It's all there in Smith you know, really, it is

By means of glasses, hotbeds, and hotwalls, very good grapes can be raised in Scotland, and very good wine too can be made of them at about thirty times the expense for which at least equally good can be brought from foreign countries.

At which point why would we desire to encourage domestic production of things we can get cheaper and better from elsewhere?

Giant greenhouses will be given planning permission under a “grow for Britain” strategy to be unveiled by Boris Johnson, to end the UK’s reliance on overseas food.

Why? Some parts of the world don’t require the greenhouses. So, we should go get our food, as our wine, from there.

It is understood that food the UK has the climate and expertise to produce needs to be increased as the country only produces, for example, 23 per cent of the cucumbers and 15 per cent of the tomatoes supplied domestically.

It is also hoped the rising cost of energy for farms can be helped by making use of surplus heat and CO2 from industrial processes, and renewable sources of energy.

Why do we desire to move to a more energy intensive food system, especially given climate change worries? This has been extensively studied too:

Tomato consumption has increased fast in Europe over the last decade. Intensive production techniques such as heated greenhouses and long-distance transport overcome seasonal constraints in order to provide year-round fresh goods. However, studies that evaluate seasonal and off-season production are scarce. Here, we analyzed the carbon footprint of tomato production systems in Austria, Spain, and Italy using a life cycle approach. We collected data from four main supply chains ending at the point of sale in an average Austrian supermarket. We aimed to identify hotspots of greenhouse gas emissions from agricultural production, heating, packaging, processing, and transport. Our results show that imported tomatoes from Spain and Italy have two times lower greenhouse gas emissions than those produced in Austria in capital-intensive heated systems. On the contrary, tomatoes from Spain and Italy were found to have 3.7 to 4.7 times higher greenhouse gas emissions in comparison to less-intensive organic production systems in Austria. Therefore, greenhouse gas emissions from tomato production highly depend on the production system such as the prevalence or absence of heating.

Grow tomatoes in England in that short part of the year that the sunshine can take the strain, otherwise ship ‘em in from Spain. This being something that the price system already tells us, that Smith tells us from 250 years ago, the way the industry works right now and therefore we’ve got the muddleheaded saying we must change this?

How did we end up with the grossly partial - partially informed and partial as to what the answer should be - determining where tomatoes should be grown? We’ve even that absolute proof that just leaving it to the grocers and the farmers already produces the correct result.

Not just how did we end up with these people doing these things but how do we stop them doing so?