Eating for England

Food symbolises the body of Christ. It is an aid to seduction. Eating some foods, like the fugu of Japanese cuisine, can be exquisite suicide, as its poison numbs the throat. Bad food makes us sick, and fatty foods thicken our blood. Anorexics die from fear of getting plump, while millions succumb to obesity. Policies for growing food waste ?20 for every British household each week. Food causes conflict: from rivalries in the produce tent at village f?tes, to armed confrontation over access to famine relief. Bananas, tuna fish, hormone-laced milk and beef on the bone, transgenic soya and irradiated prawns: food looms large in trade disputes, too.
There is a gentler battle being fought in Britain?s food supply, a dialectic between two visions of how we should feed ourselves. On the one hand there is the industrial food economy, big, brash and clever; on the other the food artisan. Economically they cannot be compared, but both tell us about our values and culture and the country we want to inhabit. For most of us?all but the very poor?food is freedom, a weekly, daily or hourly chance to express our 21st century destiny as consumers. Food?fast or whole, grazed or feasted?is our most frequent expression of choice. Our options have expanded enormously. This is the great gain of industrialisation. But it has been achieved at a cost.
The industrial food economy is characterised by scale, uniformity and ruthless competition. Its chain of command starts at the farm. Britain is an overcrowded country, yet we have the largest farms in the EU, and they are getting larger still. As a result, fewer people work on the land?2 per cent and falling fast. This represents a lower proportion of the workforce than any other country in the OECD except for metropolitan Singapore, with no farmland to speak of.
With larger farms come fewer enterprises: mixed farming is now rare; production is divided between the arable east and the pastoral west. There is monotony in the things we produce, with a narrowing genetic pool and in-breeding. The top three varieties of spring wheat account for 86 per cent of plantings; the top three varieties of oats for 77 per cent of plantings. Commercial flocks and herds are dominated by super-breeds: the dairy Holstein, the Large White porker, the laying Warren, the Ross table chicken, with heavy thighs and bones often incapable of bearing its weight.
As farming abandons the four-course rotation which revolutionised 18th-century England, it relies more and more on external inputs. Where the livestock is gone, there is no call to maintain the hedges. Fields get larger, so bigger tractors become more economic?and burn more diesel. Energy input to output ratios are declining?moving away from sustainability. As plant food in bags supplants farmyard manure, half the arable farm?s energy consumption comes in the form of glistening white granules?nitrogen fixed from the air, each pellet a speck of gelled power. A truncated rotation means more persistent weeds. Mile upon mile of uniform crop made lush with bag-N is the ideal nursery for pests and disease?so we call for the sprayer, another outing for the tractor, more fossil fuels burned.
Our large farms are increasingly producing on contract. The marketplace of the economist?s dreams, with many buyers and sellers, has given way to oligopoly. A few large buyers?the retailers and processors?can dictate the terms. In this food economy, agricultural products have become industrial feedstock?undifferentiated milk, grain or slabs of meat, like the frozen pork bellies of Chicago trading-floor fame. Who would recognise?by sight, or even by taste?a cube of protein soaked in scarlet sauce on a plastic tray as part of a chicken?s anatomy? And when their tastes are disguised, ingredients are easily substituted. If the potatoes for starchy snacks get too pricey, new technologies allow wheat, maize, cassava or rice to be used instead.
As ingredients are substituted, so too are suppliers. The horticultural trade is particularly vulnerable: a perishable product gives more power to the buyer. With fresh vegetables, supermarkets stipulate the exact type of packaging and labelling to be used, on pain of rejection. There is no room in that supply chain for the small business. It takes investment beyond the means of most farmers even to be eligible to sell produce to supermarkets.
This dominance comes from a highly concentrated market, with nearly three quarters of sales through only five supermarket companies. In some areas, such as Sutton, in Surrey, one food retailer can have nearly two thirds of all sales. Because competition law defines a monopoly as 25 per cent or more of the market at a national level, this local dominance escapes the authorities? notice. Yet to the consumer this is what matters; notwithstanding growth in car use, food shopping is still a local activity. It is no consolation to the shopper in Plymouth that there may be more competition in Bristol, let alone in York.
Large stores are the urban expression of the industrial food economy, both as consequence and cause. The larger they are, the wider their dominance?and the more they generate traffic. Of eight categories of new urban development in the traffic planners? trip generation model, only restaurants cause more car journeys for a given space. It is widely believed that modern shopping patterns have reduced the number of shopping trips. In fact there are more, they are longer, and more are by car. The total number of shopping trips is up by nearly one third over the last 25 years; the distance covered by drivers has more than doubled. The car is now totally dominant: in the mid-1980s less than two thirds of people did their main food shopping by car; ten years on, more than three quarters did so.
If getting people to their food has changed, so too has getting food to the people. Take a Welsh hill farm I know, with its annual field of carrots sold through two shops in the local town. One distribution route is from soil to greengrocer direct in a sack. Total distance travelled: five miles. The other is via packhouse and regional distribution centre and back to the town?s only supermarket. Distance travelled: 25 times further?and the carrots, on arrival, less fresh.
Ninety-eight per cent of the supplies to an average superstore come via such a distribution centre, and ?just-in-time? delivery has replaced storage on site. Most modern superstores have minimal warehousing space. The result is a huge increase in freight. As an industrial sector, food, drink and tobacco account for about one tenth of GDP (with tobacco declining), but more than one third of the growth in road freight. Thankfully, no other sector comes close to such an explosion in demand for lorries and motorways. We eat the same amount as we did 25 years ago, but it travels more than 50 per cent further within Britain. Air-freighted food tonnages have increased even more, doubling in the 1980s and now growing faster still.
The food economy has delivered a cheap food policy?we spend less each year on sustaining ourselves, and are probably better fed and undoubtedly living longer than ever before. Yet in many respects this food economy offers a bleak prospect for the future. It delivers diversity on the shelf, but stifles it in the field. It does damage to much that we value.
Yet look more closely and you?ll see other trends: small seedlings sprouting like convolvulus in the monotonous landscape, taking root and spiralling to bind more people to the land. Ironically, the artisan food economy has been enjoying a renaissance, simultaneous with the tightening grip of industrialisation. But perhaps it is not ironic; perhaps it is the natural human tendency to seek or recreate colour amid greyness, to build a stockade on the prairie and plant it with wallflowers. Although the number of independent bakers continues to decline, in some towns they are coming back. Certainly there are more cheese-makers. New and piquant chutneys and mustards are made alongside more traditional preserves. Tamworth, Middle White and Gloucester Old Spot pork is available again. Smoked or jellied eel is easily obtainable and, with a bit more effort, hot-smoked venison, cured wild boar, even dormouse, grey squirrel from a Wealden butcher, and prize-winning Cornish salami. One food writer, Henrietta Green, makes a living from celebrating the new speciality food producers of Britain. Her publications get thicker each year.
If these are the glimmerings of a revived local food culture, organic production is the sun around which they revolve. There is a lot of nonsense spoken about organic farming?from thinly-veiled hostility in the agricultural press to the sneering disdain of Britain?s farming leaders. Even campaigning environment groups?including those dedicated to the countryside?have been arrogant and patronising. As a result, Britain?s record in organic production is deplorable. We import 70 per cent of organic food consumed here, much of which could be grown in Britain; and we have the lowest level of payments for organic farmers and, consequently, the lowest organic acreage of any EU country. Yet we have more reason to support it than most: Britain inflicted BSE on the world by ignoring the precepts of sound husbandry.
The distinctive features of the artisan food economy are the inverse of its industrial foe. It is small-scale and labour intensive, with organic farming shown to provide 10 to 50 per cent more employment per acre. With no artificial fertilisers and strict limitations on sprays, energy use is lower. The benefits for landscape and wildlife are even clearer: crop diversity is obligatory on organic farms; hedges and other landscape features must be maintained; birds, wildflowers and butterflies thrive as a result.
Artisan food producers are also finding new ways?or in some cases reviving old ways?of marketing their produce. Most feature direct trade between producer and consumer, ensuring freshness, reducing food miles, delivering good value for the buyer and the full retail price to the seller by cutting out middlemen. Despite tighter food hygiene rules, mail order is one well-tried route. Farm shops are springing up, encouraging a wider range of enterprises on the farm. A handful of farmers? markets have appeared, where farmers come to town one or two days a week and sell direct: from small beginnings, there are now nearly 2,500 such working markets in the US, serving a million shoppers each week.
In Britain, perhaps the best-developed model of direct marketing is the thriving network of box schemes, where the grower establishes a distribution round in a local town, delivering a box of mixed produce on a weekly basis for a fixed sum. Direct contact between consumer and producer leads to experimentation with new crops and varieties.
New plots are being dug for growing food in towns. The Guinness site in Wandsworth, south London, under occupation for a summer in 1996 by campaigners from The Land is Ours, sprouted vegetables, herbs and fruit trees. More enduring are some of London?s community schemes, such as the garden and orchard in Camberwell Green and the vegetable plot in Hackney?s Grazebrook Primary School. The Battlebridge Centre in King?s Cross uses raised beds to bring life to a contaminated site. This year saw the first CityHarvest festival for London?s produce, to show the potential of London?s 2,500 acres of allotments, 4,000 acres of derelict land and 1.5m household gardens, parks, rooftops and playgrounds. In Salford, Reading, Nottingham and Bradford, food is being produced on communal land. In Glasgow, surplus produce from allotments is sold through the local food co-op, while the West Midlands? Sandwell co-op is starting new allotments to produce its own fruit and greens.
True, this picture of opposing food economies is an over-simplification of a complex food system. Even the staunchest defender of local production will buy household detergents from the supermarket; and many artisan producers aspire to, or sell already, through the multiples. The industrial food economy is fast to react to any challenge to its hegemony, by co-opting the characteristics which mark out its counterpart. The high street baker may have gone, but some of its features have reappeared in Sainsbury?s. Similarly with the fishmonger, butcher and greengrocer. Organic produce, long spurned by the big retailers, has now penetrated even Marks & Spencer. Home delivery?traditionally the preserve of the high-quality grocer?is now available from superstores. There are even a few products stocked only in the superstores closest to where they are produced. (Five years ago the retailing leviathans said this was not possible, given centralised distribution. Today the products are a totem of local commitment.)
The edges are blurred, but the distinction remains. Two systems compete. Does it matter which wins? I think it does. It matters because industrialisation of the food system has huge hidden costs. It matters because diet is closely connected to health and well-being. And because, with the homogenisation of food culture, we risk becoming stateless in the culinary world.
In Britain we demand cheap food. As a proportion of income we spend only one third as much as the Portuguese and Greeks, half as much as the Italians (despite the fact that prices in British supermakets are higher than those on the continent). Within the EU, only the Irish spend less. Yet cheap food has exacted a heavy price. We have paid, with the loss of one mile of hedgerow for every hour of daylight in the last 20 years; with the disappearance of our horticultural small holdings and of thousands of jobs on the land. Our street markets, auction marts and shopkeepers have gone; town centres are now studded with the same national chains. Our towns are clogged with traffic. Lorries pound our roads and jets scar the sky, but most of the orchards and hop-fields of Kent now grow corn, their trees and bines long since grubbed. Public policy must share the blame for this loss, but no industry is more guilty than the one which brings us our food. In the economist?s jargon, it has externalised its costs; and prospered at the expense of much we hold dear.
We are suffering, too, from the diseases of affluence. Of the 23 countries in Europe, Scotland tops the toll of deaths from ischaemic heart disease, followed in third place by Ireland and fourth by England and Wales. Cancer?some types of which have a strong dietary link?comes second as the cause of premature death. Our more sedentary lifestyle means that we should take more care; to prevent both diseases we must eat more fruit and vegetables. This means eating less processed food, much of which is high in fat and sugar. But processed foods are profitable for the food industry, and therefore heavily promoted.
As consumers we are relinquishing control over the ingredients of what we eat: almost a third of our food is now consumed away from home, and a third of what is eaten at home comes pre-prepared. Cooking skills are in decline (witness the latest Delia Smith series on the BBC). Less than half of seven-to-15-year olds know how to boil an egg or bake a potato, and cooking is now seldom taught in our schools. School meals are no longer subject to national nutritional standards, victim of a food industry campaign against state interference. Plans for improved nutrition labelling have also gone the same way.
The third area of loss is our traditional food culture, the distinctiveness of regional dish or local variety. Our culinary repertoire has grown, and we have daily access to a cornucopia which would amaze our forebears. But globalisation and convenience foods crush local flavour in the name of the brand. Railway food illustrates the point: sandwiches, burgers, fried noodles and chicken tikka?dishes from four culinary traditions, a menu from anywhere in the world. I don?t decry choice, but I fear the industrial muscle which makes the words ?coca? and ?cola? the second and third most widely understood in the world (behind okay). This way lies homogeneity; ultimately, one global diet.
The food writer and broadcaster Derek Cooper, who has done more than most to promote good food in Britain, defines his ideal food economy as one in which you could travel across the British Isles and know where you were by the types of food on sale. It is an image of an artisan economy restored, and one which is gathering disciples.
There are many ways in which we can promote a benign realignment of food growing and selling and a rekindling of interest in our national food lore. As consumers and citizens we have complementary roles. We can return to the high street, buy fruit from the market and ask the superstore manager to stock local cheese. We can petition the council to provide more allotments. We can eat seasonal vegetables, and plant a local variety of apple tree. We can use our homes for cooking, and restore the pleasure of eating to its rightful place in our social lives. We can also demand better from those who govern us. Government ?both national and local?has closed off many of our choices, conniving with centralised distribution and concentration of retailing in fewer and fewer hands. Some local exceptions stand out: Birmingham defends its street markets (it has the highest number in Britain) and several planning committees nobly opposed applications for out-of-town stores. Bath held the first farmers? market. Sheffield provides financial help and facilities for a Healthy Gardening Group.
Only government can tackle excessive food transport, and say no to the road lobby?s domineering food barons. Competition policy could tackle local monopolies and prevent the predatory pricing which bankrupts small shops. New planning guidelines could restrict store developments, emphasising that food shopping is a local pastime. Only government can change perverse farm subsidies which reward agrochemical use. We must have more support for organic and small farmers, and a system of incentives to restore degraded landscapes and provide rural jobs. Only government can reform health service provision and emphasise the link between diet and health.
But we can do it?and the resurgence of the artisan food economy suggests that we are beginning to succeed. As citizens, voters, consumers and workers, we have many forms of influence in a pluralistic world. By exercising these roles more discerningly, we can prevent it becoming a world of McDonald?s.