The Way We Eat Now. Би Уилсон
I can’t entirely lament the existence of the Cavendish banana, not least because I always have them in my kitchen, ready to feed to a hungry child or to slice onto morning porridge. Without the Cavendish, millions of poorer consumers would have little or no fresh fruit in their diets at all. They are a useful source of potassium, fibre and vitamin B6. But this monoculture of fruit is a symptom of our food culture’s wider obsession with cheapness and abundance over flavour. The salient fact about bananas – one of the most wasted foods in the typical home kitchen – is that there always seem to be too many of them to eat up before they turn brown.
A short history of eating too much
The immense volume of food in our lives is no fluke; it was planned for. In more ways than one, our food system goes back to the aftermath of the Second World War, when governments around the world became obsessed with making sure that their citizens had enough to eat, after the misery of war. In Europe and the US, farmers were paid subsidies for the sheer volume of food that they could produce. We are still living with this legacy of quantity over quality.
Before the war, most farmers had run small mixed farms based on the principle of crop rotation to maintain soil fertility and control pests. After the war, farmers started to specialise, in order to get the maximum yield possible from the land. Nitrogen was diverted from the old bomb factories to make fertiliser and tanks were repurposed as combine harvesters. Under the US Marshall Plan, which ran from 1947 to 1952 to help with post-war reconstruction in Europe, $13 billion was pumped into the economies of the continent. Much of it arrived in the form of animal feed or fertilisers. The era of plenty was beginning.42
One of the paradoxes of the post-war food system was that it entailed the greatest expansion of agriculture the world had ever seen, even as there was a mass exodus of farmers from the land. By 1985, just 3 per cent of the American population were farmers, where a hundred years earlier it had been more than half of the population. But the new farms did not need so many farmers, thanks to huge efficiencies of machinery and fertiliser. Between 1950 and 1990, world output of wheat, corn and cereals more than tripled, with the US leading the way. Something had to be done with all this grain. Increasingly, it was fed to animals to fuel a rising meat market.43
In this revolution of the land, we lost thousands of small farmers. But what we gained was a colossal supply of calories, which after all was exactly what governments had been hoping and planning to achieve after the war. The calories available to the average American increased from 3,100 per day in 1950 to around 3,900 by the year 2000 – around twice as much daily energy as most people need, depending on their activity levels. Put another way, to avoid over-eating in today’s food environment, most of us would need to reject half of our allotted calories. Every day. This is not impossible but nor is it easy, given that it is human nature to eat whatever’s available.44
These changes went along with the increasing dominance of huge multinational food companies who found a way to take the surplus calories and ‘add value’ to them – which meant adding margins. The power accrued by these companies in the decades since the war is hard to overemphasise. By 2012, the revenue of Nestlé alone was $100 billion, twice as much as the GDP of Uganda (at $51 billion). It was these companies, more than the farmers themselves, who profited from the overproduction of subsidised crops in the West. If you break down the US food dollar now, only 10.5 per cent goes to farmers. A much bigger share (15.5 per cent) goes to those processing the food. By itself, the actual raw cereal in a box of cereal is almost worthless. What adds the value are the flavourings and sweeteners and crisping agents, the pictures on the box and the advertisements that make a child clamour for its parents to buy it.45
Average energy use versus average energy need: this graph shows the vast rise in the oversupply of food in most countries since 1990.
In the early 1990s, European governments were still subsidising farmers to churn out mountains of food, surpluses of which often found their way onto the world market where they made it hard for producers from poorer countries to compete. In 1995, the World Trade Organisation was founded. Its aim was to end the unfair subsidies and remove trade restrictions, to give the developing world more of a level playing field. But the new liberalised global markets were not necessarily any fairer than the system that came before and they certainly did not result in better diets. The richer countries carried on subsidising their own local farmers but also benefited from relaxed subsidies overseas, enabling their farmers to enter new markets in the developing world. Meanwhile, rules on investing in the food markets of poorer countries were radically liberalised, which led to a huge wave of foreign investment from companies selling highly processed foods. This paved the way for the nutrition transition to happen in Asia and South America.46
Western eaters have been living in the sugary abundance of stage four for decades. The difference now is that so many other, poorer countries are galloping to join us. In wealthy countries, the key decades of dietary change were the 1960s and 1970s, when people shifted en masse to diets higher in sugary drinks and highly processed foods. As far back as 1980, the average Canadian was already getting more than a thousand calories a day from animal products, chiefly meat, and more than three hundred calories each from oils and sugars. The great food revolution of our times is that people across the entire globe are starting to eat this type of oil-heavy, ultra-processed diet.47
One of the frightening aspects of stage four is how fast it has happened. It took thousands of years to get from a hunter-gatherer society to one based on farming (from stage one to stage two). The effects of the Industrial Revolution in Europe and the US took only a couple of centuries (stage two to stage three). But the new shifts in the West away from home-cooked meals and tap water and on to packaged snacks and sugary drinks were speedier still, taking only a couple of decades. In Brazil and Mexico and China and India, the change is happening even faster, in the space of ten years or less. For South America, the peak decade of nutritional change was the 1990s. Over just eleven years, from 1988 to 1999, the number of overweight and obese people in Mexico nearly doubled, from 33.4 per cent of the population to 59.6 per cent.48
Mexican diets have changed at tumultuous speed. After the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed by the United States, Mexico and Canada in 1994, it spelled the end of subsidies for home-grown Mexican corn and the Mexican market was flooded with cheap yellow corn from the US which did not have the same qualities as the old corn, either in taste or nutrition. Traditional Mexican tortilla were made from locally adapted landrace corns of diverse species, each of which had its own distinct flavour and nutritional properties. Before it was cooked, the corn was ‘nixtamalised’: soaked in an alkaline solution which increases the nutritional properties of the grain. The old tortillas were eaten with beans, a culinary arrangement which also reflected agricultural practice. Traditionally, in Mexico, corn and beans were intercropped, to enrich the soil. Now, corn and beans are not necessarily seen together either in the soil or on the plate in Mexico. Refried beans have been edged out by ultra-processed foods, whose sales expanded at a rate of 5–10 per cent a year from 1995 to 2003.49
As in South Africa, the pattern of eating in Mexico has changed, radically and fast. We are not talking here about the occasional fizzy drink or a Friday night plate of fried chicken but a near total transformation of the food supply, which has gone hand in hand with disastrous changes to the population’s health since the 1990s. From 1999 to 2004, 7-Eleven doubled its number of stores in Mexico. There are Mexican towns where running water is sporadic and Coca-Cola is more readily available than bottled water. Meanwhile, the prevalence of overweight and obesity among people in Mexico rose 78 per cent from 1988 to 1998 and by 2006, more than 8 per cent of Mexicans were suffering from type 2 diabetes.50
A changing plate of food in China and Egypt in 1961 and 2009.
A similarly tragic nutrition