by Jay Rayner
Obviously companies need to make money, or they wouldn’t be able to invest in their business, which in turn means they wouldn’t be able to serve their customers. But if absorbing the expense to make these improvements meant Tesco’s 2011 half-yearly profits went from £1.95 billion to, say, £1.85 billion, and if Sainsbury’s made not £395 million but £390 million, who exactly would weep? Not me.
Let’s be clear. A 25 per cent meat pie is still not a fabulous item. Nor would Blumenthal and I have swooned over a 54 per cent pork sausage. Likewise, we can lecture those in dire straits on the need to eat more fresh fruit and vegetables – where the value ranges happen to score well – though patronizing people who are struggling to make ends meet has always left me with a nasty taste in the mouth. The fact is that the items I looked at are invariably going to be a part of the diet, and that leads to simple questions of respect; of the supermarkets, which do so well out of us in good times, not forcing the very poorest to eat dross when the bad times come.
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.
FINDING THE CHINESE IN KIGALI
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 malnou
rishment. 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 in these circumstances a valuable one. They are, in the brutal language of child malnourishment, stunted. And all of that affects the population as a whole, because if malnourished, stunted kids make it to adulthood they are unlikely to achieve their full economic potential. In a country like Rwanda, where over 40 per cent of children are malnourished, that can have a massive impact on the ability of society to prosper, develop, and pull itself out of the mire of poverty.
That was why I was there: to see the situation for myself, to write and broadcast about it.
It was also why I suggested to some of the team I was travelling with that we should go for a Chinese at the restaurant across the road. I told them my story about eating Chinese food in odd places, and about how I’d eaten awful Chinese meals in Greece and Turkey and France. And I laughed and said what we needed was a totally surreal experience, so let’s go to that dimly lit place across the road, the one with the hanging Chinese lanterns and the open walls with its views out over the city.
But it wasn’t true. What I actually needed, what I craved, was a bit of normality, and in the flavours of Chinese food that I knew so well I felt I could locate that.
Because what I was seeing during my trip wasn’t normal. It felt a very long way beyond normal. I was wrong, of course. It was only not normal for me. For the people I was meeting in Rwanda who were living these lives it was entirely normal. That was the real tragedy.
Rwanda has food. The place looks like it is built of the stuff, the deep red earth heavy with fruit and grain and leaf. It is called ‘the country of a thousand hills’ – a gross underestimate – and it looks like every inch of those hills is under cultivation, from the prime plots at the bottom of the valleys to the very peaks for the poorer landowners, who must exhaust themselves climbing up there before they can even start work. The land is laid out in a tight patchwork of fields which, to the average grow-your-own fanatic in the West, must be a unique kind of gastro-porn. Look at the hand-tilled land! Gawp at the rows of beans, the tall stalks of maize, the cassava and sorghum and groundnut crops! Gasp at the yams, the tomatoes ripened to the deep red of a postbox. Oh my! What a perfect small-is-beautiful world. If only Kentish Town could look like this. If only we all grew our own and abandoned supermarkets and fed ourselves like the Rwandans, who are so much closer to the earth.
Or not quite. There is an ugly reality hidden by all this verdant loveliness. Rwanda may be very fertile but it also has lots of people. It is the most densely populated country in Sub-Saharan Africa, with over 400 souls per square kilometre (and, in places, over 700). By contrast, the UK has a population density of just over 250 per square kilometre, while the United States has a mere 32. Although the inter-tribal hatreds behind the genocide are well known, some theorists, most prominent among them the Pulitzer Prize-winning academic and writer Jared Diamond, have described the events in Rwanda as proof positive of Thomas Malthus’s theory that lack of resources would keep the human population in check. In short, they say, underlying the genocide was a scarcity of food and land to grow it on. If true, it’s further cause for concern: the population of Rwanda is now higher than it was before the genocide. Certainly the battle for those resources is fierce. Nearly 60 per cent of the population have less than half a hectare to cultivate.
According to figures from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the average Rwandan gets by on 2,090 calories a day. The average British person consumes 3,450 and the average American 3,750. Around 9.5 per cent of the Rwandan diet is protein, of which just 0.9 per cent comes from animals. In both the UK and US, 12.1 per cent of the diet is protein and more than half of that comes from animals. Around 38 per cent of the diet in the UK and US is fat; in Rwanda it’s just over 20 per cent. Rwanda does not have an obesity problem. Instead it has a population problem.
Not that you need to be bombarded with facts and figures to get to grips with Rwanda’s challenges. You can see it everywhere. One day we drove out from Kigali in our Save the Children 4x4s, the vehicle of choice for celebrity poverty tours. At first we were on solid, metalled roads paid for with international aid – half the country’s budget comes from donors – and then on roads of rutted earth. There were the hills to look at and the fields to admire, for it is a jewel of a place. But most of all there are the people, and so many of them so young. Half the population is under 18 years old, and while there are efforts to get them into school many are still not in full-time education. They were hanging out on the grass verges watching the world go by, or waving furiously at our cars as they passed. There was an overwhelming sense of a horde of humanity at rest (though across the fields we could also see the silhouettes of women, stooped over their crops as they worked. It was almost always the women, not the men).
We visited a new health centre, built by the charity, on land punctuated by outcrops of black volcanic rock from the smouldering volcanoes that ring this part of the country. Mothers sat with their tiny babies, waiting patiently for their children to be weighed, part of a project to monitor their progress since being identified as malnourished. Measuring bands were wrapped around the kids’ spindly arms to check if they were filling out. If their arms were found to be in the green area of the scale they were fine. If they were in yellow, as many were, they were chronically malnourished; if in the red, the situation was acute. Rain battered down on the veranda roofs and the air smelt heavily of vegetation on the turn.
I talked to 23-year-old Josephine, who was sitting with a 2-year-old and a 1-year-old on her lap, the two fighting over her breasts for feeding rights as she talked. She seemed oblivious to the lifelong sibling rivalry being born on her knees. She was small and thin with high cheekbones and a long slender neck and dressed in vivid wraps of fabulous prints; these were, I was told by my guides, probably her Sunday best, put on because she knew we were coming. I was wearing tired linen trousers and a saggy jacket. I felt I should have made more of an effort.
A health visitor had come to her house a kilometre or two away to tell her there was a problem with her kids, Josephine said. I asked if it was upsetting. ‘Not really. They gave me the supplements.’ They were fed on Plumpy Nut, a protein and fat-rich peanut paste, fortified with vitamins, foil-wrapped packs of which she received at each visit. Gathering enough food for her family – she had other children at home – was tough. ‘I have no land and I am the only one who gathers food. I get it by working in other people’s fields.’ So why did her children become malnourished? I asked.
It was a stupid question, but I was flailing around, trying to find the right way to talk about what sounded to me like any parent’s worst nightmare. Before becoming a restaurant critic I was another sort of journalist, one who spent too much time writing about the evil that men do. I covered murders and terrorism and politics
and poverty. Worst of all were the child abuse cases, for I found in myself the ability to project the stories I was hearing onto my own children, to swap one set of faces for another. One night after a day spent sitting in court listening to the wretched and banal details of acute neglect, of small children left to rest in their own faeces, ignored despite their calls for help, I went home and washed my own eighteen-month-old so fiercely in the bath I gave him a rash. My child would be clean. My child would be cared for. I needed to wash out the dark stain of those stories.
This felt similar, and yet I was required to engage. I was required to find a language. So then, why did Josephine’s children become malnourished? She looked at me blankly and, through the translator, said, ‘Because I cannot get enough food.’ I nodded solemnly and wrote the words down in my notebook – ‘cannot get enough food’ – knowing they were the answer to a very stupid question.
In another part of the centre we met a mother who had only given birth a couple of days before, her newborn son in her arms, tightly swaddled. He stared up at us, wide eyed and baffled, and we made the right noises about how beautiful he was and how I hoped the delivery had been OK and how helpful a health centre like this must be to mothers like her. Then I asked his name. She smiled thinly and said something to my translator. By tradition, he told me in turn, they did not give babies names until they were eight days old, ‘because they need to see if the baby will live’. I scratched more notes on the bloody obvious in my notebook. It was all part of the same story. It was all about maternal malnutrition as much as it was about child malnutrition. It was about the creaking arithmetic of life and death here on Rwanda’s fecund, pulsing earth.