Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives (17 page)

No great surprise, then, that the biggest EU farm subsidies in Britain, far from going to the small producers who most need the help, go instead to the sorts of food manufacturers that one might have thought could fend for themselves. In 2005, the food journalist Felicity Lawrence revealed that the sugar company Tate & Lyle had received £227 million in export subsidies the previous year, while Nestlé was paid to export milk – presumably their $60 billion food sales were in need of a boost.
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The result of such export subsidies is that world commodity markets are undermined. A recent report by Oxfam estimated that EU sugar ‘dumping’ had lowered world prices by 17 per cent, preventing countries such as Mozambique, where sugar production is the largest source of employment, from developing their own industry.
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The same goes for milk: according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), subsidised powdered milk from the EU in 2002, exported at 60 per cent of the international price, put the Jamaican dairy industry out of business.
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In a bizarre twist of logic, it seems that milk and sugar – two of the most profitable urban foodstuffs in history – are now being used against the very people who could most benefit from supplying them.

Western countries are constantly accused of sabotaging world trade talks in order to protect outdated farming policies. But whatever agreements are reached at such talks (or not, as the case may be), the real powerbrokers in the negotiations are not governments, but agrifood corporations. That’s not to say that national governments have no power – far from it. It is just that most choose not to use it. As long as the food industry carries on delivering plenty of cheap food, it suits the British government to let it be. Like the eighteenth-century Parisian grain police, the government
pretends
to control the food
supply, while all it really does is provide a legal veneer for the abusive market practices that keep food nice and cheap.

It might seem alarmist, even tasteless, to mention food security in the West when we appear to be enjoying the greatest era of abundance in history. Food security is something we tend to associate with the developing world, and considering how many people worldwide face starvation every day, worrying about our own food supply seems almost obscene. Yet the two phenomena are directly connected. Both are the products of a global food system gone mad, that no longer bears any relation to the people it evolved to serve. The modern food industry is a law unto itself: a transnational cartel with its own rules of engagement, more political clout than governments, and bank accounts to match. In the end, control of food is power, and over the past hundred years or so, it has been passing steadily out of the hands of nation states (to say nothing of cities, farmers and consumers) and into the paws of an elite group of global corporations.

On the face of it, the modern food industry seems to have solved the problem of food supply. Far from waiting anxiously at the quayside to see whether our ship will come in, there is now so much food swilling about in Western cities that most of us are more likely to die of obesity than hunger. Supermarkets ply us with BOGOF (buy one get one free) offers, and when we get our food home, it never seems to go off. What could possibly go wrong?

The short answer is: just about everything. The ‘quick and easy transmission of food’ may not
seem
like a matter of life and death today, but it still is, arguably more than ever. The cities we live in were shaped by modern food distribution systems; without them, our cities wouldn’t even exist. We are as dependent on food conglomerates as ancient city-dwellers were on their king or emperor (or, in the case of London, a myriad of small suppliers), yet unlike them, we have no direct relationship with those who feed us – apart, that is, from when we hand over our cash at the till. Supermarkets supply us with 80 per
cent of our food in Britain, but theirs is a business prerogative, not a political one. They take no responsibility for feeding us: if we can’t pay, they aren’t interested.

Contrary to appearances, we live as much on a knife-edge now as did the inhabitants of ancient Rome or
Ancien Régime
Paris. Cities in the past did their best to keep stocks of grain in reserve in case of sudden attack; yet the efficiencies of modern food distribution mean that we keep very little in reserve. Much of the food you and I will be eating next week hasn’t even arrived in the country yet. Our food is delivered ‘just in time’ from all over the world: hardly the sort of system designed to withstand a sudden crisis. The fuel tax protest led by British lorry drivers in 2000 showed how quickly the slick, split-second operation that delivers our food can break down – and how quickly our sophisticated, take-it-or-leave-it attitude to food can break down with it. On that occasion, panic buying of food began within hours.

Perhaps surprisingly for an island nation, we have never been overly worried about food security in Britain – apart from when German U-boats showed us how vulnerable we were. After the Second World War, the government vowed never to be reliant on food imports again, but ‘never’ can be a short time in politics. Britain produced just 62 per cent of its own food in 2005, with the figure falling steadily.
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Yet in the same year, the Minister for the Environment, Elliot Morley, was quoted as saying that ‘in an increasingly globalised world, the pursuit of self-sufficiency for its own sake is no longer necessary or desirable’.
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So that’s fine, apparently.

Of course the
economic
logic for abandoning local food production in Britain is obvious, so long as international freight costs remain artificially low. Quite what will happen when the oil starts to run out is anyone’s guess, but one thing is certain: the way our food is produced and delivered will change beyond recognition. Even George Bush Jr recently recognised that oil and food weren’t quite the inexhaustible commodities Americans like to imagine them to be. In a speech delivered in April 2006, he announced a new initiative to increase US production of the biofuel ethanol from corn. But in the same speech, he also acknowledged that the new fuel wouldn’t provide any easy answers: ‘Ethanol is good for the whole country,’ he said, ‘but you’ve
got to recognise there’s a limit to how much corn we can use for oil. After all, we’ve got to eat some; and animals have got to eat.’
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Even forgetting politics for a moment (never easy to do when talking about food), the scale of modern food production has security implications that affect us all. In the name of ‘efficiency’, we are streamlining nature itself, reducing the variety of foods worldwide to dangerous levels. Never mind Ashmead’s Kernel; what about bananas? Almost all commercial bananas in the world today are of just one variety, Cavendish, yet 50 years ago, the variety didn’t exist. It had to be bred specially when worldwide stocks of the previous commercial banana, Gros Michel, were wiped out by the Black Sigatoka fungus, the banana equivalent of Dutch elm disease. Luckily, a wild banana resistant to the disease (Cavendish’s ancestor) was found in a remote forest in India; but should a similar pandemic occur today, we could be in serious trouble. In 2006, the FAO expressed alarm at the rate at which wild banana species – which are chiefly found in India – were being lost through the destruction of natural habitat.
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The FAO urged a worldwide exploration of small-scale producers who still grow non-commercial species, in order to gather the remaining gene pool before it is lost. The future of commercial banana production may well depend on peasant farmers who have never heard of the five companies (Chiquita, Del Monte and the rest) who between them control 80 per cent of global trade.
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The loss of genetic variety is not just occurring in the exotic plants and animals of the rainforest either; it is also occurring in those we breed to eat. Over 90 per cent of milk in America now comes from a single breed of cattle, and over 90 per cent of commercial eggs from a single strain of hen. According to the FAO, 30 per cent of 4,500 livestock species worldwide are at a high risk of extinction.
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In terms of food security, whichever way you look at it, that is not a very sensible approach. It’s the genetic equivalent of putting all our eggs in one basket. As the meat-producer Fred Duncan put it: ‘We’re dependent on very few varieties of grain that are effectively our store of food. Most
beef and dairy cows are fed on grain; all pigs and chickens are fed on grain. If there were a disease, there could be a massive problem. That’s a doom-watch scenario.’
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The scale of modern food supply systems creates other vulnerabilities too. In his farewell speech in 2004, the US Health Secretary Tommy Thompson admitted that ‘I, for the life of me, cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply, because it is so easy to do.’
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After 11th September 2001, the US government is taking the threat very seriously indeed, setting up a federal bio- and agro-defence facility to deal with the problem. There is little doubt that the physical concentration of the American food chain makes it uniquely vulnerable to attack. Research carried out at Stanford University suggested that contamination with botulinum toxin of one of the 50,000-gallon milk silos that feed American consumers could kill 250,000 before the contamination was even discovered.
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Another possible target could be the state of Kansas, where 80 per cent of US beef is reared in vast feed lots that contain tens of thousands of cattle at a time. Farmers there are so worried about the threat to their herds that they have formed an ‘Agro Guard’, a kind of neighbourhood watch for farmers, to protect them.
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In the pre-industrial world, the surest way to attack a city was to lay siege to it: to surround it and wait for the food to run out. In the post-industrial world, the situation is reversed. As cities become increasingly amorphous, their sources of food are becoming more concentrated. It is a tendency with far-reaching consequences, not just for those who supply our food, but for the very future of urban dwelling.

The irony of the modern food industry is that it has made the very thing it promised to make easier – the feeding of cities – infinitely more complex. We depend just as much on our gas-guzzling, chilled plug-in, ‘just-in-time’ food deliveries as ancient Romans did on foreign conquests, shipping and slaves – and our food system is no more secure, ethical or sustainable than Rome’s was. In both cases, the problem is one of scale. Rome was the monster of its day, stretching ancient food supply systems to breaking point. The same is true of the way we live now. Industrial supply chains are what sustain us as urban beings, yet we behave as though they were no big deal. Which no doubt suits those who supply our food just fine.

The shopping centre which can do more than fulfil practical shopping needs, the one that will afford an opportunity for cultural, social, civic and recreational activities will reap the greatest benefits.

Friday lunchtime, on a cold, wet day in February. Opposite Southwark Cathedral, an assortment of white vans, cardboard boxes and debris shelters under a dripping railway viaduct. Trains rumble overhead, sending shock waves through the brickwork, pigeons peck distractedly at the ground. This is London at its gloomiest, but not all here is gloom. Stretched between two iron columns is a green banner that reads
Borough Food Market – Knowledge, Service, Traceability – Handy for all your food shopping
. Beneath it, a clutch of food stalls, awnings aglow with fairy lights, burst with an improbable range of produce: organic pork and wild rabbit, stuffed olives and ‘urban honey’, rustic bread and round yellow cheeses the size of car tyres. The place is heaving. Herds of tourists in rainproof jackets jostle with City types in pinstriped suits and cashmere overcoats. ‘Let the Feasting Begin!’ roars one of the latter to his two companions, who, to judge from their startled looks, are new to this latest form of urban grazing. ‘Just Wander and Eat, Wander and Eat Some More!’ adds Gargantua, before plunging off into the fray.