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A supply chain of vaults: what changed in v1.2.0
From v1.1.0 (2026-09-27, 4030f39f7) to v1.2.0 (2026-09-28, bcb99f919), paragraph by paragraph.
4 paragraphs added, 2 removed, 1 changed in place, 81 unchanged. About 306 words added and 221 removed. Insertions are marked like this, deletions like this; unchanged runs are folded to one line; figures appear as their file names.
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1 unchanged paragraph
Summary: TheA conversationBBC aboutRadio food4 securitydiscussion andon the cost of livingfood keeps askingasked for new ideas and keeps producing the same ones,ideas, and the loudest thing usually said about AI in thatthe conversationfood debate is that it is dangerous. This article argues the opposite case, with the evidence it could find. The food chain from a field to a shelf is a series of hops that each keep their own records, mostly in spreadsheets, and share as little as they can; the one party with real systems is the big buyer, and once it holds a large share of a farm's output it names the price, which is the mechanism Giblin and Doctorow call a chokepoint. All of that is logistics, and logistics is what generative AI, used the way this site uses it, is good at: capture everything, structure it, and generate the small, custom tool each piece of the chain needs, then run production without a model in the line. A supply chain of encrypted vaults, one per party, joined by append lanes and a typed graph, is described piece by piece, with what exists today and what is proposed kept apart. The hypothesis that this lowers the price of goods is set against the evidence: two thirds of supply chains on spreadsheets, 13% of food lost before retail, and the gains early adopters of AI planning report. It then takes on two dogmas, that falling prices are always bad, which the BIS's own history of deflations does not support, and that sharing is giving things away, when the uncounted cost is the cost of not sharing. It closes with the second memo's case for openness: open source and Creative Commons for supply chain workflows, open-weight models that run inside a company's own environment and can be built on, the under-reported advantage of the economies already using them, and sharing the journey rather than the curated success story.
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I was listening to a programme about food security and the cost of living, and what struck me was not what was said but how little of it was new. The panel agreed that we need new ideas. Then it produced the ideas it has been producing for twenty years: subsidise this, regulate that, ask the supermarkets to be kinder. The dogma runs so deep that the request for novelty and the absence of it can sit in the same sentence without anyone noticing.
The one genuinely new thing available to that conversation is generative AI, and the conversation has already decided what it thinks about it. It is dangerous, it is a bubble, it is coming for jobs, and anyone who says otherwise is selling something. I think much of that fear is manufactured, a good deal of it by the same investor-driven ecosystem that sells the frontier models, and I think the result is a kind of AI fatigue in which rational people roll their eyes and stop looking. We saw the same cycle with the web. What we are missing, while we roll our eyes, is that generative AI used well is a massive amplifier of the supply chain, and that the supply chain is where the cost of living is actually decided.
I was listening to *The Cost of Food*, BBC Radio 4's *Food Programme* recorded live at the Abergavenny Food Festival, and one line stayed with me: we need new ideas. The tools usually on the table (subsidy, regulation, asking the supermarkets to deal more fairly) matter, and people on that stage have spent years making the case for them. This piece tries to add one more tool, from a direction the food debate rarely looks at.
> This piece was prompted by *The Cost of Food*, BBC Radio 4's *The Food Programme*, recorded live at the Abergavenny Food Festival in September 2026. It was presented by Sheila Dillon with Dan Saladino, Vicki Hird and Simon Wright, and produced by Natalie Donovan. The figures on farmers' share of the food pound come from Sustain's *Unpicking Food Prices* (2022), which Vicki Hird helped write.
The one genuinely new thing available to the food debate is generative AI, and the wider debate has largely decided what it thinks about it. It is dangerous, it is a bubble, it is coming for jobs, and anyone who says otherwise is selling something. I think much of that fear is manufactured, a good deal of it by the same investor-driven ecosystem that sells the frontier models, and I think the result is a kind of AI fatigue in which rational people roll their eyes and stop looking. We saw the same cycle with the web. What we are missing, while we roll our eyes, is that generative AI used well is a massive amplifier of the supply chain, and that the supply chain is where the cost of living is actually decided.
79 unchanged paragraphs, under In short, What the food pound says, The chokepoint…
*© 2026 Dinis Cruz. This article is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). You're free to share and adapt it, as long as you give credit.*