A Greedy Man in a Hungry World

by Jay Rayner

  Let’s not pretend. Paying farmers more will mean a further, relatively small increase in the price of food in the supermarkets, on top of current food price inflation. Consumers had better get used to the idea because the era of cheap food is well and truly over. And if they don’t do that Britain’s self-sufficiency will continue to fall. If that happens those consumers will be left completely powerless when a global food supply shock happens, as has been increasingly predicted for 2013. Big businesses in Britain will try to keep supplying themselves from the global market only to discover that – oh my! – not only have prices shot up there too, but they can’t even get their hands on the stuff because of all the other countries which have secured their own lines of supply. Suddenly food price rises won’t just be modest. They will be dizzying. Meat will double or triple in price; bread, vegetables and fruit will do likewise. And all because we didn’t pay enough for our food in the first place.

  Hell, by the time you’re reading this, it might already have happened. You might already be peering at your shopping bills with wide-eyed awe and fear, occasionally glancing across at the family pet and wondering just how much meat there might be on a 12-year-old tabby cat.

  In October 2012, as the drought in America began to impact upon global grain prices, the United Nations issued a warning. ‘Populations are growing but production is not keeping up with consumption. Prices for wheat have already risen 25 per cent in 2012, maize 13 per cent and dairy prices rose 7 per cent just last month. Food reserves are at a critical low level,’ said Abdolreza Abbassian, a senior economist with the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. ‘It means that food supplies are tight across the board and there is very little room for unexpected events.’ I am writing in the early winter of 2012. Did early 2013 bring deep floods or heavy snows? Was it an unseasonably hot spring or a late, late frost? Have we experienced ‘unexpected events’?

  I hope not.

  Already in late 2012 British supermarkets were admitting they were finding it hard to keep the shelves stocked with fresh produce. Questions of supply had suddenly become real. So real that one supermarket chain, Sainsbury’s, finally recognized what campaigners had been telling it for years. It stopped shunning fruit and vegetables purely on aesthetic grounds. In the past if a carrot or an apple or an onion wasn’t the perfect shape, it didn’t go on sale; between 20 per cent and 40 per cent of all fruit and veg grown in Britain is wasted in this way. Suddenly Sainsbury’s realized it could no longer afford to do that. It was a light-bulb moment.

  ‘We’ve taken the decision to radically change our approach to buying British fruit and vegetables as a result of this year’s unseasonal weather,’ said Judith Batchelar, director of food for Sainsbury’s. ‘This may mean a bit more mud on peas or strawberries that are a little smaller than usual, but our customers understand and love the idea.’ If you want hard evidence of just how fragile global food supply is, you will find it in a misshapen carrot. Perhaps one of those that looks like the crossed legs of a man desperate for a pee. Laugh at it. Show it to your mates in the supermarket. Post pictures of it on Twitter. Then buy the bloody thing, cook it, and eat it.

  What else can the consumer do?

  Although it really is possible that the more sustainable products could come from abroad, for the moment it probably does make the most sense, on balance, to buy the food grown in your own country wherever possible. It’s not about nationalism. It’s not about patriotism. It’s about cash: buying what farmers produce helps them to invest. The more they can invest, the more sustainable a model they can reach for. Because consumers really can drive this. However, to do so they need to be given the right tools.

  Key to that, within the next few years, has to be a new kind of labelling. A genuinely robust gastronomics means that the food we buy needs to have a sustainability rating. The food industry will complain about bureaucracy and paperwork. I get their point: one study found there are currently around 400 certification systems in operation around food in Europe alone. They will moan about cost. They always do. But far too much depends upon this for vested commercial interests to be allowed to stand in its way. And in the long term it’s in their interests. Already we would not dream of buying a fridge or a freezer or a car without first being made aware of its environmental rating. We want to know whether the choices we are making are good or bad, not just in terms of value for money, but also in terms of the environment. We all now have to make an active decision to buy an energy-inefficient washing machine. It isn’t something that just happens.

  The same should apply to our food. It will require international cooperation. It will require the creation of cross-industry bodies and a quite significant amount of patience, but it’s nothing that hasn’t been done many times before. Plus the professional skills to create sustainability ratings already exist. Significant numbers of food producers, both big and small, already audit their carbon footprints. It’s clear to me from talking to people in the industry that they regard it as good business practice to do so. The closer to a carbon-neutral model you move, they tell me, the better your bottom line. So if businesses are already doing this, why would they not want to share that information with consumers, unless they have something to hide? Or, to put it another way, the food businesses you should be deeply suspicious of are the ones that do not wish to share their sustainability data with you. Sure, the best way to measure sustainability is still argued over. It is a work in progress. New measurements come in; others are dumped. But the fact that it’s all in flux is absolutely not a good reason for not doing it.

  Some will argue that this will baffle shoppers. That’s to underestimate them. People are really quite smart. They become used to new ideas very quickly. All they need is something straightforward and readable. There could be a number of ways to do that. But imagine two ratings from light shades of green for highly sustainable to deep shades of blood red for less so. One of the ratings would show you where each foodstuff stood in relation to the rest of your basket. So meat and dairy would almost always be in the red zone compared with, say, apples or potatoes, which would almost always be in the green. The second rating would show you where products stood in relation to each other within their category, enabling you to choose the most sustainably produced dairy products or beef. Producers would have an incentive to reduce the carbon footprint of their food as much as possible so as to get the best sustainability rating possible and therefore win a place in the shopping basket.

  This scale will need a name. And if you want to call it the Rayner Scale, well, I can just about live with that. Surely having my name slapped across the entirety of your food shop is only right and proper? No? Stupid idea? Please yourself. Call it what you like. Just get on with it and introduce the damn thing.

  Elsewhere in the supermarket we need one other change. Nowhere in this book is there a section on food waste. Why? Because it’s so blindingly obvious that it’s a very bad thing. You really do not need to read pages of me traipsing across a rubbish dump and retching at the smell to understand it. In January 2013 a study by Britain’s Institution of Mechanical Engineers found that up to 50 per cent of all food produced globally is wasted or lost at various points along the food supply chain. It is a very special kind of obscenity. Get rid of both food waste and biofuels and the simple business of feeding the planet would probably stop being a hot-button topic (though questions of sustainability would remain). So how do we get consumers to stop buying more than they need and then throwing away perfectly good edible food?

  Here’s one small idea: ban the bagging of fruit and vegetables by supermarkets. The big supermarkets like bagging stuff up for a couple of reasons. First, it’s much easier to promote single units, a bag of six apples, say, or three traffic-light-coloured peppers. You can do two-for-one deals on bagged fruit and veg in the way you can’t on loose. Two-for-one deals encourage shoppers to buy more than they could ever need, only to throw it away later. Second, you can’t put a ‘use by’ date on lo
ose fruit and veg. You can put one on a bag. And all of a sudden consumers become infantilized. They are no longer making adult decisions about the edibility of potatoes or courgettes, based on experience. They simply read the side of the bag and if the date printed there – which always errs on the side of caution – has passed, out it goes. If we had to buy all this stuff loose we would be far more likely to buy only what we needed and far less likely to throw out food that was still perfectly good. Oh, and the law change would get rid of a whole pile of carbon-hungry packaging.

  It’s a no-brainer.

  Big Agriculture, Big Food – call it what you like – is here to stay. A lot of people will still find the very concept distasteful. I understand that. Mega-corporations do seem to have a habit of trampling over the little people. They lack human scale. Still, we should take some comfort from the fact that a leviathan like Cargill now recognizes it has to be responsive to the demands of social media; that it can no longer act with impunity because the high-profile brands which use its products do not like being associated with scandals. Today, as myriad grassroots campaigns against big brands have proven, big business really does get called to account. Apple had to respond to social-media protests over working conditions in its Chinese manufacturing plants. The coffee chain Starbucks was forced onto the defensive by a campaign over the lack of corporation tax it paid in the UK. The tech company behind Blackberry, Research in Motion, had to apologize for the failure of its email service as a result of a chronic lack of investment in its infrastructure.

  I could now call for an end to the involvement in the food chain of large corporations, but I’ve really never been one for futile grandstanding. They are a fact of life, and we depend upon their logistical power. Given the scale of the challenges we face in this century we need them to clean up their act and do the thing they do best: move food in volume from the place where it is grown to the place where it is needed. Small really ain’t all that relevant here.

  There will, of course, be other models; markets function best when there is diversity. Within Britain’s food market there are a number of enterprises which have managed to plough a furrow between the fragile, self-serving economics of small scale and artisan on the one side, and gargantuan on the other. ‘Big smallness’ is also a pretty stupid term, but it does rather describe the family-owned supermarket chain Booths, based in the north-west of England. Booths doesn’t have 1,000-plus branches like a Tesco or Sainsbury’s. It has about thirty. This means it still has proper buying power, and can work to economies of scale, while at the same time staying very close to its suppliers and giving them a deal that enables them to prosper. Shopping there is a little more expensive than at its rivals, but as Edwin Booth, the current member of the family to run the company, said to me, ‘You could argue it’s a price the consumer should be paying. There are more and more people shopping with a conscience.’ Hence the company runs an ongoing carbon-footprint audit and sustainability goals are built into its buying policies. When I suggested to Edwin that Booths sounds like the ultimate business for the middle classes he laughed. ‘I like to talk about inclusive exclusivity. It’s about loving the sense of community and that’s not the exclusive domain of the middle classes.’

  Edwin Booth is right. Too much about food has become a class issue. It’s become about lifestyle. It’s become about how we see ourselves. But global hunger isn’t a lifestyle choice and nor is grinding poverty. We are still allowed to care a little bit too much about what we’re going to have for dinner tonight. We’re very much allowed to get excited over the best ingredients, or a killer recipe. And just because you slump on the sofa of an evening after a hard day at work to watch a bit of food television, that doesn’t make you a bad person.

  But as the twenty-first century gets into its stride it’s time we had a very close look at all the assumptions we have been fed about the world of food. We need to stop reacting emotionally, and start thinking realistically. We need to read the numbers, understand the maths, focus on the science.

  Because be in no doubt: all of this is far too important for us to risk getting it wrong.

  EPILOGUE

  Late one Saturday afternoon a couple of weeks after I bought it from Lidgate’s, I took the £31 chicken from the freezer where I had stowed it. A chicken costing that much was not just to be dispatched quickly. I felt it needed its moment. It deserved a bit of an occasion. I let it defrost overnight. The next morning I took the bag of giblets from its cavity, put the bird in an oven tin, rubbed the skin with a little olive oil, and sprinkled it with flakes of expensive sea salt farmed from the waters off the Essex coast. I stuffed a few wedges of salted butter into the creases around the legs and wings and shoved it all into a hot oven, surrounded by those giblets. After about forty minutes I turned the bird over, seasoned its back, and let it cook in that position for another twenty minutes. For the remaining half hour after I had righted it, I basted it every ten minutes or so, and tried to resist the temptation to rip off bits of bronzed chicken skin from places where my larceny would not be spotted. I failed. I let it rest after cooking for a good half an hour.

  We ate it for a late Sunday lunch, with lots of caramelized cauliflower, because my two boys love that, and a good, sticky gravy made by scraping up the bits left on the tin by roasting the liver and neck and heart from the giblet bag. It was a good Sunday lunch, the kind I really like. We chatted. We laughed. We told the boys not to eat so damn fast.

  As to the bird, what can I tell you? It tasted of chicken.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  It is customary, when writing acknowledgements, to save until the end the news that all views expressed in the text are the author’s own. Given how controversial some of the opinions expressed in this book are, I’m getting that disclaimer in first. The fact that I thank people for their help does not necessarily mean that they agree with me (though, of course, they should).

  While I undertook an awful lot of original research for this book, it also depends hugely on the stories I covered and the experiences I have had as a journalist elsewhere. I would therefore like to thank my colleagues at the Observer – editor John Mulholland, deputy editor Paul Webster, Observer Magazine editor Ruaridh Nicoll and Observer Food Monthly editor Allan Jenkins along with many others – all of whom have given me the opportunity and uncommon freedom to roam the waterfront as a journalist. Likewise, I am indebted to the exceptional team at the BBC’s One Show, led first by Doug Carnegie and now by Sandy Smith, for allowing me to experience so much about food production through what must now be close to the 150 films I have made for them. I am immensely proud of my associations with both the Observer and The One Show.

  For general and specific help I would like to thank (in alphabetical order): Adrian Barlow of English Apples and Pears, Edwin Booth of Booths, Tricia Braid of Illinois Corn, Rosie Childs and her colleagues in both Britain and Rwanda at Save the Children UK, Steve Dolinsky, Steven Fairbairn of Cargill, Firmdale Hotels, Jim Iuorio, Sir David King, the staff of F.W. Mansfield’s Fruit Farms, Chris Marshall of QV Foods, Jennifer Middleton of Lemonzest PR, the press office of the National Farmers Union, the entire staff of J. Penny and Sons, Steve Sexton, Scott Shellady and Roger Thurlow. There are also a number of people who spoke to me on condition of anonymity, and at some professional risk to themselves. I am grateful that they did.

  Tim Benton, Professor of Population Ecology at the University of Leeds and the UK Champion for Global Food Security, was hugely generous with both his time and his research database, providing me with enormous numbers of relevant academic research papers and studies. He always made himself available when I needed a little help understanding exactly what it was I was reading. I would also like to record a huge debt of gratitude to the marvellous Louisa Loveluck, the most talented researcher and journalist any chap could wish to have on his team. She was brilliant at digging up statistics, research papers and cuttings throughout the writing of this book; quite simply, she made it possible to comp
lete this book in the time allowed. She comes highly recommended.

  My agent Jonny Geller of Curtis Brown was, as ever, a source of encouragement and support and believed in this project from the very start. Iain Macgregor and his colleagues at my publishers HarperCollins have been equally enthusiastic and energetic in helping to turn the idea for this book into the work you now hold in your hands. They were everything an author could wish for.

  But my biggest thank you must go to my wife, Pat Gordon Smith, who read every draft of this book as it was being written, put her trained editor’s eye to work in keeping both me honest and the text clean, kept my spirits up when I found myself in the weeds, and my glass filled at the end of the day. I simply couldn’t have done it without her.