In India, a mother dips her finger in honey and writes the Om symbol on the tongue of her new-born baby. Om means “I am” – it’s a nice image to illustrate that, in a metaphyiscal and a physical sense, we are what we eat. In Britain, if we really are what we eat, we’re in deep trouble. After all, we have lurched from food scare to food scare – from Sudan 1 to BSE. Our children are now so constipated with junk food that their colons are compacted with excrement. We need change – in 21st century Britain, eating has become a political act.
As the presenter of BBC 2’s Full on Food, I have witnessed the abbatoir system up close. I have seen the way pigs are intensively farmed, and the way pesticides are sprayed onto our vegetables. It makes me mad, but I’ve been mad for years. I was a militant vegetarian, and once carried a placard that read...
“Original actor who played Ronald McDonald: Jeff Juliano.
Diet now followed by Jeff Juliano: Vegetarian.
Role model you are following: A Clown.”
I was mad about everything from the force-fed cruelty of foie gras to the crating of veal calves, but the sad fact is that, these days, there’s a lot more to be mad about.
Anyone who travels to Italy, France and Spain will notice the markets, selling fruit and vegetables still warm from the sun. The towns are busy with butchers and bakers. Unless, of course, they are on their two-hour lunchbreak – our continental cousins take the matter of lunch very seriously. They have better quality food than we do, they have more variety than we do, and they pay less money than we do. But their supermarkets are nowhere near as powerful as ours are. A coincidence? I don’t think so.
Our four big supermarket chains pay the lowest possible prices to their farmers – often less than it actually costs them to produce the goods in the first place. It costs small dairy farmers anything from 18p to 22p to produce a litre of milk. Until the Milk Marketing Board was abolished in 1994, they were being paid 24p per litre – today they are paid 19p per litre, for something the supermarket will sell on for more than 70p. The farmers have no alternative but to look for ways to produce more food, more cheaply.
They do that by farming intensively – by raising animals on as little land as possible, with the cheapest feed possible. Now pigs, for instance, are affectionate animals that like to live in a family unit. But, at intensive farms, piglets are taken from their mothers at 3-4 weeks old, so the sows have little chance to get to know, or look after, their young. They are made pregnant again a week after their piglets have been taken away and the whole process is repeated. Pigs at intensive farms never see the light of day.
Every factory-farmed chicken in the UK lives in a space no greater than a sheet of A4 paper. Up to 40,000 birds are in the same housing unit, with no natural light or ventilation, creating an ideal breeding ground for disease. So farmers routinely feed them on antibiotics. It’s the same with all factory-farmed animals. The drugs form a toxic residue in the animal’s meat. When we’re so careful about antibiotics from our doctor, why are we so careless about antibiotics in the food we’re eating?
But you know who else it to blame? We are. Since the 1960s the proportion of income spent on our food has dropped from 25% to 10%, while real incomes have gone up. The Italians are still spending twice what we are. According to official statistics, food is no longer the main item of expenditure in the British budget. It has been overtaken by ‘entertainment’. We need to realise that good food is worth paying for. The supermarkets are, after all, only giving us what we ask for – at a price that we’re prepared to pay. So are the farmers. We have got the food we deserve.
And that is a terrible example to set for our children. To make matters worse, they are getting junk at home and, as shown by the brilliant Jamie's School Dinners, they are getting junk at school. The dinner, served alongside vats of chips, is usually high in fat, which is one of the reasons why obesity among children is growing so rapidly.According to the Health Development Agency, 20% of all boys and 33% of girls will be obese by 2020. The NHS simply will not be able to cope.
With schools spending as little as 30p on dinner ingredients, I worry about the quality of the meat they’re using. I’ve been a stickler about meat ever since I watched three sheep trucks turning into an abattoir. There was no smell and no sound, until the sheep began to climb up the ramp to the gates. The flaps opened, and out poured a river of brown. “That’s pure fear,” whispered the slaughterman stood next to me. I felt ashamed. Now I try to find out where my meat comes from and how humanely its slaughtered. I owe it to the animal.
After all, I may care about what I wear, but when I buy a new shirt, it doesn’t become part of me – when I eat meat, it does. When I was researching a story about British farmers who were secretly feeding their cattle genetically-modified maize, I wanted to know more. Given a choice, I don’t want to eat genetically-modified anything. Not until I’m sure it won’t end up genetically modifying me. But I couldn’t find a farmer who was brave enough to tell me the truth on camera.
We already eat too much ‘laboratory’ food. So much of our food’s natural flavour has been lost over the years that there’s now a huge industry supplying colourants, flavourings and additives to make it palatable again. We eat huge quantities of Sunset Yellow – banned in Norway – Tartrazine – banned in Austria and Norway – and Amaranth – banned in the USA, Russia, Austria and Norway. If the ingredients were good enough in the first place, they just wouldn’t be necessary.
It doesn’t feel like our food is being properly policed. Look at Sudan 1. This cancer-causing red dye was at the root of a food standards agency alert earlier this year – and few people who eat processed food will have avoided it. The dye, which was used to adulterate poor quality chilli powder, found its way into a brand of Worcester sauce which, in turn, was used to flavour over 350 different types of supermarket ready meal. Everything from vegetable soup to lasagne. It’s only a matter of time before the next Sudan 1 – but next time it could have even more devastating results.
There are chemicals on the outside of our food too. Currently, over 400 chemicals can be regularly used in conventional farming to kill the weeds and pests that attack crops. A Cox’s apple, for instance, can be sprayed up to 16 times with 36 different pesticides. And a lot of those pesticides can’t simply be washed off. No-one really knows what damage they do. Or what effect they have when they combine in the body. But why take a chance, when the organic alternative is available?
Britain is still having to import the majority of its organic produce. And – just to make things complicated – some would argue that our obsession with everything organic is actually hindering not helping the environment. A traditional Sunday lunch, for instance, could have travelled 25,000 miles if the lamb came from New Zealand, and the vegetables came from Africa. It’s a strong argument in favour of buying what’s British and what’s in season. That could reduce the total distance the Sunday lunch travels to a more manageable 376 miles.
I’ve just started eating a Sunday lunch again. After years of No carbs! and No Fat!, I’m just eating less. And it’s working. Which makes me happy – like the scientists say, consuming fat-free meal after fat-free meal has been shown to eradicate all traces of humor from the personality. I still miss a whopping great burger sometimes. Which is why I endorse a radical new approach to tackling the problem of fast food in our diets – we should keep it, but try to make it healthy.
It’s happening at Leon, a fast-food restaurant in London. Their crunch-coated fish, wrapped in a Lebanese flatbread, tastes like a fast food fish burger. And I mean that as a compliment. The taste of “fast food” is chemically enhanced, and has more to do with men in lab coats than men in chef’s whites. But the Leon burger is cooked in olive oil and slathered in a tartar sauce, rich with capers. The fact that the fish comes from environmentally-friendly sources is of secondary importance. It was a really happy meal.
Leon is run by Henry Dimbleby – a former chef at the Michelin-starred Four Seasons Inn on the Park – and John Vincent. The entrepreneurial pair have spotted a real gap in the market. “We want to make it possible to get away from empty, sugary foods that make you fall asleep in the afternoon and wake up fat” says John. It’s not an expensive place, and it’s nice to think that there’s finally a place where you can have your cake and eat it too.
At the other extreme is, wouldn’t you know it, an idea from the United States. The latest trend among health-obsessed foodies in California is gourmet raw, or “living food,” restaurants. These places use only vegetables, nuts, seeds and fruits in their dishes, and don’t heat anything above 47.8 degrees Celsius (the point at which, some believe, enzymes begin to degenerate and harm to the body). Demi Moore’s new body is said to have been perfected by the regime.
There are 30 gourmet raw restaurants in the United States, offering everything from Caesar salads with sea kelp instead of anchovies to “burgers” made of sunflower and flaxseed meal. It’s a world away from the other America – the American of doughnut shops and fried chicken bars. It reflects exactly what we’re seeing in Britain – the divide between the haves and the have-nots is growing. Going to good butchers, buying decent food and eating well takes time – and money.
But if we can afford £100 on a pair of frivolous shoes, we can afford better food. And, for me, that means organic. The ‘organic’ label guarantees that the food is strictly regulated, and inspected at least once a year by the UK Register of Organic Food Standards. It guarantees fewer pesticides, and no genetically modified ingredients. Even if it costs me, on average, 25% more, it’s a price I’m prepared to pay. And until science proves that I’m a fool, I’ll keep on paying it.
Six things I avoid at all costs
New Zealand lamb. When it’s flown all of those miles? And we’ve got Welsh lamb at the end of the M4?
Veal. If it’s English you will, at least, know that the veal was loose house reared. If it’s Dutch, it was probably reared in crates.
Cheap, factory-farmed chicken. Look for the "hock burns". The dark marks on the leg show where the ammonia from the bird’s own excrement has burned into its own flesh. Yum-yum.
Cheese string. Need I say more?
Bagged salad. Unless it’s organic, the chances are that it will have been washed in water with chlorine. Not great.
Non-organic carrots. Along with the vegetables in the brassica family (cabbage etc), carrots absorb the most pesticides. Even the Government ministry Defra has advised us to cut 3mm off the tops of non-organic carrots before we eat them.