The Way We Eat Now

A short history of eating too much

The immense volume of food in our lives is no fluke; it was planned for. In more ways than one, our food system goes back to the aftermath of the Second World War, when governments around the world became obsessed with making sure that their citizens had enough to eat, after the misery of war. In Europe and the US, farmers were paid subsidies for the sheer volume of food that they could produce. We are still living with this legacy of quantity over quality.

Before the war, most farmers had run small mixed farms based on the principle of crop rotation to maintain soil fertility and control pests. After the war, farmers started to specialise, in order to get the maximum yield possible from the land. Nitrogen was diverted from the old bomb factories to make fertiliser and tanks were repurposed as combine harvesters. Under the US Marshall Plan, which ran from 1947 to 1952 to help with post-war reconstruction in Europe, $13 billion was pumped into the economies of the continent. Much of it arrived in the form of animal feed or fertilisers. The era of plenty was beginning.42

One of the paradoxes of the post-war food system was that it entailed the greatest expansion of agriculture the world had ever seen, even as there was a mass exodus of farmers from the land. By 1985, just 3 per cent of the American population were farmers, where a hundred years earlier it had been more than half of the population. But the new farms did not need so many farmers, thanks to huge efficiencies of machinery and fertiliser. Between 1950 and 1990, world output of wheat, corn and cereals more than tripled, with the US leading the way. Something had to be done with all this grain. Increasingly, it was fed to animals to fuel a rising meat market.43

In this revolution of the land, we lost thousands of small farmers. But what we gained was a colossal supply of calories, which after all was exactly what governments had been hoping and planning to achieve after the war. The calories available to the average American increased from 3,100 per day in 1950 to around 3,900 by the year 2000 – around twice as much daily energy as most people need, depending on their activity levels. Put another way, to avoid over-eating in today’s food environment, most of us would need to reject half of our allotted calories. Every day. This is not impossible but nor is it easy, given that it is human nature to eat whatever’s available.44

These changes went along with the increasing dominance of huge multinational food companies who found a way to take the surplus calories and ‘add value’ to them – which meant adding margins. The power accrued by these companies in the decades since the war is hard to overemphasise. By 2012, the revenue of Nestlé alone was $100 billion, twice as much as the GDP of Uganda (at $51 billion). It was these companies, more than the farmers themselves, who profited from the overproduction of subsidised crops in the West. If you break down the US food dollar now, only 10.5 per cent goes to farmers. A much bigger share (15.5 per cent) goes to those processing the food. By itself, the actual raw cereal in a box of cereal is almost worthless. What adds the value are the flavourings and sweeteners and crisping agents, the pictures on the box and the advertisements that make a child clamour for its parents to buy it.45

Average energy use versus average energy need: this graph shows the vast rise in the oversupply of food in most countries since 1990.

In the early 1990s, European governments were still subsidising farmers to churn out mountains of food, surpluses of which often found their way onto the world market where they made it hard for producers from poorer countries to compete. In 1995, the World Trade Organisation was founded. Its aim was to end the unfair subsidies and remove trade restrictions, to give the developing world more of a level playing field. But the new liberalised global markets were not necessarily any fairer than the system that came before and they certainly did not result in better diets. The richer countries carried on subsidising their own local farmers but also benefited from relaxed subsidies overseas, enabling their farmers to enter new markets in the developing world. Meanwhile, rules on investing in the food markets of poorer countries were radically liberalised, which led to a huge wave of foreign investment from companies selling highly processed foods. This paved the way for the nutrition transition to happen in Asia and South America.46

Western eaters have been living in the sugary abundance of stage four for decades. The difference now is that so many other, poorer countries are galloping to join us. In wealthy countries, the key decades of dietary change were the 1960s and 1970s, when people shifted en masse to diets higher in sugary drinks and highly processed foods. As far back as 1980, the average Canadian was already getting more than a thousand calories a day from animal products, chiefly meat, and more than three hundred calories each from oils and sugars. The great food revolution of our times is that people across the entire globe are starting to eat this type of oil-heavy, ultra-processed diet.47

One of the frightening aspects of stage four is how fast it has happened. It took thousands of years to get from a hunter-gatherer society to one based on farming (from stage one to stage two). The effects of the Industrial Revolution in Europe and the US took only a couple of centuries (stage two to stage three). But the new shifts in the West away from home-cooked meals and tap water and on to packaged snacks and sugary drinks were speedier still, taking only a couple of decades. In Brazil and Mexico and China and India, the change is happening even faster, in the space of ten years or less. For South America, the peak decade of nutritional change was the 1990s. Over just eleven years, from 1988 to 1999, the number of overweight and obese people in Mexico nearly doubled, from 33.4 per cent of the population to 59.6 per cent.48

Mexican diets have changed at tumultuous speed. After the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed by the United States, Mexico and Canada in 1994, it spelled the end of subsidies for home-grown Mexican corn and the Mexican market was flooded with cheap yellow corn from the US which did not have the same qualities as the old corn, either in taste or nutrition. Traditional Mexican tortilla were made from locally adapted landrace corns of diverse species, each of which had its own distinct flavour and nutritional properties. Before it was cooked, the corn was ‘nixtamalised’: soaked in an alkaline solution which increases the nutritional properties of the grain. The old tortillas were eaten with beans, a culinary arrangement which also reflected agricultural practice. Traditionally, in Mexico, corn and beans were intercropped, to enrich the soil. Now, corn and beans are not necessarily seen together either in the soil or on the plate in Mexico. Refried beans have been edged out by ultra-processed foods, whose sales expanded at a rate of 5–10 per cent a year from 1995 to 2003.49

As in South Africa, the pattern of eating in Mexico has changed, radically and fast. We are not talking here about the occasional fizzy drink or a Friday night plate of fried chicken but a near total transformation of the food supply, which has gone hand in hand with disastrous changes to the population’s health since the 1990s. From 1999 to 2004, 7-Eleven doubled its number of stores in Mexico. There are Mexican towns where running water is sporadic and Coca-Cola is more readily available than bottled water. Meanwhile, the prevalence of overweight and obesity among people in Mexico rose 78 per cent from 1988 to 1998 and by 2006, more than 8 per cent of Mexicans were suffering from type 2 diabetes.50

A changing plate of food in China and Egypt in 1961 and 2009.

A similarly tragic nutrition transition is currently playing out in Brazil, where much of the population is both malnourished and obese. Throughout Brazil there are ‘dual burden households’ where some family members (usually the children) are underweight and stunted and others (usually the mothers) are obese.51 Many adolescent girls in Brazil are both anaemic and obese, suggesting that their diets, though plentiful, are low in crucial micronutrients, especially iron.52

To Americans, junk food is nothing new. Cracker Jack, a sticky packaged confection made from popcorn, syrup and peanuts, was first sold in Chicago in 1896. The difference now is the sheer global reach of branded processed items, which have succeeded in travelling to some of the remotest villages in Africa and South America. From the late 1990s onwards, the multinational food companies worked hard to get their products into even the tiniest village food stores in Africa. As soon as electricity reached a given region, Coca-Cola would be there, offering free coolers and kiosks to shopkeepers who would stock their products. But now, food companies have taken this marketing a stage further, employing travelling salespeople to bring branded processed foods right into individual homes.53

In 2017, reporters from the New York Times followed some of the women who act as door-to-door salespeople for Nestlé in Brazil. Items such as chocolate pudding, sugary yoghurts and heavily processed cereals are sold door-to-door to consumers who may believe they are doing the best for their families by buying these products, which often boast that they are fortified with vitamins and minerals. In the poorer regions of Brazil, door-to-door sales enable multinational food companies to reach households they could never otherwise have penetrated.54

A report on the Nestlé website in 2012 boasted about door-to-door sales as a form of ‘community engagement’ because the foods being sold were fortified with vitamins. What the report doesn’t mention is that these fortified foods contain excessive amounts of sugar and refined starch and are displacing other, more nourishing foods from the Brazilian diet. The company currently had 7,000 saleswomen going door-to-door in Brazil, but aimed to expand this number to 10,000. Nestlé claimed that the initiative brought a sense of ‘independence’ as well as valuable income to the female sellers. Needless to relate, the company said nothing about the fact that most of these women – like their customers – were now grappling with diet-related ill health. A reporter for the New York Times spoke to Celene da Silva, a 29-year-old seller for Nestlé, who weighs more than 200 lb and has high blood pressure. She drinks Coca-Cola at every meal.55

This is a story not just about the food industry but about social change. The rise of the big multinational food companies in Brazil and elsewhere is part of a bigger picture which includes rising incomes, changing patterns of work, urbanisation, electronic kitchen gadgets and a growth in TV, computer and mobile phone ownership. Mass media is one of the drivers of the nutrition transition that we often forget about. In China in 1989, only 63 per cent of households owned a TV set and of these, half owned a black and white set. By 2006, 98 per cent of Chinese households owned a TV, and almost all of them showed a full colour picture. TV watching not only encourages people to be less active than ever before, but it also allows direct marketing of novel processed foods, particularly to children. Almost all the food advertised in the world on TV is what nutritionists call ‘noncore’: inessential, sugary or salty snack foods rather than those served for a main meal. The aim of the adverts is to create a preference for these unhealthy foods in children which, the manufacturers hope, will last a lifetime.56

It’s not that electronic entertainment or labour-saving kitchens and city life are bad in themselves – to the contrary. Speaking for myself, I would hate to go back to a life before Spotify – never mind before refrigeration and colour TV. So many of the social changes that have gone along with the nutrition transition have enabled people to lead fuller, easier, more comfortable lives. In the spring of 2018, when I visited Nanjing, one of the biggest cities in China, I walked on ground that would have been farmland ten years ago, full of workers doing back-breaking labour in the fields. Now, these neighbourhoods were full of glitzy high-rise malls where young people whose grandparents had lived their youth in toil and hunger sat in air-conditioned branches of Starbucks nibbling fluffy cakes flavoured with green matcha tea. Older Nanjing residents who would once have struggled to afford exotic fruit such as durian or lychees more than once or twice a year could now buy these fruits every week, and carry them home on a super-fast metro train.

In a way, the modern global food industry is a miraculous achievement. It can grow anything, transport anything, sell anything (so long as that anything can be neatly packaged and placed on a supermarket shelf). The system can produce fresh green beans and perishable meat in a far-flung corner of one country and distribute them, still in an apparently fresh state, to hungry eaters anywhere on the planet in a matter of days. For those with the cash to buy them, there are summer fruits in winter and sweet cups of piping-hot chocolate topped with whipped cream all the year round. Where our ancestors worried intensely about the safety of dairy products, we can now buy fresh refrigerated cold milk, mostly free of pathogens, whenever we feel like it.

The food transformations of stage four are unlike anything else the world has seen. Sometimes, I look at my three children and think how extraordinarily fortunate much of this generation is, never having to doubt whether there are things to eat in the shops. Fresh fruit is almost like running water to them. When stuff in our refrigerator runs out, we know there is plenty more where it came from. My children have never known empty shelves or rationing. Nor have I, come to that.

Needless to say, it still isn’t possible for all children, everywhere, to rely on this diet of abundance, even now. The terrible food shortages in present-day Venezuela are a bleak reminder that we cannot necessarily count on this era of plenty lasting for ever. It’s also the case that many children, even in rich countries, are not sharing in the plenty to the same extent, with one in five American children suffering from food insecurity. Stage four has seen the emergence of new forms of social and economic inequality around food. Some children have never tasted a strawberry, except for the fake strawberry flavour in a fast food milkshake. Others – from wealthier families – are given organic oats and farmers’ market berries for breakfast. The gap in quality between the diet of the poorest and that of the richest is wide and widening. The poorest families in America may not look hungry in the way that Victorian orphans looked hungry but they eat fewer dark green vegetables, fewer wholegrains and fewer nuts.57

The great question held out by stage four is whether it is possible to enjoy the advantages of modern eating without the downsides. The post-war food system succeeded in delivering a vast surplus of calories. What it has not delivered thus far – at least not in most countries – is food for the masses that won’t make people unwell.

Bending the curve

Experts in development studies talk about ‘bending the curve’ of the nutrition transition, meaning changing its direction to a healthier pattern of eating. In an ideal world, we would be able to enjoy the convenience, variety and pleasure of modern food without the chronic illness that so often seems to be its corollary. Can the curve be bent away from junk food and towards vegetables? If so, where has this ever happened?

One country – South Korea – comes up again and again when we consider these questions. South Korea managed to pass from stage three to stage four of the nutrition transition in lightning time without experiencing anything like the same consequences of a changing diet seen in Brazil and Mexico and South Africa. Almost alone in the world, South Korea bent the curve.

From the early 1960s to the mid-1990s, the South Korean economy was completely transformed. Between 1962 and 1996, per capita GNP increased an astonishing seventeenfold. Meanwhile, life expectancy had increased from 52.4 for Korean males in 1960 to 82.16 in 2015. As elsewhere, this growing wealth went along with demographic changes, as populations rapidly moved away from the countryside and into cities. South Koreans acquired TVs and microwaves and electric rice cookers. In 1988, the city of Seoul hosted the Olympic Games and became exposed to international influences as never before.

As we might expect, these economic and social changes went along with huge adjustments to the South Korean diet. Household food consumption surveys suggest that Korean meat eating increased tenfold between 1969 and 1995 – not exactly a trivial change. Previously, a dish such as spicy bulgogi – made from shredded beef marinated in soy sauce and sesame oil – might have been a special meal. Now, with rising incomes and falling food prices, it was an everyday midweek supper for middle-class families. Meanwhile, the consumption of cereals (majoring on rice) plummeted from 558 grams per person in 1969 to 308 grams in 1995.

Given how rapidly South Korea moved from poverty to wealth and became exposed to new world markets, you would expect the country to have moved equally rapidly to an obesogenic diet high in sugar, new fats and packaged foods. But compared to people in other rapidly developing nations, Koreans retained their traditional diet to a much greater extent. When researchers examined the data for South Korea from the 1960s to the 1990s, they were startled to find that South Korean fat consumption was still reletively low. In 1996, the typical South Korean ate less fat than the average Chinese person, even though the GNP of South Korea was at that time fourteen times higher than China’s.58 Meanwhile, levels of obesity in South Korea were also markedly lower than would have been expected from the nation’s level of economic development. As of 1998, just 1.7 per cent of men and 3 per cent of women in South Korea were obese.59

The area where South Korea bends the curve most of all is in vegetable consumption. In 1969, the average South Korean ate 271 grams of vegetables, fresh and processed, every day. In 1995, despite all the other changes to Korean society – from the strange vogue for bubble tea to the invention of K-pop, a fusion of Western and Asian pop music – the amount of vegetables Koreans ate had actually gone up slightly, to 286 grams. The city-dwelling Koreans of the 1990s led completely different lives from Korean villagers in the 1950s, yet they continued to eat their greens. The example of Korea shows that it is possible to be a modern person who is not disgusted by cabbage.60