If you ever come round to my house, I can guarantee one thing: you won’t go hungry. It is no accident that I chose a career as a chef. I love food, but most of all I have a powerful and seemingly innate compulsion to keep people fed. You might not always get served a twelve-course plated banquet made from the finest ingredients, but I would be devastated if you spent the afternoon with me and felt the need to pick up a kebab on the way home. My insatiable desire to feed is a well-established joke within my family. I frequently err on the side of over-catering and nothing gives me more satisfaction than knowing that people’s bellies are full. On the flip side, little makes me more anxious than guests going hungry, which was a handy compulsion throughout my career in restaurants and hotels. I hated the thought of a table spending too long without food, and I relished the challenge of organising a fast-paced service to ensure that this never happened. When I moved into the world of food manufacturing, I had already honed my instinct for what motivates people to buy food over long years of worrying about how to keep my restaurant customers fed and happy. Most of my food manufacturing career focused on developing products that make cooking family meals a bit easier, such as stock cubes, pasta sauces and gravy granules. I was proud to be helping other people do the thing that gives me the most pleasure: filling the plates and bellies of loved ones.
When this becomes difficult or impossible, it genuinely pains me. I occasionally wake in a cold sweat, traumatised by the time I served a near-raw beef rib after foolishly attempting to show off a new low-temperature cooking technique. I still get anxiety dreams where I am stuck in a disastrous restaurant service, despite it being fifteen years since I last worked in that sort of kitchen. Such food calamities were just blips in a career where I successfully fed many thousands of people, but they still pain me to this day. The beef eventually cooked; the restaurant cheques eventually cleared. Food always got to the tables somehow, and no one ever went hungry for long.
Clear and Present Danger
The prolonged hunger of a single child is a tragedy that can have lifelong effects. This makes the prospect of millions, or even billions of people going without enough food something that a civilised society should consider unthinkable. Yet it is becoming increasingly clear that without significant change, this terrifying prospect could become a reality within the next few decades. Over the next thirty years, the population of the world will reach approximately 9.8 billion souls.1 The world’s food system must produce enough to feed all those people, and somehow make sure that food is distributed efficiently in order to keep everyone from going hungry. This challenge – feeding a growing and increasingly affluent population – is beyond huge. Between now and 2050 we will need to grow more food than has been produced in the history of humanity. If the food system remains as it is, this will be impossible to achieve. Significant change is urgently required. At the same time, there is an ever-increasing need to limit the environmental impact of the food we produce, and more broadly, the way we live. Modern agricultural systems are having a devastating effect on the natural world, making an ever-larger contribution to ecosystem destruction and climate change. To make matters worse, climate change is impacting upon our ability to produce and distribute food efficiently, leading to an increasing number of people going without. In 2017, for the first time in a decade, the number of people going hungry in the world increased, in large part due to the extreme weather events caused by climate change.2 In a nightmarish feedback loop, agriculture is driving climate change, which is in turn lowering the efficiency of food systems, requiring us to increase production, so leading to even more climate change.
This is not a vague and intangible question about our future. Although it is often out of sight in the Global North, climate change is happening right now, with droughts, rising temperatures and extreme weather killing thousands of people every year. Dramatic events, such as typhoons and hurricanes devastating vulnerable island states, floods washing away towns, polar vortexes freezing cities, and droughts causing crops to fail, are newsworthy, yet such incidents are frequently dismissed as random chance, engendering sympathy but not blame. Among other things, this book will bring these threats into sharp focus, calling not for planning and strategy, but immediate action. And it will also examine why change is so hard, and why we freely dismiss such a clear and present threat.
Why Are You Picking On Food?
Although many people attempt to keep it separate and minimise its importance, the food system is a hugely significant frontier in the fight against climate change. This is not to diminish the importance of energy, transport, construction and the many other contributing industries, some of which are even more culpable. Unless the oil and gas industry changes quickly and dramatically, any shifts in agriculture and food will be of little consequence. But on a worldwide scale, food is a hugely significant part of climate change. In this book I will present the evidence, and much of it is not pretty. As for solutions, you will be glad to hear that I will not be prescribing a correct way to eat ‘guilt-free’, and I strongly believe that any ‘sustainability diet plan’ is likely to be as damaging, misguided and insidious as any of the diets I have debunked in the past. In fact, I shall be looking in detail at how the environment and climate change is being used as a dietary battleground, a shiny new way to make us feel guilty and inadequate about the way we eat. As regular readers of my blog, The Angry Chef, might expect, I shall be picking apart the claims, hypocrisy and false certainty of those trying to commoditise sustainable food, and we shall see that much of what is being sold to us is just as ridiculous and damaging as detox smoothies, alkaline diets or Paleo lifestyles. When it comes to sustainability, the rampant greenwashing* of food choices is hugely unhelpful and increasingly common, with offenders that include some of the biggest companies and brands in the world. If we want true progress, this really has to stop.
* Greenwashing is a term used to describe when companies make an unsubstantiated or misleading claim about the environmental benefits of a product. I recently discovered that the only biodegradable thing about the dog poo bags I had bought was the cardboard tube in the centre of the roll, despite the packaging shouting loudly about them being more environmentally friendly. This definitely counts as greenwashing.
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