Stop panicking about what’s on your plate

Food is a funny thing. For the whole of human history there has been only one thing to say about it. Can I have some more please? Post-war developments in agriculture overcame many productivity limits and we entered an era of abundance, at least in the developed west. This should be a cause for celebration but instead a series of panics have ensued which have undermined people’s faith in the modern food system.

Over the last few years the smorgasbord of panics over food have included: bacon and bladder cancer, beef and breast cancer, canned fish and premature birth, trans fats and heart disease, breakfast cereals and high blood pressure, processed foods and mental illness, mad cow disease, GM, saturated fat, and salt. There have also been campaigns against proposed intensive farms, rioters attacking supermarkets, organic supporters who dismiss accepted farming techniques and initiatives designed to change the food served to children in schools. Our pensiveness about food seems unending.

The last time food was such a big issue was in Victorian times.  John K Walton, in his ‘Fish and Chips and the British Working Class, 1870-1940’ notes a moralistic debate about the dangers of the Chippy that echoes the modern concerns about fast food: ‘Critics alleged that fish and chips were indigestible, expensive and unwholesome. They were seen as a route to, or an aspect of, the ‘secondary poverty’ which arose from the incompetent or immoral misapplication of resources that would otherwise have been sufficient to sustain an adequate standard of living. It was presented as part of a pathology of culinary ignorance and the failure to use cheap ingredients to their best advantage’.

The difference is that in the 1880s campaigners were upfront about their belief that the working classes were incompetent and immoral. Today such campaigners hide their disdain for ordinary people behind nutritional guidelines, obesity figures, BMI calculations and a discussion of unsustainable NHS expenditure. In the 1880s however, or even in 1914 when Maud Pember-Reeves was investigating the diet of working class households in Lambeth, the problem was that people did not have enough food to go around. Our ability to solve the problem of feeding ourselves hasn’t solved the tendency to problematise people’s food choices.

Rob Lyons, author of Panic on a Plate: How Society Developed an Eating Disorder,  who spoke at the ‘Food Fight’ strand at this years’ Battle of Ideas festival, describes the fallout following Jamie Oliver’s TV campaign which set about addressing the state of school dinners. The campaign, encapsulated by Oliver’s suggestion that this was the first generation expected to die before their parents, resulted in dinner ladies considering strike action, parents taking lunch orders to the local burger joint so that their children could have some food they would actually eat. People came away with the false impression that bad diet causes Asthma and that grossly overweight children could end up vomiting up their faeces.

Worse still, following the programme, 400,000 children reportedly turned their backs on school meals – a 12.5 per cent fall – which called into question the financial viability of school meals services. Having been told that school food was killing their kids, parents decided it would be wiser to simply give children packed lunches or money to buy takeaway food instead. Oliver’s reaction was to slam parents, saying that packed lunches ‘are the biggest evil. Even the best packed lunch is a shit packed lunch.’

If, in the eyes of panic-mongering campaigners, everything is an ‘epidemic’, a ‘plague’ or a ‘time bomb’, then government too has relished the opportunity to reconnect with people through their fears over food.  Successive governments have used health issues in particular as a way of micromanaging people’s lives.

What came out of the Battle of Ideas food discussions is that we are in danger of losing our ability to experience food as an enjoyable part of life. The anxiety that food choices can cause today, far from expressing a reality about our food which is more abundant and safer than ever, turn a good situation into a bad one. Modern society has made incredible strides in changing the lives of people for the better through the application of science, industry and reason. We should be pleased by how far we have come and enjoy, not only what we have, but the prospect that with a little imagination everyone could have food as good and plentiful as we do today.

Throughout October and November, The Independent Online is partnering with the Institute of Ideas’ Battle of Ideas festival to present a series of guest blogs from festival speakers on the key questions of our time.

Jason Smith is Judges Coordinator for the national sixth form debating competition, Debating Matters (www.debatingmatters.com), and the founder of Birmingham Salon (www.birminghamsalon.org). He co-produced the ‘Food Fight’ strand at the Battle of Ideas 2011.

Picture:Getty Images

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