Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives (9 page)

One of the ironies of British attitudes towards the countryside is that arguably our most famous image of it – John Constable’s
The Hay Wain
, painted in 1821 – itself depicts a rural way of life that was disappearing. A contemporary of Cobbett’s, Constable could see the farming communities near his home at Dedham Vale on the Suffolk/Essex border were under threat from industrialisation, and he sought to save them by painting the landscape he loved so that others might fall in love with it too.
The Hay Wain
shows a perfect English summer’s day: scudding clouds sail over a flaxen meadow, oaks rustle in the breeze, a team of carthorses cools off in a stream. The immediacy of the image comes from Constable’s ability to capture the constantly changing light and mood of the British weather: ‘No two days are alike,’ he wrote, ‘nor even two hours; neither were there ever two
leaves of a tree alike since the creation of the world.’ Standing in front of
The Hay Wain
, one can almost feel the breeze on one’s cheek, hear the horses neigh, smell the hay. Constable makes us see the world his way, through a window as manipulative as any TV screen. But, as with all pastoralist imagery, the painting’s beauty masks a desperate reality. Rural life in Britain was already on its knees, squeezed out by the economies demanded by urban markets and competition from abroad. When it comes to food, some things never change.

Today, with farmers fast disappearing from the scene, the British countryside is starting to look to a growing number of people like a large piece of valuable real estate. Many, quite understandably, are asking why, if we are not going to be farming it any more, we need to keep all that green stuff empty. With a chronic housing shortage in the south-east, the sanctity of the green belts is coming under increasing pressure. Meanwhile others are looking to turn the countryside into a business opportunity. ‘Constable Country’ is set to become a global brand, with the proposed Horkesley Park Heritage and Conservation Centre, a £20 million leisure complex with shops, cafés and even an ‘art experience’ (a genuine Constable painting) at its heart. The centre, which lists as its main content an ‘interactive interpretation experience of the Life and Times of John Constable’, hopes to attract 750,000 visitors a year. The proposals have caused an uproar, with English Heritage, owners of nearby Flatford Mill (the original scene of
The Hay Wain
), worried that the tiny site, which already attracts 200,000 visitors a year without any publicity at all, will be completely swamped.

Projects like Horkesley Park highlight how detached we have become from rural life in Britain. By turning our countryside into a heritage theme park and buying all our food from abroad, we might think we are getting the best of both worlds, whereas what we are actually getting is the worst. While we prettify and petrify our own back yard, our eating habits are despoiling those of others. Like the picture of Dorian Gray turning nasty in the attic, we are letting a hidden world bear the brunt of our urban lifestyles, while we pretend those consequences don’t exist. Never mind pastoralism – what we are practising is Nimbyism, and on a global scale.

With its rural depopulation, land reforms and economies of scale, the English agricultural revolution paved the way for modern agribusiness. Today, rural communities all over the world are being transformed, with traditional mixed farming methods giving way to large-scale monocultural production. Peasants are a threatened species. Although there are still 700,000 small-scale farms in India, that figure is expected to drop by half in the next 20 years, and the story is the same all over Asia. As Western patterns of urbanisation are adopted worldwide, so are our far-from-perfect methods of feeding ourselves.

Technical advances in farming are nothing new. Farmers have always sought ways to increase yields by improving the seeds they sow, and at first glance, the genetic modification of crops just seems like the latest step in an age-old tradition. The development of plants to make them more resistant to disease, for example, should theoretically be an entirely benign and important use of science. But recent developments in GM have taken it in a very different direction. Cell-invasion technology, in which new DNA is ‘smuggled’ into a host gene, now allows engineers to interfere with the very life-force of a plant. And if that seems a little sinister, how does this sound: ‘terminator technology’, in which plants are bred with ‘suicide genes’ so that they die after just one germination? For thousands of years, farmers have saved their seeds, selectively breeding them over time to create a better crop. But if modern seed companies get their way, grain, like cars, will soon have an inbuilt obsolescence. Farmers who want to sow next season’s crop will have to buy next year’s model – it will be a case of germinate, and terminate. If Justus von Liebig thought he was ‘sinning against the Creator’, one wonders what he’d call what we’re doing now.

Modern agribusiness isn’t just about producing food, it is about maximising the profit to be made from it – and after a landmark ruling by the US Supreme Court in 1980 that the
patenting of life
was permissible, there has been plenty to be made from GM.
⁷³
Ever since then, the US biotechnical company Monsanto has been doing just that, accumulating more than 11,000 patents on genetically modified seeds, giving them a 95 per cent share of the global market. As the film-maker
Deborah Koons Garcia documented in her 2004 film
The Future of Food
, the company is ruthless in asserting its rights of ownership. Farmers unlucky enough to have land neighbouring Monsanto’s are frequently sued by the company for illegal possession of their seed if it is found to have accidentally blown over in the wind.

Unsurprisingly, Monsanto has attracted plenty of criticism for its bully-boy tactics, but its lobby is a powerful one. Several board members have served on the US Environmental Protection Agency, which has taken a remarkably soft line on GM testing. Now, thanks to something called TRIPS (the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights Agreement), companies like Monsanto can claim patents on life all over the world.
⁷⁴
As the Indian farming campaigner Vandana Shiva points out, that is not good news for millions of farmers in the developing world. Not only is the ancient practice of farmers saving their own seed under threat, but those who take out loans to buy expensive seed and fertiliser are finding themselves in a spiral of debt. Worse still, many of the crops they buy are failing. Designed in a laboratory somewhere in the USA, many of the crops turn out to be unsuited to the conditions in which they are actually grown. For the first time in history, Indian farmers – who are not exactly unused to hardship – are committing suicide in their tens of thousands.
⁷⁵
As Shiva observes, when food production goes global, small farmers are the first to go.

Whatever your agricultural persuasion, it is hard to ignore the fact that there is something very wrong with the way we’re feeding ourselves now. One doesn’t have to look very far for the physical evidence: deforestation, soil erosion, water depletion, poisoning and pollution – it all speaks for itself. Our food may
seem
cheap, but that is only because the price we pay for it doesn’t reflect its true cost. The damage is accounted for elsewhere. One recent study by Essex University found that the annual cost of cleaning up the chemical pollution caused by British agriculture was £2.3 billion a year – almost as much as farmers themselves got back in income.
⁷⁶

Leaving aside the questions of soil, seed and pests for a minute, there is one element of farming that is often overlooked: energy. Energy, in the end, is what food is, and in order to produce it, we need the help of our greatest energy source, the sun. Photosynthesis, the process by which plants convert carbon dioxide and water into glucose and oxygen, depends on it, as does the ‘fixing’ of atmospheric nitrogen necessary for plant growth. Until about 1850, harnessing solar energy in edible form is basically what farmers did; and it is more or less what they have done ever since, except that from around that date, they have supplemented the process with the use of fossil fuels. From the earliest experiments with powered farm machinery and fertiliser to modern combine harvesters and food processing, fossil fuels have transformed farming from a thankless, back-breaking task (the punishment of the gods) into something really quite rewarding. Today, almost every aspect of industrial farming involves the use of oil in some way, from running machinery to making fertilisers and pesticides to the transport, processing and preservation of produce. Around four barrels of the stuff go into feeding each of us in Britain every year; nearly double that amount is used for every American.
⁷⁷
We are effectively eating oil.

The problem with that, as the German economist Ernst Friedrich Schumacher pointed out as early as 1973 in his book
Small is Beautiful
, is that fossil fuels are no more than the sun’s energy, captured millions of years ago and packaged in a readily available form. ‘One of the most fateful errors of our age,’ he wrote, ‘is the belief that “the problem of production” has been solved.’ The confusion arises, argued Schumacher, because we fail to distinguish between ‘income’ and ‘capital’ from the natural world: ‘Every economist and businessman is familiar with the distinction, and applies it conscientiously … except where it really matters: namely, the irreplaceable capital which man has not made, but simply found, and about which he can do nothing.’
⁷⁸

For the past 150 years, we have been living in the ‘oil age’: an era of unprecedented cheap energy that has allowed us to drive cars, fly planes, wage wars and wander around our homes in winter wearing nothing but a T-shirt, munching a sausage roll that cost us next to nothing. But our gas-guzzling lifestyles are about to run out of guzzle. Opinions differ over quite when it will happen, but most agree that
‘Peak Oil’ – the moment when the rate of oil production from known global reserves will reach its peak – is coming sooner rather than later, with some experts predicting it within the next five years.
⁷⁹

While driving and flying are useful, neither is strictly necessary for survival. Food is a different matter. Whether we do it by growing crops, foraging for berries or hunting rabbits, we have to feed ourselves, and we must expend energy in order to do so. We face what the carbon educator Richard Heinberg calls the ‘net energy principle’: a nutritional version of Mr Micawber’s famous dictum that human happiness rests on making sure one’s income exceeds one’s expenditure. Which is far from what modern agribusiness is doing at present. For every calorie of food it produces, it is burning an estimated 10 in the form of fossil fuels.
⁸⁰
Modern farming might like to call itself efficient, but with outputs like that, it is a strange kind of efficiency.

Rome versus Germania; lord versus peasant; Young versus Cobbett – farming has always divided opinions, and things are no different now. As far as the question of how we are going to feed the world goes, the jury is out. Even those in the best position to know, professional farmers, cannot agree. While the organic movement argues passionately for an approach that harnesses natural biosystems, the industrialists insist that only modern techniques can feed the planet. The latter have some impressive statistics to back them up: according to the geographer Vaclav Smil – not himself an industrial lobbyist – were it not for the Haber-Bosch process (a method of artificially ‘fixing’ atmospheric nitrogen so that it can be absorbed by plants), two out of every five people in the world would not be alive today.
⁸¹
But, counter the organic lobby, commercial farming is killing the planet, and its results, which look so impressive now, won’t last. Not only could we feed the world organically, it is the only sustainable option. So, what is the truth?

Polarised debates often frame the wrong questions. Rather than asking how we’re going to feed ourselves in the future, we ought to be
questioning the way we eat now. Food is the most devalued commodity in the industrialised West, because we have lost touch with what it means. Living in cities, we have learnt to behave as if we did not belong to the natural world; as if we were somehow distinct from ‘the environment’. Rather than see ourselves as part of it, we see it as something to exploit or control from the outside, or (once we have messed it up enough) to try and save. We forget that we are animals bound to the land; that the food we eat links us directly to nature. We stuff ourselves with chicken without a second thought, but if we were locked in a room with a live hen and a sharp knife, most of us would probably starve. We have forgotten the ancient lesson of sacrifice: that life is part of a cycle, and that effort and, ultimately, death are necessary in order to renew it.

All of which brings us back, more or less, to those two very different Christmas dinners that popped up recently on British television screens. In the end, the difference between them is cost: you get the food and the countryside you pay for. Two pounds won’t buy you a happy chicken or a beautiful landscape; 10 pounds might. But to express it like that – as an either/or dilemma – is to fall into the classic polar trap. There is another way. If more of us were prepared to pay just a
little
bit more for food, the operational costs of producing whatever it was – free-range chicken, organic lettuce – would start to fall. More importantly, if food were a bit more expensive, we might start to pay more attention to what is, after all, the most important thing in our lives. We might, for example, start to eat less meat, which would be no bad thing, for us, our planet or the animals we breed to eat.