by Jay Rayner
But we really do have to eat less meat (I say, with tears in my eyes and a knot in my tummy). The idea of a Meat Free Monday, as proposed by Paul McCartney among many others, doesn’t just sound like a good idea. It sounds like a vital one. Meat-free Tuesday and Wednesday may well be up for grabs too. Indeed, as far back as 2008 Dr Rajendra K. Pachauri, chair of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was arguing for a massive cut in meat consumption globally, to save the planet. In many countries in the developed world the notion is gaining purchase. People are getting it. The problem is selling that to the emerging economies, especially China and India. Telling the newly affluent there that they can’t gorge on the meat their new-found economic heft is allowing them to buy, because the rich bastards in the West have already buggered up the planet by doing so, is going to be a very hard sell.
It is also a potential point of conflict, as reports seeping out of Tehran on 23 July 2012 proved. According to Saeed Kamali Dehghan, writing on the Guardian’s website, a sudden rise in chicken prices in the city of Nishapur in the country’s north-east had led to angry demonstrations on the streets. ‘Shame on the rise,’ the crowds chanted, as what the Iranian media called ‘the chicken crisis’ deepened. The government responded quickly by distributing discounted chicken, which resulted in long queues. We are used to the idea of bread riots and rice riots and, as they were nicknamed in Mexico during 2008, tortilla riots. As the Arab Spring proved, the rising price of staple foodstuffs, inciting the mob to rise up, has been a challenge to governments down the centuries. But suddenly there was the prospect of a meat riot, and that was something entirely new.
A solution is required, a new source of animal protein to go alongside a vastly reduced supply of the conventional kind. There is one out there. But it’s one many self-proclaimed food lovers in the developed world will find very hard to stomach. It goes against everything they believe in or have ever championed. Nevertheless, as food prices rise and supplies become scarce, objections will start to crumble. Indeed, if we really are going to make sure everyone is fed, if we are going to embrace a future of sustainable intensification, we will find ourselves with no choice. We will have to dump hackneyed and fuzzy ideas of what is natural in our food supply chain and head to the lab.
We will finally have to embrace biotechnology. Which in turn means we will finally have to engage with science.
9.
N IS FOR NARCOTICS
Arranged along the top shelf in my mother’s office at home when I was growing up was a series of box files. They were in alphabetical order. ‘A’ was for allergies, ‘I’ was for impotence, ‘M’ was for the menopause, and so on. Inside each of these box files were academic papers and research studies culled from the numerous publications that came into the house every week. We received The Lancet, one of the oldest and most respected general medical journals in the world. There was the British Medical Journal, the BMJ, published by the British Medical Association. There were countless nursing quarterlies and scholarly works on everything from psychiatry to midwifery. She would read each one of these, tag them, and pass them over to her team of secretaries and assistants so they could cut them up and get the relevant papers into the right boxes. This was a part of the serious and formidable body of work which underpinned her non-fiction books and the answers she gave in her newspaper problem pages.
Claire had a secular rationalist’s commitment to, and respect for, rigorous science. She was fascinated by it; by the beauty that lay at the very heart of biology. One of her pleasures was collecting antique medical equipment and textbooks. She had a tray of early Victorian glass eyes, in a velvet-lined box, each pair with a slightly different-coloured iris, which I loved to stroke with the soft pad of my middle finger. There were the exquisitely detailed and delicate nineteenth-century anatomy guides – one for each gender – made of countless cut-out pieces of paper which turned back to take you deeper and deeper into the body: first the skin, then the muscles, followed by the skeleton and nestling within it the vital organs. There were terrifying metal implements which made you grateful for the wonders of the modern age. She had a huge disdain for anything that smacked of hucksterism and had no time for fraudulent theories passed off as ‘New Age’ enlightenment. For example, she always said there was no such thing as ‘alternative medicine’. You double-blind tested whatever the substance was. If it worked it just became medicine.
As an inquisitive, questing, restless adolescent I found this bedrock of scientific knowledge that had become part of the fabric of the house extremely useful, although not necessarily in a way my parents would have either anticipated or approved of. For sitting on the shelves in that office was a series of box files marked ‘N’.
‘N’ was for narcotics. I got an awful lot of use out of those.
I smoked my first joint when I was 13. It was rolled for me by one of the managers on a Jewish youth group away weekend, somewhere deep in the Gloucestershire countryside. I was not at all religious, but as a result of moving house and changing schools to one far from where I lived, I’d ended up short of friends. To be honest I was so short of friends I didn’t have any. From the age of 10 to 12, weekends were bleak and empty. Seeking a solution, my parents had eventually swallowed hard and packed me off on a summer camp run by Reform Synagogues Youth, held in a very English public school in the Dorset countryside. It worked. I returned home with a tight, intimate circle of just 150 friends, all Jewish, scattered all over the country. I knew an awful lot of girls called Danielle. There was a bit of the religious stuff, but mostly, this being the Reform movement, it was ritual-lite. Though my parents didn’t give a damn – they just didn’t like the fact that I was lonely – most other parents sent their kids off on these holidays in the hope that they would meet a nice Jewish boy or girl rather than end up with someone who wasn’t of the tribe. Snogging and fumbling was positively encouraged; if we weren’t all copping off with each other the youth workers would worry that the venture had been a failure.
At the summer camp, and both the winter camp and various away weekends held at Outward Bound centres in the English countryside which happened to have kosher licences, it really was more about the social side. There were organized games. There were – oh God – sports. Jews should never be made to do sports. No good can come of it. Occasionally, for a bit of light and shade, they’d show us the gruelling films made by the legendary television journalist Richard Dimbleby of the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at the end of the Second World War. Holocaust education was regarded as a key part of the project and as teenagers we became very used to watching films of atrocity. It wasn’t all bleak and awful. Sitting in the dark, it was often a good excuse to try holding some girl’s hand, just for, y’know, a little moral support.
Inevitably, at some point during these trips away, somebody would play ‘The Sound of Silence’ on the guitar and we’d all sit around looking very intense and profoundly moved. We’d then try to grope each other in the sweetest way possible in an attempt to prove how intense and moved we were.
Getting stoned with the youth workers wasn’t an official part of the programme but it did happen quite a lot. Now, as a parent myself, I can’t just shrug my shoulders and say it was fine. I know it wasn’t fine. It was outrageous; my own parents would have been appalled. Their trust had been betrayed. I would feel the same way if it involved my kids now. But I can’t pretend, just for the sake of appearances. At the time – we’re talking the very late seventies – it felt like a safe and comfortable environment in which to find out what being out of your head on hash was really like. I enjoyed the high. I loved the accessories involved, the way words like ‘red Leb’ and ‘sensimillia’ rolled off the tongue. Then there was the camaraderie; I welcomed the sense of being a part of a culture. I had a privileged, safe and very comfortable upbringing. This made me feel just a little bit mad, bad and dangerous to know. It made me feel less safe. I quickly committed myself to the notion that, whatev
er other sort of teenager I might be, I was definitely a stoner; one who recognized the infinite variety of drugs that might be available to a resourceful kid, if only he could get the cash together.
And yet, for all that, I did regard myself as smart and responsible. If I was going to consume lots of drugs I really ought to know what the hell I was doing. Which was when I remembered the box files. Ferreting around in there on nights when my parents had gone out, I found endless academic papers on the general impact and addictive qualities of everything from grass and hash, through its opiated cousins, to barbiturates, psychotropics, and speed, coke and heroin. I was determined to be a discerning and educated drug user. I wanted to be learned. For example, the evidence of the effects of ingredients with which clumsily produced amphetamine sulphate might be cut soon helped me decide it was not for me. Domestic cleaning materials really didn’t sound like fun. Heroin was clearly too serious a drug; I hated the thought of both dirty needles and cheap cutlery.
But when I heard there was a little opium floating around the neighbourhood I determined to read up on it in detail. I quickly deduced, from the academic studies collected in N for Narcotics, that it was not an experience I should repeat too often. It’s addictive qualities were obvious. Still the romantic, slightly literary part of me wanted to give it a go. All of the papers I read warned of temporary impotence in men. However, as I was only 16 years old, grossly overweight and terribly clumsy, the opportunities for getting laid were extremely limited. I didn’t see a touch of impotence as a major issue.
An opium high (or, to be more precise, low) was, as it happens, soft, gentle and a little dull.
Of course, I eventually got into trouble for all this. How could I not? After the last night of a school production of The Taming of the Shrew in which I played a cleric, my Semitic curls held in place by a finger full of KY Jelly (it’s a brilliant hair gel, and sets hard when it dries), there was a party held at the house of the boy who had played the lead. The school laid on a coach to get us all there. Knowing what form an all-nighter like this might take, a group of us had talked long and hard about how to approach it. We reckoned alcohol was not the way to go. We’d all drink too much, too quickly, and end the night throwing up. Alcohol poisoning was no fun. Better to get gently stoned. A dozen kids gave their money to one of the group who scored the hash for them; I had my own dealer, a whippet of a man who lived in a squat that smelt of damp dog, with a foot-long iguana in a hot glass tank. It’s often the way with dealers.
It was a great night. We all got quietly stoned to The Dark Side of the Moon and pushed on until the first smudge of an early summer morning.
It was never going to be that easy. Nothing ever is. One of the other party-goers split on us. An inquest was started at the school. A dozen or so of the accused coughed immediately and were suspended for a week. I tried to hold out. I denied it all, aware that there would be deeper, darker consequences for me, until they related in exact and fetishistic detail what I’d been seen doing (‘You were seen heating a piece of cannabis hashish on a safety pin over a flame; you were seen crumbling said …’). I should have held out. I should have demanded they bring the witness in front of me, but my fight had gone. I crumpled, admitted everything, and my father was summoned to take me home. We drove in silence. It was May. I was told I was not welcome back that term; that they would decide in due course whether I would ever be returning at all.
They did let me back to complete my A levels, although not before the deeper, darker consequences I had feared had come to pass: the story had been splattered across the national press, courtesy of my mates Charlie and Ted, who flogged it to the Daily Mail for £150 (thanks, boys; if you were going to sell me out, you could at least have haggled). I was the problem son of agony aunt Claire. I was Claire’s Agony. I was delinquency in smudgy, black 72-point. (A few years later, after university and a period as a student journalist, I obtained work experience in almost all the national newspaper groups in London. These were the days when yellowing cuttings were kept in named files. I found all of the files with my name on them, in each of the cuttings libraries, sneaked them out, and destroyed them. The only person who would be reminding the press of my early brush with fame was me.)
Though I did continue smoking dope for about eighteen months after that, I returned to N for Narcotics just once more, to look up the peer-reviewed studies on psilocybin, as found in ‘magic’ mushrooms. They grew in volume in a field not far from my house and I’d heard interesting things. That said, I really didn’t want to read about the upside. The positive impact could reveal itself to me at the time. It was the negatives I cared about. On this, those academic studies were in general agreement: a bad trip could engender paranoia, anxiety, depression and uncomfortable hallucinations.
Science is a clever thing; they were bang on. The first couple of experiences were fine. Indeed, they were more than that. They were joyous and funny and relaxing. By now I was in my first year at Leeds University, and I was happy to sit in my student flat in Headingley, staring for hours at the weave of the cheap dog-poo-brown carpet and all the patterns that danced and shimmered there.
The third trip was different. I took them in a mushroom cup-a-soup with a friend, in his battered flat, high in the eaves of a tall Victorian house as the wind and the rain of an early winter Leeds night battered at the windows. The previous trips had been so much fun that I had doubled the dose. I believed I could take it. I was hardened. After all, drugs had been a part of my life since I was 13. After all, I knew what I was doing. After all, I had read the academic papers. It took about an hour for the panic to slowly fall across me, like high grey clouds filling a once sunny, blue sky. Within ninety minutes my heart was at double speed. I was sweating and fearful and I just needed to get away. I ran from the flat, and all the way home, and spent the night clinging to the bed and praying that morning would come soon and doubting that it ever could again.
Morning did come again and with it a general, disconnected sadness that did not lift for days. When at last it had passed I decided to celebrate by rolling myself a joint. The papers that I had read had said flashbacks were a possibility, and once again they weren’t wrong. Within minutes I was right back where I had been a few days before. I was panicking. I was sweating. I was terrified.
That was that: the complete end of my drug career. I was only a couple of months past 18 years old. Again, I won’t pretend. I had enjoyed it immensely. It had been a part of me. When Ecstasy and the second summer of love came around a couple of years later I was merely a spectator, and a mournful one at that. I knew that I was missing out on something. Still I wasn’t tempted. The person who had done all of that had been subtly different. Magic mushrooms had changed me, just as the papers I had read had told me they might.
Later, a lot later, when I had left university and married and had children of my own I would often find myself standing in my mother’s office at the house where I had grown up chatting to her, while she sat behind her heavy wooden desk. As we talked my gaze would slowly drift upwards to the shelf of box files and N for Narcotics. Sure, it was just a pile of peer-reviewed scientific studies. It was just so much paper and ink. But it was also an important fragment of my childhood. It was a piece of me. It made me feel terribly wistful.
In later years, as I found myself covering more and more stories involving scientific studies, I realized that my approach to those box files had been a robust one. True, I had been a little too quick to think that I would dodge the negative effects of magic mushrooms that all the studies had told me were possible. But at least I had looked for multiple sources of information, and read multiple studies rather than relying on just one before making choices, which is exactly what you should do. Not that you would know this from reading about science in the mass media. Most popular newspapers and television news broadcasters leap upon each and every passing scientific study as if it were gospel truth, because men in white coats were involved. A single study apparently
reveals an increase in cancers among people drinking red wine and suddenly it’s proof that ALL WINE WILL KILL YOU. A small study finds lower blood pressure among people who regularly eat dark chocolate, and it’s time for a banner headline about chocolate being THE ELIXIR OF YOUTH. Cheese mustn’t be eaten in pregnancy. Hot baths make you impotent. Facebook gives you cancer.
IT’S THE TRUTH.
I may have invented one of these. Or maybe not.
Knowledge doesn’t work like this. Scientists may wear crisp white coats and have benches full of neat stuff to play with but even they – or at least the good ones – know that they are not in the truth business. They are in the ‘studying things, observing outcomes and reporting them in a way which will help us move towards a generally agreed version of the world in which we live’ business. Each new study adds to the growing pile of evidence. We inch towards conclusions. It is why scientists often carry out studies which involve no direct experimentation at all, but instead simply do literature reviews: meta-studies looking at all the studies that have already been done on a particular subject to see what patterns emerge. (Interestingly, a new meta-study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in December 2012 looked at all the papers claiming that various foodstuffs were linked to cancer risks: coffee, sugar, salt, butter, and so on. Their close examination of the results found that many had ‘borderline or no statistical significance’.)