No-Nonsense Guide to World Food, 2nd Edition

Wayne Roberts

• Publisher: Between the Lines
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781771131223
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Advocacy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In this updated edition of The No-Nonsense Guide to World Food Wayne Roberts puts under the microscope a global food system that is under strain from climate change and from economic disaster. He shows how a world food system based on supermarkets and agribusiness corporations is unsustainable and looks at new models of producing healthy food from all over the world.

1 Introducing the food system

The concept of a ‘food system’ helps explain many of the problems and opportunities in today’s confusing and fast-changing global food scene. Food systems are sometimes described as ‘hidden in plain sight’ – only obvious after they’ve been pointed out. The same goes for food’s healing powers, which can be tapped by people looking to make a difference in their lives, careers and communities.

FOOD IS a hot topic these days, for two totally different reasons. First, many people realize that food as they’ve known it can no longer be taken for granted. They’re unsure how to protect themselves from unsettling trends in food safety and food processing, the rapid rise of obesity and chronic disease, or levels of poverty that impose hunger and malnutrition. Second, and in a totally different vein, many people are excited about heartwarming food projects that help them find their voice and satisfy their desires for a meaningful, engaged, empowered and authentic life. The world of food is poised on the edge of problems and opportunities. Welcome to a subject that impacts upon everyone, and invites everyone to make a difference.

At issue is a New Food Equation. It’s not your grandmother’s food equation. The industrial formula that took enormous strides toward delivering ample, affordable, healthy and safe food in the Global North during the 1950s and 1960s hasn’t lived up to its reputation in the Global North, and isn’t making much positive headway in the Global South. The anticipations of an earlier generation are being disappointed just as a new generation emerges with rising aspirations – that food should taste real, provide fulfilling careers, support health, contribute to local communities, honor the environment, and enhance global sustainability. X marks the spot where dashed expectations meet rising ones, creating what Welsh academic Kevin Morgan calls the New Food Equation.¹

The ‘food problem’ problem

There are two general ways of responding to the New Food Equation. The standard way is to present the challenge as a ‘food problem’, and to urge people to solve the problem by making good food choices rather than bad ones. One column on a typical chart could have a heading for good foods, and the other column could have a heading for bad foods. The two-way split of foods would carry on down the columns – healthy foods versus junk foods; vegetarian meals rather than heavy servings of meat; low-fat against high-fat; organic in place of conventional; local as opposed to imported; cooked from scratch as an alternative to highly processed; slow versus fast, and so on.

The premise of this standard view is that there’s a ‘food problem’, or at least a problem with specific foods. This approach makes common sense for many people because it corresponds to everyday food experiences that either feel good or bad. The approach also fits with popular beliefs that individuals need to make responsible choices about what foods to avoid and which ones to eat. In my experience, this ‘food problem’ approach is largely unquestioned – almost a given. When I’m invited to give a talk about food outside of my hometown, for example, local journalists almost always start by asking what food problems I’ll discuss. Will I talk about the food problem of the world’s 1.8 billion people who eat too much for their own good, or the food problem of the billion people who eat too little, or the food waste problem?

This line of questioning leaves me tongue-tied because I don’t like to talk about food when it falls under the shadow of the word ‘problem’. I want to shift the discussion to what I would call governance or system problems. To paraphrase former US President Bill Clinton, I believe there is nothing wrong with food that cannot be fixed by what is right with food. For example, it’s not a food problem that leads to hunger. In 2005, enough food was produced to share a very filling 2,772 calories with every person in the world every day. In sub-Saharan Africa, where 27.6 per cent of people suffered from hunger, there was enough to provide everyone with 2,238 calories a day. South Asia, where 21.8 per cent of people are hungry, had enough for all to enjoy 2,293 calories a day. It’s not a food problem that causes hunger. It’s a system problem of people who can’t manage abundance.²

The central argument of this first chapter is that blaming food problems and bad food choices is a bad habit that needs to be broken. I like to trash junk food as much as the next person, but setting up a category for junk food gets us off on the wrong foot by underestimating the real proportions of the problem. Junk food needs to be seen along a spectrum, not as a separate category on the fringe. It’s not a simple matter of poking fingers at the junk-food outlet over there. A good many mainstream foods have lost their original nutrients, are laden with salt, sugar, fat and empty calories, are prepared with minimal skills and eaten with little grace – not much difference from junk food there. For example, a popular case has been made that most grain for white, brown, whole-wheat and multi-grain bread, bagels and pasta has grown from seeds selected for baking and storage properties, not for nutritional quality, and has been stripped of wholesome fiber, and mixed with lavish amounts of salt, sugar and other additives. The same can be said for breakfast cereals.³ Orange juice has gone down the same track: drinks companies own the dominant brands, and process the oranges in ways that remove most of the original goodness, a detailed study shows.⁴ Likewise, another study points out that most Florida-grown tomatoes have been raised to sacrifice nutrients and taste for bright color (the credit for which goes to ethylene gas, not time out in the sun) and low price.⁵ Prepared soups, sauces, salad dressings and sandwich spreads use ingredients and processing methods similar to junk-food outlets. People may go to a full-service restaurant or supermarket thinking they are choosing real food over junk food, but the ingredient list shows otherwise. If this is indeed a ‘food problem’, it’s a bigger mess than just junk food.

The ‘food problem’ approach can mistakenly badmouth certain foods. Such mistakes remind me of a friend who survived a stroke but was frustrated by his inability to move his right arm, which he called his ‘bad arm’. Don’t blame the arm, his physiotherapist told him; the problem is in your brain’s message center. That principle applies to a wide range of ‘bad foods’ – coffee, tea, chocolate, sugar and salt among them – which have had their good side bent out of shape by a faulty control system. The bad reputation may be a result of too much of a good thing, or too much messing with a good thing.

A good example of this is palm oil, the second most traded edible oil in the world, found in about 10 per cent of processed foods, cosmetics and soaps (most famously Palmolive). Like so many other ingredients shipped around the world – check how many times you find palm oil, carrageen or guar gum on a food label, for instance – palm oil is used to stop combinations of food in prepared meals from losing shape, breaking apart or collapsing into themselves as sticky goo over a long life on the shelf. Palm oil is stable and solid at room temperature, and performs well under high heat. These qualities explain why it is widely used in baked and fried foods, make-believe creamers, whipped toppings, candies and cookies that spend a long time on shelves, and why the combo of chocolate and palm melts in your mouth, not your hands. But food critics smear it for its high saturated fat content, while environmentalists slam plantation-style palm monoculture for displacing millions of hectares of rainforest. Since almost all commercial palm oil comes from Malaysia and Indonesia, it accounts for a good portion of the mileage that processed foods cover as they travel from farm to fork.

Who would ever guess that the palm oil squeezed by hand from the pulped fruit of the original palm tree of western Africa is something of a wonderfood, high in Vitamins E, K, A and ‘good’ cholesterol? In its home base in Africa, the multi-purpose palm tree was raised as one of several trees in a forest garden, and offered up its leaves for disposable wrappers around meats, cattle feed, basket weaving and thatched roofs, while its sap was used to make a relatively nutritious sweetener and delicate wine. ‘Like so many African treasures,’ investigative reporter Joan Baxter writes, ‘once the foreign industrialists got their hands on it and took it away, the oil palm became something quite different’ – its fruit processed beyond recognition. But that’s not a food problem or a palm-tree problem. Making it seem that way just serves to deflect attention from the real problem of an inadequate food governance system.⁶

The need to shift focus from food problems to food systems is confirmed by an overview of giant food companies. A 2010 survey of the world’s top 50 food companies showed that 49 of them sold mostly highly processed, highly refined, high-fat, high-salt, highly packaged, highly advertised, high-calorie, low-nutrient foods, snacks, soda pops and alcohol. Dole, known for marketing fruit, stands out as a top company that sells stand-alone foods. The success of the top 50 indicates that consumers around the world are eating up the items found on food problem lists. Israel, Qatar and Oman are among a handful of countries where people spend more money on fruit and vegetables than on booze and tobacco.⁷ This 2010 survey, which has been largely ignored in the media, raises some interesting questions. First, why does hardly anyone recognize the names of more than 10 of the world’s top 50 food syndicates? ‘Food problems’ are often linked to highly advertised and well-known junk-food chains, not to gray and greasy eminences. Something more systemic than famous companies and products must be at work. Discovering that force leads away from a simple chart of food problems towards analysis of food systems.

The way governments approach food also sheds light on the need to think beyond a list of food problems. Chew on the Canada Food and Drug Act definition of food: ‘any article manufactured, sold or represented for use as food or drink for human beings, chewing gum, and any ingredient that may be mixed with food for any purpose whatever’. No problem figuring out how the prefabricated Tim Hortons donut became Canada’s national food, though how this wording gets repeated virtually word for word in US and European law bears inquiry into either plagiarism or the power of the chewing gum lobby. The law makes no reference to food being grown, foraged, cultivated, nurtured or raised, and only specifies food as being manufactured, which speaks to the industrial mindset of the post-1940s world when the modern food system developed. The law gives blanket authorization to companies to describe any manufactured good they produce as food. In one fell swoop, this pulls the rug out from under public health advocates, who often refer to high-fat/high-sugar/high-salt foods as ‘competitive’ foods, because they compete for customer loyalty and stomach space with healthy foods that don’t have an advertising budget. Under the law, competitive foods enjoy all the tax-free, subsidy and regulatory advantages that healthy foods enjoy, and none of the tax and regulatory costs of presenting themselves for what they really are – risky amusement or entertainment products with little resemblance to anything that passed for food before 1940. When governments embed this approach to food in bedrock legislation, something is going on that goes beyond ‘food problems’, which wouldn’t exist if the government didn’t call them food.

A joyful approach to food

The ‘food problem’ discourse creates unnecessary anxieties and divisions among people who could be saving their energy for something positive. In 1931, Irma Rombauer wrote one of the best-selling cookbooks of all time, The Joy of Cooking. The book is a milestone because she defied all the messaging from food processors who depicted food preparation as drudgery akin to slavery. The Joy of Cooking, as subversive in her day as The Joy of Sex was 30 years later, came out and said the Joy word, right beside Cooking. Weirdly, the cooking hang-up has stuck around longer in some societies than the sex hang-up. The concept of food problems is its legacy. In 1995, I learned the joyful approach from Herb Barbolet, a pioneer of Canada’s food movement. ‘The biggest food problem is the failure to recognize food opportunities,’ he told me at his Farm Folk City Folk office in Vancouver. I’ve been hooked on food ever since, as a way to get people engaged in doable projects that help them act on food and people opportunities. I like to present potential food projects, rather than advocate for them, as if I’m presenting a dessert tray, and let people pick a project that suits their tastes. Good meals have appetizers and treats, and food organizers can learn from that example.

Here’s a typical suggestion I offer up on a platter. It doesn’t sound too appetizing, but it whets the appetite f...