Lawrence - Not on the label: what really goes into the food on your plate

It is nearly a decade since the first edition of Not On the Label emerged from a series of investigative journeys I had taken around the global food business.

Those had been shaped partly by my personal experience. I had worked for a couple of years in Pakistan on the Afghan border and, having been isolated from Western culture for a long stretch, on my return I found myself looking at it through different eyes, as though for the first time. Having lived among refugees in an area where food could never be taken for granted, the contrast back in London was dramatic. Here people struggled with overeating and the diseases of excess rather than the diseases of malnutrition and hunger.

The march of the supermarket across our food culture, well under way when I left, was almost complete by the time I came back. There was a cornucopia of plenty at every journeys end but the destination mostly seemed to be a retail car park. Seasons, so prominent in the bazaars of Central Asia, had been abolished in favour of a permanent transcontinental summer time on the high street. It looked awesome. It had removed the daily grind of shopping that had consumed the time and energy of women (mostly) of the previous generation. I wondered if a genius in a white lab coat had invented it while I was away.

But there was something missing from this way of producing, selling and consuming food that seemed to reflect a deeper societal malaise. Human interaction had been reduced to a hurried minimum. There was no scent and little taste to much of the fresh food on offer. The infinite variety on the aisles so often turned out to be just fifty variations on the same over-processed combinations of denatured commodity ingredients high in salt, sugar and fat, despite being packaged and marketed as different brands. There was so much waste.

For all the sophistication of food production in Europe, there was a sense of loss. Independent shops and markets were disappearing. Unpackaged, unprocessed food that had not passed through the mill of big chains was hard to find, and even harder to find at an affordable price. Farmers struggled to make a living. The system was a miracle of logistics and a response to our ever busy and changing lifestyles, but in gobbling sandwiches furtively at our desks, wolfing fast food on the run or throwing together a meal of pre-cut chicken and ready chopped vegetables to consume in front of screens, much of the cultural significance of shared meals had been sacrificed. And in those places where meals were given time and significance, it was at the other extreme. Foodie feasts and high-end restaurants were so hung up on provenance you practically needed a bank loan to indulge in their dishes. I remembered the simple meals from communal bowls set on a Baluch carpet in a refugees mud house, where the business of eating was serious. It wasnt just about refuelling as efficiently as possible, it was the focus of human exchange. The simplest things could be the most delicious. Sitting together over food was where adults shared news and views, where children learned to communicate, to defer to the needs of others and were socialized.

Oddest of all, given this abundance and all the technology that created it, everyone back home seemed worried about their food. Food poisoning had been a regular part of life abroad in an under-developed and war-torn region, but why did so much anxiety surround food even in the affluent West? All the hi-tech hygiene and computerized traceability systems of which the industry boasted seemed unable to keep a series of crises in their complex global chains at bay. Each of these revealed the dysfunction at the heart of our food system.