The Way We Eat Now

At a cultural level, some of this change has been wonderful to see (and to eat). So many of the old barriers and prejudices that kept people from experiencing each other’s food have been ripped apart. Many Westerners who used to look with suspicion on anything too garlicky or spicy or strong will now happily eat Korean-spiced barbecue or fiery Thai curries.

But if our palates have widened in some ways, they have narrowed in others, particularly at the level of ingredients themselves. When ‘food’ becomes a common language across the whole planet it stops being food at all, as our ancestors would have understood it. No matter where on the planet we live, there’s a striking convergence going on in our eating habits.

In the early 2010s, a team of researchers led by Colin Khoury, an American plant diversity expert, set out to quantify how the world’s diet had changed over the past roughly fifty years from 1961 to 2009, using food supply data from the FAO. For every country about which they could gather evidence (152 of them, representing 98 per cent of the world’s population), they measured which crops were eaten and how many per capita calories and other nutrients each of the foods delivered. Overall, the researchers looked at fifty-three different foods, from oranges to rice, from sesame seeds to corn.23

These researchers found that there had been massive changes in eating since the 1960s. Wherever in the world you happen to live, you will now have access to much the same menu of core ingredients as someone who lives a thousand miles away in any direction. Khoury’s team referred to this phenomenon as the Global Standard Diet.24

I started scrolling through the data on the FAO website trying to ascertain how the ‘average’ global eater in the 1960s differed from the average eater today. Then I realised the very question I was asking was wrong. The whole point is that in the 1960s, there was no such thing as an average eater across most countries, just lots of specific and wildly divergent patterns of eating. Back then, there were maize eaters in Brazil and sorghum eaters in Sudan. There were steak and kidney pie enthusiasts in Britain and goulash devotees in Hungary. But it made little sense to ponder how a globally average person might eat because no such person existed.

It is only now that we can, following Khoury, speak of a Global Standard Eater, because it is only now that humans have come to eat in such startlingly similar ways. Perhaps the biggest change is in the quantities that we eat – around 500 calories on average more per day than our equivalents in the 1960s (from 2,237 calories in 1961 to 2,756 calories in 2009). The Global Standard Eater consumes a whole lot more of almost everything than most eaters of the past. From the 1960s, we started to eat more refined grains and more fat, we drank more alcohol and, quite simply, we ate much more food. The average eater consumes a lot of sugar and rice and very few pulses or beans. Our diets overall are becoming sweeter and oilier and meatier and we are highly dependent for our sustenance on foods that have been grown or produced far away from the place where we live, wherever that place might be. Khoury and his colleagues have calculated that more than two-thirds of national food supplies across the world are derived from crops that are foreign to the country where they are eaten.25

One grey rainy spring morning I am talking with Colin Khoury over the phone. He is at his home in Colorado, where he works at the US National Seedbank. His background, he explains, is not in nutrition but in plant science. ‘I’m a diversity person,’ he says – one of the many biologists who believe that the future of the planet depends on maintaining the maximum biodiversity for healthy ecosystems. As he and his colleagues began to draw together all the data on the world’s food supply, Khoury was startled to see just how homogenous the global diet had become, with eaters tending towards a common mean.

In Denver, where Khoury lives, the breakfast burrito is a local favourite in diners and cafés, especially at weekends. This greasy and comforting wrap is made from flour tortillas stuffed with eggs, potatoes, green chillis, maybe cheese and some kind of meat – sometimes chorizo, sometimes bacon or steak. The sandwiches are an object of local pride, like the Philadelphia cheesesteak.

To those who love it, the Denver breakfast burrito is a distinctive thing. But in another sense, this ‘local’ American speciality is not local at all. The bacon and the eggs come from giant production lines in Iowa. The eggs are fried in soybean oil from Brazil. As for the wheat that makes the tortilla that binds the whole meal together, it is the same dusty refined white flour made from the same flavourless modern strain of wheat that goes into most breads in America, from bagels to sliced Wonderbread to hotdog buns. The ingredients may be shuffled differently, but the Denver breakfast burrito is built from much the same deck of cards as a New York hamburger and fries or a pepperoni pizza in the Philippines.

‘People are eating much more of the same crops,’ Khoury tells me. ‘We have all these local twists on food but underneath it is not a huge list of species.’ In a way, the leap into stage four is like the emergence of agriculture in stage two: a narrowing of the diet which brings new diseases in its wake.

When you strip away the packaging, the recipes and the brand names, most humans – from Rio to Cairo – are getting a sizeable majority of our energy from meat, sugar, refined wheat, rice and refined vegetable oil. The average global eater largely consumes certain staple items, most of which will have been internationally traded before they reach the shop or the plate. The average eater gets the bulk of his or her daily calories (1,576) from just six sources. These are:

1 animal foods

2 wheat

3 rice

4 sugar

5 maize

6 soybeans

Of these, animal foods and wheat each contribute around 500 calories, with a further 300 calories apiece coming from rice and sugar, 200 calories from maize and 76 calories from soybeans. Compared to these big six items, all the other food commodities pale into insignificance.26

There has been a startling shift away from multiple traditional diets towards a single modern one, with the same sweet-salty flavours and the same triumvirate at its heart of rice, wheat and meat.

You can trace the effects of these homogenous diets all the way to the gut. Compared to the average affluent Westerner, a hunter-gatherer from the Hadza tribe in north-central Tanzania – subsisting on an ever-changing diversity of roots and berries and wild meats – has 40 per cent more microbiome diversity (the microbiome being the host of micro-organisms in the human gut). Having a less diverse gut microbiome has been linked with both obesity and type 2 diabetes.27

It’s worth noting that in some countries the move towards a global average diet has been beneficial. ‘In some places,’ Khoury points out, ‘it actually means an increase in diversity,’ certainly compared to fifty years ago. Averaged out, the world’s diet is more balanced now than it was in 1960, if balance is defined as eating an even spread of different foods. Until recently, many countries in east Asia were dangerously dependent on the single staple of rice to feed themselves. Apart from being a monotonous way to live, such single-staple diets are precarious when the single crop happens to fail – as the Irish potato famine demonstrated in the nineteenth century. Thanks to the opening up of new global markets, east Asian countries such as Vietnam have now been able to diversify into wheat and potatoes, which bestows greater food security as well as more varied nutrients.

But in most places, the new global diet has involved a narrowing down of what people eat. Our world contains around seven thousand edible crops, yet 95 per cent of what we eat comes from just thirty of those crops. As omnivores, humans are designed to eat a varied diet, so there’s something strange and wrong when, as a species, we become so limited in our choice of foods.28

It might surprise you to learn (it did me) that the most average place in the world, food-wise, is not the United States, which is actually pretty extreme in the composition of its diet. To take one example, Americans have access to around twice the global average calories from meat (around 1,000 calories as against 500). Americans also consume far more sugar and sweeteners than the global mean.

To find the most average eaters in the world, you need to look to some of the middle-income countries of the developing world, especially in Latin America. These countries seem to hold up a mirror to the way food consumption is now shifting to a global mean. Purely in terms of the crops consumed, one of the most average places in the world for food is Colombia. Here, the top four sources of calories used to be maize followed by animal products followed by sugar and rice. Now the order is changed. Top of the list of Colombian foods are animal products (518 calories) followed by sugar (404 calories), then maize (368 calories) and rice (334 calories). Compared with the 1960s, people in Colombia have access to far more wheat and sugar and more refined oils.29

The idea that Colombians eat in anything like an average way would once have seemed laughable. Until recently, Colombians’ food habits were not merely different from those of Europe and the US, but distinct to the point of eccentricity from the rest of Latin America. There is nothing ‘average’ about a country where people eat milk soup with eggs for breakfast, garnished with spring onions and coriander leaf. Called changua, to those reared on it this soup is as soothing as congee or chicken soup. Another distinctive element of Colombian food was its unique and abundant range of tropical fruits.

On a trip to Spain in the spring of 2017, I got into conversation with the best-selling Colombian writer Héctor Abad (author of the magical and strange book Recipes for Sad Women). We strolled through the city of San Sebastián just before sunset and Abad told me of his love of old books and old ways. He recalled that when he first travelled from Colombia to Italy, he was astonished to find that Italians ate fruit at the end of the meal rather than at the start. In the Colombia of Abad’s youth, local fruit was the opening of every dinner for those who could afford it. The fruits of Colombia range from succulent pink guavas to guanábanas, which Abad later described to me in an email as ‘a fruit with the peel of a dinosaur, and the meat a sweet humid cotton that you can easily chew’.

When Abad was eight years old, in the 1960s, an American student called Keith came to visit his family. Keith ‘almost vomited’ when Héctor’s mother offered him changua soup for breakfast. Keith was also no fan of arepas, the Colombian corn bread which used to be ground and roasted and baked fresh every day. Keith complained that in the city of Medellín there was not one place to get a hamburger. Abad was a teenager before he first tasted ‘that strange and very caloric thing called pizza’.

These days, Abad and his wife still eat the good old foods of Colombian cuisine, or as many of them as they can find. They cook a lot of soups and fish or hearty dishes of meat, rice and vegetables. But such dishes are no longer the norm for Colombians. Abad is convinced that if Keith came back to Colombia now, he would have no problem finding foods just like the ones he ate back home in Los Angeles.

Abad has noticed that young Colombians no longer eat the way that he does and that the change has happened lightning fast – ‘maybe five years, maybe ten’, he tells me. He sees young Colombians abandon the old corn arepas for breakfast in favour of Westernised sliced wheat bread. He watches as they eat hamburgers and avoid the old rice and beans. He sees them sipping not fresh fruit juices but fizzy drinks, ranging from 7 Up to Colombiana – a local drink that Abad describes as ‘sweeter than syrup’. He feels sad that the country seems to have lost its pride in the old foods. Abad’s 94-year-old mother still makes changua for herself when she is ill, but he doesn’t know anyone else who does.

What’s happening in Colombia is happening in most other countries too. Children around the world are now eating weirdly similar food to each other. You wouldn’t expect a child in Portugal and a child in China to consume the same after-school snack. But a study conducted from 2011 to 2013 across twelve countries based on interviews with more than seven thousand nine- to eleven-year-olds found that there were very similar patterns of eating across all twelve. In particular, those children who had an ‘unhealthy’ pattern of eating tended to consume near-identical foods: packaged cookies and cereal bars, branded sweets, chocolates and crackers.30

Whether the children were in Australia or India, Finland or Kenya, they knew and devoured much the same things, which had nothing to do with the traditional cuisine of their country or even whether they were rich or poor. The children ate French fries and drank fizzy drinks; they ate doughnuts and crisps, cakes and ice cream. The nine-year-old in Bangalore and his or her counterpart in Ottawa had access to the same fizzy drinks, the same breakfast cereals, many of the same bagged savoury snacks. Across all the countries, the more healthy-eating children also shared similar patterns (except for the fact that children in India drank whole milk whereas those in Finland and Portugal drank skimmed milk). Children of all countries who ate ‘healthily’ ate dark leafy vegetables, orange vegetables and beans; fish and cheese; and fruit, especially bananas.31

If any single food illustrates the monotony of modern global diets, it is the banana. The Cavendish banana has found its way into kitchens around the world without having a great deal to recommend it as a fruit. Those soft yellow crescents have become an emblem of our food system’s lack of biodiversity. They are now not only the most popular fruit in the world but the tenth most consumed food of any kind.32

The mythical banana kingdom of Iceland

The unlikeliest bananas in the world grow in Iceland, a couple of hundred miles from the Arctic Circle. Iceland is not, to put it mildly, an obvious location in which to grow tropical fruit. Winter days in this part of Scandinavia sometimes have just four hours of sunlight and temperatures regularly drop below freezing. But near the city of Hveragerði in the south of the country there is a lava field that produces enough geothermal heat to power greenhouses where Nordic bananas grow.33

Home-grown Icelandic bananas are a magical proposition, one which seems to buck the trend for increasingly global, faceless modern food. Around the turn of the millennium, rumours circulated that Iceland had become ‘the largest banana republic in Europe’. Others spoke of Iceland attempting to become self-sufficient in the yellow-skinned soft fruits.34

Sadly, the ‘mythical banana kingdom of Iceland’ turned out to be just that, a myth. Bananas may grow in Iceland – a fact which is amazing enough in itself – but that does not mean that they can be grown on a commercial scale. Back in the 1940s, when plant scientists first discovered that bananas could be grown in Iceland, there were experiments with banana farms all over the country, but they were never profitable. The growing season for Icelandic bananas is short, with harvests lasting only from April to June. Soon, the Icelandic banana entrepreneurs gave up and donated their remaining plants to the Agricultural University at Hveragerði. You won’t find a geothermal banana in any local shop because the university is a publicly funded body that is not allowed to sell anything for profit. The tiny crop of bananas produced each year – about a ton – are enjoyed as a free perk by teachers, students and visitors.35

For the rest of their banana needs, Icelanders do exactly the same as people in all northern and western countries: they buy Cavendish bananas shipped in abundance from sunnier countries by a large multinational corporation. Most of the bananas in Icelandic supermarkets – and there are plenty of them – have the blue Chiquita label depicting a glamorous woman wearing a fruit-decorated Carmen Miranda hat (‘Miss Chiquita’). An American firm based in North Carolina, Chiquita is one of the largest global fruit brands, operating in seventy countries, selling bananas produced in South and Central America, with a large concentration coming from Guatemala and Mexico. So far from being a banana outlier, Iceland is in fact entirely typical in the way that it consumes bananas.

Banana bread is currently one of the most-eaten cakes in Reykjavik and modern Icelanders are also enthusiastic consumers of raw bananas eaten out of the hand to gain a quick boost of energy. By 2000, according to FAO data, Iceland imported 12.46 kilos of bananas per head, nearly four times as many as Russia.36

Bananas are a quintessential modern food in that they are overwhelmingly grown in tropical regions but eaten in temperate regions. Bananas are grown in developing countries for the pleasure and nutrition of developed nations. Our dependence on bananas reflects the astonishing fact that it has become more common to eat foods grown from foreign crops than from your own country.

Those yellow fruits, once rare and specific to certain places, are now an ordinary presence in kitchens across the world, a foreign taste that is no longer foreign. To our grandparents, unless they lived in the tropics, the banana was exotic, a huge and unusual treat. Now, there’s nothing unusual or exotic about bananas, which tend to be the cheapest fruit in the supermarket.

Bananas have become an everyday food in Italy and Oman, in Germany and India. Wherever in the world you eat a banana, it is likely to be the same bland Cavendish variety which dominates the world export trade, even though they never taste very good. Cavendish account for 47 per cent of all bananas grown (and close to 100 per cent of all bananas eaten in China and the UK).

For a long time I was puzzled by bananas. Sometimes British people of the wartime generation would speak of how desperately they missed bananas during the war and how they yearned to eat these special fruits again when the war was over. I couldn’t fathom this because the Cavendish banana is nothing to crave. But the bananas of the wartime generation were different. Before the Cavendish, the dominant banana was the Gros Michel, which was said to taste much better. It was a rare example of an old fruit that was sweeter than modern produce; and not just sweeter, but creamier in texture, with a deep, winey and complex flavour. If you’ve ever eaten a banana-flavoured sweet – that deep, sweetly pungent aroma – it’s apparently much closer to the Gros Michel than to the Cavendish. The problem was that the Gros Michel was wiped out by Panama disease in the 1950s.37

When casting around for a new strain of bananas that consumers would accept, the United Fruit Company, the American-owned company that controlled most of the world’s banana plantations, alighted on the Cavendish. It tasted nothing like the Gros Michel – growers at United Fruits noticed that the flavour was off and the texture was dry – but it looked the same, it transported easily and, crucially, it was resistant to Panama disease. Without having much to recommend it in terms of flavour or texture, the Cavendish became the banana to conquer the world, largely because it looked the way people expected a banana to look. (At the time of writing, the Cavendish has been hit by a new strain of Panama disease, which casts yet more doubt on the wisdom of the banana industry investing so heavily in just one strain.)38

As a fruit engineered to be seedless, every Cavendish banana you buy is an exact genetic clone of every other banana. Bananas are the monoculture of all monocultures. There are more than a hundred varieties of bananas in existence – including red-skinned ones – but you wouldn’t know it from the selection on offer in most shops, where bananas come in just one variety. Except for plantain-eaters who eat them in cooked form, you seldom hear anyone talk about the virtues of different varieties of banana because the whole point is that you expect them to taste the same: not the most delicious thing you ever ate, but cheap, filling and fairly wholesome – compared to a bar of chocolate if not to other fruit. Bananas in the supermarket are mainly marketed not on variety or flavour but on size: small ‘child-sized’ bananas, larger ones for the rest of us.

Cabusse Caroline Cacanska Pozna Caroline Hopkins Cagarlaou Carrara Brusca Calville Blanc d’Hiver Carrata Calville d’Aout Carrey Calville d’Oullins Carswell’s Honeydew Calville d’Ulzen Carswell’s Orange Calville de Doue Cartaut Calville de Maussion Carter’s Blue Calville de Saint-Sauveur Carter’s Pearmain Calville des Femmes Case Wealthy Calville des Prairies Castle Major Calville Duquesne Catherine (M27) Calville Malingre Catshead Calville Rouge d’Automne (Barnes) Caudal Market Calville Rouge d’Hiver Cavallotta Calville Rouge du Mont d’Or Ceeval Cambusnethan Pippin Cellini Camelot Celt Campanino Chad’s Favourite Canada Blanc de la Creuse Champ-Gaillard Canvada Channel Beauty Captain Kidd Chantecler Caravel Chantegrise Cardinal (INRA) Charden Carlisle Codlin (of Bultitude) Charles Eyre Carlton Charles Ross (LA 69A) Carmingnolle Charlot Carnet Charlotte Caroli d’Italie Chataignier

List of British apple varieties beginning with the letter C (a partial list). Out of all these varieties (more than 150), the only one for sale in most British supermarkets is Cox’s Orange Pippin.