by Jay Rayner
It’s nothing, not compared with the size of pork sales in Britain. The British supermarket Morrison’s, one of the big four, slaughters 22,000 pigs a week itself. That’s only for its fresh pork business. It has to import most of its cured products, like bacon and hams (Britain’s pig farmers have had such a bad deal from the supermarkets over the years that enormous numbers have left the industry; there is simply not enough capacity to supply British needs.) Of course, Morrison’s is only one of the big four. There are the other supermarkets and food operations all needing pork. So just how many pigs do you think we slaughter in Britain every week? Are you ready for it? Here it is:
Somewhere between 150,000 and 160,000 animals.
Every seven days. And that does not account for the vast volume of pork products imported from Denmark and the Netherlands.
Imagine we do as has been proposed by a number of campaigners and academics and cut our meat consumption by half (we’ll get to meat in the next chapter). We will still be slaughtering more than 75,000 pigs a week. Against which even a farmers’ market sector ten times its current size is still just a piglet’s lame squeak. No wonder the offering is a premium one. It doesn’t make sense to do anything else.
Ah, but it’s not just about that, say the defenders of farmers’ markets. It’s about the supply chain. It’s about sustainability. It’s about localism, for we are all locavores now. Away with food miles. Bring food closer to us all.
Well, yes, it’s time we got to all that, isn’t it. And as we do so you might just like to get out your smartphone and place it next to you as a kind of visual reminder.
In November 2009 I lost my temper in front of a television camera in a way I have never done before or since. Or, to be exact, I lost my temper in front of eight television cameras. I was in Los Angeles working as a judge on the second season of that American television series Top Chef Masters. For the final, the three remaining competitors had been asked to cook a series of dishes that told their story: their first food experiences, where they are now, where they are going, and the like. For the dish that defined where he was going the Las Vegas-based chef Rick Moonen had cooked a venison dish, using meat imported from New Zealand.
This was baffling. Throughout the competition Moonen had described himself as ‘the fish guy’. He was also ‘the sustainability guy’. He cared about the planet, he told us day after day of the competition. He cared about his impact upon it. I can’t pretend. I had not warmed to the man. The sustainability guy? His flagship restaurant was in Las Vegas, one of the least sustainable cities on the face of the planet. I had no doubt that he sourced his ingredients sustainably, but just being in Las Vegas, a city that gulped water and petrochemicals like they were going out of fashion (they are), was in itself an unsustainable act. Plus he had a grating, humble, man-of-the-people line in patter which got my back up. Oh, and in an earlier challenge he had cooked the worst Thai green curry (using a shop-bought paste) that it had ever been my misfortune to taste. He had only survived that round because someone else had done an even worse job.
And now here was the fish guy, the sustainability guy, announcing that he had used meat imported from halfway across the world. When he was in front of us I asked him some pointed questions. Once the competitors were gone, and we were deliberating, I let rip. Admittedly, after a month in LA I was knackered, desperate to get home to see my family, and pissed off with a city and a population which, compared with Europe, appeared incapable of spelling the words ‘carbon footprint’, let alone doing anything about it. In LA the lights were always on and nobody cared.
I shouted. I raged. Veins bulged.
HAD THE MAN NEVER HEARD OF THE BLOODY CONCEPT OF FOOD MILES?
I was furious.
The producers saved me from myself. They included none of my rant in the final edit. I made up for it, once that episode had aired, by writing a piece for my newspaper explaining my fury. Moonen responded online by calling me out; the venison had arrived in LA by sea, he said. It was fully sustainable. His supporters in Vegas alleged that I had robbed their man of the prize. I can say firmly that the Kiwi venison was not why Moonen lost. The cooking by Marcus Samuelsson, an intriguing Ethiopian-born chef who had been adopted and raised by a Swedish couple before making his name in the US, was so much better. Samuelsson deserved to win. But Moonen and his well-travelled Bambi did himself no favours.
Cut to three years later and I am reading an academic paper with a very snappy title: ‘Food Miles – Comparative Energy/Emissions Performance of New Zealand’s Agriculture Industry’, by Caroline Saunders, Andrew Barber and Greg Taylor. I’m citing the full title so you can look it up. It’s not a breezy read but it is an important one. At the very least it requires me to apologize to Rick Moonen. Having read it, I can now say that while it’s in no way certain it’s possible venison raised in New Zealand and shipped to California could well be more sustainable than the alternatives in California. At least he deserves the benefit of the doubt.
Sorry, Mr Moonen.
I’m still not a fan, and it really doesn’t change the result of the contest. There were three other judges. But on this point it looks like he may have been right and I may have been wrong.
Because, according to this exceptionally detailed study from 2006, lamb, apples and dairy produced in New Zealand and shipped to Britain have a smaller carbon footprint than the equivalent products produced in Britain. To be exact, Britain uses twice as much energy per tonne of milk solids produced as New Zealand, and four times more than New Zealand for lamb. I was so baffled by the report I wanted to know whether I had read it correctly. I emailed Tim Benton, Professor of Population Ecology at Leeds University, who is also the government-designated ‘UK Champion for Global Food Security’, charged with coordinating work on the subject between research councils and government departments. He truly understands both the global food challenges that we face and what sustainable intensification means. He had been an invaluable source of academic papers and scholarly advice for this book from the very start. I wanted to know whether the report was simply a function of the New Zealand agriculture sector attempting to protect its commercial interests by ferociously massaging some numbers.
He threw in some caveats (which we’ll get to later) but, he said, ‘the overall picture is probably true’.
For me it was the final nail in the coffin of localism. Then again, I’d been listening to the hammering for months.
In the late nineties, when the term ‘food miles’ was first coined by Tim Lang, Professor of Food Policy at City University, it was a vital and important part of the debate on how our food system worked. It was a simple and easily understandable notion: the further your food travelled from point of production to point of retail the worse for the environment it was, by dint of the amount of fuel that journey took. It was that simplicity which made it a rallying cry for food campaigners across the developed world. Here, finally, was a tangible way in which to describe what was wrong with our food system. It is hardly a coincidence that both the concept of food miles and the farmers’ market movement emerged at exactly the same time. It also gave environmentally minded consumers a simple way to judge whether they should buy a product. Had it come from as close by as possible? If yes, then into the basket it went.
The problem is it’s far too simple. Looking only at transport costs for your food is not just to miss the bigger picture: it’s to miss the picture entirely. The only way you can get some sense of the footprint of your food is by using what’s called a Life Cycle Analysis, or LCA, which brings everything about the production of that item into play: the petrochemicals used in farming and in fertilizers, the energy to build tractors as well as to run them, to erect farm buildings and fences, and all of that (and so much more) has to be measured against yield. It’s about emissions per tonne of apples or lamb. The New Zealand report used nearly thirty different measures in its LCA. And it’s when you start drilling down into those that the point is quickly made.
Jan Kees Vis, global director of sustainable sourcing development at Unilever in the Netherlands, has overseen research which puts the proportion of the global carbon footprint of your food as a result of its transportation at 2–3 per cent. Not convinced? After all, Unilever would have rather more than a small vested interest in this. Fair enough. Look instead at the detailed and independent 2008 study by Christopher Weber and H. Scott Matthews of Carnegie Mellon University. They put it at 4 per cent. Or as Professor Benton explained it to me, ‘If you want to wipe out all the food miles in what you eat, all you need do is swap from one day’s red meat eating a week to white meat. Not even to a vegetarian diet. Just to white meat.’
There’s an awful lot of research to back this up. I am up to my nipples in research papers and pointy-headed bits of analysis and strident hunks of arithmetic which show just how much extra land you would need if food production moved from where it is now to be conveniently close to you so you could feel good about your food miles. But even I would find that tedious.
So instead come with me briefly to the fens of Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire. Generally I hate flat places. They sap the will, drain away ambition. If there are no hills you have no need to find out what’s on the other side. Huge, flat plains and big, dreary skies make me brood. But I’ll put up with it to make a killer point about comparative advantage in agriculture. If you look at a map of potato growing in Britain you’ll quickly see that it’s concentrated here on the flat expanses around King’s Lynn and in the Scottish borders. It’s no accident, as potato farmer Bill Legge explains to me while he gives me a tour of his fields, hemmed in on each side by the grassy banks that keep the waters at bay. Legge has been farming potatoes around here all his life, on land which was under water until the seventeenth century. ‘It’s peat soil here, so we need to use less in the way of nitrogen fertilizers,’ he says. Not only that. This dark, loose soil is good for the harvesting of potatoes. It’s not as good as a sandy soil, but that needs more carbon inputs to make the potatoes grow. ‘Here we get about twenty tonnes of potatoes an acre,’ Bill tells me.
So how about if potato production was moved closer to the capital? After all, there’s more people living in London than, say, here around King’s Lynn. ‘Well, it’s a clay soil there and it’s not as productive. Plus it’s bloody hard to harvest them from the solid clod.’
How much less productive is it?
‘You’d get sixteen tonnes an acre there.’
So the yield would be 20 per cent less. In other words, to get the same amount of potatoes to grow local to London you would need 20 per cent more land. Or you’d have to bombard that land with military-strength doses of fertilizers. Either way the footprint of your potatoes would be bigger. And that’s why potatoes are grown in Norfolk and Lincolnshire and not in Essex.
It’s exactly the same reason why that smartphone of yours is made in China. You can put it away now.
Of course, if you live in Norfolk or Lincolnshire that’s where you should get your potatoes from. They’re local to you. They are the most sustainable option. Look, I never said this was simple. It’s anything but. Just as food miles made everything too simple, the end of food miles as a single measure makes everything very complicated. It should also be said that, just because meat and fruit from New Zealand may be more sustainable than those produced in Europe or the US, that doesn’t mean we should rely on being able to get them from there. In fact, that may well not be a choice. Remember, the hungry Chinese and Indians, the Brazilians and the Indonesians are out there with the fast-growing economic strength to suck up all the surplus food that New Zealand can produce.
And let me make it a little more complicated: there are other good reasons for buying local food which have nothing to do with sustainability. It can be great for rural economies, and viable rural economies can be good for communities. As with growing your own, anything that reconnects us with where our food comes from has to be a good idea. But if you get caught in the corner of the supermarket by some goggle-eyed food warrior examining the contents of your basket for signs of food-mile transgression you can tell them that I said they should sod off. Go on. Have a practice. Shout at the mirror. It feels good, doesn’t it?
It should be obvious by now that all of this also applies to issues around seasonality. The argument has long worked like this: if an ingredient is available out of season it must have been grown somewhere far away. Therefore, by dint of the miles it has travelled, it is unsustainable. But as we now know this may well not be the case. A strawberry ripened beneath the winter sun of Morocco can easily have a smaller carbon footprint than one raised in a polytunnel at the height of a so-called British summer. You can make lots of arguments about seasonal British strawberries tasting nicer. Once again that’s purely about aesthetics. You can, I suppose, also argue that it’s healthier for our food culture if we only eat with the seasons, though in an increasingly globalized world, where we happily consume film, music, television and books from all corners of the globe, the argument does not exactly have legs of steel. What you can’t immediately assume is that it’s the less sustainable option. Explaining this to people who have built entire patterns of behaviour around the idea of seasonality is tough. Nevertheless, they do need to be told.
And while you’re at it you might want to have a word with them about the whole organics thing.
In the early autumn of 2003 I was locked in a kitchen in south London with the Australian chef John Torode, still then a few years off becoming a fixture on British television as a judge on Masterchef. Surrounding us were about eighty products, mostly available in the British supermarkets, some own-brand, some not. All of them carried the legend ‘organic’. The value of organic sales in Britain had just slipped past £1 billion a year. It was still (and would remain) a tiny proportion of Britain’s retail food market, which is worth about £155 billion – never more than 1.5 per cent. But with percentage growths into double digits year on year it wasn’t unreasonable to think that the future would be more to do with organic food than less so. The supermarkets had piled into the sector. What, we wanted to know, was all this stuff like? After all, it was sold at a premium. It cost more, often a lot more. What did that money get you?
It got you depression and misery; it got you angst and indigestion; it got you anger, fury, and aching eyeballs from all the rolling.
It was, in short, a dismal afternoon; sometimes, for men who cared a little too much about what they ate, shockingly so. Across the sixteen categories that we tried – organic apples and cheddars, marmalades and tomato sauces, spaghetti, muesli, sausages, butter, and onwards – there were some great products, to which we enthusiastically gave the maximum five stars. There was Swaddles’ Green Back Bacon. ‘Gosh,’ we said in our summing up, ‘a yummy bit of bacon with great fat.’ Or, as John puts it, ‘That’s no bullshit bacon. Give it six out of five.’ We raved about Yeo Valley Organic Butter (‘That almost cheesy edge you look for in a great butter’), eulogized Riverford Farm Foods’ Po
rk Sausages with Herbs and Black Pepper (‘You need all your own teeth to eat one of these’), and were suitably impressed by the yoghurt from Neal’s Yard Creamery (‘We expected a good product from Neal’s Yard and got one’).
But those were the exceptions. The majority of what we tasted that afternoon was awful. Tooth-grindingly, mind-numbingly, shoot-me-now-I’ve-suffered-enough dreadful. Our notes were littered with products that received one out of five or even zero. ‘We only ate it because we had to,’ we said of one yoghurt. ‘It’s only just coffee,’ we said dismissively of some brown dishwater produced by something that had made a wasted journey all the way from Papua New Guinea. ‘Absolutely pants,’ we said of a Tesco’s ham. And then there were the cheeses. Our verdict on the whole lot appeared as a single sentence separated only by ellipses. The first couple received two stars, but it was downhill to zero from there. ‘Has a crumbly texture and a certain creaminess …,’ we said of the first, before continuing under the second, ‘… as does this one … [two stars] … but what’s the point of an organic label if all you produce are a bunch of dull … [no stars] flaccid and insipid cheeses that are not a patch on … [no stars] … the non-organics? It shouldn’t be a marketing tag. It should offer a better product and these aren’t [no stars].’
Almost ten years have passed since that miserable day. In all that time I have seen nothing to convince me that the organic tag is proof of anything other than what you are buying is likely to be more expensive than if it were not organic. That doesn’t mean there aren’t great organic products. There are. But from my experience of meeting with and talking to organic farmers I have come to the conclusion that this has far more to do with the care and attention involved in the whole approach to food production that comes with obtaining organic status. In other words, if you are the sort of obsessive person who is willing to go to the effort and quite considerable expense of getting your produce certified organic, you are also likely to be the sort of person who will generally make a greater effort to come up with something very good; to lavish more care on your plants or your animals. You will be deep in the premium market and will know there is someone out there willing to pay more for something that’s obviously better. Or not, as the case may be. It is hardly surprising that organic sales started falling across the developed world in 2008 for the first time in fifteen years when the first credit crunch started to bite.