The Tracing Paper

When people eat (source Cabinet Office) Enlarge

The Tracing Paper is mostly interested in what we eat, where it comes from and how it’s produced. But the when of food is also changing in revealing ways.

This graph - one of many intriguing graphic displays of the data of our food in the Cabinet Office Strategy Unit’s analytical report on its recent study of food - charts the striking changes in when we eat between 1961 and 2001.

What’s supper?

50 years ago the nation was eating four distinct meals a day, at pretty definite times of day - breakfast between 7am and 8.30am, lunch between noon and 1.30pm, tea / dinner between 4.30pm and 6.30pm, and supper around 10pm.

Today, British mealtimes are all slightly later, less distinctly identifiable and spread over a longer period of time. The fourth meal of the day, a supper just before bed, has almost completely vanished, replaced by a steady grazing throughout the evening.

(A letter in Saturday’s Guardian questioned whether anyone other than David Cameron still uses the word supper. It looks as though the meal may have fallen from favour before the word, though I’m still happy to follow the OED’s definition of “the last meal of the day”, whenever that might be.)

Breakfast? Anyone?

Examining the detail of the chart confirms other trends. Breakfast used to be a clearly defined and generally eaten meal, with over 80% of the population having eaten by 9am. Only around 60% of us have eaten anything by noon today.

It’s remarkable just how few of us are eating at any one time. In 1961 almost a third of the country was eating lunch at 12.30pm. Now, no more than 15% of us are simultaneously eating at any time of day. 6.30pm is the most popular time to eat in 2001.

From dining tables to water coolers

Of course, much of this confirms much discussed trends: the decline of mealtimes, the rise of snacking and meals eaten on the hoof. The decline in family meals is a perennial source of concern and subject of news stories. Still, the extent of the change is surprising: the rhythm of the day’s mealtimes is being replaced by a continuous pattern of national consumption.

(The Cabinet Office report gives The changing practice of eating: evidence from UK time diaries, 1975 and 2000 by Cheng et al as the primary source of this data.)

What influences food prices (source Defra) Enlarge
Note the fourfold effect of the oil price

The UK government is at last waking from its long complacent slumbers and asking serious questions about food security. After enjoying an abundant supply of ever cheaper food for the last five decades, the developed world may at last be beginning to realise that we can’t take the essentials of life for granted indefinitely.

Tim Lang, professor of food policy at City University, has long been warning that we are “sleepwalking into a crisis”. Is it possible that we’re waking up in time to find another path?

A rash of reports

After years of waiting for a decent government report on the food system, three come along at once.

Following last week’s Cabinet Office publication of the most important policy statement on food for decades and a Treasury report on global commodities (mostly focusing on food and energy), Hilary Benn (Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) yesterday released a Defra discussion paper on food security.

Recognising the issues

While Tim Lang talks about “a new era”, even the government is openly raising questions of:

unforeseen disruptions
(Defra)

instability and uncertainty
(HM Treasury)

long-term challenges for world food security
(Cabinet Office)

The Cabinet Office even admits

we are still a long way from having an environmentally sustainable food chain

and

none of [agriculture's emissions and use of resources] is sustainable in the long term

Change to the food system is inevitable and it’s imperative that we do whatever we can to change it for the better.

UK Self-sufficiency

The Defra paper pulls together some revealing figures on the UK’s ability to feed itself. Continue Reading »

Figure illustrating food prices from Food Matters

The destiny of nations depends on the manner in which they feed themselves.
(Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste)

This unlikely quote is one of three that open the new Cabinet Office report on food policy, Food Matters: Towards a strategy for the 21st century. Less surprising, is the dropping of a fourth quote that found its way into the earlier analytical report:

I’ll bet what motivated the British to colonize so much of the world is that they were just looking for a decent meal.
(attributed Martha Harrison)

Taking food seriously

Tim Lang stated in his keynote speech to the recent Growing Food for London conference that we’re now living in “the most dangerous … but potentially the most interesting time for food policy”. True enough, the British and other governments are now recognising that we can no longer take for granted a stable global supply of cheap food.

Just a glance at the report’s chart of the price changes in major foods since 2000 is enough to convince anyone these are extraordinary times for the global food system. And desperate times for those already spending a significant proportion of their income on food. In the UK, where just 9% of average household spending is on food, most of us are lucky enough to enjoy plenty of leeway before rising prices make us hungry.

More than just leftovers

As Felicity Lawrence notes in the Guardian, the cabinet office report is a serious document that was only trivialised by Gordon Brown’s launching it by talking about eating up our leftovers.

The report makes some striking acknowledgements of the problems with the food system:

• its dependence on increasingly scarce and expensive resources
• its enormous emissions of greenhouse gases
• the social inequalities in what and how we eat
• the health impact of our diets

Out of this list, the Number 10 spin doctors chose to highlight an issue, waste, and more particularly household leftovers, that while undeniably important was always the one most open to ridicule.

The Prime Minister’s lavish 18 course meal (or was it just 8, or as many as 19?) with his fellow world leaders only made his talk of leftovers appear even more ridiculous and patronising.

More to digest

There’s a lot more to consider in this report, and we can only hope that these critical issues are aired and debated once the 18 empty plates and leftovers are just a memory. Expect more from the Tracing Paper at least…

Early August and the harvest of the winter sown oilseed rape (Brassica napus, its edible varieties also known as canola) is well underway in the UK. The spring-sown crop ripens later and will be ready for harvest in late August and September.

From Spring Yellow to Harvest Brown

Rapeseed ready for harvest is a drab brown, a far cry from the bright yellow fields of the crop in flower, and often has a distinct cabbage smell, a reminder that it’s a member of the Brassica family.

Spring-sown rape ripens unevenly and must generally be dessicated or swathed a week or two before harvesting to ensure ripeness of all the seedpods. Both methods kill the plants to allow ripening to continue without further growth or maturation - dessication is achieved by chemical means (generally Diquat spray), swathing is a mechanical alternative.

Rape is combine harvested to yield its tiny black seeds, destined to be crushed to produce oil for food, industrial uses and, increasingly, biofuels. A growing number of farmers are cold pressing the seeds themselves to produce extra-virgin rapeseed oil. The meal left after crushing is high in protein and used for animal feed.

Continue Reading »

Fair Trade for British Farmers is a new campaign to raise awareness of the problems faced by British farmers and how choosing fairly traded and priced British food can help. Country Living magazine and the Farmers Guardian are leading the campaign, with the support of Waitrose.

Our daily shopping choices shape farming and the food system, from the viability of farming and the farmed landscape to the conditions of everyone working to produce food. The campaign focuses on the plight of farmers and the landscape, but makes no mention of other workers in the food and farming industry.

Express your support by signing the Fair Trade for British Farmers online petition, but use the message of support box to express concern for the conditions endured by food and farming workers as well as farmers - “British farmers deserve support and fair prices, but fair wages, conditions and treatment are essential for all workers in the food and farming industry.”

Continue Reading »

Food is one of the few essentials of human life.

Each of us has to eat every day to provide the energy for our daily lives and to maintain our health and the substance of our bodies. But eating is more than a mere biological necessity, but something worth living for. The joy of eating is a wonder of everyday life, our meals daily social and cultural events.

The British countryside is a farmed landscape, created by the need to produce food. The nature of much of our most beautiful countryside depends on grazing or other farming activities. Globally, much of the planet is shaped by food production. Urban areas too are moulded by the supply of food, the character of our streets largely determined by the shops we choose to buy our food from.

Continue Reading »