by Felicity Lawrence
Penguin, 352pp, £8.99
Review by DAVID SEXTONFELICITY LAWRENCE'S FIRST BOOK, Not on the Label: What Really Goes Into the Food on Your Plate, published in 2004, was a classic polemic. In short order, she
ripped through the absurdities and abuses in our food production and distribution system. Combining concern about what ends up on our plates with anger about the impact of the industry all round the world, she forced the reader to make the connection – as she went from, say, examining the contents of a 99p bag of ready-washed salad to discovering the way it had been produced in Spain, exploiting migrant labour. It is one of the most hair-raising books about food ever published and if reading it doesn't make you think again about how you eat, nothing can.
The topics she covered then included chicken, bread, coffee and ready meals. Now in Eat Your Heart Out, Lawrence moves on to more generic areas – cereals, milk, pigs, sugar, fats, soya – and delves deeper both into the misapplied science of food production and the structure of the industry, dominated by a few, huge multinationals. Although she mixes travelogue into her analysis and argument, it's sometimes tough-going – but her ability to link macro-economics to what's on a shelf and in a packet keeps the reader hooked in appalled fascination.
She opens with a bravura account of breakfast cereals. "One of the earliest convenience foods, processed cereals represent a triumph of marketing, packaging and US economic and foreign policy ... Somehow they have wormed into our confused consciousness as intrinsically healthy when by and large they are degraded foods that have to have any goodness artificially restored." And we're greater suckers for them than anybody else. "The British and Irish are the largest eaters of puffed, flaked, flavoured, shaped, sugared, salted and extruded cereals in the world."
It's fairly well known that packaged breakfast cereals began with the Temperance movement in America and were originally intended by John Harvey Kellogg as cures for both constipation and masturbation. "In Kellogg's mind, the two were closely linked, the common cause being a lack of fibre, both dietary and moral."
It's also not news that the packets are about as nutritious as the contents. Back in the 1970s, an adviser told a Congressional hearing: "Rats fed a diet of ground-up cereal boxes with sugar, milk and raisins were healthier than rats fed the cereals themselves."
But, remarkably, Lawrence quotes the managing director of Kellogg's Europe, Tony Palmer, alluding to this. When she challenged him about the high salt and sugar content of cornflakes, he told her: "The risk is, if you take the salt out you might be better off eating the cardboard carton for taste."
Moreover, she warns, "industrial cereal processing produces acrylamide" – a chemical compound classified in 1994 as a probable human carcinogen. And breaking down the costs involved, she reports that "it takes 7,000 kilo-calories of fuel energy to process a typical medium-sized box of breakfast cereal that provides only 1,100 kilocalories of food energy" – and that when you do finally buy the stuff, "about a quarter of your money is going not on the food but on the manufacturer's cost of persuading you to buy it".
Breakfast cereals are an excellent illustration of the way huge corporations profit from "adding value to cheap commodities through processing". But their main business is using subsidised commodity crops as animal feed, persuading the world to move up the food chain and then controlling the process.
Lawrence delivers a steady stream of bad news about our habits. "Each British household consumes 130kg of packaging from oil-derived plastics a year; two-thirds of that packaging is used for food." Livestock "is responsible for a bigger share of all greenhouse gas emissions than the whole of global transport". A chicken in 1970 "contained 8.6g of fat per 100g but today contains nearly 23g of fat per 100g". And on it rolls.
Some of the most alarming information is about the dominance of a few giant corporations that have , no public face. One privately owned firm, Cargill, has been said to control up to 45 per cent of the global grain trade, as well as being a leading player in the "global chicken value chain", as it is grotesquely called. "Most of us eat its products in some form every day, yet many people have never heard of it. Nor had I before I began writing about the politics of food," Lawrence admits. Then again, "About two-thirds of British pork, bacon and ham comes from just two companies, Tulip and Grampian".
The stories about sugar and fats and the predominance of soya – "today over 60 per cent of all processed foods in Britain contain soya in some form" – are particularly horrifying. As are her overall conclusions: "Modern food production involves processes that, quite apart from having little care for real nutrition, drive people off the land, stimulate migration, increase inequalities and the depth of poverty, are corrosive of society, and depend on extravagant use of natural resources, from water to oil to land, which are running out."
What then must we do? "Things will have to change, if only because they simply cannot go on," Lawrence says – and she praises pressure groups, from the Women's Institutes who have supported dairy farmers to the Fairtrade organisation, Banana Link.
On an individual level, though, her advice on how to shop and eat remains pretty much the same as it was before – "organically, more locally, more seasonally, more directly from producers and independent retailers, more Fairtrade, less meat and animal produce, more wholegrains, pulses, fresh fruits and vegetables, few highly processed foods, nothing with ingredients on a label you cannot recognise, nothing that claims to be a new or techno food, nothing highly packaged".
A counsel of perfection? Yes. But taken together, Lawrence's excellent, alarming books are more likely actually to make you change the way you eat than any diet manual or celebrity cookbook could ever hope to do.
• Felicity Lawrence is at the Edinburgh book festival on 21 August.
The full article contains 1047 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
