I WONDER what first comes to mind when the word ‘security’ is mentioned. Would it be the increasingly intrusive apparatus at airports, bands of dark-spectacled supersized heavies who swagger around every so-called celeb from president to botoxed diva, or even the burglar alarm on your front door?

How high on your personal list would come food? It’s a long time since food rationing ended in the UK – 1954, to be precise. Since then we have enjoyed relative plenty – far longer than our biblical seven years, up to the point where we’re apparently throwing away up to a third of the food we buy, which amounts to a staggering two thousand tonnes a year in this Island alone.

We might get away with it while there’s a plentiful supply, but the possibility that resources are more fragile than we’d like to believe is now being taken very seriously. Scientists are warning that a whole range of commodities, from food, energy, minerals to water supplies, are being consumed at such a rate that they can actually predict when they will be exhausted.

Doomsday prophesies have been in brisk circulation over the past couple of weeks. Fears about the prospect of the lights going out, prompted a group of leading UK industrialists to produce a report last month called ‘The Oil Crunch – a wake-up call for the UK economy’.

There are many – even in the oil industry itself, who believe that oil and gas production has already peaked and that future resources will be more expensive and difficult to extract.

Food production has been heavily geared to an abundance of cheap energy, but it’s important not to allow ourselves to sink into depression or panic. Better to prepare strategy for the future, while accepting that we may only get one shot at getting it right. Indeed, in the face of some pretty wobbly thinking, the UK government recently unveiled ‘Food 2030’, based on the expectation that we’ll need to be producing as much food in the next 50 years as has been provided in the past 500!

Though we’re still basking in relative plenty, we’ve already had a taste of fragility. The recent cold snap exposed to us on this island how even inclement weather conditions can interrupt production and distribution.

That may have just been a blip, but if we look further, the changing climate is undoubtedly affecting growing conditions globally and hence supplies for an increasingly hungry planet. Fears of a swine pandemic and a financial crisis which brought ‘safe’ economies to the brink – to say nothing of unstable political relationships along the supply chain – should flash bright warning lights to the complacent.

So maybe we should heed the wake-up call from the Director of the Soil Association, Patrick Holden, who was visiting Guernsey last week. His premise is that we should place more respect on where food comes from. Of course, in a global environment, nations derive a livelihood from exporting food and other commodities too, but if we’re to take responsibility for our own security we should be investing more loyalty with our producers – particularly local ones.

Remember, ‘think twice, buy local’, we could reinforce that with ‘think global by growing local’. The evidence of not doing so is all around us. In order to drive down prices we have been squandering our second level of defence. It’s estimated, for example that nine family-run UK dairy farms are being lost each week because of the tiny margins left to make a living and the NFU predicts that if the trend continues the UK will soon become a net importer of milk.

We still do have a local dairy industry, though much reduced, and we still grow things. But every week, we read about agricultural land under threat from development. The most vulnerable area is the current abandonment of green houses.

Once highly productive in tomato growing, they’re falling victim to the spurious argument that far from being ‘green’ agricultural land that just happens to have glass frames erected on it, they are ‘brown’ zones only fit for planting posh homes in concrete. Sadly, the new Island Plan subscribes to this fallacy. Are we not actually securing the wrong things?

‘Dig for Victory’ might seem a retro slogan alongside our new-found convenience existence, but it spawned a generation schooled on never, ever wasting food, and there is now a growing appetite among 21st century value-for-money entrepreneurs to till their own patch of soil. Look at the waiting list for local allotments.

Maybe you’ve heard of ‘Transition Towns’. There are 250 scattered around the world. Totness in Devon is one. It’s not all open sandals and composting toilets. The philosophy is to explore an alternative methodology of living when resources – oil mainly – run out. So recycling is a prominent activity, and waste is spurned. In short, it amounts to ‘consumer detox’.

The opposite of security is uncertainty, with physical safety and mental assuredness replaced by anxiety. Fear promotes strange things – aggression for one. Hollywood loves to indulge in pulse-quickening frighteners. The recent apocalyptic movie, ‘The Road’, which paints a nightmarish portrait of a world where resources have run out, there’s been a complete social breakdown and conflict abounds, conjures up a nightmare scenario too far.

Nevertheless it has prompted the more ‘gung-ho’ to dig up the odd croquet lawn, plant veg and indulge in weekend combat training. In America, they call themselves ‘Prepists’.

Frankly, I’d prefer to put my faith in solar panels, a regular order with my local farm shop, and rigorous scrutiny of what goes into the waste-bin. It may not be self-sufficiency, but in the current climate, it’s the best security I can muster.