There are two big stories to tell about food today and they could hardly be more different. One of these stories is something like a fairy tale; the other is closer to a horror story. Both, though, are equally true.
And they never went hungry again
The happy version of the story goes like this. Humans have never in history been fed as well as we are right now. As recently as the 1960s, you could go into almost any hospital in the developing world and find children suffering from kwashiorkor, a form of severe protein malnutrition which gives rise to swelling all over the body and a pot belly. Today kwashiorkor is mercifully rare in most countries (though it still afflicts millions of children in central Africa). Other diseases of deficiency such as scurvy, pellagra and beri-beri are – with a few exceptions – terrors of the past. The waning of hunger is one of the great miracles of modernity. And they never went hungry again is the happy ending of many fairy tales.1
Until the twentieth century, the threat of famine was a universal aspect of human existence across the world. Harvests failed; populations starved; for anyone but the wealthy, food wasn’t to be relied on. Even in rich countries such as Britain and France, ordinary people lived with the daily spectre of going to sleep hungry and spent as much as half their income on basic staples such as grain and bread. In the rice-based economies of Asia, mass starvation regularly killed whole communities.
The decline of hunger is one of the great wonders of our time. In 1947, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) at the United Nations, half of all the people on the planet were chronically underfed. By 2015, that figure had dropped to one in nine – even though the overall population had risen astronomically during the same period. The number of people living in extreme poverty continues to decline dramatically. On any given day in 2017, the numbers affected by extreme poverty – defined as less than $1.90 a day per person to cover food, clothing and shelter, adjusted for inflation – declined by 250,000.2
Absolute hunger is much rarer than it once was. In 2016, the Swedish historian Johan Norberg went so far as to argue – in his book Progress – that the problem of food had been solved. Advances in farming technology over the course of the twentieth century made massively more food available to vastly more people. A modern combine harvester can yield in six minutes what it once took twenty-five men a day to do and modern cold storage can prevent crops from rotting and being wasted after harvest.3 More food is produced each year than ever before.
Perhaps the greatest changes of all came about through the invention in the 1910s of the Haber-Bosch process, a method for synthesising ammonia which made highly effective nitrogen fertilisers cheap to produce for the first time. Vaclav Smil, a Canadian expert on land use and food production, has calculated that as of 2002, 40 per cent of the world’s population owed their existence to the Haber-Bosch process. Yet how often do you hear anyone talking about Haber-Bosch? Without it, many of us might not be here today, yet it has far less name recognition than Häagen-Dazs, a fake, supposedly Danish label for a brand of ice cream dreamed up by a businessman in the Bronx in 1961. In a way, our ignorance about Haber-Bosch shows once more how lucky we are. We have reached the point where most of us can afford to think more about ice cream than survival.4
It is said that Norman Borlaug, a plant agronomist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, saved a billion lives from starvation with his invention of semi-dwarf, high-yield wheat varieties. Thanks to Borlaug’s miracle wheat – coupled with modern farming methods – yields of the crop nearly doubled in India and Pakistan from 1965 to 1970.
Many of us yearn for the good old days of food when it was normal to bake your own bread – or roll your own tortelloni, as the case may be; but no one would wish themselves back to a state of famine. We sometimes forget that for most of history, even in rich countries life expectancy was short and people were sometimes so deprived of food that they mixed tree bark into flour to make it go further. Even for those who did not suffer actual famine, the business of cooking and eating on an average family budget could lead to a pinched and frugal existence, especially in winter when – before refrigeration was available – meals centred on staple grains and salted meat with little that was green or crunchy, never mind spicy or particularly delicious.5
Today, many of us have instant access to almost preposterous quantities of food, year round, of a freshness and variety our grandparents could not have imagined. In the city where I live, a three-minute walk from my home in any direction will take me to food shops with plentifully stocked shelves. I can stroll east and arrive at a Chinese supermarket, a butcher and a south Asian grocery which sells everything from fresh mint leaves and every spice under the sun to home-made falafels and samosas. To the north I will find a health food co-op offering local sourdoughs, ancient grains and organic apples; and a Hungarian deli selling any European cheese I can possibly name, as well as a few that I can’t. To the west and the south are four rival supermarkets, each heaving with fresh fruits and cereals, meat and fish, oils and vinegars, ginger and garlic.
Magical as it is, I’ve come to feel entitled to this abundance. On the rare occasions that I arrive at one of these many shops and the one specific thing I was expecting to buy has run out – no Parmesan left on a Sunday night! Outrageous! – I feel a mild consternation, because my expectation to eat exactly what I want at the precise moment I want to eat it has been scuppered.
In the developed world, many are living in a new Age of Delicious, liberated from the last vestiges of post-war austerity. The decline of hunger has been accompanied by a bright new dawn of flavour. Cooks are relearning the arts of pickling and fermenting, but this time we are doing it out of love not necessity. Never have so many cups of heavenly-tasting coffee been topped with so many variations on beautiful latte art. Clever home cooks have made food far more inventive and open than it was even ten years ago. Gone is the old food snobbery that said you couldn’t be a good cook if you hadn’t mastered half a dozen elaborate French sauces or a shellfish bisque. The internet has enabled recipe swapping on a scale and at a speed that is dizzying. Where our grandparents (in the Anglo-American world at any rate) sat down dutifully to plates of under-seasoned meat and two veg, we have developed unexpected new global palates: for spicy Turkish eggs sprinkled with sumac or vibrant salads of green mango and lime. Food has gone from being a scarce and often dull kind of fuel to an ever-present, flavoursome and often exotic experience, at least in big cities. Think how casually we eat ingredients such as Kalamata olives or couscous now, as if born to them.
Yet the omnipresence of food has created its own completely new difficulties. Widely available cheap food can look like a dream; or it can be a nightmare. It’s impossible to accept Norberg’s assertion that the problem of food has been solved when diet now causes so much death and disease in the world. The same food that has rescued us from hunger is also killing us.
As of 2006, for the first time the number of overweight and obese people in the world overtook the number who were underfed, in absolute terms. That year, 800 million individuals still did not have enough to eat but more than a billion were overweight or obese. To our hungry ancestors, having too much to eat might have looked like the gold at the end of the rainbow, but what these new calories are doing to our bodies is not a happy ending.6
The problem isn’t just that some people are overfed and others are underfed, lacking enough basic calories to ward off gnawing hunger (though that remains a real and brutal problem). The new difficulty is that billions of people across the globe are simultaneously overfed and undernourished: rich in calories but poor in nutrients. Our new global diet is replete with sugar and refined carbohydrates yet lacking in crucial micronutrients such as iron and trace vitamins. Malnutrition is no longer just about hunger and stunting; it is also about obesity. The literal meaning of malnutrition is not hunger but bad feeding, which covers inadequate diets of many kinds. If governments have been slow in acting to tackle the ill health caused by modern diets, it may be because malnutrition does not look the way we expect it to.
Despite the decline