Food is...
There is a report that comes out once a year by the (presumably) well-meaning folk at The Food Foundation called ‘The Broken Plate’. Each year, it details how broken the UK food system is. As an Angry Chef, I guess I should celebrate something that wangs on about how relentlessly terrible everything is, but as the years go by, it has started to grate, even with cheery old me. Because these days, the more I am told how bad things are, the more my piss starts to boil. And with the state of my aging bladder, that’s a problem.
These days, almost every conversation about food begins with the premise that things are just fucking terrible. If you release a report called ‘The Broken Plate’, there is little doubting what it is going to say. The world of food has been royally shafted by nefarious forces. Everything is shitty. Fucked to buggery. Getting worse with every minute.
It doesn’t matter what side of politics you sit on. You might be a left-leaning public health epidemiologist, a foaming at the mouth MAHA campaigner, a lunatic Green party activist or a holistic-herbal-nutritional-therapist-wanker trying to get clicks on LinkedIn. Whoever you are, there is absolute agreement that everything in our food system is terrible and rapidly getting worse. The plate is broken. We need to reset, tear up the rules, start over. The fact that such diverse factions agree, means that it surely must be true.
It’s a strong field, but my most controversial food opinion is that right now, things really aren’t that bad. Not perfect, obviously. I, along with nearly everyone I work with, spend most of my time trying to make the food system better. If everything was great, what would be the fucking point in that? There is injustice, hunger, sickness and harm. It’s really shit for everyone who is suffering. We should definitely be doing stuff to address the bad things, and striving to make people’s lives better. You’d have to be a monster not to want that, which, contrary to what Bee Fucking Wilson wrote about me a few years ago, I am not.
Jez, are you still going on about that shitty fucking Guardian review. It’s been 7 fucking years. Let it go.
Yes, I am an Angry Fucking Chef and I’m allowed to bear a grudge. Also, I bet you didn’t know Bee Wilson has the same middle name as Jamie Oliver.
(this joke is brought to you from the Angry Chef Classic Collection – have a great night and don’t forget to tip your waitress)
To start from the premise that every aspect of our food system is broken, which strongly implies that things were better (not broken) at some point in the past, sets us up for failure. We won’t improve anything by going backwards. We do not need to make things great again or healthy again, because by every measure, the past is a place we should do everything possible to avoid. It was not great or healthy, no matter what you’ve been told.
Similarly, selecting random radical alternatives to our current way of feeding people is unlikely to create positive change, particularly if those alternatives involve high levels of state intervention into our food supply. There is a tale, perhaps apocryphal, told by the economist Paul Seabrook, about the time in the late 80s when communist Russia was looking to transform into a market economy. This was perhaps the most significant economic transition in human history, and as part of the planning process delegates from across the Soviet Union would come and visit the UK on fact finding tours. They would marvel at lots of things and be troubled by others. Visible poverty, homelessness and drug addiction showed the dark side of the free market. But the one thing that every delegate was astounded by was the quality, choice and constant availability of food in the shops. Stacked shelves, short queues, low prices, endless choice. And remember, this was in the 1980s, when Tizer and Pop Tarts were the height of UK culinary sophistication. A step into a modern Tesco Superstore, with its 24 types of heritage tomatoes and dedicated Tzatziki fridge, would have exploded their tiny communist minds.
‘I want to meet the man who controls the supply of bread into London’ one of the delegates demanded of Seabrook, clearly marvelling at the remarkable job this imagined individual was doing. The answer, that no one is in charge and that bread just somehow appears as a result of the market economy, is one of the most astonishing miracles of our time. It is only because it happens with such monotonous regularity that we don’t find it absolutely fucking incredible. Even during the first Covid lockdowns, with everything stacked against it, bread magically appeared on shelves up and down the UK every fucking day. Ingredients suppliers, manufacturers, retailers and distributors rapidly redrew their working practices to maximise social distancing, whilst PPE became impossible to procure. Thousands of low paid workers put themselves at life threatening risk to ensure that no one went without, and in thanks, retail staff were abused, punched and spat on. Happy fucking days.
The miracle that is our modern food system has its issues, but it is without doubt the most effective way we have ever found of sustainably feeding a population. Most people reading this will be incredibly unlikely to suffer genuine food shortage in their lifetime. The shelves will almost certainly be stocked until the day you die. This remarkable system, the one that has freed us from hunger within a few generations, is almost certainly the finest work of humankind. It may seem a triviality, but I would strongly argue that it is our most profound and earth-shattering achievement.
Severe, life-threatening hunger has blighted humanity for the entirety of our existence. Until just a dozen generations ago, the vast majority of people on the planet would regularly experience chronic, life-threatening food shortages. Lack of adequate food would kill millions of children each year. Severe nutrient deficiencies would blight most people’s lives, causing a wide variety of crippling mental and physical disabilities. And crucially, for most of human history, the main focus of our cognitive abilities has been directed towards ensuring there is food available for our next meal, leaving little mental resource for anything else.
Speak to anyone who lived through Eastern bloc communism, and they will quickly start talking about the hunger and food shortages. They will also tell you that the best and brightest people in the population wasted much of their abilities on obtaining groceries, something that set back societal progress immensely. Hungry people do not develop vaccines, improve human rights, build adequate housing, create great music, advance scientific understanding, cure infectious diseases or improve sanitation. Hungry societies do not move forward. They do not explore the cosmos, give rights to minorities, or strive to protect the environment. This is why the advances to our food system are the most significant in human history, because they underpin everything else. Until most of the population was adequately fed, only a small elite were responsible for science, culture and art. Today, we have music, literature, understanding, entrepreneurship and technological progress from nearly every walk of life, and the rate of development is greater today than it has ever been. We have, in just a hundred and twenty years, moved from a world where only 10% of the population had enough to eat, to one where 90% of the people on earth will have full bellies tonight.
For the entirety of our existence, the whims of nature have taken an extraordinary toll on human life. For every decade that records exist, large scale famines, defined as those that kill more than 100,000, have claimed millions of lives. The toll in most decades is between 30 and 140 deaths per 100,000 people, greater than that of many major conflicts or disease pandemics. But by around 1970, that number starts to fall dramatically, and by the 2010s, such famines have been virtually eliminated. Our modern systems of food production, distribution and communication, plus advances in the way we deliver nutrition to hunger victims, has managed to almost completely defeat one of our oldest and most brutal enemies.
Between 1980 and 2021, in the context of an expanding global population, the number of children dying from protein energy malnutrition fell fivefold, from over half a million per year, to less than 100,000. That represents many millions of children saved from a shattering and gruesomely slow death, and millions of parents spared perhaps the greatest agony imaginable. Between 1961 and 2005, the amount of food available globally per person doubled and as a direct result, life became immeasurably better.
How about the UK? Surely it’s broken here, right? Again, things ain’t perfect, but a trip down memory lane does not take us to some promised culinary nirvana. In the 1950s, rates of death from cardiovascular disease were five times greater than they are today. Although there are many reasons for this (smoking rates, new medicines, surgical interventions), improvements to diet are certainly a factor. It would be bizarre to pin modern day CVD deaths on food but then claim that nutrition has not played a part in historical improvements. After all, since the 1960s, average per capita consumption of saturated fat has nearly halved and trans fats have been virtually removed from the food supply. Consumption of salt has fallen nearly 20% since just 2000 and is thought to have declined even more significantly since the 1950s. We now eat more fruit, a far greater variety of fresh produce, about half as much white bread and roughly 40% less sugar. It is hardly surprising that the vague, ill-defined concept of ultra-processing currently dominates the nutrition debate, because by every other measure, our diets have improved dramatically.
Compared with the 1950s (or any other point in history for that matter) we have far longer life expectancy and can expect to live far more healthy life years. We also have a considerably lower chance of dying from cancer, stroke or heart attack. Since the mid-twentieth century, within the UK and most European countries, the risk of suffering from severe calorie malnutrition or any form of micronutrient deficiency disease has fallen to virtually zero, largely due to increased affluence, lower food costs, improved food availability, developments in nutrition science and various successful fortification programmes.
It is almost impossible to overstate how much better things are now than they were in the middle of last century. And if we were to go back sixty years before that, we would be entering a place of misery that our modern minds can hardly contemplate, yet one that was within the memory of people I met during my childhood. Go back another 60 years, and most of Europe was regularly gripped by horrendous famine and average life expectancy was less than 40. In just a few generations, we have transformed our food system, our food system has transformed us, and in turn, we have transformed everything about the way we live. It is, without doubt, the finest work of humankind.
Yes, there are still many hungry people. Yes, there are still diet related diseases. Yes, we should fight to change things for the better. But we should always look forward. And we should stop occasionally to thank those that improved our food system over the years, and those that work so hard to keep it running. If it stopped functioning for more than a couple of days, there would be rioting in the streets. During Covid, many employees sacrificed their health, their lives and the health of their families to keep bread on our shelves. And instead of thanks, food has become the most reviled and demonised industry there is.
The plate has not been broken. The truth is it was never fully intact. We are still building it every day, and it is more complete now than it has ever been. There is a lot of work still to do, but if we are always pointing in the wrong direction, the job will never be done.