Because that’s what we have been living through recently. A survey in late 2012 by the market research company Kantar Worldpanel found that the households on the lowest incomes in Britain were spending more and more money on the very cheapest processed foods, because they were perceived to be more filling. They were buying exactly the grim products that we had trawled through, shoving the country into what was being described as a ‘nutritional recession’. It was presented as a trend, a function of short-term food price rises and falling incomes.
But what happens to the total crap pedalled by the supermarkets to the people with the least choice when, as a result of their own brutal buying policies, the supply chain breaks down? When the prices for absolutely everything go through the roof? When producers from abroad no longer wish to supply the supermarkets and there isn’t enough agricultural production left at home to pick up the slack?
What happens then?
One evening late in 2011 I found myself at a private dinner, sitting next to a very senior board-level executive from one of the big supermarkets. Although I had written positive pieces about the supermarkets in the past, and had explained patiently why they weren’t necessarily evil, my relationships with the big multiples had become increasingly strained. I rarely got an answer from them when, as a journalist, I asked questions. And yet, here I was, sitting next to one of the big beasts. It was an opportunity.
And so, very intently, while filling up the exec’s wine glass, I began to explain my over-arching theory of everything: that by giving the big supermarkets unfettered access to the retail food market we had allowed them to completely destroy farming; that we were becoming increasingly less self-sufficient in food because so many farmers were quitting in the face of horrible business practices. All of this mattered, I said, because of the global food security situation. Some of the price spikes of 2008 might have eased, but it was only a moment’s respite. Those issues would come back to haunt us. Countries like China, India and Brazil would be competing for the resources we wanted and when prices spiked again we would no longer be able to afford them. And when we turned back to Britain for our food needs the supply simply wouldn’t be there. In short, I said, supermarkets had to start paying producers more so they could invest in agriculture and reinforce our food supply system.
I said it all very cleverly with my special, non-patronizing explaining face.
There was a pause. The executive looked at me. The big beast of the supermarket world said, ‘Is this off the record?’ I said yes. (Look how I’m not even giving them a gender to protect their identity. It could be a woman. It could be a man. It could be a man dressed as a woman. It isn’t. But it could be.)
The executive nodded slowly and said, ‘I entirely agree with you.’
I opened my mouth and closed it again. That, I hadn’t expected.
My dining companion did go on to say that it was their life’s mission to secure a means of food supply so that the supermarket they worked for could source everything they need for decades to come, but still, the point had been made. We are facing a very serious crisis. A global crisis, one in which the supermarkets are complicit.
And to fully understand it, we need to get out a bit. We need to travel. So let’s start in Rwanda, a country in central East Africa with a dark history and a complicated present, which also happens to have a lot to tell us about global food supply. And perhaps even more to tell me about the knotty business of being a greedy man in a hungry world.
4.
I like eating Chinese food in odd places. Anybody can go out for a Chinese in a place where lots of Chinese people live, like central London or Toronto or perhaps even China. But eating Chinese food on a Greek island or in Turkey or in Paris, where Chinese food is famous for being bone-numbingly awful, has a certain cachet. Other people try to make themselves sound like gastronomic adventurers by sucking fat-thick milk straight from the hot teats of yaks, while being watched by baffled Mongolian herdsmen, or by scarfing fermented shark meat which has been preserved in the urine of the fishermen who caught it. I’m sure the shark-in-wee thing is an interesting experience, and one of the many reasons for visiting Iceland, but interesting is not always the same as good. To me it just sounds like the waste of a perfectly good mealtime.
So instead I express my gastronomic adventurism through Chinese food in peculiar places. It’s intriguing to see how a set of dishes you know from one setting is shaped and changed by another, depending on the size of the Chinese population and the availability of ingredients. Plus it gives you something to say when you get home from a holiday during which you did nothing other than lie on the beach and read. Chinese food on the Greek island of Zakynthos, for example, is generally very poor: too many gloopy sauces thickened with cornflour; too many gnarly spare ribs coated in sugar and bright orange food dye the colour of an American daytime TV host. By contrast, the food at the Peking Garden in Ovacik, a small, trashy Turkish holiday resort just over the hills to the south of Fethiye, was, for a while, surprisingly good. Their hot and sour soup had a proper punch and they made their own pancakes to go with the crispy duck, pressing a local wheat-heavy crepe recipe into the service of this famous British suburban Saturday-night favourite. Then we went back one year and it was awful. Perhaps the chef had gone home. Perhaps they couldn’t get the ingredients any more. Perhaps they had simply lost interest. It was practically Zakynthos standard. Yes, that bad.
So now I was in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, there was a Chinese restaurant called The Great Wall opposite my hotel, and I knew what I had to do. I had to eat there.
Rwanda is, of course, less famous these days as a place for dinner and more as the country where, in 1994, 800,000 or more souls were slaughtered in a furious genocide executed in a matter of months and, for the most part, using machetes. Nazi Germany industrialized its genocide of the Jews and the Gypsies, the disabled and the gays. It built gas chambers and crematoriums and did serious systems analysis to make it all function with as much Teutonic efficiency as possible. By contrast the Rwandan genocide – inspired in the main by long-held inter-tribal enmities – was a bespoke, hand-tooled affair. It was neighbour on neighbour. It was townsfolk on townsfolk. It was embedded into the very weft and warp of society. Rwanda has done an impressive job of reconstructing and reconfiguring itself in the years since. It has both confronted the issue and not confronted the issue. There is a museum in the centre of Kigali to the genocide. But there are also laws in place to prohibit discussion in the workplace of which tribe – Hutu or Tutsi – people happen to be from. It is the great undiscussable, mentioned more in whispers than shouts. Spending time in Rwanda is like hanging out with a huge extended family with a big, dark secret that is so terrible and so exhausting and so completely known that nobody has the energy to discuss it any more. Just move on. Nothing to see here.
I was in Rwanda with the charity Save the Children, helping to launch a campaign on chronic child malnourishment. We know about acute hunger. We know about famines that emaciate; food supply crises that fill the nightly news with shots of cargo planes unloading sacks of aid onto dusty runways at the very end of the world. Rock stars hold gigs in stadiums to ease acute hunger. Comedians swim the Channel to raise funds. Chronic malnutrition does not make the nightly news in the same way, because it rarely comes with pictures, and nobody swims anything to raise money to deal with the problem. Save the Children estimates that if affects 170 million children worldwide and could blight the lives of half a billion kids in the next fifteen years. It is the hidden underlying cause of 2.6 million child deaths a year as their malnourished bodies give in to diseases like malaria or pneumonia they might otherwise have been able to survive. Malnourishment never appears on death certificates in these cases. It is just there, a fact of life and a bigger fact of death. The children have food to eat but not enough. Or if they have what looks like enough, it lacks the basic nutrients they need for healthy development.
Chronically malnourished children can be 15 per cent smaller than they should be for their age. Their intellectual development is also held back. Malnourishment can knock off IQ points, a blunt measure of smartness, but