A Greedy Man in a Hungry World

by Jay Rayner

  In 1978 Chinese meat consumption was a third of US meat consumption. China overtook the US as a consumer of meat in 1992, and by 2012 was eating more than double the US. Obviously the Chinese population at 1.35 billion is much higher than the US population of 315 million. Per head the Americans still eat more, at seventy-five kilos a year, though US meat consumption has dropped from its 2004 peak of eighty-four kilos and is expected to carry on falling. But China’s sudden affluence and the leap in its appetite for things with a pulse has completely altered the entire functioning of the world’s food production system. In 2011 China harvested the largest crop of any country in human history, and a third of that went straight to feeding animals to satisfy the growing hunger for meat, milk, eggs and farmed fish. Between 2006 and 2012 Chinese consumer spending on dairy products as a proportion of their budget leaped 40 per cent. Which is remarkable for a population generally understood to have high levels of lactose intolerance, as much as 30 per cent among children. Since 1978 China’s use of grain as an animal feed has increased ninefold.

  ‘The thing is, the Chinese can’t produce all this food themselves,’ my friend in the bar told me. ‘At least not yet.’

  So what are they doing?

  ‘They’re buying Africa.’

  How do you mean?

  ‘Just as I say. They are buying up huge plots of Africa, offering to build infrastructure in return for farming rights to vast tracts of land.’ The West, he said, was hooked to an aid model in Africa. Send them money. Send them skills. Teach them. It was an old-fashioned model built on the blood-stained guilt of a history of colonialism. The Chinese, meanwhile, were taking a totally different tack. Western governments might find many regimes in Africa too obnoxious, too repressive, too corrupt, too dysfunctional to trade with. Giving them handouts was more palatable. The Chinese meanwhile just don’t care. They are in there. ‘Look at Zimbabwe. The Chinese are all over it, farming the land, building power stations. They don’t care about crap governance. They’re just getting on with it.’

  As are countries of the Middle East, which also have their own food security issues. Since 2000 around 5 per cent of Africa’s agricultural land has been bought or leased by those foreign interests. China’s ZTE Agribusiness did the second biggest of these deals, for at least 100,000 hectares of Democratic Republic of Congo on which to farm palm oil. It may be as much as 280,000 hectares, depending on the figure’s source. In truth China’s interests in African agriculture are dwarfed by their interests in oil, gas and minerals but still amount to many billions of dollars. The Chinese have pledged to train up thousands of agricultural experts and technicians and fund the building of more than a dozen major technology centres. Some of the Chinese-controlled land is already being farmed; it’s believed that the rest of it is being held for a time in the future when long-term food security issues begin to bite.

  In October 2012 Oxfam issued a major report on the way land was being bought up by foreign powers. ‘In the past decade an area of land eight times the size of the UK has been sold off globally as land sales accelerate,’ it said. ‘This land could feed a billion people, equivalent to the number of people who go to bed hungry each night. In poor countries, foreign investors have been buying an area of land the size of London every six days.’ Thirty per cent of Liberia had been flogged off, the report said. Indeed, in just ten years an area the size of Kenya had gone from Africa. Where it was being used for food crops it was almost always for export from the country where the land was situated. With growing economic and population pressures Oxfam expected the situation only to get worse unless the international community acted now to do something about it.

  I wondered if this was having an impact on little Rwanda. I wasn’t quite sure how it could. There is some commercial coffee farming in the country – Rwandan coffee is fabulous: rich and intense and fragrant – but most of the agriculture there is built around a subsistence model. What would the Chinese get out of that?

  But that, it turned out, was to misunderstand the sophistication of the Chinese approach to securing the resources they need for their population, which some have branded a form of neo-colonialism. From the moment I landed in Kigali and started reading the East African, the highly impressive English-language newspaper of the area published in Kenya, it became clear the Chinese were thinking less in terms of nation states and more in terms of the entire region. Everywhere was interconnected to everywhere else (and literally so: attempts to create an East African Union along the lines of the European Union continue apace). Infrastructure work in Rwanda fed in to other contracts with Kenya or Tanzania or Uganda.

  ‘I’m sure the Chinese will be in Rwanda,’ my drinking partner said. ‘They’re everywhere.’

  The curious thing was that, while there was a lousy Chinese restaurant opposite my hotel, I hadn’t seen any actual Chinese people in Kigali, which might have explained why the food was so dismal. Then one night I found them. My hotel was like something out of a bad David Lynch movie. Outside my room, in the huge, echoey corridors, Ella Fitzgerald was on a constant loop singing ‘Stormy Weather’. Some of the rooms had been built with no outside windows. Instead they looked out, into a corridor along the side of the building, as if the architects had got their maths wrong. On the top floor was a circular bar, with a panoramic view of the city, that was almost entirely pitch-black save for pinpricks of light in the ceiling that throbbed on and off.

  And on the second floor was Kigali’s one and only casino. Through the metal detector, manned with very little enthusiasm by a young man in a suit two sizes too big for him, and there I was in a smoke-filled room full of roulette tables and high-paying one-armed bandits, and dealers in blood-red waistcoats and crisp white shorts, shuffling cards out of horseshoes just as quickly as their fingers would allow. There were ‘no smoking’ signs all over the walls. But that didn’t seem to trouble the clientele, who were almost entirely Chinese. It was like this every night, I was told by a barman. There must have been around a hundred people in the relatively small space and all but about five of them were from China: big, round-cheeked men – there were only men – in white, short-sleeved shirts bulging at the belly, perched side on at the tables, fags grasped hard between the knuckles. Winding down after a hard day’s work pouring money into Africa. Trusting to lady luck.

  Curiously it was that moment, standing on the casino floor, watching the Chinese expats in Kigali ruling the world from the blackjack tables, that made me realize just how few of those debating food consumption at home had really grasped what was going on. We talked earnestly about food miles, about supermarkets’ buying policies, two-for-one offers and the virtues of localism. We cheered when the asparagus season kicked off each spring and booed when retailers filled their shelves with out-of-season stock from Peru, as a sign that something terrible and malignant was eating away at the heart of our long-fought-for food culture.

  And yet, beyond our shores, something so much bigger was going on, which too many of us had failed to recognize. It was something which was going to have a vast impact on how and what we ate.

  At the same time I also knew that it was only a part of the story; that there was more to tell beyond the narrative of Chinese neo-colonialism in Africa and chronic child malnutrition in Rwanda. I knew that if I was genuinely to get to grips with what was going on I had to carry on travelling. I had to head west to the one country which per head of population has managed to consume more than any other in human history, and which is responsible for feeding a huge swath of the world.

  I had to go to America.

  5.

  SLOW BOAT TO ELLIS ISLAND

  Growing up in a north-west London Jewish family, I was haunted by a thought: that if my great grandfather, Josef Burochowiz, had just been blessed with a little more stamina, and had stayed on the boat a few days longer, I wouldn’t have grown up in London at all but instead in New York. I would have been one of those noisy American Jews, raised in the land of salt beef and bag
els, where the buildings were taller, the skies bigger, and everybody was from somewhere else. I liked my foreign-ness but wanted everyone else to be foreign too. It may explain why, in adulthood, I moved to Brixton in south London, one of the most ethnically diverse areas in Western Europe.

  Then, one Saturday lunchtime in 1977, a little bit of America came to me. My mother had been invited to an event at the American Embassy. I have no idea why; it was just the sort of thing that happened to her. All I do recall was that it was odd because Saturday mornings was when my parents did the family food shop. Nothing got in the way of that because if they hadn’t been shopping how could we do fick and porridge at lunchtime? And yet, for the American Embassy, Claire would make an exception.

  Lunchtime came and she was back and carrying with her the solution to this lack of anything worth ficking or porridging: a shallow cardboard box containing a couple of dozen soft, round packages wrapped in thin, glossy greaseproof paper, dressed with the mammarian curve of golden ‘M’s. She had brought us hamburgers. A lot of them.

  With hindsight, this could be viewed as a blatant act of cultural imperialism. The first branch of McDonald’s had opened in Woolwich, south-east London, in 1974, though it had yet to impact upon me. I hadn’t been to one. Now here was the US Embassy – the US government itself, on UK soil – handing out McDonald’s hamburgers to a woman who, as a high-profile journalist, could influence opinion. Perhaps there was a CIA briefing document somewhere outlining how the American version of freedom could be spread about the world by the judicious distribution of free McDonald’s hamburgers to opinion formers. It’s not an entirely far-fetched idea. In his book The Lexus and the Olive Tree, published in 1999, the New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman proposed the ‘Golden arches theory of conflict prevention’ as part of a discourse on Democratic Peace Theory. The latter argues that no two countries which are true democracies will ever go to war against each other, because of shared and mutual interests. Friedman argued that the presence of McDonald’s in a country was a similar example of a particularly advanced level of economic and social development, and that no two countries which had outposts of the fast-food giant would ever attack each other. It proved to be a remarkably robust theory until, later that year, when the Kosovo war broke out and NATO bombed Belgrade, already home to the golden arches.

  The truth of our hamburger windfall was, I think, a little more prosaic. The embassy had got McDonald’s to cater the event and, at the end, seeing a number left over and being appalled by the waste, my mother had offered to take them home, thereby dealing with the lunch issue. Whatever the cause, I was delighted. Even cold, I had never eaten hamburgers like them: there was the intense sweetness of the bun and the juicy meat of the patty and the punch of the pickles. It was a sugar-fat-protein party in my mouth. I bloody loved it.

  This was what America meant to me: food with a certain shamelessness; lunch with its knickers around its ankles. Around this time an expatriate American called Gabriel Gutman launched the Dayville chain of ice-cream parlours in Britain. ‘There is superb cream in England and excellent chocolate,’ he told the New York Times, who were so excited by the arrival of American ice cream in Britain they gave it 1,000 words. ‘Nobody ever married the two together. It’s been driving me crazy for years,’ Gutman said. The actress Lee Remick, who had just starred in The Omen and was living in London, was more savage. ‘They don’t know from ice cream in this country,’ she said, as if she had identified the very heart of Britain’s famed malaise. Remick had a point. Until Dayville arrived you could have any flavour you liked here as long as it was strawberry, chocolate or vanilla. Or maybe, at a push, tutti frutti, but nobody had a clue what tutti frutti really was; it looked like vanilla into which someone had stirred lumps of Lego. Plus the ice cream itself was hard and, well, icy. British ice cream was a beautiful promise, broken. The only alternative was the vegetable-fat-heavy Mr Whippy stuff, served by ice-cream vans which announced their arrival on your street by playing jangly tunes that sounded like a cat being strangled in a bath. The process to inflate the vegetable oil–dairy fat mix with air had partly been invented by a young research chemist called Margaret Hilda Roberts who would, as Margaret Thatcher, soon become Prime Minister. That didn’t make the stuff taste any better.

  And now here, praise the gods of greed, was Dayville, who proclaimed thirty-two flavours, but seemed to offer many more. There was banana split or bubblegum-flavoured ice cream. There was toffee nut crunch, key lime sorbet, and something called peppermint fudge ripple, which, to a fat boy yet to navigate the hormonal rapids of puberty, sounded seriously rude. This was what America meant to me: it was a place where you could get thirty-two flavours of ice cream, and one of them was called peppermint fudge ripple.

  It didn’t end there. In 1977 another expatriate American, Bob Payton, opened the Chicago Pizza Pie Factory off St James’s, complete with mezuzah on the doorpost; Payton was quiet about his Jewishness, but still closed the joint on Yom Kippur. Not that he was exactly that Jewish. After all, his Rib Shacks were hardly short on pork products. He was my kind of greedy, godless Jew. In these places, and at the chain Maxwell’s, music blared, everything came slathered in a sticky vinegary barbecue sauce, and cutlery was optional. Us over-privileged Jewish kids – was there any other kind? – would go to these restaurants without our parents, aged 13 or 14, and play at being grown up, while really we were just getting a big sugary, salty hit. Sod that lazy swine Josef Burochowiz. For an hour or two we were finally American and we had become American through food. It felt good.

  I arrived in America for the first time in January 1989, a young journalist on the make, and nothing about my first encounter with New York made me feel I was very far off the mark in my understanding that the American sense of self was intimately tied up with the way it ate. As an immigrant nation it grasped at what that irritating university contemporary of mine Eugene would still have insisted upon calling the ‘cultural signifiers’ and which I shall instead call ‘dinner’: at the things which made each ethnic group identifiable. It hunted down those things which held most tightly the symbols of where they had begun. Food is very good at doing that. I was once told by Jonathan Gold, the famed restaurant critic of the LA Weekly, that the most traditional Korean restaurants were to be found not in Korea but in Los Angeles. ‘In Seoul they are too busy looking forward and reinventing themselves to worry about the past,’ he said. ‘Here in LA all the Korean restaurants are about remembering.’ This is combined with a frontiersman spirit, a sense of pushing at the boundaries to make a better life; it’s a characteristic which still underpins the American sensibility. In that narrative having more than enough to eat has always been a mark of having succeeded. Look at how I have prospered: the table is full.

  That first night, pissed on jet lag, nervous with adrenalin, I sat on the end of my hotel bed and watched endless adverts for a restaurant chain called Red Lobster. Which served lobster. Proper, big-clawed, snappy, red lobster. This was baffling. In London eating lobster was something you did while being carried about in your very own sedan chair by bare-chested dwarves, while lolling on cushions stuffed with swan feathers and trimmed with baby panda fur. In London lobster was a premium item. It was a pure luxury. I was 22 and I wasn’t entirely sure I’d ever eaten one; here it was so ordinary as to be advertised on television, as an offering at a chain of restaurants.

  I never did go to Red Lobster, but I went to many other places instead on repeated trips across America and became enthralled by its largesse. Forget bigness. We know America’s big. But big doesn’t necessarily mean extravagant, and everything I found was extravagant, even the stories I was covering. I pursued a sex pest Congressman from Oregon who’d been caught with his hand in his staff, and doorstepped the indicted leader of the Navajo Nation at his mobile home in the middle of the New Mexico desert. In Riverside, California, I met a man who was convinced he knew how to live for ever and, just in case he was wrong, was preparing to have ju
st his head cryogenically frozen at his death so he could be revived in the future when medicine had found a cure for what had killed him. (He couldn’t afford to have his whole body frozen.) I reported the aftermath of the race riots in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights, hung out with an overweight porn mogul in Manhattan who bought his clothes in three sizes – the size he wanted to be, the size he was, and the one he suspected he was going to be – and talked to NASA scientists in Pasadena about the search for extraterrestrial life.

  And, of course, I ate. In restaurants I was served steaks the size of my pet cat, with a glorious char, and the luscious texture that only comes from being grain fed; I was presented with bowls of pasta that could feed a family of five and introduced to the lobster roll, the most shameless use of that luxury ingredient I had fretted over in my hotel room, the entire contents of the shell slathered in mayo and then laid on a soft white bun like it was a two-dime hot dog. For the first time I met real hamburgers, served rare in the way that too many health and safety nuts in my country would not allow, and I wallowed in breakfasts of fluffy pancakes and butter and maple syrup and crisp streaky bacon which would leave me fed until dinner time, of the next day.

  From all of this I quickly learned that America’s relationship with its food is also partly a result of physical geography. There’s just so much of the country: it is grassland and desert, forest and mountain, and all the things in between. Tiny Rwanda has a fragile fecundity to it, as if, at any point, it could slip from growth to rot and decay and ruin. Its red earth may seem fertile, but those endless ‘thousand hills’ are the enemy of cultivation. Rwanda has fed itself in spite of geography (or, to be more exact, geology), not because of it. America is the other way round. It’s a place engineered for large-scale production. The numbers stand this up. Unlike Britain, the US is hugely self-sufficient in food. It has the rolling prairies of the Midwest, the country’s bread basket, where wheat and corn and soya beans grow on fields the size of English counties, and cattle graze in their millions. To the west in California is the Central Valley, which, on just 1 per cent of US land, produces 8 per cent of American agricultural output, and where the five counties in the US with the top agricultural sales are all located. It is the primary source of America’s grapes, tomatoes, almonds and apricots, among much else. Meanwhile over in the east are the orange groves of Florida, which produce nearly 70 per cent of all the citrus fruit consumed in the country, and quite a lot of it consumed elsewhere too.