Reading about what is going on in the world of mass-produced food leaves a bad taste, writes JOHN McKENNA
THERE IS a strange paradox at work when we read about food.
For the most part, reading about what we eat is filled with pleasure – the menu in the restaurant where you are just about to enjoy dinner; the latest Domini Kemp recipe in The Irish TimesMagazine on Saturday that you want to cook; the favourite cookery book you turn to time and again for inspiration and enlightenment; the restaurant review that has you salivating so much, you ring up straight away and make a reservation. All these things bring us delight.
And then there is the other sort of reading about food. The books that reveal just what is going on in the world of mass-produced food. There is no delight in this sort of reading about food, no matter what angle the authors take.
If you take an objective, balanced, academic viewpoint, as Colin Sage does in his excellent Environment and Food, the news is not good, and the prognosis is grim. If you take a highly personal point of view, as Jonathan Safran Foer does in his book, Eating Animals, then the news is decidedly dyspeptic. Both books set out what is going on, and what is going wrong, and they are sobering to read.
Colin Sage lectures in geography at University College Cork and his analysis of how both our food production and consumption injures the health of the planet is startling. Did you know that meat production globally is estimated to be responsible for 18 per cent of global warming, a figure greater than that caused by the worldwide transport sector? Did you know that Ireland’s agriculture, with its extensive dairy and beef sectors, causes 28 per cent of the country’s total greenhouse gas emissions?
Did you know that the Aral Sea, between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, was once the fourth largest lake in the world? Today, following decades when it was drained to irrigate collectivised farms, it is a fragment of its former size, and the fishing industry on the sea that once supported 60,000 people has been destroyed.
Sage maintains a calm, even, objective tone throughout Environment and Food, which is more than the reader does. Page after page drives home a simple message: while we are excessively concerned about food and our personal health – Am I overweight? Should I eat more vegetables? How much coffee is too much? – we are blithely ignoring a simple, irreducible fact: our diets are making the planet sick.
“There is little about the contemporary global agri-food system that can be regarded as sustainable,” Sage writes, but that doesn’t make him throw in the towel, and the book’s final chapter is a splendid analysis of the need to develop an ethical viewpoint when it comes to what we eat.
Sage also looks at the systems that have been created already – such as Fairtrade, farmers’ markets and certain public procurement policies. We need, says Dr Sage, to stop thinking of ourselves as consumers, and to see ourselves as food citizens: Allons enfants de la Patrie . . .
Jonathan Safran Foer’s book is the sort that makes people act. I was gifted my copy by a friend who read it, and stopped eating meat. Foer is not interested in balance, and nor should he be: factory farming of animals is an obscenity, and we should not eat the meat that comes out of them.
Such food is unhealthy for us, as eaters and as human beings, as well as being deeply unhealthy for the planet. As Foer points out, though, avoiding this food is easier said than done: virtually all of the meat eaten in America is produced in factories.
But Foer’s book didn’t make me despair, nor did it make me change my eating habits. What it taught me was that we are lucky in Ireland, for a simple reason: we are still close to animals. It is easy in Ireland to buy food that has been produced by people who care deeply about the welfare of the animals they rear and the quality of the produce that they grow, and who also care deeply about the health and wellbeing of the people who will consume that food.
The next time you are in your local butcher’s shop, for instance, just think how lucky you are. The local butcher’s shop is one of the most unremarked upon aspects of Irish life, yet it is actually one of the most remarkable aspects of how we live, and how we eat.
Because the shops are small, individually owned and modest, we underestimate their significance. And yet, your local butcher operates one of the portals to food citizenship, selling food that is good for your health, and good for your head. And the butcher is only one player among many who toil to bring us ethical, honest, decent food.
Let’s thank our good fortune, while resolving to change what we can, for the sake of our health, and the health of our planet.
Environment and Foodis published by Routledge. Eating Animals is published by Penguin.
John McKenna is author of the Bridgestone Guides
