Who stands to gain?

The Global Harvest Initiative has identified this target as its express goal:

By 2050, we must eliminate the global productivity gap by sustainably doubling agricultural output to meet the needs of a growing world.

Feeding the world is an undeniably commendable aim, but is a rush to increase agricultural productivity really the best way to go about it? As Paula Crossfield, of Civil Eats, has observed, the target may do more to increase the profits of multinational agri-business than to feed the world’s hungry. Who’s behind the GHI? DuPont, Monsanto, Archer Daniels Midland and John Deere.

More achievable and sustainable approaches to addressing hunger include reducing food waste along the food supply chain, distributing the world’s food more equitably and managing demand for resource-hungry meat and dairy products.

Profligacy

Tristram Stuart examines these issues in his powerful new book, Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal. Stuart developed a very personal interest in food waste from seeking swill for his pigs as a child to rescuing supermarket waste from bins as a campaigning freegan. He successfully combines personal experience with extensive research to present a compelling argument that profligate waste of food is at the heart of our dysfunctional food system.

Stuart digs up some truly shocking statistics from FAO data: of a total global edible food harvest of 4,600 kCal per person per day, only 2,000 kCal are consumed (1,700 are fed to animals, yielding just 400 in return; 600 are lost between field and food industry, 800 lost in distribution, retail, catering and households). The world is already producing more than twice the amount of food we actually consume.

One of many striking graphs in the book’s appendix plots countries’ GDP against edible crop harvest (including crops fed to livestock) as a percentage of nutritional requirements. In every country except the Democratic Republic of Congo, the harvest is over 100% of requirements, rising (in close correlation to GDP) to over 300% in most of the developed world and over 400% in the USA and Greece. Meat production is an important part of the story, but needn’t be such a drain on resources: another telling morsel of information is that livestock in Kenya are net contributors to food supply, feeding on residues and grass rather than arable crops.

Besides the abundance of informative data, a diverse collection of photos starkly illustrates rampant profligacy in farming, processing and retail.

Positive lessons

Stuart examines, and dismisses, possible arguments that waste is inevitable, identifying positive examples of less wasteful countries and cultures, particularly the Uighurs of China. The FAO identifies a food supply level of 130% as providing a sufficient buffer against crop failure and other supply problems; achieving this would leave enough surplus food at current production levels to feed an additional 3 billion people (without any change to dietary patterns), about the number by which the world’s population is expected to rise by 2050.

All of which suggests that we don’t need another Green Revolution to feed the world, rather to eliminate profligate waste from farm to table. Such a waste revolution will not even require drastic changes to our lifestyles, but will have to be achieved piecemeal, changing the attitude and behaviour of individuals, households, businesses and farms across the world.

Practical local steps to eliminating waste

At a local level, farms and businesses can take relatively simple steps to reduce waste. Production planning, supplying food through more diverse and direct markets, professional supply chain management, raising production standards, collaborating and sharing information, auditing sustainability and monitoring waste: all can contribute to a more efficient and less wasteful food supply system. Provenance, a new food supply and sustainability consultancy, hopes it can play a part in helping businesses achieve such vital steps.

Reducing waste to feed the world was first published on the blog of Provenance: for more sustainable food systems.

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2. Twittered morsels: foreign cheddar, old seeds, waste tips, pale imitations
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The GLW map of global pig population densities makes an interesting comparison with the 1922 map of world hog production (noted in The Tracing Paper’s recent round-up of food maps):

The distribution (production levels are another matter) is remarkably consistent: the most striking difference being India, which had virtually no pigs in 1922, but widespread moderate population density in 2005.

(Thanks to the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog for leading me to GLW via GLiPHA)

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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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Ever wondered how Easter eggs are made? Cadbury opens the doors of its factory in Bournville, Birmingham, which produces about half the UK’s Easter eggs, 40 million a year. This short BBC film provides a fascinating insight into the process behind the jauntily packaged eggs we devour every Easter.

There’s a surreal fascination in the endless eggs proceeding smoothly along conveyors belts – sometimes marching along in neat rows, later whizzing in single file towards the robot arms that fit the half-shells together with faultless precision. When the egg is complete, it’s wrapped and spun under a roller to smooth its foil. After all this automation, it comes as a surprise to see real people adding the bags of chocolate buttons to each packet.

This mechanical dance presumably continues virtually all year round, even when Easter eggs are far from our thoughts. It’s just one example of the unceasing processes behind all the manufactured food we eat.

(With thanks to the Local Food Research Project, which led to this via its post on the BBC’s film of the workings of the Goodfella frozen pizza factory.)

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2. Behind the scenes of the food industry: Our Daily Bread
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I scurried to my archives to fill in the detail of the memory and unearthed this piece I wrote for local magazine Suffolk Norfolk Life (bear with me and wade through the first few paragraphs of digression to get to the bread!):

Dereham

I love to think on thee, pretty, quiet D___, thou pattern of an English country town, with thy clean but narrow streets branching out from thy modest market place, with thine old-fashioned houses, with here and there a roof of venerable thatch…

George Borrow, one of Dereham’s best known and most eccentric sons, penned this fitting eulogy to the town at the very heart of Norfolk. Written in 1851, his words still ring true today. With two weekly markets (Tuesday and Friday), recently a monthly farmers’ market (the second Saturday of the month, at the Railway Station) and a good range of independent shops, Dereham is a model market town. One feels that Borrow would still be proud.

Writer, wanderer, linguist and student of gypsies, Borrow travelled and wrote widely. Just the titles of his most remembered works – The Bible In Spain, Lavengro, Wild Wales and Zincali, An Account of the Gypsies in Spain – are enough to convey his eclecticism. In Lavengro – the curious title simply a gypsy word for linguist – he wrote fondly of his native Norfolk. His later years were spent almost back in the county, at Oulton, to which he retired with his wife. Even then he was liable to announce that he was out for a walk and set off for several months.

The best dumplings in the world

In Wild Wales, Borrow recounts an incident in which, speaking in Welsh to the locals, he was mistaken for a native of Wales. He leapt swiftly to the defence of his roots,

I am not a man of Llydaw’ said I, in English, ‘but of Norfolk where the people eat the best dumplings in the world, and speak the purest English.

The best bread in the world?

At North Elmham, five miles north of Dereham, the people might well claim to eat some of the best bread in the world, for the village is home to the excellent North Elmham bakery. As soon as he speaks, Norman Olley’s deep love for bread is clear. His approach is simple – the best ingredients, the simplest of recipes and plenty of time are all it takes to make good, honest English bread.

Choosing flour

Norman’s insistence on using only the finest ingredients leads him to use only 100% strong Canadian flour, the hardest available, for his white dough. European wheat has a protein content of between 7 and 11%, whilst the short, sharp summer growing season of the Canadian prairies, and the varieties cultivated there, give protein contents up to 14%. Protein is crucial to the chemistry of bread, specifically the glutenin and gliadin which form gluten, the long strands of which absorb water and give a light, even texture. The higher the protein content, the more the dough absorbs moisture and the better the texture.

While other bakers may use blended flours that might contain 60-70% hard wheat, Norman insists on 100% strong flour. This comes at a price around double that of the cheapest bread flour and Norman reckons he’s probably the only baker in the country to use it.

Following tradition

Norman makes his dough according to the traditional “one stone” recipe – 14lb flour, 4oz fat, 2oz salt plus water and yeast – kneaded in a twin-arm mixer for 25 to 30 minutes, and left to stand for an hour. The action of time is important and if the dough hasn’t doubled in size after an hour, Norman leaves it and comes back later. Once it’s risen sufficiently, the dough can be shaped or put into tins, and then baked in the 3 tier brick-clad oven. The oven’s 1700 bricks ensure a gentle, even heat that gives a slow and mellow bake impossible in modern convector ovens. Even the 28 year-old patina of the bread tins contributes to the end result, just as an ancient teapot often gives a better brew.

Besides the white dough, Norman makes a wholemeal and “Norfolk crunch”, with malt and whole seeds. (Norfolk crunch is similar to “Granary”, but as the flour isn’t from Rank Hovis MacDougall, who own the rights to that name, it can’t be so called.) Though he only works with these three basic doughs, each can be shaped into any one of over 200 shapes and sizes to give a distinct flavour and texture. It’s easy to think that bread is bread, but this approach reveals the same complexity in simple materials that Italian cooks recognise in their hundreds of pasta shapes.

Daily bread

Bread is one of the most basic, but potentially most delicious, foods with a place at the heart of our culture. From its part in Christian prayer and worship, to our use of the word “bread” for money, it is clearly of great value to us. A true baker, like Norman, brings no complication or sophistication to the making of bread, just a dedication to the fine details of an age-old process. Mass production cuts corners – on quality of ingredients, time and method – and compensates with additives and marketing that try desperately to paper over the product’s failings.

Millions may be spent persuading us to eat the latest garishly packaged creation, but to taste properly made bread, containing only the most basic of ingredients, is to realise that some so-called progress should be stubbornly resisted. Norman’s bread is as simple as it comes but as delicious as any and has a surprising complexity in its flavours. The soft, springy texture, slight sweetness of taste and delicate yeasty aromas of the middle are matched by the gentle bite and hint of caramel in the crust. It’s better than sliced bread.

Norman spreads the word about good bread by giving talks through the county. He also introduces children to the joys of proper bread by bringing school groups into the bakery and teaching them to bake their own loaves. The teachers are often amazed at the enthusiasm with which the children throw themselves into the process and their eager taste for the end result, as they come to realise that bread can be delicious in itself and not just a tasteless base for the latest spread.

Tough times for real bread

Nonetheless, the business of selling proper bread is increasingly tough. The bakery once had several shops around central Norfolk but has had to scale back to selling from just the bakery itself and one shop in Norwich St, Dereham, with wholesale deliveries to other independent outlets. In the 1950s there were 9 bakeries in Dereham alone; today, there are just 6 in the whole of Breckland. Only 4% of the population buy their bread from small bakeries, but most of them are loyal customers.

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• 5 Irish processors that handled pigs from farms affected by the dioxin contamination
• 12 affected meat processors in Northern Ireland
• 38 English, 3 Scottish, 3 Welsh and 7 Northern Ireland meat companies that received pigmeat or pork products from those Irish processors.

Meat processors and companies in receipt of pigs, pigmeat and pork from affected farms

Follow the links from the FSA’s news release on the recall of Irish pork for pdf documents of the complete lists.

The FSA also reports that most retailers and caterers have traced and removed all affected products but is still working with businesses to “agree a date this week when we will be able to say with certainty that consumers can now buy Irish pork unaffected by contaminated feed”.

Retailers, caterers and producers selling pork that can be directly traced to unaffected farms are able to continue selling those products.

Dioxins in cattle

The Food Safety Authority of Ireland has now confirmed that contaminated feed has also been fed to beef and dairy cattle in the Republic of Ireland, while the FSA confirms that 9 cattle farms in Northern Ireland received contaminated feed.

Stock is being withheld from the food supply chain but the risk has been evaluated as insufficient to warrant a product recall or withdrawal. The FSAI states:

samples are technically non-compliant with proposed EC limits for marker PCBs but not at a level that would pose any public health concern

The FSA explains the different reaction to contamination of beef:

The risk to UK consumers remains very low. This is because you would need to eat large quantities of the contaminant chemical over a long period of time for there to be any risk to your health. Because of this low risk to health, we’re taking a proportionate approach and therefore products are not being removed from the shelves.

Our only options are to trust the experts on this complex evaluation of risk or avoid any products that might conceivably be affected.

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1. Contamination of Irish pork exposes our fragile food system
2. Tories call for honest food
3. Twittered morsels: British cheese, Irish cheese, Norfolk cheese, Suffolk cheese

Both the UK Food Standards Agency and the Food Safety Authority of Ireland are advising the public not to consume any raw or cooked pork products (including sausages, bacon, ham, pate etc) produced on either side of the border in Ireland.

Reassurances over risk

Meanwhile, both authorities are offering reassurance that the risk to consumer health is very low, despite some of the affected pork containing 80 to 200 times the agreed safety limit. As the FSA’s chief scientist, Andrew Wadge, clearly sets out in his excellent blog, there is a sound scientific explanation to this apparent contradiction:

Dioxins accumulate gradually in the body over a period of about 30 years, after which the rate of dioxin intake will be about the same as the rate the body gets rid of it. The total amount in your body will then be about 2000 times higher than the average daily intake. For example, an intake of 10 times the TDI on a single day would result in a 0.5% increase in the total amount in your body, which would not be sufficient to have any effect.

It’s sensible to avoid the risk of consuming excessive quantities of dioxins, while not excessively worrying that high levels may have been consumed on occasion.

A concerning lack of resilience

More concerning is the fragility of the food system exposed by this food scare, like so many before.

The toxic dioxins are thought to originate from a single producer of pig feed and have been fed to pigs on just 10 farms. These 10 farms are big, representing around 10% of Irish pig production, but the problem has been amplified by extreme concentration in the food processing industry. Pigs from the affected farms were slaughtered at 4 abattoirs that handle 80% of Irish pork production. Suddenly, the vast majority of Irish pork is suspect.

The Irish pig industry is particularly concentrated, with over 90% of pigs reared in herds of over 1000 (The International Cost Competitiveness of the Irish Pig Industry, Teagasc Rural Economy Research Centre) and just 12 abattoirs slaughtering pigs in the entire Republic of Ireland (Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food list of approved establishments).

A local problem goes global

It gets worse. Ireland exports about half of its pigmeat and pork production, some of it for further processing overseas. The resulting products need not be labelled as Irish.

Indeed, they might be explicitly labelled as British. Although UK food law requires labelling not to be “false or misleading”, it’s accepted that goods may be deemed to have been produced in the country in which they last underwent a treatment or process resulting in a substantial change. The Foods Standards Agency recommends a more thorough and transparent approach, but it’s not clear to what extent this is followed.

Just about any pork product is suspect until assurances are given by the producer. In 2005, more bacon was produced in the UK from imported pigmeat than from UK production (An Analysis of Pork And Pork Products Imported Into The United Kingdom, BPEX 2006).

Identifying origin

It’s hard – often impossible – for consumers to be sure about where their food comes from, but even the retailers appear to find it difficult to identify exactly which products might be contaminated, as The Telegraph reports today:

Last night Tesco, Asda, Morrisons and Aldi had still not produced lists of affected products. Waitrose and Marks & Spencer said they only use British pork in their products. Sainsbury’s published a list of withdrawn products on its website.

It’s a tragic consequence of the Irish contamination that many products from pigs raised in Britain and completely unaffected will fall under suspicion. It’s a terrifying thought that the spread and identification of contaminated food would be similar even if a more acute contaminant were at large.

Good labelling

Of course, some food is explicitly and clearly labelled so that consumers can be sure about where it’s from. This is true of many local brands (but careful attention should be paid to exactly what the label claims) and food sold under assurance schemes such as Assured Food Standards’ Red Tractor or the BPEX Quality Standard Marks for pork, bacon and ham.

The only meat with a legislative requirement for clear and detailed labelling of the country of origin is beef, under the Compulsory Beef Labelling Scheme brought in after the BSE crisis. It looks as though more sensible transparency in the food system will only come about in response to this later crisis. The opportunity to avert the worst consequences has already been missed.

Related posts:

1. FSA releases full list of meat companies affected by Irish contamination
2. Tories call for honest food
3. International organisations reassert safety of pork

If you’ve ever wanted to know more about the food you eat – to see what goes on behind the scenes of the modern food industry; to witness current food production and farming practices; to see inside abattoirs, hatcheries, food factories and glasshouses – then Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s wonderful, revealing, disturbing and moving Our Daily Bread is the film for you.

For those who missed its run at the ICA and single screening on Channel 4 earlier this year – or if, like me, you saw it but still want to take in its hauntingly compelling images again – the film is now now available on DVD.

Critical praise

Since its release in 2006, Our Daily Bread has enjoyed success and praise at film festivals and screenings around the world:

shocking and profound … crushing and sublime
(Philip Hoad, The Guardian)

the film’s formal elegance, moral underpinning and intellectually stimulating point of view also make it essential. You are what you eat; as it happens, you are also what you dare to watch.
(Manohla Dargis, The New York Times)

The inside story of food: from hatchery to abattoir

Our Daily Bread shows the production of our food with an unflinchingly dispassionate eye, lingering on scenes of giant fields and glasshouses, day-old chick packing units, abattoirs and cutting plants long enough for the viewer to take in the alien details of ordinary food.

In many scenes, the scale alone is staggering. Wide shots of rows of crops stretching into the distance and seemingly endless processions of animals for slaughter defy comprehension. Elsewhere, the baroque complexity of food processing is at odds with the mundane everyday products that result.

The human element

Industrialised food production may often be a streamlined and efficient largely mechanised process, but people still play a fundamental role. The critical actions are almost always still carried out by human hand: the harvesting of salad leaves or tomatoes, the sorting of animals, the killing of livestock, the finer elements of butchery.

Our Daily Bread successfully captures the human side of factory farming and food processing, focussing on the workers. Though the film has no commentary, leaving judgement to the viewer, it’s hard not to see many of these farm and food workers as alienated by their isolation in dehumanised surroundings, numbed by the commodification of the food – often live animals – they handle and the often repetitive nature of their work.

Not for the squeamish

The pictured stills are some of the less gruesome scenes of the film, which also shows conveyor belts laden with young chicks, pig carcasses swaying as they’re hauled around the abattoir, the swift felling of a cow by electrocution and the delivery of a calf by Caesarean section.

Dare you confront the truth beyond your plate and the supermarket shelves?

Related posts:

1. Our Daily Bread: A Taster
2. Real bread: a slice from the archives
3. England’s Bread Basket