The Atlas of Food: Who Eats What, Where and Why

Every day, the world’s food system has 6.5 billion mouths to feed. It’s humanity’s single biggest undertaking: 1.3 billion farm-workers work 4.9 billion Ha with 26.2 million tractors, applying $30.2 billion worth of pesticides, to produce 356 kg of grain each year for every person alive.

Still the system isn’t working: “2 billion people suffer from chronic under-nutrition and 18 million die each year from hunger-related diseases”. The 356 kg would be plenty to feed everyone if equally shared, but distribution is far from equal despite global trade flows of 774 millions tonnes of food a year. We’re producing enough food (for now) and moving it around the earth’s surface in vast quantities, but we’re still failing to adequately feed a third of the world’s population.

Meanwhile, agriculture faces increasing challenges: climate change, soil degradation (9% of the world’s agricultural land is suffering “strong, extreme” soil degradation and a further 43% “moderate”), water shortages (26 countries are forecast to be suffering water scarcity by 2050 and a further 12 water stress) and resource constraints. All this and a further 3 billion people to feed by 2050, with growing demand for resource-hungry meat and dairy products.

Understanding the world’s food system better is essential if we’re to face these challenges and move towards a more equitable and sustainable way of feeding ourselves. The burden of understanding and action weighs on each of us: we’re all participants in the global food system, whether as consumers, producers or both.

Tim Lang and Erik Millstone’s updated edition of The Atlas of Food in an invaluable guide to the complexities and scale of world food, presenting clear maps and charts of the many elements of our production, trade, marketing and consumption of food. The graphics illustrate the figures behind our food and highlight striking geographic variations; tucked away at the back of the book are detailed tables of the source data and references.

The authors’ mostly restrained commentary helps to elicit meaning from the figures and graphs. There’s an underlying polemic of sustainability (no surprises there), but the authors rely mostly on the force of the information to guide our thinking (though there are few easy answers to the issues faced by such a complex system):

• The percentage of the US beef trade controlled by the top four companies grew from 72% to 81% between 1990 and 2000
• It takes 930 kg of grain to feed a person for a year on a meat-based diet, just 180 kg on a grain-based diet
• 75% of all EU agricultural land is used for growing animal feed
• Denmark slaughters 3,986 pigs per 1,000 people per year; the world average is 194
• Agricultural wages in Mexico are 15% of manufacturing wages
• Namibia has lost 26% of its agricultural labour force to AIDS
• 30% of Russia’s food is produced on suburban land
• 14% of London households grow vegetables in the garden
• 65% of fish stocks are fully exploited or over-exploited
• Of 649 identified pig breeds, 151 are extinct, 58 critical and 106 endangered
• 80% of farmers in developing countries do not need to change their methods to be certified organic
• Australia exports over 5 million live sheep each year to the Middle East

These are just a handful of the indicators of the state of our food system provided by The Atlas of Food. Immerse yourself in the book’s facts, figures and charts, and draw your own conclusions.

(All quotes and figures – unless otherwise referenced – are taken from The Atlas of Food: Who Eats What, Where and Why (The Earthscan Atlas Series) – first edition.)

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Regional distribution centres: the name is almost as dull as the nondescript buildings.

So anonymously designed that we give them barely a second glance, these giant sheds have played a pivotal role in the journey of our food since the major retailers started taking greater control of the food supply chain in the 1970s. Most of the food we eat will have passed through a regional distribution centre (RDC) on its way to our plates.

Unceasing movement

The only hint of activity outside the blank walls is the incessant coming and going of hundreds of articulated lorries; inside the activity is more frenetic, as our food is moved from delivery bay to storage to loading bay. Much of the activity is automated though hundreds of staff are required to log, manage and shift. Many RDCs operate 364 days a year – only Christmas is sacred.

The food system’s lynchpin

Almost all supermarket food (80% of the food we eat at home), and much sold by independent retailers too, is supplied via RDCs: trucked in from the producers, packhouses and manufacturers; briefly stored (warehouse time and space is money); then trucked out again on the supermarkets’ dedicated fleets. Fresh milk and, bizarrely, some dried herbs are amongst the few foodstuffs delivered direct to stores. (Some retailers are now moving some of their sourcing back to more direct and local supplies: Waitrose “is experimenting with allowing local suppliers to deliver direct to shops”, while ASDA has developed a network of independent local hubs supplying more locally sourced food.)

RDCs are the lynchpin of our food system, the central focus of the supply chain, the narrowest part of an hourglass that funnels food from millions of farmers worldwide, via thousands of manufacturers, through perhaps a few hundred RDCs, out to thousands of stores, to feed millions of consumers.

Big boxes

Handling so much of our food, RDCs are necessarily enormous, each serving dozens of stores (Tesco has over 2,100 stores in the UK, supplied from 24 distribution centres) almost every day of the year. The 1,220 staff at Fenny Lock, just one of Tesco’s depots, were reported to have handled 11.5 million bottles of wine and 13 million cases of mince pies in December 2008. Some RDCs only handle particular categories of product, such as ambient, chilled or frozen, while others cover a wider range.

Inevitably, the size of RDCs is popularly measured in football pitches: Fenny Lock is said to cover an area the size of 10 pitches, the one shown in the BBC’s Britain From Above’s fascinating insight into an RDC’s inner workings is even bigger at 13. Seeing as there’s no one standard size for a football pitch, The Tracing Paper will abandon the convention and specify sizes in fixed units.

Controlling more of the food supply chain

Some supermarkets, such as Sainsbury’s, have supplemented their RDC network with primary consolidation centres (PCCs), even more warehouses for the immediate storage of manufacturers’ products. Producers are encouraged to send their products straight to a PCC rather than storing them themselves. The supermarket then has control over and responsibility for onward supply to their RDCs, but ownership of the products remains with the manufacturer until arrival at the RDC.

Uncovering the mystery

Despite their size and the crucial role they play in our food supply, RDCs go mostly unnoticed and are little known. There’s no simple way to find out where they are, how many there are, or which of them has supplied the food any one of us eats. Always hungry for information on the origins of our food, The Tracing Paper is launching a new Food Tracer resource: a partial but growing list of RDCs.

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Sainsbury’s Chilled and Ambient RDC at Waltham Point

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UK exports of apples and oranges (£ million per year)

It’s good news for struggling English (and the few Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish) apple producers, and also for the lucky recipients of our excellent Discoveries, Coxes, Worcester Pearmains and Bramleys.

Fruit imports and exports: after the good news, the bad and the mad

Now, the bad news: imports of fresh apples in the same year were almost 20 times greater, at £312,604,000.

This much is unsurprising, but nonetheless depressing, old news. Despite Britain’s rich heritage of apples and ideal climate for the production of apples of deep and complex flavour, our supermarkets are full of imported apples even at the height of the British season.

Next, the mad news: the UK exports more oranges (and mandarins etc) than apples. Defra’s figures contain the staggering revelation that British exports of oranges and mandarins amounted to £25,062,000 in 2006.

More extraordinary exports

Oranges are not an isolated anomaly. The United Kingdom is also exporting significant quantities of bananas (£14.6 million in 2006), chocolate (£306 million), coffee (£148 million), grapes (£21.4 million), lemons and limes (£7.1 million) and tea (£156 million).

The reasons for these exports of non-indigenous foods are more obvious for some of these products than others. We don’t grow much tea in Britain (for those who like their tea really British, the Tregothnan estate sells tea grown in their Cornish tea garden, a snip at £6.99 for 25 tea bags) but “British tea” is famous the world over.

There’s clearly global demand for much of the best (and worst) of food produced in British factories from global ingredients.

Why oranges?

A certain nostalgic or curious taste for PG Tips bagged in Manchester or Cadbury’s chocolate manufactured in Birmingham is one thing, but who’s buying all those oranges? I can’t imagine oranges take on any cachet by passing through Britain.

It is presumably simply a case of the re-export (to more local European markets?) of shipments imported from much further afield. Particularly for more niche products like organic and fair trade oranges, a British importer may well find other markets to export product to virtually untouched.

It’s a sad indication of the perceived value of British apples that this sort of trade exceeds demand for the United Kingdom’s own harvest.

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Last night, BBC One aired the first instalment of their new series Britain From Above, examining the infrastructure of the United Kingdom, from the morning rush hour to the distinctly British evening power surge when over a million kettles are turned on after Eastenders.

The dance of necessity

The program’s appeal lies in its insight into the complex dance of goods, data, power and water that goes on all around us, often unseen and rarely noticed. Flickering GPS traces of some of these movements beautifully illustrated the endless frenetic activity across the UK.

Our food’s journey

Food is, of course, one of our most essential requirements and the feeding of Britain requires an extraordinary infrastructure of production, processing and distribution. Last night’s program touched only briefly on the distribution of food by container and truck, with a rare and fascinating glimpse of the inner workings of a supermarket distribution centre.

These great warehouses (the one shown covers an area equivalent to 13 football pitches) lurk anonymously beside many of our motorway junctions, their bland exteriors hiding the relentless movement of most of our food in, around and out again, destined for the supermarket shelves.

The journey of our food

Arrival from afar

The arrival of goods from abroad by container ship takes place on a still greater scale, the stacked giant boxes and buzzing cranes defy appreciation of their actual size. More than anything, they simply look like toys.

Containers are perhaps mostly thought of as carrying consumer goods like clothes, toys and DVD recorders, but much of our food travels this way too. Only the most perishable or urgently needed foodstuffs justify the expense of air freight, with most imported processed food shipped by container. Even some meat and fresh produce from far afield is transported in refrigerated containers.

Container shipping

Farming from above

The extensive Britain From Above website also has a good gallery of aerial photographs of farming in Britain by Jason Hawkes. The geometry of intensive production – from pigs and poultry to cereals and salads – is strikingly beautiful and frighteningly alien.

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