We are what we eat

A new book, reviewed in this week's New Scientist, convincingly argues that producing food with biodiversity in mind is also good for human health.

The book is 'Food Wars: The global battle for mouths, minds and markets', by Tim Lang and Michael Heasman (Earthscan, London, 2004).

This review by Professor Jules Pretty is from the 'New Scientist' - 09 October 2004, page 44:

EATING IS the most political thing we do on a daily basis. Whether it's a tin of giant beans in tomato sauce and a tub of hummus from a neighbourhood Middle-Eastern shop, deep-frozen pizza and chips from a down-at-heel minimarket, or wild salmon and free-range quails' eggs from a luxury supermarket, there is no escape.

Even a very ordinary European retail outlet contains 25,000 food products, and each year more than 20,000 new packaged foods and beverages are released onto the market. Food prices have stayed low, too, with a much smaller proportion of family budgets spent on food than just 25 years ago. So, food in Europe and North America is now plentiful and cheap.

And back at home with the shopping basket unpacked, the average family today spends a mere six-and-a-half minutes preparing the evening meal, down from the two-and-a-half hours required 50 years ago. This convenience brings many benefits, especially to women, who do most of the food shopping and meal preparation.

Over the past 40 years, during which the world's population doubled from 3 to 6 billion, world food production has accelerated. Each person now eats, on average, 25 per cent more food than their grandparents. This is an extraordinary increase. In Asia and Latin America, per capita food production has risen by 75 per cent and nearly 30 per cent respectively, and in China it has trebled. In Africa, however, it has fallen by 10 per cent per person. This difference points to the reality behind those superabundant shelves stacked full of convenience foods: hunger is still widespread.

Nearly 1 in 8 of the world's population - some 800 million people - are short of food today, tomorrow, and probably will be for many years to come. In about 33 countries, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, adults still consume far too few calories for health. How could we consider this a modern and progressive world when so many people lack the basics for a decent life?

And paradoxically, malnutrition caused by overeating has, for the first time in history, crept up to the point of becoming a widespread health hazard. The health costs of obesity in Europe and North America now exceed the costs of smoking, and in a number of developing countries there are more obese people than hungry ones. Some 1.7 billion people are now overweight or obese.

And is it such great progress that for every one of the 18,000 days of the last 50 years, some 219 farms in the US have closed and been amalgamated into larger enterprises? In the UK, 11 farms close every day. Some argue this is caused by simple economic efficiency and the need to be globally competitive. Others, that it represents a cultural loss of some kind of family farm ideal which many people still hold dear as part of their local and national identity.

At the same time, badly managed agriculture has led to environmental degradation in many parts of the world. Fields have encroached on wild habitats, and agriculture and industry have contributed to species extinction. Soils, too, have been damaged or eroded by intensive agriculture, leaving some 2 billion hectares worldwide degraded. Conflicts between agriculture and domestic users over fresh water are set to increase, especially as climate change disrupts rainfall patterns.

This, then, is the landscape against which Tim Lang and Michael Heasman's expertly diagnosed and dissected Food Wars: The global battle of mouths, minds and markets will be fought. The authors paint the big picture this way: "We see the world of food supply currently in the throes of a long-term transition: from a food policy world dominated by farming and agriculture, agribusiness and commodity-style production to one dominated by consumption: major branded food manufacturers, food retailing and food services. This transition is causing new tensions, challenges, threats and opportunities along the whole food chain, from farm to consumer, which we call the Food Wars."

Lang and Heasman set out a conceptual model for these changes based on three competing paradigms, for which they produce helpful labels: the current and dominant productionist paradigm, the newly emerging life sciences integrated paradigm, and the ecological integrated paradigm.

Since these are coinages, a brief definition of their terminology is in order. The origins of the productionist paradigm lie in the industrialisation of food over the past two centuries, driven by advances in chemical, transport and agricultural technologies. Small-scale production became large-scale and concentrated into fewer hands. The pressures to intensify production increased, and the use of labour in agriculture decreased.

The life sciences integrated paradigm is one of two science-informed visions for the future. At its core, Lang says, is a view of food that is mechanistic, and an almost medicalised interpretation of human and environmental health where food is seen almost as a kind of drug, and production viewed as involving a range of biotechnologies - especially genetic modification.

And then there is the ecologically integrated paradigm. While this is still biologically based, its assumptions are far less to do with bioengineering, seeking instead to give more emphasis to mutual dependencies and symbiotic relationships between nature and people: for example, when Asian farmers learn to use predatory insects as pest controls.

Will there be a clear victor in these wars? Are there other paradigms still to be born? How radical can you get in seeking solutions? Is anyone among the food manufacturers and industry decision makers actually listening? Or among government policy makers round the world?

This is another major theme in Food Wars. Left to the market, agricultural and food systems can deliver much, but are unlikely to improve the supply of either environmental or health-related public goods and services. In most institutional and economic circumstances, there is a need for the positive intervention of public policy.

Sadly, we do not seem to be very good at this. Lang and Heasman are adamant that "the Food Wars are battles over food policy", but that on the whole "evidence fails to inform policy: policy makers are often just not interested in the evidence because it embarrasses a politically driven agenda".

It is also clear that most agricultural ministries, while focusing on using policy to improve farm productivity, have been very slow to develop policies to protect natural resources and rural communities. A new piece of policy jargon has recently entered the agricultural lexicon: the idea that agriculture is "multifunctional". In other words, it does more than produce food: it also has many positive and negative side effects on environments and people. As these side effects tend to be public goods, so the intervention of public policy to create incentives to encourage certain sorts of agriculture, or disincentives to stop other sorts, is further justified.

So the key questions are: what are the most effective approaches to intervention? Which are the cheapest? How can governments be persuaded to take action in the public interest? How can the enormous vested interests - from companies to campaign groups - be encouraged to engage in major transformations?

Many people are looking for answers here, and indeed to the rest of the questions raised in Food Wars. But it would be foolish to expect easy answers. Perhaps one should instead be glad that this book is such a mine of information that it will serve to fuel serious debates on, to name a few, food-related diseases and their burden on healthcare, food cultures and good diets, the growth of biotechnology and organics, the widespread decline of cooking skills, the growth of corporate power, and the effect of retailers charging fees to food producers and manufacturers to display their products.

The book contains some particularly chilling figures that will leave readers thinking that global food systems are machines running out of control. The potential influence of some companies is simply staggering. As Lang reminds us, in the US, four companies control 81 per cent of beef packing, 81 per cent of maize exports and 80 per cent of soybean crushing, and another four control between 45 and 50 per cent of pork, chicken and turkey production.

The world's top 15 food companies, each with annual food sales of more than $10 billion, make some $300 billion per year. Wal-Mart, America's most "admired" company of 2003 according to Forbes magazine, now operates 4300 supermarkets in nine countries, with annual sales of some $250 billion. Appallingly, the top 30 food retailers' turnover amounts to almost $1 trillion per year - representing 1/17th of the world's formal economy. McDonald's has 13,600 outlets in the US, but a further 17,500 worldwide, all serving 46 million customers a day. For every $1 spent by the World Health Organization on improving nutrition, another $500 is spent by food companies on promoting processed foods.

The curious thing is that we have the means to produce food in ecologically sound ways. We can choose foods that keep us well rather than sending us to an early grave. We know that permanent poverty can be solved with sufficient political will and vision. And yet we seem to pretend that these problems are part of some kind of unchanging background - a permanent landscape behind the changes of normal life.

Something has to be done, but can it be radical? Are the extreme, even revolutionary, options in food and health feasible or even possible? Is it perhaps too late? Will overwhelming self-interest shape the nature of our food systems whatever we collectively feel ought to happen?

Surprisingly, given all the gloom and doom he has had to deal with in amassing the data for this book, Lang is not a pessimist. He knows what he wants: stronger backing for the ecological paradigm. "A diet that is good for biodiversity is also good for human health," he says. Meanwhile, to cheer or even empower the readers, he has a 14-point list of positive "rules for food and ecological health" that we can follow. These include a good warning to the obese: "Eat no more than you expend in energy", and one to the penny-pinchers of the rich west: "Be prepared to pay the full externalised costs; if you do not, others will."

Jules Pretty

Jules Pretty is professor of environment and society at the University of Essex, UK. His latest book is Agri-Culture: Reconnecting people, land and nature (2002)