GORGING INTO THE GRAVE

It’s a deadly paradox: we’ve never had such abundance of cheap food, but the choices we make are now to blame for one in six deaths. In this dramatic wake-up call, a top food historian reveals why so many of us are unwittingly...

EVERY day in my home city, there are so many food delivery riders on the road that I sometimes have to pinch myself to remember that until a few years ago there were none.

Until recently, it would have seemed an unimaginable luxury to ask someone to bring dinner to your front door. Yet now, at least for many urban populations, it is utterly normal.

In an indicator of this phenomenon, Deliveroo, which was founded only in 2013, today employs 30,000 riders worldwide, is worth €1.75billion and operates in 150 cities, using cycles or scooters to convey hot restaurant food minutes after it has been ordered.

The explosive growth in meal deliveries is part of a food revolution that has swept the world, where the quest for sustenance has been replaced by the comfort of abundance.

Many of us are lucky to live in a new era of delicious plenty. Shops overflow with products from across the globe, from Japanese sushi to Bolivian quinoa seeds. Food has gone from being a scarce and often dull kind of fuel to an ever-present, flavoursome and often exotic experience.

Visits to restaurants and cafés, once rare treats, have become part of the enjoyable routine of life in the developed world. Half of all the money that Americans spend on food goes on eating out.

Food is not only more accessible, but also much cheaper. In the past, poorer people in Western societies had to spend more than half their income on food. Today, food makes up just a small fraction of most household budgets. In Ireland, households spend an average of €123 on food.

The revolution, driven by greater prosperity, industrialised farming methods and globalised supply lines, is also having an impact in the developing world. In 1947, analysis by the United Nations showed that half the people on our planet were underfed. Today, it is just one person in nine.

Yet, despite this apparent progress, there is a strange paradox at work.

Amid all the affluence, our diets are badly undermining our health. We are filled up, but not well-nourished. Our food is killing us, not through its lack, but through its abundance: a hollow kind of abundance.

A major new study recently revealed that poor diets are now to blame for almost one in six deaths.

The findings, in The Lancet medical journal, show that the cost in lives is almost as high as those who die from smoking-related illnesses.

Other figures show that what we eat now is a greater cause of disease and death overall than either tobacco or alcohol.

In 2015, seven million people across the world died from smoking and another 3.3million from alcohol-related causes, yet 12million deaths were attributed to ‘dietary risks’ such as lack of vegetables or a high consumption of processed meats.

Malnutrition literally means ‘bad feeding’, and that is certainly the modern plague, with our food culture promoting quantity above quality.

It is because our diets are rich in calories, but poor in nutrients, that we now see the dangerous expansion in obesity and diseases like hypertension, stroke and preventable forms of cancer.

Something has gone badly wrong with our approach to food – and it is not hard to find the explanation.

Part of the problem is that we are simply eating far more than our ancestors. Combined with our more sedentary lives, dominated by computer screens, that is bound to lead to excess weight and obesity.

For one thing, our plates and glasses are much larger than those used by our grandparents. In fact, it is estimated that we now eat 500 more calories a day on average compared with the 1960s.

But given how much food retailers encourage us to abandon restraint, that figure is hardly a surprise. Recently, I was amazed to see a special offer on a Snickers chocolate bar that was a foot long. Such a promotion, that normalises obscene extravagance, brings us to the heart of the issue.

We are not just eating more, but also more of the wrong stuff, with not enough healthy ingredients and too much refined oil, salt and sugar.

The food revolution has delivered ultra-processed dishes for the masses that is literally making them sick.

Because of the absence of nuts, pulses and wholegrains, many people’s diets are low in protein, so they try to extract the balance from carbohydrates, with the result that they overeat – especially sugary and oily products.

In fact, oil is the hidden culprit of our modern culture – even worse than sugar.

By a wide margin, it has added more calories to diets around the world than any other food group.

In the past 50 years, the availability of soy oil has gone up by 320% and sunflower oil

We may be filled up, but we’re not well-nourished

by 275%, whereas consumption of sugar and sweeteners has risen by just 20%.

Due to the environment created by the food industry, our eating habits are changing rapidly – and not for the better.

The average adult eats a mere 128g of vegetables a day – which is about one and a half portions – compared with 400g a day in the late-1950s. In place of proper nutrients, there is a reliance on cheap snacks, processed meats and fast foods.

This phenomenon is not confined to the West. Across the world, sales of fast food grew by 30% in just five years, from 2011 to 2016. In the same period, those of packaged food rose by a quarter.

This trend is highlighted by the remarkable fact that a new branch of the Domino’s Pizza chain is opening somewhere in the world every seven hours. Today, the average Westerner eats twice as much meat as bread. It’s a huge change from the past, when meat was seen as a luxury.

The transformation in habits is graphically symbolised by Kentucky Fried Chicken’s Double Down burger – two slices of chicken rather than bread forming the outer casing to the sandwich, with bacon and cheese on the inside. That means an immense amount of calories, fat and salt.

And it’s not just food that’s been transformed. Drinks have also succumbed, as consumers swallow vast quantities of fattening colas, juices and milky coffees. Sadly, some people no longer recognise the simple taste of water.

But the alternatives to water can be profoundly unhealthy. A milkshake, for instance, often contains more than 1,000 calories, compared with 200 in the average bar of chocolate, while the fashionable frappuccino has the equivalent of 20 teaspoons of sugar.

In a world of industrialised food production, even supposedly healthy foods are not always as nutritious as they appear.

For instance, most grapes, especially green ones, are no longer a seasonal product: intensive methods and globalisation mean they can be obtained at any time of the year. But the engineered growing process means that most grapes, though always sweet and seedless, have far fewer nutrients than in the past, and many contain pesticide residues.

The same is true of bananas, which are engineered, massproduced and increasingly bland.

Bread, too, is of poor quality. Too many loaves are padded with preservatives, sugar, salt and dough conditioners. But also its fundamental ingredient, wheat, is debased by heavy processing.

A lot of the blame can be attached to the huge, multi-national corporations and retailers who dominate the food supply lines and have a vested financial interest in increasing demand for their unhealthy products at the expense of nutritious ones.

It is estimated that wholefoods generate profits of around 3% to 6%, whereas processed foods can yield profits of around 15%.

That is why the global giants such as Nestlé, whose revenues are twice the size of the entire domestic output of Uganda, are so keen on heavily marketing their brands.

The same enthusiasm for the promotion of processed foods can be found in the big supermarkets who dominate food sales.

In a sector where profit margins can be as low as 1% or 2%, fresh produce is more of a risk for a retailer because if it is not sold quickly, it will go off and be wasted – a process known in the trade as ‘shrinkage’. There is a lot less shrinkage in a box of sugary breakfast cereal than in a lettuce.

The same commercial impulse can be seen in the warped priorities for marketing, where packaged goods always trump healthier products.

In Britain, in 2015, the total amount spent on advertising vegetables was €14million compared with €100million for soft drinks, never mind junk food.

It is a sign of confused values that the purchase of a cauliflower feels like coercion, but that of chocolate feels like love.

With equal cynicism, the giant corporations also claim to provide remedies to the very problems they have created, by peddling diet products, low-fat goods, replacement meals, protein bars and misnamed ‘superfoods’.

But that array of merchandise simply highlights how badly the food supply is out of control. The truth is that food does not need to be reinvented. It is already known what is good for us.

The victory for salty, sugary, oily consumption is a disaster not only for our health, but also for the planet. Neither the soaring rates of obesity nor the damage to the environment from intensive methods can be tolerated much longer.

In addition, the obsession with snacking and fast food is weakening the social bonds that used to unite us. Meals are no longer taken communally and in unison, but are a cacophony of individual collations snatched here and there.

Our food culture, therefore, has to change.

Some argue that reform is down to individual responsibility. According to this view, people are overweight or obese just because they eat too much and fail to take enough exercise. But that is simplistic, unfair and counter-productive.

It takes no account of a host of realities, such as poverty, the relative expense of fresh produce compared to junk food, the pressures on family budgets, and the impact of ruthless marketing.

Nor does stigmatisation work. The answer lies in a new food revolution – one where governments and corporations face up to their duties for citizens’ health and the future of the planet.

That means retailers and producers putting far more emphasis on the promotion of healthy products through initiatives such as more special offers on vegetables and far fewer on snacks.

But industry will not act unless forced to do so by governments – and that’s what needs to happen.

Any attempt at official regulation always prompts complaints about the ‘nanny state’, but, given the depths of the health crisis, such cries should be ignored.

Our politicians could take some inspiration from Chile, where 66% of the adult population was obese or overweight at the beginning of the last decade.

So their government introduced a number of significant measures which helped to tackle the problem, including clear labelling, an 18% sugar tax and a ban on the use of enticing cartoon characters on cereal packets.

They might also take inspiration from a shining model much nearer home.

At Washingborough Academy in Lincolnshire, England, the headteacher, Jason O’Rourke, has created a healthier eating regime with a range of schemes, among them the creation of a school apple orchard sponsored by local businesses and the establishment of a kitchen garden where children grow the very vegetables that they use in cooking classes.

But we all have our part to play in achieving change. We can switch to smaller portions. We can pay less attention to snacks and more to meals. We can ditch juices and fizzy drinks and drink water instead.

We can ignore the marketing pressures and develop a real interest in food.

There is certainly no shortage of ideas around us: TV schedules are stuffed with cookery programmes. Better than watching the TV experts produce their feasts, why not make your own?

If you have time for TV, chances are that you have time to cook. As things stand, far too many of us are simply eating ourselves into an early grave.

O ADAPTED from The Way We Eat Now by Bee Wilson, Fourth Estate, €18.20. © Bee Wilson 2019

A new Domino’s opens every seven hours Today, we eat twice as much meat as bread