Lawrence - Eat your heart out: why the food business is bad for the planet and your health

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First published 2008
1

Copyright Felicity Lawrence, 2008
All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

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978-0-14-191960-7

For Matt, Ellie, Cecy and Anna

Four years ago I wrote a book called Not on the Label to explain how the food of our modern industrialized diets is made. Like many people I had become disconnected from the processes involved in getting that food on to my plate. It was a revelation then to me as well as to others that a chicken nugget might consist of chopped up skin and fat disguised by additives rather than be made of lean meat, or that the pristine packs of washed, fresh salad I used to buy in supermarkets generally emerged from factory baths of chlorine thanks to hidden armies of poorly paid migrant workers. I found myself exploring a brave new world in which independent shops, local distribution networks and small farmers around the world were being squeezed out with alarming speed to be replaced by increasingly centralized and industrialized processes that are greedy of fossil-fuel energy and that concentrate the money made from food in the hands of a few corporations. Quite apart from epidemics of obesity, heart disease and cancer, the food this system produced just didnt taste very nice.

I was overwhelmed and humbled by the response to that first book. I lost track of the hundreds of letters and emails I received from people kind enough to tell me how they had changed their way of eating and shopping, or even their whole lives, after reading it. For some, change meant considerable personal inconvenience or upheaval there was the elderly couple from Cornwall who vowed never to shop in supermarkets again having read about the working conditions of migrants; there was the city dealer who decided to reconnect with the land, giving up his lucrative career for a smallholding and a more sustainable life. I heard from dozens of people who had started their own campaigns, dozens more who had joined food co-ops, become part of fair trade towns, sought out farmers markets, started using breadmakers, or simply gone back to cooking.

In the last four years our understanding has moved on. Concern about the quality of our food and about the wider social and environmental impacts of the way it is produced has at last become the stuff of the mainstream. Celebrity TV chefs have taken up the cause of improving diets and used the all-powerful medium of television to spread the message.

But what has struck me more recently is that while we have become more equipped to chose food that is better for our own health and that of the planet than we were just a few years ago, many of the connections still remain opaque. I find people ask me whether a particular food is all right, whether this brand might be better than that, or one particular retailer better than another, or a new apparently miracle food or technology might be the answer, when what we need for real understanding of the system and what we are being sold is knowledge of how the whole works and why it developed the way it did. What are the forces, economic, political, cultural, that led us down the path of degraded industrialized food in the first place? Where will those forces take us next, if the fundamentals are not changed? How do hunger and migration in one part of the world connect with obesity and ill-health in another? As climate change accelerates, and pressure on resources grows, the answers seem ever more urgent.