A Greedy Man in a Hungry World

by Jay Rayner

  The problem was not simply lack of land, though that was a big part of it. The price of staple foods in the markets here had, as everywhere else around the world, shot up. There didn’t appear to be a shortage of food to buy. In the central covered market in Kigali I saw heaps of flour and potatoes, and piles of shiny aubergines of a quality that would make a London restaurateur weep. It was all there. It just cost too much. The impact was twofold. First, there was the obvious problem that those right at the bottom of the economic heap simply couldn’t afford to supplement their diets with extras from the market because of the global price rise. And then there was a curious impact: instead of feeding all their crops to their kids some subsistence farmers had a price incentive to sell them for money, because of those price rises, earning cash which they might then use to buy things other than food, often for the best of reasons. A farmer might choose to buy a kerosene lamp, I was told, so his kids could carry on with their homework once the sun had gone down, education being seen as a route to a better life. Poor families in Rwanda, I learned, were likely to fall back on a staple like cassava, a starchy root that could be ground down into a flour to make a dry doughy paste. It’s about as bland nutritionally as it tastes. Imagine a soft dough made from cardboard. Then remove any of cardboard’s grace notes. Cassava does boast calories but it is almost completely nutrient free. Eat too much of that and you would soon have a vitamin deficit. The Rwandan diet is in need of a serious overhaul.

  We moved on to a village where the houses had mud walls and mud floors and most of the cooking was done inside, over open fires so that the high tang of soot hung over the room. Outside the house representatives from the Rwandan health ministry, the health centre and Save the Children, the standard entourage for a visitor to the country with a media profile they might be able to work to their advantage, stood around tapping away on smartphones and making calls. Here, as elsewhere in Africa, the mobile phone network has revolutionized communication.

  Outside the house we were firmly in the twenty-first century. Inside we had slipped backwards into what felt like a pre-industrial age. I was introduced to Leonie and Immaculate, both widows, both mothers of six, each of whom had children displaying the most acute symptoms of stunting. Immaculate’s 9-year-old daughter, Claudine, was particularly affected. She had learning difficulties and was very small for her age, and stood curled into the folds of her mother’s long skirt, staring out at me from a domed, slightly swollen head. She had scant hair, a classic sign of malnutrition. ‘I was surprised when they told me,’ Immaculate said, ‘because I did my best to feed my children. I thought it was some other form of disease.’

  At another home I met Vestine, who had lost three pregnancies because she was malnourished and forced to work in the fields too close to her due date. She and her husband, Claver, had a daughter who was 8, plus eighteen-month-old twins. Their daughter in particular was showing symptoms of malnourishment. When Vestine led me into the house to show me what she had to feed them with, it was easy to see why. She was doing her best, but the pile of beans, potatoes and green leaves defined the word meagre.

  I was accompanied by a producer from Save the Children and a cameraman, who had passed most of his career in war zones – Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq – and now liked to spend some of his time working for charities. We were shooting a short film about my trip that would go up on the web and they asked me now to do a piece to camera about the situation in which Vestine found herself. I knew the film would be seen by lots of people. I knew I was doing what the charity asked of me. I knew that it would highlight a vital and important issue. I knew an awful lot of very obvious things.

  But as I squatted down by Vestine’s open fire, and felt my knees creak and saw my linen trousers stretch tight across my bulked-out, varicose thighs, I couldn’t help but feel a certain impotency. What in God’s name did I think I was doing here?

  I have experienced poverty, but only once and only then for about thirty-six hours. It’s not to be recommended. It was at the end of a solo back-packing holiday across Greece and Turkey. I returned to Athens, where the trip had started, with a couple of days left until my flight home and barely enough cash for anything more than a plot for my sleeping bag on the roof of a hostel, and the bus fare to the airport. I passed the time lying in the shade on a bench in a park, reading a book I had already read and trying not to think about how hungry I was. When I finally boarded my flight home, I fell upon the tray of airline food with a genuine enthusiasm, the one and only time that has ever happened.

  In short, I have never experienced poverty. I have never gone without, not really. My parents, however, both really did have meagre beginnings, a Jewish working-class background in a time when many Jews in Britain were still at the bottom of the heap. My paternal grandfather was a hairdresser with a gambling habit who managed to lose whatever money he might have made; my mother’s parents, whom I never met – she said I wasn’t missing anything and I took her word for it – were mostly feckless and on the run. My mother told me that if she ever came into any cash as a child – say an aunt had given her a ten-shilling note – her mother would use emotional blackmail to talk it off her, or her dad would nick it. Either way they would get their hands on the money.

  My late mother Claire eventually met and married my father Des Rayner and became nationally famous as the agony aunt, broadcaster and novelist Claire Rayner. She made that journey by lying about her age and, at 15, enlisting as a trainee nurse. In nursing she found an escape from the parents she’d come to hate, and a new kind of family. Because her parents kept moving the kids around she had never been able to complete formal education but found a capacity for learning that saw her advance in nursing exams, though it was not a route to riches. When we were kids Claire told us that as a student nurse she was so poor she couldn’t afford both bits of underwear. Being a big girl she decided a bra was more important. It was a troubling image, one I never thanked her for, though the point about money being tight was well made. Still, by the time I was born, in 1966, that was all history. My father had abandoned a less than rewarding career as an actor for fashion PR and my mother was a successful freelance journalist.

  Then in 1972 we fell rich. That was the year my mother became famous. She had already published a number of novels but in 1972 one of them, the first in an historical series called ‘The Performers’, sold paperback rights in the US for $250,000 – a big sum now, a huge one then. In the same year she landed a weekly agony column on the Sun newspaper and a regular slot on Pebble Mill at One, a BBC daytime show broadcast daily from Birmingham. With the money my parents bought two rings. One was my dad’s freedom from that PR job he had come to hate. He became my mother’s agent and manager, bringing the 10 per cent in-house, and was able to concentrate on his career as an artist which up to then had been a sideline. The other thing they bought was duvets. We were one of the first families in north-west London to chuck out the sheets and blankets. We felt very modern. Plus making the beds was quicker. One night, lying beneath his crisp, brand-new duvet as my mother came to say goodnight, my brother Adam asked if, when she died, she would be buried in a diamond coffin. She laughed, and said, no, darling. (She was, for the record, cremated in an eco-friendly wicker basket affair.) The fact was we were well off and we knew it.

  So now we took our places in the self-made upper middle classes. It came with many things: a series of au pairs, various extensions to our suburban semi, expensive summer holidays down on the Dorset coast in a hotel patronized by the fading aristocracy. And then there was all that food. I have always wondered about my mother’s instinct to over-cater. It could be seen as a reaction against a childhood of poverty and not having enough. She told me once that, during a period as a neglected evacuee to the country, she was taught by the local kids how to nick swedes from the fields, which they ate raw, cutting the pieces up with pocket knives. ‘You could fill yourself up quite well from one of those.’ I think she liked the image of herself when young,
stealing crops from wealthy farmers just to keep herself fed.

  Certainly she was in a position to make sure none of that was visited on her children, and so the table was always full. She never simply prepared enough, because enough to her felt like the exact opposite. She made meals with emergency guests and seconds in mind. She cooked as though we were limbering up to be an emergency shelter in a storm. Of course, despite her antipathy to organized religion, this could all have been as a result of a genetic marker. Jews over-cater. It’s what we do. After all, the Cossacks may be coming, and you’d better eat now, in case tomorrow you are on the run across the Russian steppe. I grant you it would take a vivid imagination to get you from our home in the cherry-blossomed streets of suburban London to the cold wastes of Russia, but the collective memory was there.

  Claire fed us as if food was a defence against the brutal realities of the world. Despite a busy working life she found a way to build chicken casseroles in the morning for a long, slow cook before hitting the typewriter. She roasted lamb breasts and grilled chops and when she had people round for dinner she made coulibiac, that seventies party piece of salmon and rice wrapped in flaky pastry and baked in the oven. At lunchtimes on Saturday, after they had been out doing the weekly shop, a buffet of cold cuts and salads and bread and cheese and pastries would be laid out, with the expectation that friends would drop by, and they did for they knew the drill. Saturday lunch was known as fick and porridge, a spoonerism of ‘pick and forage’, a wordplay Claire loved a little more than it deserved.

  We ate in restaurants like Stone’s Chop House, a grand place behind Piccadilly Circus, where almost everything seemed to be flamed tableside in brandy before you were allowed to eat it. And we became regulars at Joe Allen, a New York-style bistro behind the Strand that was so smart and fashionable its entrance was marked by nothing other than a shiny brass plaque. Either you knew about it or you didn’t. That was what gained you entrance to this non-membership members-only club. We were members. There we ate proper Caesar salads and plates of sticky ribs with black-eyed peas and a brownie à la mode, which was a fancy name for ‘with ice cream’.

  Why I should, from childhood, have had those weight issues remains a mystery to me, as it must to you. To be fair, there must be something deep in the genes, a metabolism engineered for those winters on the run across Mother Russia. I am a man built to survive a pogrom, only without a pogrom to survive. I don’t think the rest of my family would be too hurt if I were to say that applied to them too. Each of us has at one point or another struggled with our size. Claire eventually found a solution, but it involved surviving a five-week stint in an Intensive Care Unit, during which she lost half her body weight. As weight loss programmes go it’s probably not the best. In this narrative greed is learned behaviour, part of a family culture, but it is also an obvious mark of affluence. I became greedy because I was in a position to be so. Greed was presented to me as a lifestyle choice. I decided it was one that would suit me very well.

  The food at the Great Wall Chinese restaurant in Kigali was not great, much as a car crash is not great and herpes simplex is not great. There was a plate of deep fried chicken wings which were edible, but otherwise it was all slippery, gloopy things, their ugliness hidden by the ill-lit gloom. Rice steamed inside thick tubes of bamboo is not a wonderful idea; it tastes like new bamboo furniture smells.

  It’s tempting to argue that this was exactly what I deserved. What the hell was I thinking? Going to Rwanda to investigate the realities of chronic child malnourishment, and hanging out at day’s end in a Chinese restaurant just because I thought it would be amusing? Shame on me.

  Except the argument doesn’t stack up. It’s not like I was alone in the restaurant or that there was only one restaurant for me to be alone in. Kigali is full of restaurants, not just Chinese, but Italian, Greek and Indian too. (Apparently African food doesn’t work outside the home so well.) Kigali even has a readable restaurant blog. It is a quiet, safe city in a country which is undergoing an economic boom – think yearly growth of around 8 per cent – albeit from a very low base. In the five years before my visit, one million people had been lifted out of abject poverty. Things are changing. These restaurants weren’t just full of big-haired food critics from Britain, out on a jolly after a little light, self-serving charity work. Everyone was visiting them. It was a normal thing to do; as normal for a modestly middle-class section of the population as it might be to go out to dinner in London, New York or Paris.

  The more time I spent with the aid community in Rwanda, discussing the issues, trying to reconcile what I was seeing with what I did for a living, the more that seemed to be the point. Nobody – or at least very few people, other than the achingly self-righteous and the compulsively bleeding-heart – hesitates to go out for dinner if they can afford to do so in London or New York or Paris just because, in Rwanda, there are kids whose diet is not giving them enough of what they need to eat. Perhaps you think about the issues. Perhaps you give money to charity. You do something to raise awareness. But you also get on with your life.

  Or to put it another way, just because one way of living in Rwanda is bad – chronic child malnourishment, leading to higher mortality rates, holding back economic development – does not necessarily mean that another lifestyle in the developed world is also bad. Sure, if you’re a gun-runner or a pimp, a drug dealer or the former CEO of the Royal Bank of Scotland, you may well have grounds to think carefully about your personal morality. Perhaps you should give up a few pension entitlements. But most of us, even those of us who write a newspaper column which seems to be about nothing other than indulging our appetites, lie within the normal spectrum.

  A child in Rwanda does not have less to eat because I order the lunch menu at Le Gavroche in London. And thank God for it, because the lunch menu at Le Gavroche – around fifty quid per head for three courses plus half a bottle of really good wine – is bloody lovely. If it was as simple as that, if my greed genuinely was the cause of someone else’s hunger, well, then the solution would be simple. Just stop it. Get a grip. And yes, there are some issues where a simple formula does begin to apply (most notably around the consumption of meat; we’ll get there.) But for the most part situations like those I saw in Rwanda are to do with failures of good governance, economic mismanagement and lack of infrastructure. Of course, a global population of nine billion poses major challenges, but time and again as I travelled the landscape of food security I was told there were many ways to feed people and keep them fed. Me going on a diet was not one of them. What was needed was investment. And biotechnology. And a whole bunch of other things that countries in the West might find less than appetizing. And the Chinese were already doing it.

  One night shortly before my trip to Rwanda I went to a small market town in the north of England to meet a man who works in the wholesale fruit and vegetable business. He trades with supermarkets. He works with distributors. He’s deep inside the British food machine, so deep inside that he demanded complete anonymity. I had no idea how brutal and cutthroat a world this was, he said. No one could know we were talking. I said he made it sound like a mafia. He narrowed his eyes and nodded slowly.

  Nor, he said, did I realize what a state of flux it was in; how the big British supermarkets were being forced onto the back foot by changes beyond our shores which they had completely failed to anticipate. They were desperately fighting to take costs out of the system. Until now they had done all their buying through middlemen, but those middlemen were being cut out. Some of the supermarkets were trying to buy direct because it helped them save money, and all of them would be doing it in time. The key, he told me, was the Chinese. And the Indians. And the Brazilians. And the Indonesians. The map of global consumption was changing.

  He leaned into me conspiratorially, and said, ‘Did you know that the price the Chinese are willing to pay for unpacked, ungraded apples is now close to what the British supermarkets are willing to pay for graded and packed?’
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  I said I didn’t.

  ‘Well, it’s true. The only issue is that the Chinese haven’t got their act together on paying on time.’

  So the British supermarkets are still a better customer?

  He shrugged. ‘Not for long. The Chinese are very quick at adapting to the market. And they will adapt. They’ll start paying quickly soon.’

  Hang on, I said. I thought the Chinese were an exporter of apples.

  ‘They were. But demand in China is now huge.’ For fruit growers in the southern hemisphere the lure of the great British retail food market was no longer so great, because there were alternatives. He told me about fruit growers from South Africa who had recently abandoned trading with one of the big four supermarkets in Britain because ‘it wasn’t worth the hassle’. You could no longer leave it to Tesco.

  ‘Go look at the stats,’ he said. ‘Another glass of wine?’

  I did as I was told. I went to look at the statistics on food consumption by the emerging economies. Between 1992 and 2008 animal protein consumption in Indonesia rose 47 per cent. In 1992 the Brazilians were already eating three times as much animal protein as the Indonesians. By 2008 their consumption had risen by another 30 per cent.

  China’s story, though, is the most extraordinary. It’s so extraordinary you may feel you already know it: that there are loads of Chinese people and they are all attempting to join the middle classes like my parents did in the sixties, which means eating big hunks of steak and cooking coulibiac for dinner parties. Or something like that. But you have to see the numbers to grasp the reality. In the mid-seventies Chinese meat consumption was ten kilos per person per year. By 2010 that had more than quadrupled to forty-five kilos per person per year. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization predicts it will reach sixty kilos per person by 2015 and sixty-nine by 2030, though this may be a gross underestimate. Recently two economists at Nomura Bank studied Taiwan’s eating habits. In 1980 Taiwan’s annual meat consumption was forty-three kilos per head, roughly the same as China’s today, and average incomes were around $3,500, again around the same as China today. By 1995 meat consumption in Taiwan was at seventy-three kilos. That’s a massive leap. And Taiwan has a population of under twenty-five million. The impact of that in a country like China with a population that accounts for 20 per cent of all the people on the planet would be enormous.