Your choices with food
The food industry is arguably a wonder of the modern world, delivering delicious food, where and when we want it. It has been outstandingly resilient throughout the pandemic, making a difficult year much more navigable. The widespread availability of nutrition is a factor in life expectancy improving by 30 years in the 20th century. Yet…. It is also arguable that the food industry is a slow-motion health and environmental disaster. The world has lost half of its topsoil in the past 150 years and the University of Sydney claims that all insects could be extinct within 100 years. Meanwhile, ultra-processed foods are despatched to an increasingly obese nation in packaging destined for the landfill.
Confusing isn’t it? It’s really a story of how free markets work brilliantly and terribly at the same time. The way it is supposed to work is that consumers ‘send signals’ to the retailers about what they want to buy, and through the process of competition retailers deliver the required products in a convenient location and at the best possible price. And it works well….. but only to the extent that consumers send the right signals. Consumer ‘signals’ may be distorted by marketing activity, unhealthy food cravings or lack of knowledge. Faced with a packet of cheesy-puffs how is possible to know its supply-chain impacts on soil and insects. So, we rely upon the supermarkets to take control of these matters of food-provenance and sustainability on our behalf. Having worked with the supermarkets, I know they take these issues seriously and with good intentions, but it is not convincing that they have the appetite or ability to progress quickly enough.
Lets take packaging as an example. It is, by design, convenient and functional. It is also attractive, reassuring, and alluring; it entices consumers to act upon cravings and impulses. Crisp packets typically keep the product fresh for 23 weeks, being made of two layers of recyclable material (plastic and aluminium) bonded together to make it, essentially, unrecyclable. You’ll diligently put it into recycling, because that feels right, however it goes to hermetically sealed landfill. Food in modern landfills scarcely breaks down, so imagine how long your crisp packet will be there. The UK alone eats 140m kg of crisps a year, so one way or another we are creating trash today in a way that could survive longer than humankind.
Health issues abound too. The ‘precautionary’ principle means that, unless someone is prepared to put foods through pharmaceutical levels of testing, then health claims are not considered proven and so can’t be made.
The precautionary principle is well meaning, and effective at excluding snake-oil sales techniques and outlandish claims, but it does leave gaps. By its very nature the precautionary principle doesn’t help the consumer to differentiate between foods that are ‘probably’ not good for them against foods that ‘probably’ are. Look up aspartame on the internet. You’ll find that it is an artificial sweetener widely used in diet drinks; it is a neurotoxic drug. It might cause cancer, birth defects or brain tumours. It is thought that it may cause formaldehyde to acculumate in the body causing damage to DNA and the liver. Look up turmeric. You’ll find that it might have a number of health benefits; Nuffield Health (a very trustworthy health provider) cite numerous reports about its anti-cancer properties. Yet, drinks full of aspartame are marketed as “diet”, with strong positive health connotations, while turmeric comes with no allowable health claims. The balance of probabilities suggests to me that a person who has a turmeric drink every day is going to have better average health outcomes than someone who drinks diet fizzy drinks.
It is only the largest food manufacturers that could afford to test food at a pharmaceutical level of proof, and given that the best margins are typically in packaged ultra-processed foods rather than unprocessed wholefoods, why would they bother to spend money to prove that their products are unhealthy. Understandably, they spend the money on marketing and promotional activities to influence consumers.
Surprisingly, the precautionary principle doesn’t even offer protections as you might expect. ‘Known carcinogens’ (i.e. proven to a decent scientific standard) according to the WHO includes processed meat. So, despite the precautionary principle underpinnings of our food regulations, the law isn’t robust enough to require supermarkets to label sausages with a warning, like it does for other known carcinogens such a tobacco and alcohol.
Fortunately, we can help ourselves; and we don’t need to be particularly accurate in our knowledge nor obsessive in our behaviour. How much manganese, to just take one example, do I need in my diet? Dunno. But I do believe this: as a start point “nature has the answers”, and with some really easy rules of thumb we can skew the balance of probabilities heavily in favour of our health and that of the environment.
I’m not a particular fan of the “5-a-day” rule. It is uninspiring, potentially too narrow (how much benefit do we get from 5 portions of turnip every day?) and what is a portion anyway? However, I do love the idea of “30 different types of wholefoods” a week, which is a bit of a buzzword in the gut health world. It feels familiar; somewhat like old-time wisdom to eat everything in moderation and it does feel like an encouragement to build interest and intrigue into our diet. Personally, I like to have “some” walnuts, a “handful” of dried mango, a fruit+ACV smoothie, a teaspoon of raw honey and go from there. Does it get you a targeted amount of nutrients? Who knows? Does any one single ingredient have proven health benefits that can be marketed with a health claim? Probably not. But I do know that if I eat a wide enough range of wholefoods I’ll likely get what I need.
Most of us don’t know (nor could ever be bothered to find out) how much manganese we need in our diet, which foods contain it or even what is it used for. The point of this is to play the odds. These rules of thumb are great for playing the odds:
Eat a variety of 30+ wholefoods and natural foods each week
Soil Association products only come from suppliers who look after the soil and do not use chemicals such as neonicotinoids (which are considered harmful to insects)
Aluminium and glass are infinitely recyclable (and in the future lets really encourage first-mover supermarkets that give us refill / weigh-shop options)
The precautionary principle is helpful to avoid the worst form of snake oil salesmen, but let’s use the principle of maximising the probability when it comes to choosing the most varied, naturally based diet that is great for our health and the environment… And go easy on the sausages.