Kitabı oku: «The Way We Eat Now», sayfa 4
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.
What is true of bananas is true to a lesser extent of other fruits. There are around six thousand British heritage apple varieties, ranging from tart to sweet, from soft to hard, from yellow to green to red. Yet commercial apple production in the UK now centres around just ten varieties, chosen for a reliable look and shape and a certain bland sweetness. This varietal simplification has consequences for our health. Different apple cultivars contain varying levels of phytochemicals: vitamins that have been linked to the prevention of certain types of cancer and cardiovascular disease. If we only ever eat one type of apple, we may not get the full health benefits of eating the fruit.39
At least with apples, there is still a folk memory of diversity: of the enchanting old varieties that we have lost. This memory is kept alive by farmers’ markets in the autumn. But with bananas, we don’t even expect variety. The Cavendish is an archetypal modern food commodity. Whatever the season, it arrives hygienically zipped in its own biodegradable yellow packaging and it has desirable, healthy overtones. Assuming you get one at the right stage of ripeness, the flavour is as consistent as Coca-Cola. You will find them in the hot summers of Dubai and the freezing winters of Iceland.
Not so long ago, Iceland was a place where fresh fruit was rare. There was a time in the 1930s when Icelanders needed a doctor’s prescription to buy fresh fruit. You can see why Icelandic bananas seemed such a wonderful project to plant biologists of the 1940s. During the early twentieth century, fruit was only available to Icelanders in the summer when there were just three kinds of native berries: regular bilberries (Vaccininum myrtillus), bog bilberries (Vaccininum uliginosum) and crowberries (kroekiber), a type of small black berry growing on sprawling shrubs. The crowberry is mouth-puckeringly sour. Icelandic food writer Nanna Rögnvaldardóttir notes that it would not be considered a delicacy in any country that had access to sweeter tasting berries.
Crowberries used to be one of the inimitable tastes of Iceland, along with moss, seaweed, smoked offal, soured milk (skyr) and salt cod. For centuries, the people on this inhospitable island ate a diet unlike anywhere else in the world, determined by what was available. Grain was nearly impossible to grow and so, instead of a slice of bread, Icelanders sometimes ate dried fish spread with butter.40
In a world before bananas (and all the changes that came with them), Icelanders were people who could appreciate tiny differences in the limited range of ingredients that they ate. In the old days in Iceland, people ate so much cod that they became intensely attuned to the variety of flavours and textures within a single fish, from cheeks to eyeballs. There are 109 words in Icelandic to describe the muscles in a cod’s head.41
The culture that gave rise to this varied language of food has largely gone. Much of the food of Iceland is now the food of everywhere. Nanna Rögnvaldardóttir remembers a time when salt and pepper – and possibly cinnamon, for cakes – were the only spices you could find in Reykjavik. Now, Iceland – despite its cold climate – enjoys extra-virgin olive oil, sun-dried tomatoes and garlic in profusion.
Since the 1960s, an ever-increasing range of fruits has been imported into Iceland and there is no need to forage for sour crowberries unless you desperately want to for old times’ sake. A typical Icelander today gets 109 calories a day from fruit, compared with just 46 calories in 1960. At the publishing house where Rögnvaldardóttir now works, a consignment of fresh fruit is delivered to the office every day, about half of it bananas. But in all this variety, she can’t help feeling that something has been lost. ‘As virtually all our fruit is imported, we are rather ignorant of the seasons,’ she comments. Bananas are regarded with affection, she says, because they are relatively affordable and always there in the shops, even in winter. In some fundamental way, Icelanders do not know these new foods as intimately as they once knew cod and crowberries. The average Icelander eats 111 bananas every year. Yet to describe this endless feast of bananas, an Icelander has just one bland word: banani.
I can’t entirely lament the existence of the Cavendish banana, not least because I always have them in my kitchen, ready to feed to a hungry child or to slice onto morning porridge. Without the Cavendish, millions of poorer consumers would have little or no fresh fruit in their diets at all. They are a useful source of potassium, fibre and vitamin B6. But this monoculture of fruit is a symptom of our food culture’s wider obsession with cheapness and abundance over flavour. The salient fact about bananas – one of the most wasted foods in the typical home kitchen – is that there always seem to be too many of them to eat up before they turn brown.
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
