Taste the difference – or, rather, don’t

The West should learn from what the world eats – but our bad habits are spreading instead, says Daisy Dunn

PTHE WAY WE EAT NOW by Bee Wilson 400pp, Fourth Estate, £12.99, ebook £5.99

ick any page at random in food writer Bee Wilson’s new book and you will find an arresting fact. Did you know that the Cavendish banana, the kind we are all familiar with, is the 10th most-consumed food in the world? Or that the average Zimbabwean eats 493.1 grams (more than 17oz) of vegetables per day but the average inhabitant of Switzerland only 65.1 grams? The last bit did not come as such a shock to me, having just returned from Zürich, where a side order of roasted vegetables costs a jaw-dropping £20, but the discrepancy is startling.

A recent study showed that sub-Saharan Africa has some of the healthiest eating patterns anywhere. Chad, Mali and Cameroon came out top when the countries of the world were ranked by overall quality of diet. At the bottom were Armenia, Hungary and Belgium, with the USA coming in just behind them. Surprisingly, perhaps, the UK was not in the shameful bottom 10.

Twenty years from now these rankings are likely to look very different. Wilson’s is a story of global change in eating trends, but also, crucially, of globally converging tastes. Where once, she observes, “it was a fundamental fact about human beings – and about food – that people ate different things in different places”, we are becoming increasingly similar in the ways we eat.

South Africans are steadily turning away from the vegetablerich diet of the sub-Sahara in favour of Westernised dishes such as fried chicken. In Colombia, the traditional breakfast of egg and milk soup has been usurped by sliced bread. Research from the World Health Organization suggests that the much-praised “Mediterranean diet” has fallen out of favour with children in Spain, Italy and Crete. Why eat tomatoes and fish when you can have a ready meal?

On the positive side, we are now enjoying foods that were until recently almost unknown outside their native countries. Skyr, a deliciously thick yogurt, has been eaten in Iceland since the Vikings but has only recently taken off in the UK. Its popularity owes much to how often it is photographed on Instagram, though it is yet to enjoy the success of #eggs which, “in the iconography of modern food photos,” writes Wilson, “have become like Cézanne’s apples or Matisse’s oranges: rounded symbols of happiness.”

For the most part, however, our increasingly homogenous diets should be cause for alarm. One of the most astounding passages in Wilson’s book reveals that a hunter-gatherer from a tribe in Tanzania has 40 per cent more microbiome diversity – variety of microorganisms in the gut – than the average Westerner. And having less diversity of microorganisms in the gut, explains Wilson, is associated with obesity and type 2 diabetes. More than 600 children in the UK were known to have this form of diabetes in 2016 compared with none just 16 years earlier.

It does not help that the choice presented to us in supermarkets is so limited. Wilson notes that, of around 6,000 British apple varieties, only 10 or so are widely available to buy. Although we are on average eating more fruit than we were three decades ago, “varietal simplification” means that we are not reaping the benefits each genus could give us. There is also the sad fact that the price of fruit and vegetables has risen – by 7 per cent from 1997 to 2009 – while that of junk food has fallen dramatically. Wilson is probably right to blame advertising and the availability of unhealthy foodstuffs rather than our collective lack of willpower.

All this data might easily have been overwhelming, but there is

PLANT POWER Zimbabweans each get through more than 17oz of veg a day