The Way We Eat Now

1: The Food Transition

There are two big stories to tell about food today and they could hardly be more different. One of these stories is something like a fairy tale; the other is closer to a horror story. Both, though, are equally true.

And they never went hungry again

The happy version of the story goes like this. Humans have never in history been fed as well as we are right now. As recently as the 1960s, you could go into almost any hospital in the developing world and find children suffering from kwashiorkor, a form of severe protein malnutrition which gives rise to swelling all over the body and a pot belly. Today kwashiorkor is mercifully rare in most countries (though it still afflicts millions of children in central Africa). Other diseases of deficiency such as scurvy, pellagra and beri-beri are – with a few exceptions – terrors of the past. The waning of hunger is one of the great miracles of modernity. And they never went hungry again is the happy ending of many fairy tales.1

Until the twentieth century, the threat of famine was a universal aspect of human existence across the world. Harvests failed; populations starved; for anyone but the wealthy, food wasn’t to be relied on. Even in rich countries such as Britain and France, ordinary people lived with the daily spectre of going to sleep hungry and spent as much as half their income on basic staples such as grain and bread. In the rice-based economies of Asia, mass starvation regularly killed whole communities.

The decline of hunger is one of the great wonders of our time. In 1947, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) at the United Nations, half of all the people on the planet were chronically underfed. By 2015, that figure had dropped to one in nine – even though the overall population had risen astronomically during the same period. The number of people living in extreme poverty continues to decline dramatically. On any given day in 2017, the numbers affected by extreme poverty – defined as less than $1.90 a day per person to cover food, clothing and shelter, adjusted for inflation – declined by 250,000.2

Absolute hunger is much rarer than it once was. In 2016, the Swedish historian Johan Norberg went so far as to argue – in his book Progress – that the problem of food had been solved. Advances in farming technology over the course of the twentieth century made massively more food available to vastly more people. A modern combine harvester can yield in six minutes what it once took twenty-five men a day to do and modern cold storage can prevent crops from rotting and being wasted after harvest.3 More food is produced each year than ever before.

Perhaps the greatest changes of all came about through the invention in the 1910s of the Haber-Bosch process, a method for synthesising ammonia which made highly effective nitrogen fertilisers cheap to produce for the first time. Vaclav Smil, a Canadian expert on land use and food production, has calculated that as of 2002, 40 per cent of the world’s population owed their existence to the Haber-Bosch process. Yet how often do you hear anyone talking about Haber-Bosch? Without it, many of us might not be here today, yet it has far less name recognition than Häagen-Dazs, a fake, supposedly Danish label for a brand of ice cream dreamed up by a businessman in the Bronx in 1961. In a way, our ignorance about Haber-Bosch shows once more how lucky we are. We have reached the point where most of us can afford to think more about ice cream than survival.4

It is said that Norman Borlaug, a plant agronomist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, saved a billion lives from starvation with his invention of semi-dwarf, high-yield wheat varieties. Thanks to Borlaug’s miracle wheat – coupled with modern farming methods – yields of the crop nearly doubled in India and Pakistan from 1965 to 1970.

Many of us yearn for the good old days of food when it was normal to bake your own bread – or roll your own tortelloni, as the case may be; but no one would wish themselves back to a state of famine. We sometimes forget that for most of history, even in rich countries life expectancy was short and people were sometimes so deprived of food that they mixed tree bark into flour to make it go further. Even for those who did not suffer actual famine, the business of cooking and eating on an average family budget could lead to a pinched and frugal existence, especially in winter when – before refrigeration was available – meals centred on staple grains and salted meat with little that was green or crunchy, never mind spicy or particularly delicious.5

Today, many of us have instant access to almost preposterous quantities of food, year round, of a freshness and variety our grandparents could not have imagined. In the city where I live, a three-minute walk from my home in any direction will take me to food shops with plentifully stocked shelves. I can stroll east and arrive at a Chinese supermarket, a butcher and a south Asian grocery which sells everything from fresh mint leaves and every spice under the sun to home-made falafels and samosas. To the north I will find a health food co-op offering local sourdoughs, ancient grains and organic apples; and a Hungarian deli selling any European cheese I can possibly name, as well as a few that I can’t. To the west and the south are four rival supermarkets, each heaving with fresh fruits and cereals, meat and fish, oils and vinegars, ginger and garlic.

Magical as it is, I’ve come to feel entitled to this abundance. On the rare occasions that I arrive at one of these many shops and the one specific thing I was expecting to buy has run out – no Parmesan left on a Sunday night! Outrageous! – I feel a mild consternation, because my expectation to eat exactly what I want at the precise moment I want to eat it has been scuppered.

In the developed world, many are living in a new Age of Delicious, liberated from the last vestiges of post-war austerity. The decline of hunger has been accompanied by a bright new dawn of flavour. Cooks are relearning the arts of pickling and fermenting, but this time we are doing it out of love not necessity. Never have so many cups of heavenly-tasting coffee been topped with so many variations on beautiful latte art. Clever home cooks have made food far more inventive and open than it was even ten years ago. Gone is the old food snobbery that said you couldn’t be a good cook if you hadn’t mastered half a dozen elaborate French sauces or a shellfish bisque. The internet has enabled recipe swapping on a scale and at a speed that is dizzying. Where our grandparents (in the Anglo-American world at any rate) sat down dutifully to plates of under-seasoned meat and two veg, we have developed unexpected new global palates: for spicy Turkish eggs sprinkled with sumac or vibrant salads of green mango and lime. Food has gone from being a scarce and often dull kind of fuel to an ever-present, flavoursome and often exotic experience, at least in big cities. Think how casually we eat ingredients such as Kalamata olives or couscous now, as if born to them.

Yet the omnipresence of food has created its own completely new difficulties. Widely available cheap food can look like a dream; or it can be a nightmare. It’s impossible to accept Norberg’s assertion that the problem of food has been solved when diet now causes so much death and disease in the world. The same food that has rescued us from hunger is also killing us.

As of 2006, for the first time the number of overweight and obese people in the world overtook the number who were underfed, in absolute terms. That year, 800 million individuals still did not have enough to eat but more than a billion were overweight or obese. To our hungry ancestors, having too much to eat might have looked like the gold at the end of the rainbow, but what these new calories are doing to our bodies is not a happy ending.6

The problem isn’t just that some people are overfed and others are underfed, lacking enough basic calories to ward off gnawing hunger (though that remains a real and brutal problem). The new difficulty is that billions of people across the globe are simultaneously overfed and undernourished: rich in calories but poor in nutrients. Our new global diet is replete with sugar and refined carbohydrates yet lacking in crucial micronutrients such as iron and trace vitamins. Malnutrition is no longer just about hunger and stunting; it is also about obesity. The literal meaning of malnutrition is not hunger but bad feeding, which covers inadequate diets of many kinds. If governments have been slow in acting to tackle the ill health caused by modern diets, it may be because malnutrition does not look the way we expect it to.

Despite the decline in hunger, malnutrition in all its forms now affects one in three people on the planet. Plenty of countries – including China, Mexico, India, Egypt and South Africa – are suffering simultaneously from over-feeding and under-nutrition, with many people suffering from a surfeit of calories but a dearth of the crucial micronutrients and protein a body needs to stay healthy. As a result, not just in the West but across the world, people are suffering in growing numbers from diseases such as hypertension and stroke, type 2 diabetes and preventable forms of cancer. The lead cause of these diseases is what nutritionists call ‘suboptimal diet’ and what to the rest of us is simply ‘food’.7

Our ancestors could not rely on there being enough food. Our own food fails us in different ways. We have markets heaving with bounty but too often, what is sold as ‘food’ fails in its basic task, which is to nourish us.

To walk into the average supermarket today is to be greeted not just by fresh whole ingredients, but by aisle upon aisle of salty oily snacks and frosted cereals, of ‘bread’ that has been neither proved nor fermented, of sweetened drinks of many hues and supposedly ‘healthy’ yoghurts that are more sugar than yoghurt. These huge changes to modern diets have gone hand in hand with other vast social transformations such as the spread of cars, electric food mixers and electronic screens of many kinds, which have left us far less active than earlier generations, gym membership or not. The mechanisation of farm work which created the food to feed billions also resulted in farmers (in common with most of the rest of us) leading increasingly sedentary lives.

In just a few decades, these alterations to how we eat have left unmistakable marks on human health. Take type 2 diabetes. The causes of this chronic condition, whose symptoms include fatigue, headaches and increased hunger and thirst, are still being debated by scientists, but there is clear evidence that – genetics aside – there is a higher risk of getting type 2 diabetes if you habitually consume a diet high in sugary drinks, refined carbohydrates and processed meats and low in wholegrains, vegetables and nuts.

In 2016, more than six hundred children in the UK were registered as living with type 2 diabetes. Yet as recently as 2000, not a single child in the country suffered from the condition.8

So are we living in a food paradise or a food hell? It doesn’t seem possible to reconcile these competing stories about modern food. But in 2015, a group of scientists in the United States, the UK and Europe devised a systematic assessment of the world’s diet which showed that both stories are true: the world’s diet is getting better and worse at the same time.

Where the balance falls

The light is fading on a cold winter’s day. I am sitting in a café at the top of the Cambridge University graduate students’ union with Fumiaki Imamura, a 38-year-old scientist. He drinks black coffee; I drink English Breakfast tea. Imamura, who has a Beatles haircut and a bright purple tie, is originally from Tokyo but has spent the past fifteen years in the West, studying the links between diet and health. ‘There are so many myths about food,’ Imamura says. One of the myths he refers to is the notion that there is such a thing as a perfectly healthy diet.

Every single human community across the globe eats a mixture of the ‘healthy’ and the ‘unhealthy’, but the salient question is where the balance falls. Imamura’s research shows that most countries in the world are currently eating more healthy food than we ever did; but also more unhealthy food. Many of us have a split personality when it comes to food, but then this is hardly surprising given how schizophrenic our food supply has become. We have access to more fresh fruit nowadays than we ever did; plus more sugar-sweetened cereals and French fries.

Imamura is a nutritional epidemiologist, meaning that he studies outlines of diet across whole populations to arrive at a more accurate account of how food and health are related. He works in the MRC Epidemiology Unit on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus. Imamura is one player in a much larger research team which straddles multiple universities in the United States and Europe. The overall project is based at Tufts University in Boston and is led by Professor Dariush Mozaffarian, one of the leading scholars currently using big data to measure nutrition in countries worldwide.

In 2015, Imamura was the lead author on a paper in medical journal The Lancet which caused a stir in the world of nutrition science. This team of epidemiologists have been seeking to map the healthiness, or otherwise, of how people eat across the entire world, and how this changed in the twenty years between 1990 and 2010.9

At this point, you might ask, what counts as a good quality diet? Some would define healthy food in positive terms: how many vegetables and portions of oily fish a person eats. Others define it more negatively, judging it by an absence of sugary drinks and junk food. Clearly, these are two very different ways of looking at the question. Most research on diet and health has lumped the two together, assuming that a high intake of ‘healthy’ fish will automatically go along with a low intake of ‘unhealthy’ salt, for example. But, alas, human beings are inconsistent creatures.

The Japanese, who are generally considered to eat an outstandingly ‘healthy’ diet as rich nations go, consume large amounts of both fish and salt: the one ‘healthy’ and the other ‘unhealthy’. They consume much refined polished white rice (‘unhealthy’) along with copious amounts of dark green vegetables (‘healthy’). Imamura himself still eats a diet centred on vegetables and fish, he tells me, but also a lot of salt in the form of soy sauce, even though as an epidemiologist he is aware that high sodium intake has been linked in numerous studies to high blood pressure. But he is conscious that no population in the world eats exactly the combination of healthy foods that nutritionists might recommend.

There have been many attempts to measure the healthiness of the world’s diet in the past but most studies have treated human eaters as more rational than we actually are. Previous studies have summed together high consumption of healthy foods and low consumption of unhealthy foods. What made Imamura’s paper so innovative – and so much closer to the way we actually behave around food – was that he and his fellow researchers studied healthy and unhealthy foods in two parallel datasets.

Imamura and his colleagues came up with a list of ten ‘healthy’ items: fruits, vegetables, fish, beans and legumes, nuts and seeds, wholegrains, milk, total polyunsaturated fatty acids (the kind of fat found in seed oils such as sunflower), plant omega 3s and dietary fibre. They created a separate list of ‘unhealthy’ items: sugary beverages, unprocessed red meats, processed meats, saturated fat, trans fat, cholesterol and sodium. (Imamura knows that some would quibble with the items on these lists. There is an ongoing debate among nutrition scientists about the healthiness or otherwise of saturated fats versus unsaturated fats. It looks as though the key question with saturated fat, as with other nutrients, is not whether it is unhealthy in absolute terms, but what you choose to eat instead of it. There is evidence that replacing saturated fats with processed carbohydrates can be harmful for heart health, whereas replacing it with olive oil or walnuts may have benefits.10 But based on everything that the epidemiologists currently knew about patterns of diet and health outcomes, these lists were the best they could do.) The researchers then tried to map a pattern of how much of these healthy and unhealthy foods are eaten in any given country.