Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives (39 page)

‘So what?’ you might ask. If the coffee is good and the sofas soft, who cares whether Starbucks is ‘authentic’ or not? Once again, it is a question of scale. Going for a fantasy coffee in a pretend Seattle coffee shop might be jolly once in a while. But when that is the only choice one has, it starts to mess with one’s identity. The problem with chain restaurants is not the fact that they exist, but what they prevent from existing. In her book
No Logo
, the American journalist Naomi Klein described how large chains target entire urban districts – even towns – and use their economies of scale to ‘brand-bomb’, putting local rivals out of business.
⁷⁹
The strategy is exemplified by Starbucks’ policy of ‘clustering’ several outlets in a single neighbourhood – specifically targeting those with thriving café cultures – in order to saturate the local coffee trade. Starbucks drop their prices sufficiently to force their rivals to quit, then move in and take over their abandoned positions. The process can involve what Starbucks calls ‘cannibalisation’, in which the company’s own outlets fight one another to destruction in the coffee battle’s bitter endgame. Whatever the name of the tactic, its effect on indigenous café cultures is similar to the one rabbits have had on local wildlife in the Australian outback.

In 2007, Starbucks announced their intention to open another 100 branches in Britain in 2008 – and one in London every fortnight for the next decade – saying the British market had proved ‘way bigger’ than they had expected. So if you have a nice local café in your neighbourhood, watch out for a bit of cluster-bombing coming your way soon. Unless you live in Primrose Hill, that is. In 2002, the residents of the London neighbourhood (admittedly an unrepresentative
bunch consisting mainly of the sorts of people – actors, politicians, literati – who frequented coffee houses the first time round) refused to allow Starbucks to cannibalise their beloved high street, with its long-established, family-owned cafés. Their high-profile campaign, which attracted several thousand glittering signatories, was enough to persuade the company to cut its losses and try its luck elsewhere. In Primrose Hill, at least, a spark of indignation ignited the British soul at the very idea of having its food identity stolen.

Obesity is never found either among the savages, or in those classes of society in which men work to eat, and eat only to live.

Most of us in Britain neither know about food, nor care about it much, yet our indifference, coupled with our ‘special relationship’ with the nation that first brought conspicuous consumption to the masses, is affecting more than our cities. It is going straight to our middles.

We may not farm, shop or cook for ourselves any more, but we all have to eat. One way or another, we should all be experts at eating – but are we? Our environment is evolving faster than our bodies can adjust: most of us lead sedentary lives in superheated buildings, yet our appetites seem to be keeping pace with whatever the food industry can throw at us. Several recent studies have confirmed that our ancient survival instincts are still intact, urging us to carry on eating whatever is put in front of us, whether or not we are hungry. As a result, the more food we are presented with, the more we tend to eat.
⁸¹
‘Supersize’ and ‘BOGOF’ deals, in other words, appeal to those parts of our brains that haven’t evolved since we were living in the frozen wastes and hunting the woolly mammoth.

All of which would be bad enough if woolly mammoth was what we were eating. But of course it isn’t. For the past 30 years, we have been consuming increasing quantities of industrialised food, which has been putting some very strange things into our bodies. In his 2003 book
Fat
Land
, the journalist Greg Critser described how, once again, the process began in America, as the food industry began to experiment with a range of new ‘Frankenfoods’ in the 1970s: foods geared not so much towards nutritional value as their ability to ‘perform’ according to the dictates of modern food production. First on the list was palm oil, colloquially known as ‘tree lard’: a vegetable oil that remains solid at room temperature, so giving products a good ‘mouthfeel’ and imbuing them with such a long shelf life that, as one insider gushed, they seemed to ‘last for ever’.
⁸²
With credentials like that, no manufacturer was going to quibble over whether it was ethical to sell customers products containing ‘vegetable oil’ with saturated-fat levels higher than beef tallow. Another major discovery was high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), first developed by Japanese scientists in 1971. Six times sweeter than cane sugar, HFCS is also far cheaper to produce and remains fresh-tasting for longer: qualities that make the fact that it bypasses the body’s normal digestive processes, arriving ‘almost completely intact’ in the liver, easier to overlook. Certainly neither Coca-Cola nor Pepsi seemed overly concerned when they switched their products over to the new sweetener in 1984.

Armed with its new range of Frankenfoods, all the food industry had to do was persuade people to eat more of them. During the 1980s, American fast-food chains took over where the labs had left off, offering ‘supersize’ and ‘value meal’ promotions to customers. Although the deals seemed a good bargain, all they were really doing was sneaking high-profit (and high-calorie) items such as Coke and fries in under the radar. Nevertheless, the strategy brought immediate results: Taco Bell, the first chain to adopt value meals in 1988, more than doubled its sales within eight years, forcing other companies such as McDonald’s to follow suit. By 1996, a quarter of the $97 billion spent on fast food in America went on food sold on the basis of larger sizes or extra portions. By that time, a McMeal, which had originally contained 590 calories, had ballooned to a whopping 1,550.
⁸³

Bigger, faster, cheaper, pizzazzier: American fast food turned the old rules of the table on their head. ‘Eating big’ had always been a sign of high status; now, for the first time, an entire nation was doing it. Between 1970 and 1994, the number of calories available in the
American food supply rose from 3,300 to 3,800 per person per day – an increase of 15 per cent.
⁸⁴
But, as any ancient ruler could have told you, there is a limit to how much any one person, however great, can eat. So where were all the extra calories going? By the century’s end the answer was all too obvious. Several decades of porking out had taken a terrible toll on American bodies. Soaring levels of obesity, Type-2 diabetes and Type-B malnutrition – surely the most ironic of all urban diseases – meant that eating had overtaken smoking as America’s most injurious activity.
⁸⁵
As if that were not bad enough, researchers found that Americans were also the world’s most anxious eaters, associating food more with health concerns than pleasure. As one researcher put it, Americans now believed that ‘food is as much a poison as it is a nutrient, and that eating is almost as dangerous as not eating’.
⁸⁶
So much for happy meals.

Viewed as a way of life, American food culture could hardly be called successful. Disastrous would be closer to the mark. If the sight of citizens of Houston, Texas (regular claimant to the title of ‘fattest city on earth’), driving along the pavement in their fat-buggies were not enough, the rash of exposés and lawsuits that hit the fast-food industry at the turn of the millennium ought to have been enough to ensure that its gaff was well and truly blown. So why do we in Britain, and increasingly other nations, persist in eating the American way? Although it is true that many of the fast-food industry’s tactics – use of social demographics, economies of scale, aggressive marketing – are mightily effective, that does not explain why the product is so universally appealing. The real answer lies not just in the nature of the food, but in the way it has altered our whole relationship with eating.

Fast-food chains work because they offer safety in numbers – they make us feel we are not alone when we eat. In the anonymity of the post-industrial city, they appeal to the oldest human instinct of all: the sense of belonging and safety that comes from sharing food with others. When we eat fast food, our primary relationship is with the food itself,
not with anyone we might be sharing it with. Fast food is the first food in the world that is
meant
to be eaten alone – that wants to be your friend. It is the food of substitution: food that comes in helpings so all-encompassing, so laden with goodies and additives that it seems to offer the world in every mouthful. Yet despite its liberal doses of salt, sugar and fat (the classic obesity triad), much fast food remains strangely unsatisfying. Layering blandness on blandness does not lead to satisfaction, any more than eating a bowl of fries brings consolation. The most tragic aspect of the cornucopia complex is that it is a search for fulfilment that will never come.

Fast food is popular precisely because of what it does
not
provide: satiety, companionship, well-being. Like the cigarette whose heady buzz wears off after the first lungful of smoke, it promises everything and delivers little, trapping ‘heavy users’ in a cycle of dependency that keeps them coming back for more. In essence – as Cesar Barber’s lawyer John Banzhaf argued in the McDonald’s ‘fat suit’ – fast food is addictive.
⁸⁷
By its very nature, it leads us into temptation, not just because of its salty, fatty sugar-rush, but because it is an autonomous ‘fix’ we can get any time we want. Greed has been frowned upon by every society in history, yet we can now indulge in it with impunity, because the social mechanisms that once controlled it (table manners, ethics, respect for food) are no longer in place. Because it exists independently of any social constraints, fast food removes the last check on our tendency to behave like Labradors given half the chance. No wonder dieting in America has become a religion. After decades fighting the flab with low-fat and low-carb, Slimfast and Slimslow, F-plan and Dr Atkins, would-be American slimmers have finally turned to God. Divine Health, founded by Pastor Don Colbert MD, is the latest diet craze in the USA. With the slogan ‘Lose weight, eat what Jesus ate’, worshippers pray to be delivered not from the devil, but from the desire for ‘food to comfort me’.

Despite increasing alarm over the obesity epidemic sweeping America and Britain, there are few signs that our Anglo-Saxon love affair with industrialised food is on the wane. Over the past 50 years, a typical British meal has morphed from meat and two veg to sticky chilli chicken, via burgers, Coke and fries. The trend is pure Americana, as is
our growing predilection for eating out. Our bodies are responding too: one in four Britons is now obese, and we are fast catching up with the world’s fattest nation, where the figure is now one in three. Clearly this is bad news, but threatening to deny obese patients NHS treatment or banning children from eating chips at lunchtime is to fail to recognise the nature of the problem. As one Rotherham school discovered in 2006 when it tried to introduce obligatory ‘healthy meals’, we British
can
become passionate about food when denied our favourite fodder. On that occasion, outraged parents simply climbed through undergrowth to feed their kids chips through the railings.
⁸⁸

Treating us like naughty schoolchildren caught with our fingers in the sweetie jar is not going to work. Obesity is not just a question of what we eat – it is an illness that goes to the heart of the way we live. It is the bodily manifestation of our disconnected, industrialised food culture – a culture in which food is not valued or understood, and is therefore open to abuse. If we are to tackle obesity, we are going to have to look at
every
aspect of our food culture, with all that implies. We are going to have to question how we dwell in cities: how we design and build them, feed and live in them.

A century ago, Americans turned their amazing ethnic inheritance into a fearful, neutered, deeply unhealthy national gastronomy. Now we need to turn things the other way. We need to reconnect with the culture of food, and remember what it means. There is always a danger, when thinking about food, of getting nostalgic for the past: for ‘good old days’ that probably never existed. But there is still a lot that we can learn from it. The history of the table is full of injustice, manipulation and snobbery; it is also full of pleasure, fellowship and joy. It is a reflection, in short, of society itself. To ignore its power is to deny our humanity.

The shared meal is mankind’s most complex social phenomenon for a reason. It is the context in which, more than anywhere else, we define ourselves as social beings and recognise our deeper bond with land, sea and sky. We have yet to discover what a strong, local, post-industrial food culture could be like, but there has never been a better time to find out.

A sewer is a cynic. It says everything.