We aspire to better food choices, yet the way we eat now is the product of vast impersonal forces that none of us asked for. The choices we make about food are largely predetermined by what’s available and by the limitations of our busy lives.
It might be possible to eat in a more balanced way, if only we didn’t have to work, or go to school, or save money, or travel by car, bus or train, or shop at a supermarket, or live in a city, or share a meal with children, or look at a screen, or get up early, or stay up late, or walk past a vending machine, or feel depressed, or be on medication, or have a food intolerance, or own an imperfectly stocked fridge. Who knows what wonders we might then eat for breakfast?
It’s now becoming abundantly clear that the way most of us currently eat is not sustainable – either for the planet or for human health. The signs that modern food is unsustainable are all around us, whether you want to measure the problem in soil erosion, in the fact that so many farmers cannot make a living from producing food, or in the rising numbers of children having all their teeth extracted because of their sugary diet. Food is the single greatest user of water as well as one of the greatest drivers of the loss of biodiversity. We cannot carry on eating as we are without causing irreparable harm to ourselves and to the environment. At some point, governments may be forced by climate change to reform food systems to become less wasteful and more in tune with the needs of human health. The hope is – as we’ll see – that some governments and cities are already taking action to create environments in which it is easier to feed ourselves in a way that is both healthy and joyous. In the meantime, many individual consumers have taken matters into their own hands and tried to devise their own strategies for escaping the worst excesses of modern food.
Our culture’s obsessive focus on a perfect physique has blinded us to the bigger question, which is what anyone of any size should eat to avoid being sickened by our unbalanced food supply. No one can eat themselves to perfect health, nor can we ward off death indefinitely, and the attempt to do so can drive a person crazy. Our responses to food are hugely individual. Life is deeply unfair and some people may eat every dark green leafy vegetable going and still get cancer. But even if food cannot cure or forestall every ill, it does not have to be the thing that kills us.
The greatest thing that we have lost from our eating today is a sense of balance, whether it’s the balance of meals across the day or the balance of nutrients on our plate. Some complain that modern nutrition is in a state of terminal confusion and that science knows nothing about what a person should aim to eat for better health. This is not quite true. A series of systematic reviews of the evidence by some of the world’s top nutrition scientists – the kind who are not funded by the sugary drink or bacon industries – have sifted through all the data and found robust causal evidence that regular portions of certain foods do significantly lower a person’s risk of chronic diseases, such as heart disease, diabetes and stroke.12
It’s the balance and variety of what you eat that matters rather than any one ingredient, but there are certain foods you might want to throw into the mix, depending on your preferences, your beliefs, your digestion and whether you have a food intolerance. These protective foods are all relatively unprocessed and include nuts and seeds; beans and pulses; and fish, the oilier the better (canned sardines are an affordable alternative). Fermented foods such as yoghurt, kefir and kimchi seem to help us in all kinds of ways that we are only starting to understand, from gut health to reductions in the risk of diabetes. There are also numerous benefits to eating foods high in fibre, especially vegetables and fruits and wholegrains. You do not have to fork out for superfoods such as fashionable kale; any vegetables will do, as many different types as possible.
A good diet is founded less on absolutes than on the principle of ratio. Take protein. One of the missing links in the obesity crisis seems to be the falling ratio of protein to carbohydrate in our diets. This phenomenon – first documented in 2005 by biologists David Raubenheimer and Stephen Simpson – is known as the ‘protein leverage hypothesis’. In absolute terms, most people in rich countries get more than enough protein, much of it from meat. What has fallen, however, is the proportion of protein in our diets relative to carbohydrates and fats. Because our food system supplies us with a flood of cheap fats and refined carbohydrates (including sugars), the percentage of proteins available to the average person in the US has dropped from 14–15 per cent of total energy intake (which is OK for most people, assuming you are not a bodybuilder, but still on the low side) to 12.5 per cent. This leaves many of us hungry for protein even if we have more than enough calories. Raubenheimer and Simpson have observed this protein hunger at work in many animal species besides humans. When a cricket is short of protein, it will resort to cannibalism. Locusts will forage different food sources until they get the ideal protein balance. Humans are neither as wise as locusts nor as ruthless as crickets. When our food is low in protein, we try to extract the balance from carbohydrates, with the result that we overeat. If Raubenheimer and Simpson are right, then obesity is – among many other things – a symptom of protein hunger.
Protein leverage would also explain why low-carb diets work so well – at least in the short term – as a weight loss tool for many people in our current food environment. The low-carb diet works partly because it is higher in protein (and lower in sugar). But there are other, gentler adjustments you could make to get your ratios back on track short of swearing off bread for life. You could cut down on sugary drinks; add yoghurt or eggs to your breakfast; or go easy on carbs for just one meal a day. Or you could get more protein from green vegetables and pulses, which turn out to be much richer in amino acids than was once believed.13
It isn’t that there is anything wrong with carbohydrate per se (unless you are suffering from diabetes). After all, humans have thrived on carbohydrate-rich diets in the past – and, as nutrition scholar David Katz remarks, carbs can mean anything ‘from lentils to lollipops’. Our nutrient-obsessed age wants to fit every food into a certain box, yet pulses such as lentils are 25 per cent carbohydrate and 25 per cent protein. Do we welcome the lentil as a protein or reject it as a carb? Perhaps, instead, we should simply find a lentil recipe that tempts us to eat it (spiked with cumin seed and enriched with butter works for me) and call it food, because it is.
We are now at a transition point with food where a critical mass of consumers seem to be ready to make another set of changes to replace the last and, out of this craziness, to create new ways of eating that actually make sense for modern life. Very little about how we eat now would have been considered normal a generation ago, but I take consolation in thinking that surely much of it won’t seem normal in the future either. From around the world, I have found hopeful signs that the pattern of our eating may be turning back again in a healthier and more joyful direction. In the final chapter, I celebrate some glimmers of a different food culture that is just emerging: one in which nutrition and flavour are finally joined up.
To reverse the damage being done by modern diets would require many other things to change about the world today, from the way we organise agriculture to the way we talk about vegetables. We would need to adjust our criteria of prosperity to make it less about money in the bank and more about access to good quality food. We would need different food markets and differently run cities. Through education or experience, we would also need to become people with different appetites, so that we no longer crave so much of the junk foods that sicken us. None of this looks easy at present, but nor is such change impossible. If the food changes we are living through now teach us anything, it is that humans are capable of altering almost everything about our eating in a single generation.