A glimpse of the future?

Back in 2002 I wrote the Little Food Book, which was published by Alastair Sawday. It was a succinct coverage of the key issues about food, health and society. It still stands up well today. I also wrote an (unpublished) forecast of what the world would be like by 2012 as a result of the world catching up with the insights in my book. It makes interesting reading as we are still getting there, but the horizon seems a bit closer than it was.

You can get a secondhand copy for under £3 (including delivery) here.

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Dateline New York 2012 - The United Nations World Food and Health Organisation (WFHO) has published its State of the World Report.

Key data: The world’s population has, as predicted, reached a plateau at 10 billion.  Life expectancy in all the world’s nations continues to rise, with a global average of 80 years. Levels of heart disease, cancer, obesity and diabetes are all in steep decline, ensuring that the quality of life for the aged is greatly improved.  Infant and childhood mortality has plummeted to the lowest levels in recorded history.  The ongoing programme of converting hospitals into luxury apartments continues, with 7000 hospitals converted to other uses in the year 2011.  The number of the world’s citizens employed in agriculture continues to increase, along with the proportion who are part-time agriculturalists.   Farm sizes continue to reduce.  Grain reserves now stand at 400 days. Starvation has gone the way of smallpox – totally eradicated.  Land retirement continues as meat consumption worldwide falls to an average 6 kgs per person per year.  GNP per person continues to rise as the reduction of military capacity continues, transferring investment into money-saving, planet-saving technologies.  Emigration from Europe and North America continues to infuse Africa, Asia and Latin America with the capital and skills from returning immigrants, reinvesting in their places of origin. The world’s economy continues to thrive since the Global Trade Justice Agreement of 2005 that led to the abolition of all US, EU and Japanese agricultural subsidies and protectionism following the Cairns Group Ultimatum of 2004.  McDonald’s recently announced that its sales of organic vegeburgers now outstrip beefburger sales by 6 to one, with wholewheat buns now representing more than half of all buns sold.  Monsanto, whose genomics seed division has continued to come up with naturally bred landrace seed varieties tailored to the precise soil and climate requirements of the world’s regions, announced record profits.  A company spokesperson announced: “The diversification and empowerment of small farmers that followed the Trade Justice Agreement has provided us with rich rewards.  Our Small Farmers Seed Saving Programme has enriched our genomic data base while rewarding farmers who select ideal traits from their crops.”

Fantasy?  Not a bit of it.  Nothing in the above optimistic scenario should stretch the credulity of anyone who’s read this little book.   We are not faced with immutable forces that lead us to starvation, obesity, disease and environmental degradation.  We have the technologies - in agriculture, preventive medicine, food processing and energy production – to realise the above scenario. 

We suffer a distorted system where powerful forces coerce and cajole governments to work against the public interests.  Nobody really gains much from it.  None of us ever really asked for the system we got – it has been sold as delivering the greatest goods, but in practice it demands ever-increasing subsidy and brings, as a product of its systems, obesity, new more virulent bacterial diseases, increasing dependence on chemical fungicides, insecticides and herbicides as well as a cocktail of antibiotics, genetically engineered hormones, drugs and adulterants in our food and environment.

We need a new kind of accounting that counts all the costs.  Cheaper hamburgers and sugary foods may make a few pennies more profit for the shareholders in a chemical, pharmaceutical or fast food company, but who’s counting the cost in heart disease and diabetes?  Nowhere on the national account are the negative costs counted - the heartache of the bereaved, loss of earning power, amputation, blindness and agonising pain aren’t calculated on the debit side of the ledger.  If they were, we’d be in a very different situation with food.

Is cheap food worth the ill-health that is its concomitant?  Is it worth the environmental destruction?  The excessive use of fossil fuels?  The risk of global warming and increasingly violent weather and flooding?  Do we really want our children to enter puberty in hormonal turmoil, brought on by consumption of endocrine-disrupting chemicals in unpredictable interactions with the hormone imbalances inherent in obesity? 

Is it fair to the children?  They didn’t ask to be hooked on junk foods and additives before they were old enough to learn about nutrition.  The inevitable result in the longer run will be evolutionary degeneration.  Surely this wasn’t part of the deal?  I don’t remember seeing ads that said: “Eat junk food and your grandchildren and great grandchildren may well be at risk of a wide range of degenerative and congenital conditions that are a direct consequence of your ill-informed food choices.”

But it’s happened,  Inexorable, focused pressure on governments around the world has brought us to a situation where the richest 20% of the world’s population suffer chronic obesity disease and the poorest 20% starve.  The middle 60% aren’t doing that well, either, with the exception of a  rapidly-growing minority who engage in ‘joined up thinking’ about food, diet and farming.  If you do the sums properly, i.e. from the perspective of a nation or society, eating unsubsidised organically grown wholesome food free of artificial additives and in a proportion that favours grains, pulses and vegetables over meat and dairy products and sugar is the answer.

Slow Food Skye Speech

This was my keynote speech at the launch of Slow Food UK back in 2005.   I was the Chairman of the Soil Association at that time  (and went on to be Chair of Slow Food UK)

The Soil Association was founded in 1946 with a mission to research and develop an understanding of the link between the health of the soil and the health of the plants, animals and humans that it supports and to then establish an informed body of public opinion on these matters.  That informed body of public opinion was established but still had no political impact so we went one step further and helped create a $30 billion worldwide market for organic food.  Dr Innes Pearce, one of our founders, had shown, with the Peckham project, that if working class people were educated in how to freshly prepare wholesome food the indicators of social well being such as education, income, marital stability and staying out of jail all improved. So we married agriculture with social and health issues.  How, you may ask, does this fit with the Slow Food philosophy, which has its roots in gastronomy and food culture?

 Last year the Nobel Prize in medicine went to Richard Axel and Linda Buck, who mapped the code between genes and odour receptors.  They found that we have 350 genes that connect to our smell receptors.  There are another 600 genes that are dormant, reflecting humanity’s reduced reliance on smell.  Taste uses only 29 genes, and sight a mere 3, so this research emphasises the importance of our sense of smell.  As the Italian novelist Italo Calvino wrote: “Everything is first perceived by the nose, everything is within the nose, the whole world is the nose.” 

So how is it that smell, or flavour, is so important?  When plants evolved on this planet, long before animal life, they needed to create substances to protect themselves against oxidation from oxygen, ultraviolet light from the sun and the various viruses, bacteria, fungi, and insects that threatened their existence. These antioxidants, anthyocyanins, antiseptics and antifeedants come under the general name of flavonoids.  When animal life evolved it never created any of these substances, Nature is too efficient for that.  Instead we animals get them from our food.  How do we know where they are?  By our sense of smell – what we perceive as flavour is actually the antioxidants and other health-giving flavonoids that are in food.  So when food tastes really good to us it is because it really is good for us.  Cuisine and digestion concentrate and combine these flavonoids in a way that underpins our health and is at the root of our culture and civilisation. 

When a farmer uses artificial fertilisers, pesticides or other crop protection chemicals the plants produced have reduced levels of these flavonoids as they don’t need to produce them. Organic crops have to protect themselves with their own natural defensive chemicals, so their levels are often 50% higher. These natural defensive chemicals taste good to us for evolutionary reasons.  That’s why organic food tastes better and is better for us.  Gastronomy and good health spring from the same source, healthy soil and healthy plants.

The use of chemicals and artificial fertilisers springs from and underpins the industrialisation of agriculture – they reflect the need to reduce labour costs and to squeeze every last drop of cash out of every hectare of land.  The use of artificial colourings and flavourings  in food processing deceives our noses into thinking we are eating good food when we aren’t.  That’s why organic farming and food processing regulations exclude these unnatural chemicals.

Organic farming is by nature human scale and mixed.  Smaller farms are actually more efficient and more productive than large farms and, as the oil price rises, industrial agriculture will need ever increasing subsidy support.  The Soil Association supports the restructuring of land use around optimal sized mixed farming units.  Many of the pictures you saw this morning were from Soil Association conferences where Pam Rodway organised superb Slow Food lunches drawn from local producers, some organic, some not.

We heard this morning about proposed guidelines for Slow Food.  In the early days of organic food a lot of people jumped on the bandwagon and we soon saw the need for standards defining the word ‘organic.’  This led to the need for inspection protocols and then to certification systems.  The Soil Association pioneered these developments and has since helped the Biodynamic Agriculture Association, the Henry Doubleday Research Association, the Marine Stewardship Council, the Vegan Organic Trust, the Forestry  Stewardship Commission and the Fairtrade Foundation to create efficient effective systems to ensure that claims can be verified.  The day may come when Slow Food will want to protect its integrity and I hope that we will be able to help by sharing our experience and expertise in this area. 

We are only too aware that inspection and certification is a burden on the small producer – I myself pay far too much in fees for a bureaucratic process that is excessive relative to my tiny levels of production.  The Soil Association is developing and testing systems that will enable a high degree of self-certification and a reduced frequency of inspections, so that the cost of being certified organic for the small producer can be dramatically reduced.  However, these need to be approved at a European level, which will take a long time.  An ideal outcome might be that Slow Food certification enabled small producers to have an independent assurance of their integrity and that we could help with this.

Allow me to read from The Little Food Book by, ahem, Craig Sams. “Slow Food sees children as the Slow Foodies of the future and seeks to educate them in the taste of food and in how it is produced.  They even produce a book teaching kids about flavour and its appreciation via ‘aware’ tasting.”

Our Food For Life campaign to improve school dinners inspired Jamie Oliver’s influential TV series.  The Dinner Lady and author Jeanette Orrey, who now works for the Soil Association,  is now running a cooking school for dinner ladies at Ashlyns Farm in Essex.  Our Policy Director sits on the Government committee to improve school meals.  Palates that are trained in childhood never lose their taste for good food.  Our inspiration for this campaign came from the example of Italian schools, where Slow Food has been so instrumental in bringing about change.  A few weeks ago Jo and I spoke at a meeting at Sacred Heart school in Hastings where the headmistress is determined to produce school dinners on site when her catering contract expires in a year’s time.

In all our work, the Soil Association sees itself  more as an enzyme to bring about change rather than  as an empire-builder.  We initiate and support change without trying to control it.

Let me describe one effort, typical of what is beginning to happen all over the country at the local level.

Jo and I have recently taken over our founded-in-1826 local bakery in Hastings and expanded it to a retail shop that sells organic local fruit and vegetables grown locally.  Last month we budgrafted 25 trees of the near-extinct Saltcote Pippins, one of the surprisingly few indigenous varieties of apple that Sussex can boast, which originated 5 miles from Hastings in the early 19th Century.   Eventually we’ll harvest them from our orchard in November for sale when they reach their prime in late January and February and use them in our apple turnovers.  We have lamb and beef from the salt marsh a few miles away at Pett Levels.  We sell cheeses from sheep’s milk that is the natural dairy product of the Downs to the north and south of us and cheeses, ciders and wines that represent the continuation or the revival of the traditional foods of East Sussex.

We’ve kept on baking Judges’ popular and traditional white bloomers, teacakes, Eccles cakes, wet nellies,  pasties and sausage rolls – but now all 100% organic.  Many customers have commented on the improvement in flavour,  but we have not blown the organic trumpet at all.  We’ve introduced almond croissants, sweet little gingerbread seagulls, sourdough rye, onion focaccia and pan Pugliese. Whenever you go into the shop there is something to be sampled – the sale of local cheeses has soared.

ALL our breads, even our standard white tins, are Slow Bread – which to us means that the doughs ferment at least 18 hours and that the starters are nourished and built up for 3 days before the bread goes into the oven.  Some people with bread allergy have found that they can eat it without ill effects.

We aim to be part of a Slow Food ‘convivium’ that will reach out to local producers and bring together local customers who share the Slow Food ideal. Now that we’re up and running we plan to have regular Slow Food lunches where our customers will sample the produce of East Sussex producers and become part of a network that combines enjoyment with reduced food miles, just-picked freshness and that ineffable satisfaction that comes from being part of a community.  When your database of membership for the UK is up and running, remember that there are 60,000 members of the Soil Association and HDRA as well as perhaps another 100,000 supporters who are prospective members of local conviviums.

The Slow Food Manifesto speaks of ‘dealing with the problems of the environment and world hunger without renouncing the right to pleasure.’

Organic farming offers solutions to the problems of the environment. Decentralised self-sufficient farms are the answer to world hunger. Organic production fulfils the aspirations of gastronomy to take pleasure in the production, preparation and shared enjoyment of good food.  With these goals in common, I see Organic and Slow Food as natural allies – with a shared interest in combining the joy of eating with responsibility for health and the future of the planet.