The way humans produce food is unsustainable, according to Julian Baggini, a former academic director of the Royal Institute of Philosophy and a member of the Food Ethics Council. Most actors in the world’s food system agree “it is broken and we need to fix it urgently”, Baggini maintains; the arguments begin when it comes to why this is the case and how to fix it.
Baggini begins with the facts, noting how the global food system is responsible for a third of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, and how agriculture accounts for 70 per cent of global water usage, thus “leaving the planet parched”. He argues that we are approaching a perfect storm of rising populations, decreasing natural resources, increasing energy costs, growing consumption of animal proteins and global warming.
In putting forward his vision for “the principles and values that should guide our management of the food world”, he examines the issues from four perspectives: how we manage the land used for food production, who the decision-makers are behind global food supply versus who they should be, our current food system’s effects on other animals, and the role technology can play in the food system of the future.
He examines our history with food, from hunter-gatherers to farmers, from subsistence agriculture to the giant food processing plants of today. Along the way, he debunks myths aplenty, from the benefits of the Paleo diet to the miracle of cultivated or lab-grown meat, whose champions, he maintains, have overestimated its potential impact, given the enormous costs involved in its production.
Baggini shines a light on the inequities in the food system, including the issue of modern slavery in the supply chain, from cacao farmers in west Africa to migrant vegetable pickers in southern Europe. He argues against commoditisation, which has “distorted the ways we grow, process and eat food”, and the “often unscrupulous” methods employed by large food companies to market their products in order to satisfy the relentless push to grow shareholder profits.
While he occasionally overwhelms the reader with data or myriad quotes from multiple sources, for the most part Baggini’s arguments are both readable and reasonable, which should find common ground across the food industry, whether you are a committed vegan or part-owner of a meat processing plant.
John Walshe is a critic
