went extinct in Ireland, but since about 2009, it's been a very successful campaign to reintroduce buzzards, which of course, apex predators, incredibly important indigenous animals for biodiversity. Actually, something I wanted to mention this week, something that gave me wonderful hope. When I was coming back, so, so as you know, I was over in fucking Australia and New Zealand, had a wonderful time. And I flew back there last week.
2:54 Blindboy Boatclub? And when I was driving from Dublin Airport back to Limerick, the fucking windscreen on the car was battered with insects. By the time we got to Tipperary, it was difficult to see out the window. My buddy Chris was driving me back. Chris, Chris actually just has a, speaking about birds of prey, Chris lives in an actual cow shed and he has an owl. An owl lives in the attic of his cow shed and he feeds the owl biscuits and the owl eats them, which I did not think owls would eat biscuits.
3:36 Blindboy Boatclub? We were driving back from fucking Dublin and we got as far as Tipperary and you could barely see out the fucking window. And I, I saw this and I assumed, I assumed that the road was dirty. And then we looked closer and it's like, no, it's insects, insects. The windshield is battered with insects. It had been so long since I'd seen that, that I assumed it was dark from the road. I haven't seen.
4:10 Blindboy Boatclub? A windshield battered with insects since I was a young child, about 10 years of age at least. And I didn't notice that that had stopped happening until it was, until it was pointed out. That's the thing with biodiversity collapse, it's very slow. Like, I remember sometime around 2015, no, earlier, about 2012, remember about 2012, going out for cans in the summertime, summertime evening cans in someone's garden. You know, when the sun, when the sun is that gorgeous, slanty, peachy, orange that you
4:49 Blindboy Boatclub? get in June, and it's the evening time, and the cold of night time is just creeping in, and you're drinking cans, and it's beautiful, except your head is really itchy because of all the midges that are eating your head. And I remember around 2012, drinking cans in the evening at a garden party and going, something's off here, what's going on? Why isn't my head itchy? And then from then on, I noticed that my head wasn't itchy in the evening times because the insects were dying, the insects were fucking dying. I had memories of my itchy childhood scalp. And now the insects were dying, no more fucking midges. And it's the same thing with the windshields, just noticed about 10 years ago.
5:34 Blindboy Boatclub? Holy fuck. Why aren't windshields? At, at first I thought it was, maybe it's the new design of cars, maybe windshield wipers are better. I think of all these excuses, because I'm like, I remember being a kid, and marveling at the amount of insects that were on the windshield after a drive in the country. I remember this. Where are the insects gone? And, and you're blaming technology and then...
6:05 Blindboy Boatclub? You finally realise, oh no, the insects are dead. This is called biodiversity collapse. It's really serious. It's serious because it's the destruction of, of an ecosystem. What, what would it mean for Ireland if the insect populations collapsed? You'd have less food because those insects pollinate. They pollinate fucking crops that we grow to eat. You'd have less mammals because those mammals, whether it be birds or rabbits or rats or whatever the fuck, badgers, they eat insects. So if the insects are dying, they run out of their natural food source. Same with fish and the health of rivers that depend upon insects. It's an ecosystem.
6:46 Blindboy Boatclub? Fucking animals and wood and rotting things wouldn't decompose because the insects wouldn't be there to help them decompose. That would cause an imbalance in soil chemicals. You'd have a complete collapse. So biodiversity collapse is very important. So I was thrilled. I was so happy to see that many dead insects on my windshield on the way back from fucking Dublin last week. It's a very good sign. And then, when I got home, my buddy, Colly Ennis, who I've had on this podcast about four times. Colly is an expert on insects and Colly is now, he's a biodiversity officer up in Trinity College.
7:30 Blindboy Boatclub? So his job, his job is literally keeping track of insect numbers in Ireland. He posted, and this was, this was about a day after I saw all those fucking insects on my windshield. Colly posted, "I've seen more native bees and butterflies in the last week than I did all last summer." Very encouraging. So that's the Trinity College biodiversity officer saying.
7:57 Blindboy Boatclub? In one week, in one week in Ireland, he's seen more bees and butterflies than he saw all last summer. So that's, that's really, really fucking important. And I must, I must bring Colly back on to speak about this, but you know, I'd casted Georgie Addis on the podcast last week, speaking about biodiversity in Australia and the importance of having your own little wildflower garden or your own little pond. And I've spoken about my wildflower garden, which is tiny, but how I've seen, it takes about a year, but how I've seen just a tiny patch of wildflower, introduced to me insects I'd never seen before in my life in a tiny patch.
8:42 Blindboy Boatclub? I've watched it. Nature is powerful. And in Ireland, since, since around Covid, since around maybe 2021, we've had the All Ireland Pollinator Plan. And what this is, it's an initiative, right? It's, it's, it's government driven. I think it's funded by the EU. And it's been an initiative since 2021 involving local authorities, businesses, schools, farmers, you, me. It's an initiative to create habitats for pollinators, for, for insects specifically to pollinate, but all fucking insects.
9:26 Blindboy Boatclub? And this can mean building ponds, but the big one, the big one is, and you'll have noticed this, just local councils not mowing as much during the summer, not mowing as much on the side of roads and in roundabouts in particular, roundabouts that are messy and that are full of native wildflower. And this is happening up and down the country. And I hope, I hope that all those insects that splattered against my fucking windshield, I know they're dead, sorry about that, but I hope.
10:01 Blindboy Boatclub? That all those insects that splattered against my windshield are a direct, a direct result of that all-Ireland pollinator plan. And I hope that, as Colly said, he's seen bees and butterflies, you know, more in one week than he saw all last summer. I hope that that's a result of the pollinator plan too. I'm saying hope because this is just anecdotal. I'm not a scientist. This is anecdotal observations. But we really need, we need a success. We need a success like that. We need to see that our actions have results. Because that's motivating. When you see that, when you see, holy fuck.
10:47 Blindboy Boatclub? All the insects in Ireland were on the brink of extinction. And then we just, everybody just stopped cutting their fucking lawns. And people got stuck in and built a few ponds. And now things are improving? Really? That's why I'm being chased by a wasp? Really? We need that. We really, really need that. Because that type of, that success gives us hope. And then the hope gives us action. Which, I'm kind of paraphrasing something that Costa said last week. I still, I sound like a fucker. I still sound like a bereaved hawk. A hawk. A hawk who's crying. Because there's no mice for the hawk to eat. Because the mice have no insects to eat.
11:30 Blindboy Boatclub? If this is your first episode of this podcast, I suggest going back to an earlier episode to familiarize yourself with the lore of this podcast. I don't know if this is gonna be a good one to start off on. I'm absolutely ravished from jet lag too. Every night, my eyelids are falling out of my head at about half seven in the evening. And I'm having to force myself to stay awake to about 11 or 12. I've been through, I've been through so many time zones that I think it takes 14 days for my body to fully get back to Irish time. And I'm really noticing it. I'm gonna answer some of your questions this week.
12:10 Blindboy Boatclub? I asked, I asked people on Instagram for some questions or what do you want me to chat about? Usually when I do these fucking podcasts where I answer questions, I rarely get around to answering multiple questions. I'm gonna try to answer multiple questions. Ali asked, can you speak about the history of onions? That's a great question. That's a wonderful question.
12:37 Blindboy Boatclub? You know, I love doing podcasts about food.
12:41 Blindboy Boatclub? Food, food holds knowledge, food is a way to. You can read stories from food in the absence of writing. Food is, is human behaviour. Food is human desire. So onions, you'd assume onions are one of these more modern vegetables. Is it a vegetable? It's a bulb.
13:06 Blindboy Boatclub? You'd assume it's one of these fucking foodstuffs that came over from the Americas. It has a bang of the Americas about it, but it's not, it's from, it's from Asia.
13:20 Blindboy Boatclub? One of the first vegetables that, that humans domesticated. We've had onions for a long time, six, seven thousand years. The wild ancestor of the onion, which would have grown around China, up as far as Pakistan. The wild ancestor of the onion probably would have looked like a spring onion. Smaller, a little bulb underneath the soil. And then humans just picked the best ones until we ended up with what we now call an onion. They're great because they can make you cry when you cut them. What the fuck is that about? And
14:04 Blindboy Boatclub? raw onion is disgusting. Maybe you like it, I don't know. I find raw onion to be very offensive and violent. But then when you cook it, it's wonderful and sweet. I use onions in almost every single dish. It just adds a wonderful savoury sweetness. The ancient Egyptians used to worship onions. They believed that the concentric circles and the nature of the onion's layer. Revealed something about eternity. Onions are really durable. They take a long time to go off. And they're protected. They're really sturdy fuckers. Protected in their own little weird paper.
14:50 Blindboy Boatclub? And Jesus Christ, I'd be keeping onions for a long time. And it's very rare, I could have onions there for a month. And it's very rare that I'd take out an onion. And it's unusable. They really, they keep well for a long time compared to other vegetables. And in the Middle Ages. Sometimes onions were acceptable as currency because of this durability. Now I'm just listing off interesting onion facts there. Because someone asked me to go researching into onions. So I went delving into the onion facts. And looking for that story. What can onions tell us about? About humans? And something really fascinating.
15:35 Blindboy Boatclub? You know the stereotypical image of a Frenchman, right? If you grew up watching American and English TV, particularly comedy, right? The stereotypical, the stereotype of a French person is. A fella with a handlebar moustache, a beret. A black and white stripy jumper. And then a bushel of onions hanging around his neck. And that popped into my head, I was like, why, why do we, what's going on with?
16:06 Blindboy Boatclub? Why is the stereotypical caricature of French people? Why do they have onions around their necks? What the fuck is that about? Like here in Ireland, we've got these crisps. Onion rings. You've got onion rings everywhere, every, you've got onion rings in America. You have them in Britain too. In Ireland, we've got onion rings and they're called Johnny onion rings. And on the front of the packet is a cartoon of a little Frenchman with onions around his neck. So I wanted to figure out what the fuck is this about? And I went looking into the story and it's quite interesting and it tells us a lot about, about trade. And it tells us about what's going on at the moment with Donald Trump and his tariffs. So onions grow everywhere. They grow in most climates.
16:51 Blindboy Boatclub? Now, in the northeast of France, there's an area called Brittany, right? Brittany, it's in France, but they're, they're different to, to, to French people. In the way that the Basque people are different. People of Brittany are Breton and they don't speak French. They speak Breton, which is, it's, it's fairly a unique language because it's, it's a Celtic language. It's, it's not, it's not a Latin Roman influenced language like French or English. So the people of Brittany, northwest of France, just, it's nearly close to England, you know? Just poking out of France, nearly close to England across the channel.
17:37 Blindboy Boatclub? This was a very poor region in like the eighteen hundreds, right? Quite a poor region. The people are culturally different to the French. Very rugged terrain, sandy soil with great drainage. And wonderful for growing vegetables, in particular, onions. Around the coast, there's this port in Brittany called Roscoff. And they grow these wonderful pink, bright pink onions called Roscoff onions. And they were particularly delicious onions. Now, Brittany is poor, so the onion farmers of Brittany, they wanna sell their onions in Paris, right? They wanna go inland in France to fuck in Paris with their onions.
18:23 Blindboy Boatclub? But Brittany is so rugged and hilly and mountainous that in, in like the eighteen twenties, the journey on foot or by donkey or whatever, from Brittany to Paris with your onions, was just too much effort. It was too much hassle. It wasn't worth it. See of all these onion farmers in, in Brittany, these Breton farmers with their wonderful sweet pink onions. And they're like, we've nowhere to sell these onions. We can't trade these onions. It's too much hassle getting to Paris. What'll we do? Now, the beauty of the onion, like I said, is that it's durable. It's protected by its own skin. It doesn't go off. It stays fresh for a long time, so long as you keep it dry.
19:07 Blindboy Boatclub? So every summer, the onion farmers of Brittany, they used to say, we don't have to go to France. Why don't we go across the English Channel and bring our onions to England on little boats? So this is like early eighteen hundreds. So the Brittany farmers, every summer, that's what they did. They'd get on a small boat, not even a ship, they'd get onto a boat themselves, packet full of their pink onions. And then they'd row across the English Channel and they'd go to England. The first people they met on the docks were sailors, because you know, the British fucking navy, big deal. Now sailors were terrified of scurvy. Scurvy is when you don't have vitamin C in your diet.
19:52 Blindboy Boatclub? So the sailors would buy the onions because the onions kept well on the ship when they go out to sea. And the onions have vitamin C. You have to remember, this is the early eighteen hundreds. You can't keep things fresh. And also, this is before the Jaffa orange, okay? Because you're thinking sailors, vitamin C. Did they not have oranges? Did they not have limes? In the early eighteen hundreds, no, not really. The oranges and limes that were available to them, they used to go rotten. They'd go rotten. It wasn't until the invention of the Jaffa orange, which I've done an entire podcast on, I think it's called, I think it's called The Blood Soaked History of Jaffa Eggs, from a couple of months back.
20:35 Blindboy Boatclub? The Jaffa orange, which was bred in Palestine, that was the first Swede orange with a really thick skin that could be transported across great distances and would keep. But before the Jaffa orange, English sailors were like, gonna have to eat a raw onion so I don't die. So these, these, these, these lads are coming over from Brittany, these Bretton lads, on their little boats. And they're selling their pink onions to the sailors and the sailors are buying them. The Bretton lads go back, they tell their friends, they say, fuck Paris, get on a boat and go to England. They're mad for our onions over there. Then they start travelling further afield and they make it to Wales.
21:20 Blindboy Boatclub? And the Breton onion farmers have a wonderful crack in Wales because the Breton language, the language in Brittany, it's a Celtic language, it's way closer to Cornish and to Welsh than it is to English. So these Breton onion farmers are in Wales now, we're talking eighteen twenty, and they're wearing traditional Breton clothes. So the traditional Breton clothes is they wear a Breton shirt, which is a black and white striped shirt that comes from Brittany, and they're wearing a beret, which is a Breton hat. They're travelling all around Wales and England, and they're selling pink onions, Roscoff onions, door
22:04 Blindboy Boatclub? to door. And the easiest way for them to transport these onions is they wear them around their neck. And they became known locally as onion johnnies. And that's where that, that's where the stereotypical image of the Frenchman comes from. It wasn't Frenchmen, they were, they were from Brittany. They're Breton onion johnnies, who literally were a very common sight in the summertime in Wales and Cornwall and in England, when they would walk around with stripy shirts and onions around their necks. And here's the thing, the pink onions that they were selling, I wouldn't call them a luxury item, but they were, they were expensive. They were expensive because they were grown in Brittany,
22:47 Blindboy Boatclub? the lads had to bring them over themselves. They, they were able to, if you're on a fucking small boat, you're not bringing that many onions with you. You're bringing maybe two sacks at most. That's not a lot of onions. And then you're hanging them around your neck. So that's a small amount of onions. But yes, just selling that small amount of onions alone is enough to pay these farmers wages for the years, so, for the year. So it was incredibly lucrative to go to England or Wales with a tiny amount of pink onions and sell them. So they were quite expensive and people were willing to buy them because they were scarce. What I would compare it to is, and just because I've come back from Australia.
23:32 Blindboy Boatclub? It's hard to get drugs in Australia. It's hard to get cocaine in Australia. Because it's hard to get cocaine into Australia. Australia's got tight fucking borders, right? A lot of Irish people go to Australia, right? And chances are, you know someone who's been caught bringing coke into Australia. I know someone who was caught bringing coke into Australia. Irish lads or girls can bring a small amount of cocaine to Australia and sell it for four or five times the price over there. Because it's a scarce, sought-after commodity. It's expensive. And it's worth their while bringing that small amount of coke to Australia.
24:15 Blindboy Boatclub? So these onion johnnies in the eighteen twenties, they're selling pink onions that are about the same price as cocaine in Australia. Quite expensive sought-after onions that people were willing to buy. So that's where we get our stereotypical Frenchman image. Onion johnnies, they were real people. And they disappeared just after World War Two. Because after World War Two, Britain was fucked. And Britain became economically protectionist. As in, Britain limited the amount of fruit and vegetables coming into the country to boost domestic production of fruit and vegetables for their own economy.
24:59 Blindboy Boatclub? So after that, these pink fucking onions weren't coming in unless they were smuggled. Now, today I can buy onions. I can go out to Dun's or Aldi and I can buy onions and they're really, really cheap. French onions, Spanish onions, whatever I want, they're really cheap. Those Britney onions, the pink ones in the eighteen twenties, I can't tell you how much they cost, but like I said, a tiny amount that you could put around your neck was worth travelling to Wales on a boat, spending three months of summer there. That was enough to give an onion farmer his yearly wage. So they were probably quite expensive. They shouldn't be that expensive. They've travelled a long journey, they're quite scarce, they come from a particular region,
25:45 Blindboy Boatclub? they're sought after. They should be expensive. They're a delicacy. And then the onions that grow up the road, in the field, they're the cheap onions. So why are all my onions now, today, why are they all dead cheap? Because of free trade agreements and globalization, which that gives me cheap onions, but there's hidden costs. It's not necessarily a good thing. The world today is built on, on free trade agreements and globalization. Donald Trump, the past few weeks, is attacking that. I don't really understand why. A lot of people don't understand why. There doesn't appear to be a clear plan.
26:29 Blindboy Boatclub? And some people are even, aren't sure he knows what he's fucking doing. But to give you an example of, like, free trade, there's a city in Spain that I love called Cardoba. And I've been there many times to write my books. One year, I think it was about 2017. I was in Cardoba and I ran out of moisturizer. I fucking love moisturizer. I, I adore moisturizer. I love moisturizing my face. I love washing my face in the morning and then it feels dry because I've just washed it. And then rubbing wonderful moisturizer on my face. It feels great. It's as important to me as brushing my teeth.
27:09 Blindboy Boatclub? If I don't have moisturizer on my face, I notice it. My face feels tight and itchy. So I was in Cardoba once and I ran out of my fucking moisturizer. And I was like, bollocks. My specific moisturizer, I can't buy it here in Spain. Fuck, what am I gonna do? So I walked into a little shop. And they made their own moisturizers from olive oil, an olive oil moisturizer. And I bought it and it was like God wanking onto my face. It was like my skin was drinking the moisturizer, the, the most wonderful, beautiful moisturizer I've ever had. With this citrusy smell of lemons off it. And it quickly became my favorite moisturizer in the whole world.
27:52 Blindboy Boatclub? I bought multiple bottles and took them back to Ireland. And last week I finally ran out. I ran out of these fucking moisturizers that you can only get in one shop in Cardoba in Spain. Because they make it in this one shop and I ran out of it. This is, this is technically a luxury item.
28:12 Blindboy Boatclub? I can only get this in one shop in fucking Spain. This is really scarce. This is coveted to me. It should have been a disaster last week. My favourite moisturiser is gone. What am I gonna do? How will I get it again? It wasn't a problem. It wasn't a problem. I went online, the shop had a website. The moisturiser, it's not expensive. It's like sixteen quid for one bottle and that bottle lasts me six months. So that's not expensive at all. I just happen to love the moisturiser. But I clicked the button. I bought the Spanish moisturiser for the exact same price, the exact same price. As if I'd have walked into the shop in fucking Spain and it gets sent to my gaff for the exact same price.
28:55 Blindboy Boatclub? Because there's free trade in the EU. There's no tariffs. I can order moisturiser from Spain and it goes to Limerick and it's the same price as if I was in fucking Spain. That's free trade. That's globalisation. Wonderful. For me, for a consumer, that's fucking wonderful, but it kinda shouldn't exist. That moisturiser had to come over on a boat or on a plane. There was significant environmental impact. Just so I could buy fucking moisturiser in Spain for sixteen quid. The environment takes the hit. So that I can have access to free trade like that. So that I can have access to Spanish beauty products.
29:36 Blindboy Boatclub? There was a man in County Meath who was ritualistically murdered 2,300 years ago, right? We know this because his body was dug up in a bog. He's a bog body called Clonycavon Man, right? A 2,300 year old Irishman dug out of a bog, mummified. You can visit him in the National Museum. He looks like a looks like a leather handbag. But here's the thing, when you, when you dig up a bog body that's 2,300 years old. The archaeologists and scientists and anthropologists, they go ape shit because they're like brilliant. Wow.
30:15 Blindboy Boatclub? This fairly well-preserved body now, we can find out something about life 2,300 years ago. So they can analyse if there's any food contents in the stomach. But the big thing with this Clonycavon Man is...
30:33 Blindboy Boatclub? The hair on his head was preserved. And they analysed the hair on this bog body's head. And they found that he had hair gel. And this hair gel came from Spain. It came from the area of Spain where I get my fucking olive oil moisturiser that costs sixteen quid. But when they dug up this bog body, two thousand three hundred years old. They were able to tell that this man was a king. They knew that this man was a king. Cause only a king, two thousand three hundred years ago, could afford to have Spanish hair gel. How did they know it's Spanish hair gel? Because it was made from the resin of trees that were found in Andalusia.
31:18 Blindboy Boatclub? So that's brilliant, because it tells us, two thousand three hundred years ago, Ireland had a trade relationship with Spain. And the other important thing that Clonakavon man's body tells us is. So he was definitely ritualistically killed. He was murdered, right? The expensive hair gel meant he was probably a king or royal. And his nipples were cut off. And the nipple cutting off thing is very interesting because. So this is two thousand three hundred years ago. But fifteen hundred years ago, Saint Patrick wrote down in his confessions, just one little strange mention. Saint Patrick wrote down, because Patrick was from Wales, you see.
31:57 Blindboy Boatclub? He wrote about a strange Irish custom where a man had to suck the nipples of another man if he was of higher status. Patrick mentions that, and that's all we have. And historians connect that from fifteen hundred years ago with Clonakavon man with his nipples cut off. And what they reckon is, in ancient pre-Christian Ireland, a king was married to the goddess of the land. And something about the marriage of the king to the land goddess made the king's nipples conduits of fertility for the land. And basically that king's job, the king's job was to get the land goddess pregnant,
32:40 Blindboy Boatclub? to make the land fertile for there to be crops. And if he failed to get the land pregnant, if there was a famine, if there was a crop failure, if there was bad weather, then the king failed and he was ritualistically killed. And then they chopped off his nipples. And those two things, that's all we have, that's all we have to guess about Irish pre-Christian beliefs. So that's guesswork, but the one thing you can be fairly fucking sure about. If this cunt had Spanish hair gel in his head 2,500 years ago, he was very, very, very wealthy. Because that hair gel had to travel a very long distance in order to make it to Ireland.
33:20 Blindboy Boatclub? Lots of energy was expended to get it to Ireland, so therefore it's scarce and it's expensive. My God's come, olive oil moisturizer. It shouldn't cost me 16 quid, it shouldn't cost 16 quid. It should be a very expensive luxury item that makes me think twice about buying it. Because me, the consumer, I'm absorbing the cost of the great distance it has to travel. So it should be expensive. That's not the case, because there's free passage of goods in the EU, free trade, and I got free delivery. I got free delivery because I bought three bottles, so that's free trade. Wonderful for the consumer, but the costs are massive and they're hidden.
34:03 Blindboy Boatclub? And the costs are the environment and often human rights. Like, I'm just using my moisturizer there as an example. I'm gonna buy that moisturizer once every couple of years. The impact on the environment there isn't huge. One day I was on Google Maps, was on Google Maps, looking at the area of Spain that I visit in Cordoba. I love using Google Maps, just seeing, seeing a country from above. And I drifted down from Cordoba, Andalusia, down to the southern coast of Spain on Google Maps. So this is a satellite view. And as I got down to the, the southern coast of Spain, I saw like...
34:48 Blindboy Boatclub? What I, what I thought was a giant white desert. Just this huge, huge area of just pure white. And I'm thinking, fuck it. I didn't know there was a desert. Like a flat, white, salty desert on the south coast of Spain. I wanna go and visit here. So I zoom down and down and I zoom in and I'm like, this isn't a desert. What the fuck is this? So the area is called Almeria in Spain. It's on the south coast. And thi- this area, it's like multiple times the size of Cork. It's fucking huge. And I'm zooming in on maps and I'm seeing what looks like just miles and miles and miles of fields.
35:33 Blindboy Boatclub? But these fields are pure white. And I'm wondering, what the fuck could this be? What fields are bright white? Why does this area look so strange? Why is it so big? It's just fields of white. And I go deeper and deeper. And then I go, fuck this. And I do Google Street View. And it's not white fields. It's plastic. So this area in Spain, Almeria, it's miles and miles and miles of shitty plastic greenhouses. Right? And chances are, if you ate a salad today, if you ate vegetables, if you ate fruit, you bought them in the supermarket.
36:17 Blindboy Boatclub? In Ireland, they came from there. Sixty percent of Europe's fruit and vegetables are grown there in those Almerian greenhouses. If you ate a strawberry today, it definitely came from those greenhouses. And then when you look around the greenhouses, now this is, this is a European country. There's literally miles and miles of shanty towns. Not even houses. Weird little tents that people built out of old bits of greenhouses, whatever they can find. No sanitation, nothing. That's where the thousands and thousands of migrant workers live
36:58 Blindboy Boatclub? who pick all those fruit and vegetables that you and I eat. Now, like those Breton onion sellers who were getting on boats and travelling to Wales and selling their onions. In the gigantic industrial greenhouses of Almeria in Spain, African migrants make the trip over on a boat. They go to the beaches and they get jobs in Almeria as undocumented workers. Undocumented, they're not EU citizens, they're technically illegal migrants. And they don't have workers' rights, they don't get paid properly. These humans are being exploited, there's human rights abuses going on.
37:43 Blindboy Boatclub? And they're living in huts that don't have sewage or sanitation. In an EU country, in an EU country, people are just looking the other way. And that's where, that's where your salad came from today. That's where our fruit and veg came from. So that you and I can have access to incredibly cheap, incredibly cheap food. Human beings are being exploited, underpaid, living in unsafe conditions. Migrants, a lot of them are dying as they make the trip across from Africa to Spain. These people are being exploited. The climate has been destroyed because of the sheer volume of...
38:28 Blindboy Boatclub? Most of the lettuce in Ireland comes from these greenhouses in Spain. Most of the lettuce in Ireland comes from these greenhouses in Spain. That Spanish lettuce is cheaper than if you buy lettuce in Ireland. Have you tried buying locally grown, like fruit and vegetables that are organic and grown close to where you live? Have you tried to do that? You can, you can do it, it's really, really expensive. Why is fruit and vegetables that's grown around the corner from your house? Why is that really expensive and only wealthy people can buy it? But fruit and veg from fucking Spain is incredibly cheap, is unbelievably cheap,
39:09 Blindboy Boatclub? and anybody can buy it because of globalization, because of free trade agreements and globalization. It's not cheap. It's cheap to me and you, the consumer, but it's not cheap because it's, it's literally destroying the planet and it relies upon the exploitation of migrant workers. And that's the only reason that me and you have cheap food. And that then is, that's one of the underpinnings of the system of neoliberal capitalism. One of the underpinnings of the system of neoliberal capitalism is cheap food. Everybody must have access to cheap food because then that keeps wages down. Not just cheap food, cheap goods.
39:51 Blindboy Boatclub? Since the fall of the Soviet Union, when capitalism lost its competitor, we entered the era of globalization. Cheap fucking everything. If your toaster breaks tomorrow, are you gonna get that toaster fixed? Are you gonna get that toaster and bring it into town and get a person in an electronics shop to fix that toaster? You're not. You're not gonna do that because that job doesn't really exist anymore. The person who used to have a little shop in town who fixes toasters, he's gone, can't afford the rent and no one needs his job anymore. Why? If your toaster fucking breaks, you buy a new toaster because they're so cheap. You gonna get your television fixed? Probably not. You're gonna get a new television.
40:35 Blindboy Boatclub? Unless you're really broke, you're gonna buy a new television. I grew up and I'm talking, this is the fucking, when I was a kid in the eighties and maybe some of the early nineties, we rented our television. This was normal. Talk to your parents. People rented their televisions because they were so expensive. Look at game shows, look at, look at TV game shows from the seventies and eighties and nineties. What were they giving away on game shows? Televisions, dishwashers, dryers, ovens. These things were expensive. They were expensive, they were scarce, they were probably being made in western countries where people were being paid a living wage. This put the price up. These things were fucking expensive.
41:18 Blindboy Boatclub? And then from the mid nineteen nineties onwards, China, China became the world's manufacturing hub and China flooded the red, the, the global north.
41:30 Blindboy Boatclub? With cheap everything and cheap everything is part. If you've been listening to this podcast, you know, I've been, I've been shitting on neoliberalism quite a lot. Cheap everything is part of neoliberalism. When dishwashers were so expensive that you just didn't buy one. Or when televisions were so expensive that you rented them. The eighties, the seventies, fair enough, your TV was really expensive. But people had better wages, there was greater social net. Public services weren't privatized, people weren't living in tents in the streets. Healthcare was affordable, housing was affordable. People had job security, people had full time contracts.
42:15 Blindboy Boatclub? People had unions, workers' rights. People had a, a stable standard of living, but they didn't have access to really cheap shit. That's how I grew up. I grew up two working parents, food, warmth, clothing, security. But if you wanted to buy Vianetta or Romantica ice cream, you were a lunatic and never mention that again. Because that's extravagant and expensive and never speak about that again. We didn't have a dishwasher, we didn't have a, a VHS player, we rented the television. And if the toaster broke, my ma brought it into the, the fella in town who fixed fucking toasters. But at the same time, and this is all around the global north.
42:57 Blindboy Boatclub? At the same time that neoliberal policies come in, unions are taken away. Healthcare becomes privatized, lots of national, national industries. So like in England, steel, fucking, the railway was nationalized. British Telecom, uh, electricity, good fucking solid government jobs. These things are privatized, housing becomes financialized, which means from about the eighties onwards. Like my parents got a house in the 1960s. When I speak to my ma about how my parents got their house, I said, how did you get your house? Did you get a mortgage? It's like, no mortgages didn't exist. How the fuck did you get your house?
43:41 Blindboy Boatclub? The council, the council, gave us a no-interest loan. An actual loan of money with no interest. It's not for profit. To purchase a house that's really cheap, completely affordable housing. But by the eighties, that starts to disappear and housing becomes financialised. Now, housing becomes about property and hoarding property and selling property. Rents get higher. Homelessness gets higher. There's no more social nets. By which I mean, healthcare, housing, access to cheap education. These things become privatised. You're still paying fucking taxes. Here's the thing with neoliberalism. You pay a tax.
44:22 Blindboy Boatclub? You, you want your taxes to give public housing to somebody in need, okay? Under neoliberalism, when you pay your tax to provide a needy person with a home, a landlord goes right down the middle and says, "I'll take ninety percent of that. I'll take ninety percent of your taxes into my pocket." That person still gets a house, but ninety percent of the public money, the taxes, that goes to me. Same with healthcare, same with, with, same with any service that was once nationalised, that has become privatised. That's how it works. You think you're paying taxes.
45:06 Blindboy Boatclub? You are, but then a capitalist comes in and puts a little toll booth, not a little toll booth, a huge toll booth, on your taxes before they go to public services. And that's neoliberalism. That's the world we live in. It's how rich people can steal public money. That's what's happening. You get the gist. What I'm describing is there has been a steady reduction in the quality of life, the quality of work, the quality of healthcare, the quality of society. There's been a steady reduction, which has led to where we are today. What allowed it to happen was cheap goods, very cheap food, very cheap toasters, very cheap televisions, the explosion of consumerism that we've experienced.
45:54 Blindboy Boatclub? And that keeps rapidly ramping up. That explosion of consumerism that we've experienced since the fall of the Berlin Wall has allowed society in the global north to feel as if we are very wealthy when the actual wealth is being stripped away. Actual wealth isn't just money. Actual wealth is job security, having a home, having access to healthcare and feeling safe and living in a society where it feels safe. That's what real wealth is. Globalisation and free trade has given us the illusion of wealth through consumerism. And China's been a huge part of that because in China, people were getting paid fuck all.
46:39 Blindboy Boatclub? Not just China, Vietnam too, a lot of it, Pakistan, Bangladesh, sweat factories. We know what sweat factories are. I'm not sure what I call China, the global south. It might have been the global south in the nineties. The global north has been flooded with cheap goods at the expense of the climate and at the expense of human rights abuses, humans' lives. And these cheap products have worked on us like a drug. And it's, it's allowed the system to keep, keep wages low because wages don't fucking increase, to keep wages very low. And also for multinational corporations to not pay taxes, to not pay taxes and to, to funnel taxes into their own pockets.
47:24 Blindboy Boatclub? And now that's turning around and it's after biting America in the hole. And now with America, it's led to what's called a trade deficit. And a trade deficit is when, so basically, America is buying loads and loads and loads from China. There used to be jobs in America. Cars used to be made in America. Washing machines used to be made in America. Lots of shit used to be made in America. As I mentioned, these things were really expensive. They were expensive because when they were being made in America, the workers in the factories had unionized full-time jobs and they were being paid properly. So the goods that they made were expensive.
48:09 Blindboy Boatclub? Then with neoliberalism and globalization, those jobs left America, went to China, and China's making the washing machines and all the T-shirts, clothes, Bangladesh the same. They're making all the products that Americans need for fuck all. The American consumer now has a load of cheap goods that they buy from China, but the people in China are too poor to want to buy a load of American stuff, which is expensive. So now America is spending all of its money in China, and China's not spending enough money in America. And this is leading to a deficit in trade and now a power imbalance. And that's what Trump is terrified of. So he's trying to end globalization, which you'd think is kind of a good thing,
48:55 Blindboy Boatclub? but it's not gonna be a good thing under Trump. He just wants to own the sweatshops. He just wants the sweatshops to be in America so that you and I buy our incredibly cheap sweatshop goods from America and not China. And he'll figure out a way to do it if he can. So that's why he's starting this trade war, to try and bring industries and jobs back to America. He wants the EU to start buying American meat. So currently, the EU, including Ireland, won't buy American beef or chicken because the chicken is soaked in bleach and the beef is pumped full of hormones. You might hear American bleached chicken on the news. Why is American chicken bleached? Because in American chicken farms and chicken abattoirs,
49:39 Blindboy Boatclub? they've deregulated the safety standards. So in order to produce more chicken for cheaper, they slaughter the chicken in a very unsanitary way.
49:50 Blindboy Boatclub? And then just rinse it in bleach. And that's cheap chlorinated chicken. In the EU, that's illegal. There's better health and safety standards for how chicken is slaughtered and produced. Trump sees that as unfair and he wants to force the EU to buy cheap American chicken. Fifty minutes and I haven't done a fucking Ocarina pause. Bollocks. Also, I'm conscious that I'm after spending fifty minutes talking about one question about onions. Like, I don't have an Ocarina. I've got a wooden fork and my metal mug. So I'm gonna hit my metal mug with my wooden fork and you're gonna hear an advert for some bullshit. Some of these adverts are algorithmically generated, which means that it's an ad that you specifically are gonna get depending on what you were searching for earlier on that day. All right.
50:35 Blindboy Boatclub? Because one or two people were pointing out to me that I think one of Trump's hotels were advertising on this podcast. I can't control that. The adverts are put in by Acast and it might have just been you who got that advert. So here's me hitting a wooden spoon off my cup pause.
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55:09 Blindboy Boatclub? I don't have the Ocaraena this week.
55:15 Blindboy Boatclub? Might go back to hitting myself onto the head with books. That was good crack. Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com/theblindbypodcast. If you like listening to this podcast, if it brings you entertainment, mirth, merriment, whatever, then please consider supporting this podcast directly via the Patreon page. This, this podcast is my, like, my actual full-time job. This is what I do for a living. It's how I pay my rent. It's how I feed myself. This is, this is my full-time job. So please consider supporting the podcast directly if you listen to it.
55:56 Blindboy Boatclub? But if you don't have any money, if you're struggling, if you can't afford it, then listen to the podcast for free. Listen to this for free. Because the person who is paying is paying for you to listen for free. So everybody gets the exact same podcast and I get to earn a living. I want the funding of this podcast to, to model how I'd like society to be. That's how healthcare should be. That's how education should be. That's how housing should be. You can't afford that. Grand, okay, we live in a society where someone else who can is paying for you. I want that society. Except in this case, it's the individualism of a podcast.
56:38 Blindboy Boatclub? But everyone gets the exact same podcast. Even if you sign up to the Patreon, you don't get any special treatment. Everyone gets the exact same podcast. And also, if you are signing up to the Patreon, make sure you you pay actual money and don't sign up for free, because all that does is just gives Patreon your data. And also, don't sign up to the Patreon if you're new on an iPhone on the Patreon app, because Apple are greedy fucks and they take 30%. So do it on a browser if you don't mind. Upcoming tour of England and Scotland. This is very nearly sold out. We're down to the very last tickets. I can't wait to do this tour.
57:20 Blindboy Boatclub? It's in June and I'm going to be in Bristol, Cornwall, Sheffield, Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow, York, London, East Sussex and Norwich. And that's all happening at the start of June. Come along to those gigs, please. It would be magnificent fun. And then, have I anything else? I'm in Derry in September. And I'm in Vicker Street in September also. So come along to those gigs. So this week's podcast, I'm having a crack at neoliberalism again. I know I started off talking about onions, but it is relevant. It's relevant to the topic.
58:04 Blindboy Boatclub? There's huge hidden costs for all of the cheap, very, very cheap things that we consume. Like again, I'm not that old. But when I think back to my childhood, definitely the eighties and certainly before the Celtic Tiger, before the Celtic Tiger, so up until about 1995.
58:26 Blindboy Boatclub? Vegetables, right? Onions, potatoes, carrots.
58:31 Blindboy Boatclub? There used to be a fella called Jimmy the Vegman. Jimmy the Vegman used to have a fucking van, a truck, with a weighing scales at the back. And Jimmy the Vegman drove to your neighbourhood and opened the back of his truck. And everyone's ma came out of the house and walked up to the back of Jimmy the Vegman's truck. And you weighed out your veg and you bought it off Jimmy the fucking Vegman. Jimmy had been doing that in my neighbourhood since the seventies. Why? Because people didn't have fucking cars. Cars were too expensive. People didn't have cars. So Jimmy the Vegman brought the veg to your neighbourhood. Was it as cheap as the supermarket? Probably not, but it was affordable. It was affordable.
59:15 Blindboy Boatclub? It wasn't prohibitively expensive. It was affordable. Where did Jimmy the Vegman get his vegetables and fruits? From fucking Limerick. The vegetables that he drove to your house were grown thirty minutes away.
59:32 Blindboy Boatclub? They weren't grown with migrant labour in a gigantic sea of plastic in the south of Spain or Morocco or Tunisia. I'm seeing more and more Morocco and Tunisia. Why? Because the climate is collapsing right now. The climate is collapsing. And in since Covid, they haven't been getting the predictable summers that they've been that they need down in fucking Almeria. And now you're seeing empty shelves, empty shelves, and they're having to go to Morocco or Tunisia. And the strawberries are smaller. The system has eaten itself. But when I was a kid, Jimmy the Vegman came around to your fucking house in a van and
1:00:13 Blindboy Boatclub? he sold you potatoes and carrots that were affordable, that were grown a half an hour away. That's how things should be. That's how things should be. Slightly more expensive fruit and veg, but grown down the road. There's no hidden cost there. There's no migrant labour. No one's being exploited. The climate isn't being ravaged. I can go online now, I can go online now and I can buy a vegetable box, an organic vegetable box, full of veg that's grown locally. The people who grew it are getting paid properly and it didn't have to travel a huge distance, there's very little climate impact, I can do that right now.
1:00:56 Blindboy Boatclub? Sixty euro, that costs me sixty euro to get an organic, locally grown vegetable box. Or I can go to Aldi and get the same amount of food for fifteen quid. And because of globalisation and free trade, that food uses migrant labour to exploit people and it destroys the climate. And the other big hidden cost that I'm speaking about that doesn't get mentioned enough, neoliberal capitalism thrives upon cheap food and cheap goods to make us feel wealthy so that we don't notice actual wealth being stripped away.
1:01:38 Blindboy Boatclub? The actual wealth of a social net, security, safety. I couldn't buy avocados when I was a kid, we didn't know what fucking avocados were. If you opened up a cookery book and there was an avocado in the recipe, you just have to fucking forget about it. Avocados are one of the most unethical, unethical foodstuffs that you can buy. A lot of the avocado industry is controlled by the Mexican mafia. People are killed, people are murdered and killed and put into indentured servitude so that I can buy avocados for three quid, which I can do. There is a direct correlation, I'm not making the fucking boomer argument, actually no, I'm gonna turn that boomer argument on its head.
1:02:19 Blindboy Boatclub? Millennials would be able to buy homes if they stopped eating avocado toast. The most bullshit argument I've ever heard, but you can, you can draw a connection between the fact that I can get cheap avocados and the fact that people are living in tents in Limerick City, there is a connection and the connection is... The system of globalization, free trade agreements, that allow me to purchase cheap avocados, which I should not be able to do. Cheap avocados, cheap fruit, cheap goods and products from China. These things keep wages down, keep living standards down, and give us the illusion of wealth.
1:02:58 Blindboy Boatclub? We should be returning to a system where most of the fruit and veg that you eat is grown locally, and it's affordable but not as cheap as Aldi. I think most people would like to return to a situation where we can't buy as much stuff.
1:03:20 Blindboy Boatclub? If it meant affordable homes, healthcare, security, and, and people not living in tents on the side of the road. And what's frustrating me is Trump, in a way, is nearly trying to smash that system. He, he's turning globalization on its head with these tariffs. He's, he's, he's doing shit that hasn't been done since the fucking 19th century. But he's not doing it for, for good. He's not, he's doing it. He wants to move the sweatshops to America. That's all he wants to do. And my hunch is that these sweatshops, they mightn't contain as much exploited human beings, but it will contain artificial intelligence robots.
1:04:04 Blindboy Boatclub? That will, within the next 15 years, that will be the sweatshop, artificial intelligence robots. I don't know. You can't predict fucking Trump, because you don't know if he knows what he's doing. Most Americans learned this week, the impossibility. We're so entrenched in globalism, we're so entrenched in this system now, that you kind of can't go back.
1:04:28 Blindboy Boatclub? Like, Americans found out this week that, let's just say Trump got his wish. Because the iPhone, the iPhone is made in 14 different countries, a lot of it in Taiwan and China.
1:04:42 Blindboy Boatclub? Americans learned this week that if the iPhone was made in America, and everyone involved in that process was being paid American wages, then an iPhone would cost thirty thousand dollars. You'd have to buy an iPhone and it would cost thirty thousand dollars. That's the actual cost of an iPhone. We don't pay thirty thousand dollars because our technology is made by exploiting people, by exploiting people who get paid fuck all, who get paid fuck all and don't have workers' rights. And then the raw materials, some of the rare earth minerals that make our smartphones, these are made in what are called artisanal mines in the middle of Africa,
1:05:26 Blindboy Boatclub? where kids are getting their fucking hands chopped off. And that's the only reason that an iPhone costs a thousand euro or whatever the fuck it costs. So we shouldn't, the amount of technology that we have, our iPhones, our laptops, we kinda shouldn't have that, we kinda shouldn't have that. But the system of globalisation, neoliberalism, deregulation and free trade agreements, that has put us in a situation where really, really, really expensive things are actually cheap because the costs are massive but hidden. Climate destruction, human rights abuses and the erosion of quality of life in a social net through the distraction of cheap goods.
1:06:10 Blindboy Boatclub? And if you're saying thirty grand for an iPhone, that's mad. It is mad, but computers in the 1970s used to be so expensive that only companies could own them. This podcast that you're listening to, the, I've spent about maybe ten grand on all of my equipment to make this podcast. In the 1980s, that would be several million to make this podcast. I'd need a huge big studio, it would be several million, adjusted for inflation. Do you know how much a regular colour television cost in nineteen eighty? Adjusted for inflation, a colour television cost eight and a half thousand euros. That's why people rented televisions.
1:06:55 Blindboy Boatclub? Everything being cheap isn't necessarily a good thing. There are hidden costs and they're massive. My hope is that maybe if Trump does fucking smash the international system of globalisation, maybe at some point from that, something positive can come out of it. I don't fucking know, especially for food systems, that we could rebuild something a bit more local. But anyway, Trump's trade war. Can't believe this was about onions. Trump's trade war with China now at the moment, where they're both raising tariffs. It reminds me of, it's not as mad as what the Brits did.
1:07:37 Blindboy Boatclub? The Brits in the eighteen forties, well, they were ravaging us with a fucking famine. So the Brits had a trade deficit with China, right? So Britain, Britain was doing a lot of trade with China. But China had a load of shit that Britain wanted. So China was selling tea, spices, porcelain, luxury goods, and Britain was buying loads of it. But China didn't want anything that Britain had. Britain didn't have anything to sell China. Britain was like, do you wanna buy some of this furniture? What about this glassware? And then China's like, we're grand, we have our own, we're fine. We'll just take your money.
1:08:21 Blindboy Boatclub? We'll, you can give us gold and silver and then you can have all this wonderful tea and ceramics. So this was going on and on. And basically what's happening is you get a trade deficit. So Britain is buying luxury goods from China.
1:08:37 Blindboy Boatclub? China's buying nothing from Britain. And now China is just extracting all of Britain's gold and silver, its wealth. So then Britain, to solve this problem, did the most fucked up thing imaginable. Britain said, okay, well, if China doesn't, doesn't need anything from us. Well, maybe we'll, we'll create a need. Let's create a need, let, let's make China buy something from us. So this is the 1840s. So Britain controlled India. And in India, they were growing lots of opium. Opium, it's heroin. It's, it's heroin comes from opium. Opium, the opium poppy. It's a highly addictive drug.
1:09:21 Blindboy Boatclub? So Britain basically floods China with loads and loads of really cheap heroin. This ravaged the entire country. Created loads and loads of opium addicts in China. And Britain had created demand. So now Britain is, is still buying ceramics and spices and tea from China. But now China's got a massive, massive opium epidemic. And now China has illegally, Britain's illegally selling all this opium to China. Cause Britain has created a lot of addicts. Same time, doing a famine in Ireland at the same time. And then China have a problem with this.
1:10:04 Blindboy Boatclub? So they tried to stop, they tried to stop the opium. And then, then the opium wars break out, which is Britain, Britain warring with China. Cause China has a problem with Britain flooding the place with opium. And speak, speaking of ridiculous cultural stereotypes. So, so the, the comedic stereotype of the Frenchman with the fucking stripy jumper and, and the onions around his neck.
1:10:33 Blindboy Boatclub? Another stereotype of Chinese people is Chinese people smoking opium and opium dens, which was a racist caricature created by the British when they were warring with China. And it's like, ye were the ones who brought the fucking opium into China, you pricks. Ye did this deliberately. Ye did it deliberately. And now you're making it look like it's a Chinese issue. But that's the British Empire for you. So that's how a trade war turns into a real war. I answered one fucking question about onions this week. One question about onions in that 65 minutes. Apologies to everyone whose questions I didn't answer. All right,
1:11:14 Blindboy Boatclub? this is just what happens sometimes. I'll catch you next week. Dog bless. Thank you to Ali for the question about the onions. Rub a dog, wink at a swan, genuflect to a grieving hawk.
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Previous Rewilding for Biodiversity with Costa Georgiadis Next Fairy Forts, Anthrax, Dubai Chocolate bars and Seagulls are all intimately connected and flow as one in the cognitive ether Page updated November 3, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated