DEDICATION

For Sarah and Jerry, who have always fed me well.

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

AUTHOR’S NOTE

1. THE £31 CHICKEN

2. SUPERMARKETS ARE NOT EVIL

3. SUPERMARKETS ARE EVIL

4. FINDING THE CHINESE IN KIGALI

5. SLOW BOAT TO ELLIS ISLAND

6. IS SMALL ALWAYS BEAUTIFUL?

7. THE CURSE OF THE SPAGHETTI MARROW

8. SOMETHING TO CHEW ON

9. N IS FOR NARCOTICS

10. THE SUMMER THEY STOPPED EATING

11. A NEW GASTRONOMICS

EPILOGUE: THE £17.25 PIZZA

POSTSCRIPT

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

JAY RAYNER

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I am a greedy bastard. For the sake of appearances, I could lie about this. I could tell you that my appetites are entirely unremarkable; that my relationship with food does not dominate my every waking moment. But we both know this would be a lie as big and fat as each of my really quite awe-inspiring thighs. I have earned those thighs. Every shadowed dimple of cellulite has been put there courtesy of a restaurant bill. If you are eating while reading this book, if perhaps you thought that a book about food culture in the twenty-first century would be the perfect companion to a meal taken alone, and the image of my over-engineered, middle-aged, lard-heavy thighs is now putting you off your food, then obviously I apologize. That said, I can’t really empathize with you. Nothing puts me off my dinner.

This is less a confession than a vital piece of background information. Otherwise you might assume, as I lead you on a journey through the knotty complexities of how and what we eat now, that it was all merely some academic exercise on my part. It is nothing of the sort. It is motivated by lust and appetite. Even as I’m typing I’m thinking about what I’ll be having for dinner later on. At some restaurant with the word ‘pig’ in the title. I like pig. I admire the way its skin crisps so perfectly, the way the fat melts, the way it takes a cure so enthusiastically, producing the very best of charcuterie; salamis spiked with fennel or green peppercorns; chorizos so heavy with paprika they stain your fingertips orange as you get the oily slices from cutting board to mouth. There’s intense, earthy black pudding, and its Spanish cousin morcilla; bacons, singed rust and bronze in the pan, and pork scratchings that threaten to take out a filling, and …

Sorry. I think I got a little distracted there. Where was I? Oh yes. Greed, namely mine, and its impact upon my work. The point is that a lot of books written about food policy, responding to the undeniably serious issues involved, can take on a pinched and troubled aspect, as if the subject under discussion were the correct interpretation of something profound but strangely unintelligible uttered by the Dalai Lama, rather than an examination of what may well end up as lunch. Whenever I am thinking, asking questions or writing about food, the one question I am always asking myself is: how will this eventually impact upon my lunch?

Some may regard this as a moral failing, will think that too much appetite can get in the way of a cool and collected appraisal of the facts. I see it differently. Just as there’s no point reading a book about sex written by a nun, or a book about morals written by a banker, there’s also no point reading a book about food written by a picky eater. Sometimes gluttony isn’t a vice, it’s a virtue, and this is one of those occasions. Though I accept I may just be attempting to excuse my own failings. If I am, I’m doing a bloody good job of it, don’t you think?

Either way the fact remains: my name is Jay Rayner and I am a greedy bastard.

Live with it.

1.
THE £31 CHICKEN

It would suit the narrative if I could claim that, from the moment I laid eyes upon the chicken, I knew I had to have it; that I was overcome by a greed and hunger verging on the carnal. Granted it was one damn beautiful chicken: good sturdy legs for the brown meat fetishists, a robust skin with the ivory promise of plentiful fat deposits underneath; breasts big enough to make Pamela Anderson wince with jealousy. But the truth is it wasn’t the chicken I saw first, but the entire meat carnival of the butcher’s shop. I had heard tell of Lidgate’s in Holland Park before, of course. It’s one of those high-end butchers that food obsessives dribble into their computer keyboards over, when describing their shopping adventures. It’s the kind of place you visit with more money than sense.

Lidgate’s has been trading for 150 years, has remained in the same family throughout that time and has won countless awards for what, in cheaper parts of town, would be called their ready meals but here are called ‘baked goods’. The window is full of their ready-to-cook shepherd’s pies, the surface of the mash as carefully raked as the gravel outside a stately home. There are boeuf bourguignon pies and pesto-smeared saddles of lamb, and their own enormous sausage rolls, wrapped in the flakiest of butter-rich pastry. The shop is tiled inside and out in Edwardian shades of jade green. The butchers wear straw boaters as if it’s an entirely reasonable thing to do. (It isn’t.)

I stepped inside and waited in the narrow space in front of the counters with the Holland Park yummy mummies, smelling of Jo Malone products – jasmine and mint, wild fig – while others were served. I was not entirely sure what I was going to do. I like butcher’s shops, worked in one of them at weekends as a kid. I like the promise of all that meat; like to think about what it could become. I like to think about what pleasure it could give me. I particularly like high-end butcher’s shops, as if the pleasure I can achieve can in some way be correlated on a graph against the cost of the produce on offer. I like all this, while also knowing it is wrong and deluded, that the quality of the meal will actually depend on my ability to cook those ingredients sympathetically. I listened to a butcher weigh off a piece of beef and quote the price. My eyes widened. I have spent big money on my dinner before, paid unconscionable sums for bits of dead animal, but this was in a new category.

Then my gaze fell upon a small chicken, slapped with the label ‘organic free range’, from Otter Farm. Yours for £12 a kilo. Later I would check the going rate for whole fresh chicken in the supermarkets that week – from £2.04 a kilo to as much as £6 a kilo for a free-range organic bird – but even without checking I knew that this wasn’t just expensive; that this chicken laughed in the face of expensive. It had migrated to a new and unique category located somewhere between nose-bleeding and paralysing.

In its favour these were small birds of little more than a kilo, and so, individually, a whole chicken was likely to come in at less than £20. I had paid £18 for a bird once before, a free-range organic number from Borough Market in south London, a place so expensive I never went there carrying plastic, only cash so as to put a limit on what I could spend. This would, in turn, enable me to carry on buying shoes for my children. Buying the £18 chicken had made me feel dirty and wrong, albeit in a good way; but the point is that these Lidgate’s birds were within my tolerances for excess.

That’s when I saw it, on a glass shelf, creamy-coloured arse to the shop, as though its skin tones had been picked out of a Farrow & Ball catalogue. This free-range, non-organic chicken was big. Very big. I asked the butcher to put it on the scales. It weighed just over 3.2kg. At £9.90 a kilo. ‘That will be £31.78,’ he said, his straw boater rested at a jaunty angle. I let out a hiss of breath, like the air leaking from a punctured bicycle tyre. Did I want it? the nice chap asked me.

Did I want it? Yes. Yes, I did want it. Who wouldn’t? A chicken costing more than £31? What would that be like? Surely it had to be the ultimate chicken, the king (or, more precisely, the queen) of birds? Surely if I paid – I did the sums quickly – over 75 per cent more for a chicken than I had ever paid before I would accrue an equivalent amount more pleasure from the experience than I ever had before? At the very least wasn’t it my responsibility to find out? Wasn’t that what I did these days? As I left the shop, I noticed a sign in the window signed by David Lidgate, the current family member to be custodian of the business, to the effect that all their chickens were bred and supplied by small farms. ‘We pay our farmers a fair price.’ It felt like he was getting his apology in first.

Before leaving I asked the butcher where this particular chicken had come from. ‘It’s an Elmwood chicken, I think,’ he said. Back home I Googled the words ‘Elmwood’ and ‘chicken’. It turned out to be an odd thing to have said. Elmwood isn’t really a place, or at least it isn’t a place any more. It’s an idea. While there is an Elmwood Farm somewhere in East Anglia, today the word is a registered marketing label, used by the Co-op – and only the Co-op – to describe a higher-quality, more expensive bird than the bog-standard, fast-grown cheap chickens they sell. The higher welfare standards started at the original Elmwood Farm have now been pressed into service at farms across Britain. The label is now applied to all birds grown under those standards.

This is a familiar ploy by the big food retailers. Marks & Spencer has its Oakham chicken, which some might assume comes from the environs of the town in Rutland of the same name. It doesn’t. It’s just a brand name for chickens grown at farms all over the country, none of which is called Oakham. Tesco has a range of chickens called Willow Farm, which are reared on a few dozen farms across the south-west of England and Northern Ireland, none of which is called Willow Farm. The labels may portray bucolic scenes of olde farming life. They may be sold with images of carefully drawn ears of corn, but they are still birds raised on an industrial scale.

Whatever my £31 chicken was, it had nothing to do with Elmwood. I phoned Lidgate’s and asked again if they could say where it was from. ‘It’s from Willow Field in Norfolk,’ I was told by another butcher. Right. That’s more like it. Willow Field actually sounds like a real place. It had the word ‘field’ in the name. That made it sound just like a farm. Back I went to Google, but found nothing online about a chicken farm in Norfolk called Willow Field, save for a planning application to the local council for the placement of a mobile home. Conceivably the mobile home was for luxury chickens to live in, but I thought it unlikely.

I was becoming obsessed with this chicken. I had begun to fantasize about its life. Maybe its coop was completely pimped: ermine trim, leather seats, a sound system with serious bass, and a drinks cabinet heavy with vintage Crystal. At this price surely it had to be the most pampered chicken ever? Maybe they fed it on the ground-up bones of delicate songbirds? Perhaps it was watered with Evian? How else could the price be justified?

To bring things back into focus I called Lidgate’s yet again. This time I spoke to David Lidgate’s son, Danny. He could not explain the misinformation I had been given but he could categorically confirm that it had come from a farm in Suffolk which didn’t want any publicity because they couldn’t produce any more birds and didn’t want any more trade. But he could tell me that they were slow-grown, hand-plucked, and hung for seven days before being dispatched. I wanted to ask him about the ermine-trimmed coop, but couldn’t quite summon the will.

One afternoon I went onto Twitter and asked people there to tell me the most they’d ever spent on a whole chicken. There were a few who had never gone beyond a tenner. Quite a number of people had spent sums in the mid-teens. A small number had gone over the £20 mark. Curiously, people had very specific memories. ‘Eighteen pounds for a rooster in Montpellier. Nineteen ninety-one. It was worth every penny,’ said one person. ‘On one memorable occasion enough to feel obliged to give it a name,’ said another, without revealing what the sum might be. ‘Eighteen pounds,’ said a third. ‘Big bugger. Think they might have killed it for scaring the cows.’ One tweeter talked proudly of the two chickens they had picked up for a fiver in a supermarket deal; another said they had never spent more than £8 and wouldn’t dream of doing so. As these things do, the singular question about the price of a chicken had quickly become a debate about welfare standards, food poverty, excess and the morality thereof. And every now and then someone chipped in with a tweet announcing the enormous sum they had once spent on a chicken as if it were a mark of commitment.

I nodded sagely. As I had suspected, this was a game I was going to win. I gave them the big reveal, told them about Lidgate’s and the £31 chicken. There was an electronic gasp of horror. Thirty-one pounds? Too much. Absurd. Ludicrous. Bizarre.

Just wrong.

‘I once saw a woman run out of Lidgate’s in tears over the price of a chicken,’ one person said. I answered that I could well imagine such a thing.

My warped, obsessive, competitive streak now took me on a tour of London’s classiest butchers, desperate to prove that I had spent the most it was possible to spend on a chicken. For some reason it mattered that the bird which now sat in my freezer awaiting its moment, the bird which had become such a talking point on Twitter, should be able to hold onto its title. I saw birds that were local and free-range and hand-reared and hand-plucked and hung with their guts in. I went to Harrods, where the food hall throngs with tourists who have no intention of buying anything other than tins of branded tea, and looked at shrink-wrapped birds from unpronounceable places in France. I did kilo-to-pound-weight calculations in my head, asked bored butchers to weigh chickens for me and pronounce on the price, and moved on, each time satisfied I was still ahead.

And then I went to the meat counter at Selfridges’ food hall, which is run by a highly respected butcher called Jack O’Shea. There I met the £51 chicken. It was a Poulet de Bresse, a particular breed which was granted Appellation d’origine contrôlée, or AOC, status in 1957, protecting it as a name for a particular type of bird, prized for its gamey flavour and rich fat. A nice chap behind the counter called Les, who wasn’t wearing a straw boater, told me they were special ‘because of their diet. They’re treated like royalty, they are.’ The bird I was looking at, with its head, neck, and feet on, and guts in – when you bought a bird from Bresse you got to pay for a lot of things you might not actually want – cost over £22 a kilo, and it was well in excess of two kilos.

Damn.

Damn, damn, damn.

There was I thinking I had bought the Bentley of chickens, with metallic paint and sports settings on the gearbox, when it was nothing of the sort. It was just a mid-range BMW. It was an Audi with under-seat heating, the kind of thing a desperate sanitary-ware salesman trying to prove his worth might buy as a way of declaring he had arrived, when in truth all it did was signal loud and clear to anybody who could bother to be interested that he had barely got started.

I wondered, even then, whether I had finally reached the zenith of the luxury chicken business and quickly discovered I had not. One evening, in the kitchens of London’s Savoy Hotel, I came across Heston Blumenthal, the chef of the famed Fat Duck in Bray, which has three Michelin stars. He was there overseeing the preparation of the starter for a big charity dinner I was attending. I had snuck away from the velvet plush and precious gilding of the ballroom to the bright lights and hard surfaces of the kitchen, where I always felt more comfortable, and stood there in my dinner jacket, picking his brains about chickens. A few years before he had made a TV series called In Search of Perfection which involved finding and then roasting the perfect chicken. I wondered how much he had spent on the birds. He thought about £45 each. He talked about the quality of Label Anglais chickens, a British-reared bird which was supposed to challenge the big names of the chicken world.

‘But there are even more expensive ones.’ Like what? He mentioned the birds from Bresse. Well yes, I knew all about those. ‘It’s the cockerels, though. They only sell them for about two weeks of the year around Christmas,’ he said, hand-sown into muslin bags. ‘They have this fabulous skin. ‘It’s like silk.’

And how much would one of these Bresse cockerels set me back?

‘About £120.’

There was, it seems, always a more expensive chicken out there somewhere.

I went to university in the eighties with a bloke called Eugene, who was thinner than me, smarter than me, and got much more sex than me. His name isn’t really Eugene; it is, naturally enough, something far cooler than that, but it pleases me to take my revenge by giving him a really crass pseudonym, because he was horribly annoying. Though obviously not to the parade of pretty girls who were willing to go to bed with him.

Eugene had read an awful lot of Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes and, pace the kings of postmodern philosophy, liked to refer to things as ‘signifiers’ and ‘symbols’. Nothing was merely itself. In his universe everything was representative of its place within a long-drawn-out discourse; the physical world in which we lived was merely a set of these signifiers and symbols that had to be reconfigured and understood through their conversion to language. Or something. A pint of beer was never just a pint of beer. It was a signifier for the pursuit of a certain type of human experience, a way of managing communication, usually with one of the women who, a few drinks to the bad, had failed to recognize Eugene as the sociopath he was. (I’m really not bitter.) A bike was actually a signifier for modes of property ownership and an understanding of forward motion. A five-pound note was … something he cadged off you just before last orders in the back end of term when his money was running out, so he could buy this girl he’d just met another drink. Can you see just how bloody irritating Eugene was?

Which was why it was all the more infuriating that thinking about the £31 chicken had in turn made me think about Eugene and his tiresome language of symbols and signifiers. For it was clear to me that this ridiculously expensive bird was so much more than just three kilos of prime protein, delicious fat and potentially luscious crisp skin. It could stand – Lord help me – as a symbol for so many of the arguments and battles that we are, and need to be, fighting over food in the early years of the twenty-first century.

Certainly it couldn’t be dismissed as an object that was merely about wealth. I have long said that there is nothing wrong with paying large amounts of money for food experiences. Some people like to shell out for opera tickets or seats at cup finals to watch their team compete. They are buying memories, and an expensive restaurant experience is no different.

But an expensive restaurant experience is only that. You can’t go to, say, the Fat Duck for something as banal as chicken nuggets. You can’t even go there for deconstructed, ironic chicken nuggets (yet). You can only go there for a luxury experience. And sure, my £31 chicken could be given the full de luxe treatment: it could be pelted with truffles, stuffed with lobes of foie gras and basted with the richest of butters. (I can recommend a great place for something like that if you fancy it.) On the other hand it really could just be turned into chicken nuggets. However expensive the raw ingredient, it can still be converted into something very ordinary, which is precisely why the debate on Twitter had kicked off. Hell, it’s just a bloody chicken, and you make broth out of those for loved ones when they’re snotty and feverish. You barbecue their wings and drumsticks for kids’ parties, and put the breasts into pies with leeks and the kind of mustard-heavy cheese sauce that completely obscures the nature of the bird that provided the meat in the first place.

It was clear to me that wrapped up in this single bird were arguments over how we rear our livestock and the amount we are willing to pay for it: about provenance, sophisticated food marketing, the supply chain, and the value of small, local shops over large supermarkets; about the imperative to eat meat and the competing imperative to cut down on it; about the roles of money, status and class in what we eat; and the difference between what we want and what we need. In short, this one big-titted hen had become what Eugene would have called a huge signifier for the warped morality of our food chain.

That’s the point. I am in no doubt that the way we in the developed world think and talk about food has become warped; that most of the time we are completely missing the point. On television, online and in the glossy press we are bombarded with pornified images of food which attempt to cast the most expensive of ingredients as less a luxury than an ideal to which we should all aspire. In this world view any form of mass production or mass retailing is an evil; any attempt to engage with issues around food which doesn’t fetishize the words ‘local’, ‘seasonal’ and ‘organic’ is plain wrong. In short, too many of us have mistaken a whole bunch of lifestyle choices for the affluent with a wider debate on how we feed ourselves, when they are nothing of the sort.

We need to get real. The term ‘food security’ is occasionally bandied around, but it has failed to take its place right at the heart of our conversation about what and how we eat, even though it has to be there. Because, be in no doubt: a combination of world population growth – expected to hit nine billion by 2050 – climate change, appallingly misguided policies on biofuels and an ingrained Luddite response in parts of the West to biotechnology risks coming together into a perfect storm; one which will make the sight of young chefs on the telly talking about their passion for cooking and their commitment to local and seasonal ingredients sound like the screeching of fiddles while Rome burns. According to the United Nations, by 2030 we will need to be producing 50 per cent more food, and a system built around that holy trinity of local, seasonal and organic simply won’t cut it.

Indeed, while self-appointed food campaigners are banging on about that, an entirely different conversation has been going on elsewhere, within university faculties and government departments as well as at an inter-governmental level. In that world they use not three words, but two: sustainable intensification. It is about the need to produce more food, in as sustainable a manner as possible, which means thinking about far more than just how close to you your food was produced. It’s about carbon inputs all the way down the production system. It’s about water usage, land maintenance and the careful application of science. According to Oxfam, between 1970 and 1990 global agricultural yield grew 2 per cent a year. Between 1990 and 2007 the yield growth dropped to 1 per cent. We are close to a standstill on producing more food, and that is not a good place to be. In January 2011 the British government’s Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir John Beddington, published a major report entitled ‘The Future of Food and Farming’. It drew on the work of dozens of experts; over 100 peer-reviewed papers were commissioned in its writing. In that report there were 39 references to ‘sustainable intensification’, and the single word ‘sustainability’ cropped up 242 times. Where food is concerned there is a new lexicon, and it has nothing to with farmers’ markets or growing your own vegetables or fruit.

I hate polarized arguments. They serve no one, because nothing is ever black and white. Even while I pick fights with the diehard foodinistas, and I do on a regular basis, it’s obvious to me that there is a lot of good stuff in what they are saying. When they describe the modern food chain and the way we eat its product as being deformed they are absolutely right. A lot is wrong. The problem lies in the solution they propose, which is too often based on a fantasy, mythologized version of agriculture, one that isn’t much different from those lovingly drawn ears of corn slapped on the packaging for Oakham or Willow Farm chickens to suggest their bucolic origins when in fact they’ve been reared in gigantic industrial sheds.

As a newspaper and television journalist I spend an awful lot of my time travelling around Britain (and abroad) finding out how our food is produced. It’s fascinating. I have watched tons of carrots being lifted in the darkest, small hours of the night because, if harvested during the day, they would start to decay under the sunlight. I have dodged fountains of stuff from the wrong end of a cow to help milk the herd on a traditional dairy farm and visited a cow shed that can house up to 1,000 milkers at a time. I have fished for langoustine off the very northernmost tip of Scotland, helped make bespoke salt from the waters off the Kent coast, chosen beef animals for slaughter and followed them to the abattoir so I could witness them take the final bolt. I have driven a £360,000 harvester that vines peas, tried to keep my balance on the slopes of the island of Jersey that give us their sweet, nutty Royal potatoes, and stood in the rafters of an ex-Cold War aircraft hangar atop fifty foot of drying onions. I have even visited a pork scratchings factory and discovered that there is a limit to the amount of pork scratchings an eager man can eat in a day (six packs, as you ask).

From these experiences, and many others like them, I have become convinced that we are disconnected from what real food production means, and therefore afraid of it. We need to understand how it works, be unembarrassed about it, because only then can we genuinely push for the kind of sustainable supply chain which both guarantees quality and that our food will be affordable, though not necessarily dirt cheap. We need to find a way to mate the delicious promise of gastronomic culture with the rather less delicious but equally important demands of hardcore economics. For want of a better word – and there may well be one – we need a New Gastronomics.

So come with me as I show you why the committed locavore, who thinks that buying food produced as close by as possible is always the most sustainable option, has been sold a big fat lie. If what really concerns you is the carbon footprint of your food, then it turns out the stuff shipped halfway round the world may not be the great evil you’ve always been told it is. And because local does not necessarily mean sustainable, it transpires that seasonality is generally about nothing more than taste. Being concerned about how things taste is lovely. Worrying about that stuff is lovely. I do it all the time. But it’s not the same as being good to the planet. I’ll explain why ‘farmers’ markets’ can never solve our food supply problems – indeed are a part of the problem – how little the organic movement has to offer a world looking to produce more food in as sustainable a manner as possible, and why growing your own will never be more than a lovely hobby. I’ll explain why small is not beautiful and why big is not necessarily bad.

You know all those great sacred cows of ethical foodie-ism? Well, I think the moment has come for you to say your goodbyes. Give the old dears a hug. Celebrate how much you’ve shared together. Then wave them off for ever. Because I’m about to lead most of those sacred cows out into the market square and shoot them dead. I’m so sorry, but it has to be done.

People are occasionally surprised that I give a toss about all this. After all, I earn part of my living as a restaurant critic. I swan around on somebody else’s dime, licking the plate clean, trying not to order pork belly too often and writing smartarse things about it all. I have run up three-figure bills for dinner that almost ran to four figures. I have taken plane trips simply to buy a specific brand of vinegar. When my kids want to mock me they recite a tweet – ‘The dish had a hint of rosemary’ – that I swear I never sent, but which very efficiently marks me out as some ludicrous, gourmand fop who obsesses over tiny gustatory details. And all of this is, I suppose, true. I do, after all, earn enough money to be able to pay £31.78 for a chicken just for the hell of it.

But none of that precludes an interest in our food chain in general, and the ability of everybody in our society to eat as well as they need to. Indeed, I would argue that to be in such a privileged position and not to have an interest in these things would be not just obscene but contrary. Challenged once on this point by a journalist who was interviewing me, I compared it to issues of reading and writing. There was, I said, nothing contradictory about having a love for, say, the rich, expansive language of William Shakespeare, and having a keen interest in basic literacy standards in our schools. Indeed, without one you couldn’t really have the other. I think the same applies to food.

So we need to get real about our food. If we really are to shape a New Gastronomics, we need to be honest and brave. And being those things means saying stuff that some people might find unpalatable. Which is exactly what I’m about to do.

2.
SUPERMARKETS ARE NOT EVIL

Berwick Street in London’s Soho. It is the mid-sixties and my dad is striding past market stalls laden with fruit and vegetables and meat and fish and bolts of cloth and a whole bunch of other things besides. There has been a market on this site since 1778 and it remains there to this day, albeit much reduced. In the sixties, though, it was a vital part of Soho’s village life, closing the road between the junction with Broadwick Street to the north and Walker’s Court to the south, home then to the infamous Raymond’s Revue Bar and its special brand of nipple-tasselled stripping. Even to this day Soho manages to cling onto its reputation for debauchery. The ‘models’ still advertise their availability by placing in the windows of their dingy flats the sort of red tassel-shaded lamps you’d normally find in a B&B in Torquay; places like Walker’s Court are still lined with sex shops, even if they are a little more glossy and welcoming than once they were. But in the sixties Soho was the real deal, run by Maltese hoods who had the vice squad of the Metropolitan Police in their pay, so they could continue trading merrily in the glorious triumvirate of prostitution, drugs and gambling. If you were in the market for filth, Soho was where you went.

But it was still a mixed economy. In spite of – or perhaps because of – the loucheness, other industries congregated here. Some of the best Italian delicatessens in town were here (and still are), the British film industry had started occupying the warrens of offices not used by the hookers, and many of the shop units were home to the cheaper tailors, serving the theatres of the West End or the kind of clients who liked their lapels just a little too wide. Many of the narrow alleyways were filled with shops stacked with cloths of myriad weights and hues. And, of course, there was the street market.

My father, Des, fitted in well. Although he started his working life as an actor, he had become bored with unemployment and starvation and moved into the fashion industry, and worked now as a PR for the classy mid-market label Alexon. I like to think of him marching down Berwick Street in the ankle-length black leather coat with the shaggy black fur collar that he liked to wear, a cravat tied at the neck, hair swept back, beard trimmed just so. My old man wasn’t in the fashion business for nothing. And so he stops now at one of the fruit stalls to pick up some apples to take to my mother, who is back home looking after my older brother and sister. For we are in the golden age of the local shop and the street market. Self-service supermarkets are burgeoning across the US, but not yet widespread here in the UK. Even the well-known company J. Sainsbury does not generally run supermarkets. They are merely grocers, and when you shop there you must queue at separate counters for meat and dairy and fish and so on.

The fact is that there is nothing much more convenient than this market stall for a man in search of apples. So now Des points to the pristine fruit on the display that he wants. The stallholder turns and starts filling the bag from an unseen box hidden away somewhere underneath.

‘Hang on a moment,’ says Des. ‘I can’t see which apples you’re giving me.’

‘I’ll give you whichever bloody apples I like,’ says the man.

‘In which case,’ Des replies, ‘you can keep ’em.’ He turns and walks away only to hear the stallholder shout after him: ‘Suit yourself, you black-bearded, bollock-faced bastard.’

This is one of the stories with which I grew up; one of those legends that all families have. My dad was a black-bearded, bollock-faced bastard. ‘What was it that man called you?’ my mother would ask from the opposite end of the dinner table, when she thought he was being difficult. And we would reply in unison: ‘A black-bearded, bollock-faced bastard.’

What does this story tell us? Just this: that whatever critics of supermarkets might like to tell you, the alternatives – street markets and local shops – were not, and are not, all run by lovely people, with a genuine interest in and concern for all their customers. They are merely run by people. As they are across the rest of society, some people are lovely. Some of them do genuinely care about the people who shop with them. And some of those shopkeepers and market stallholders are miserable scumbags who are to customer service what napalm is to peace.

Another story, this time from the other side of the debate. I am in the very large Tesco supermarket near my home in Brixton, south London, doing the weekly shop. I am with my son Eddie, who must be 2 or 3 years old; certainly he has not yet started school. Usually he does this shop with my wife, who works part-time, and it quickly becomes clear that he is very comfortable here. For, everywhere we go, the staff say hello to him. It doesn’t just happen once or twice during our hour in Tesco. It happens perhaps eight or ten times: from the shelf stackers to the women on the deli counter to those working the checkouts. All of them know Eddie by name and have a few words for him. I am intrigued by this and so begin to notice something. We are not the only people this happens to. There are conversations between staff and customers going on all over the place, and they are not simply about which aisle the dried fruits are located on. The staff here know their customers, which really isn’t surprising, because almost all the employees come from the heart of this community.

So what does this second story tell us? Just this: that whatever critics of supermarkets might like to tell you, they are not all bland, anonymous, swollen warehouses disconnected from the neighbourhoods in which they sit. Of course, some of them might be. Some of them might feel like waiting rooms for death, just as some local shopkeepers are not very nice. But the assumptions we make about these enormous shops from which we buy the vast majority of our food simply do not stand up.

We forget very easily just what life was like in the World Before Supermarkets. I am old enough to remember as a small child being taken on the family food shopping expedition to J. Sainsbury’s in Kenton, north-west London, and the way we really would move from counter to counter. It was my job to say ‘six wings and six legs’ to the man at the butchery counter, so he could fill our weekly chicken order. It was cute. It was adorable. It was one of the ways in which my mother made the whole damn experience in some way bearable. The thing at the chicken counter broke up the tedium. Our bread came from the baker’s on the corner by our house, our fruit and veg from Robert the Greengrocers across the road, and any tinned goods from a small shop called Walton, Hassle and Port ten minutes’ walk away. It sounds lovely, doesn’t it, this patronage of local and small businesses, this tight web of inter-dependent relationships? And we did like the people involved. But gathering everything that the family might need for the week was a tiresome job.

My mother is gone now, but her close friend Carole Shuter, who also had three small kids in the sixties and seventies, remembers it in detail. ‘Oh God, it was a whole morning’s outing,’ she told me. ‘You’d have to clear the diary. I remember the Sainsbury’s thing very well, the way we had to queue half a dozen times and pay separately at each one. People romanticize things like butter being sold in blocks and you asking for a bit to be cut off, but you wouldn’t romanticize it if you had to do it every bloody week. It takes so long.’

Alan Sainsbury, the family-owned firm’s head, had come across the notion of self-service supermarkets in the US in the years immediately after the Second World War, and imported the idea. The company opened its first self-service branch in Croydon, just south of London, in 1950. Still, the roll-out didn’t begin in earnest until many years later, after Sainsbury’s went public in 1973 with what was then the biggest flotation in British stock exchange history. It didn’t reach our corner of London until the early seventies. (The last counter store hung on, in Peckham, until 1982.)

‘The first proper supermarket was a complete revelation,’ Carole says. ‘It was bloody marvellous. People are too quick to demean modern developments like that. They have no idea what it was like before. No idea at all.’

The point is that women like my mother and Carole had far better things to do than waste whole mornings of their week just getting the food shopping done. In Felicity Lawrence’s highly regarded book Not on the Label, a searing critique of Britain’s supermarkets, first published in 2004, she writes about the joys of shopping locally; of how it could be a bonding experience for her and her young family; that there was always time for such pleasures.

Really? Many of the generation of women who came before Felicity Lawrence that I talked to about this regarded it as a retrograde step: an attempt to cast women in a role they had fought throughout the second half of the twentieth century to throw off. One went as far as to say to me that buried within the anti-supermarket argument was one that sounded profoundly anti-woman because it was always the women who were burdened with the job of schlepping around the shops, which in turn made the notion of their having a full-time profession all but unsupportable. Whether the arguments around supermarkets really can be cast in these terms – a modern embarrassment about the idea that such things as food shopping should ever be seen as women’s work do kick in here – there is no doubt that, by reducing the number of hours needed to get domestic chores done, there was more time for other things. And thank Christ for that, because otherwise the economics of domestic life would have been completely unsustainable.

There are, of course, the economies of scale. Supermarkets make things cheaper. They just do. When you have more than 2,500 stores, as Tesco does, or over 1,000 like Sainsbury’s, you have serious buying power. Over 80 per cent of the retail food market spend is concentrated in the hands of the big supermarkets and, whatever the downsides of that, it has, historically, led to cheaper food. In the early post-war years it took over a third of average salary to pay for the food shop. Today it is just under 10 per cent. Or, to put it another way, you had to work until Wednesday morning to pay for the family’s weekly shop; now you’ll have earned enough by some time just after noon on Monday. And that’s not because salaries have increased enormously, compared with all the other costs we face; quite the opposite.

For these are the economic realities within which supermarkets operate. In 1962 average yearly pay was £799. By 2012 it was £26,200. It has increased by a factor of just over thirty. However, the picture with house prices is rather different. In 1962 the average house in Britain cost £2,670. Fifty years later it costs around £245,000. House prices have therefore increased by a factor of over ninety. Just stare at those numbers for a moment. House prices have increased at roughly three times the rate of earnings. Brutal, those figures, aren’t they? Faced with these realities, all those interesting historical debates about the fight by women like my mother and her friend Carole for the right to go out to work in the sixties and seventies become completely irrelevant. It’s no longer about the right to work. It’s about the need to work. The fact of the matter is that to support and run a household both members of a couple with kids need to be holding down full-time jobs. That makes them hideously time-poor. Ask anybody today to clear a morning of their diary just to go down the road to watch a man cut the butter you need off a huge block and they’d laugh in your face. In that context, supermarkets really are not evil. They are a complete godsend.

They are something else too, something the legions of food obsessives who spend so much of their time bemoaning their dreadful impact on our culture could never bring themselves to admit. Supermarkets are a force for change, good change, the sort of change that makes life worth living. We talk endlessly about food revolutions, about the way our culture has developed over the years; how we have gone from a time when olive oil was something sold in the chemist’s for earache, and Parmesan cheese came grated unto dust and smelling lightly of vomit, to a foodie Shangri-La in which we all feast at a national table weighed down with gloriously good things to eat. We go on about this without noticing that in the vanguard of this revolution are the supermarkets. None of the things we take for granted these days – bunches of fresh brassic flat-leaf parsley rather than the dried, friable stuff that looks like the wrong end of a pot-pourri; butter from Brittany with crunchy salt crystals and a slight cheesy edge; cooking chorizos; crisp, green, peppery first-press olive oils; artisan breads; free-range eggs; big, butch sausages made from happy, outdoor-reared pigs; Thai cooking pastes; miso sauce and fish sauce and sesame oil, and so many other things besides – would be as freely and as widely available as they are today without the supermarkets.

I remember the first moment this struck me. It was the mid-nineties and I was on holiday in the Yorkshire Dales. We took a day trip to Blackpool. I’m not sure why. I think we just wanted to feel cheap and dirty for an afternoon. It worked. In a good way. On the way back I decided we should stop off at the big supermarket – I think it was an Asda – on the edge of town to pick up some stuff for dinner. I had a double rack of lamb back at the cottage we were renting and I wanted to stuff it with a mixture of breadcrumbs and basil, olives, anchovies and caramelized onions. In those days my credentials as an urbane young man, who understood the imperatives of a Mediterranean diet, rested on that thing I did with the double rack of lamb. It was something I made quite often at home, but to caramelize the onions I needed a bottle of deep, dark, sour-sweet balsamic vinegar. In London, getting hold of some of that was no problem at all. There was always a well-stocked deli somewhere nearby, ready to do the business. But on the edge of Blackpool? I trudged moodily around the aisles, my face fixed in a sneer of pure metropolitan disdain. In short, I had my normal face on.

Soon the expression was gone. For there, on the shelf, was not just a bottle of balsamic vinegar. There was a choice of balsamics. Oh my.

This story looks ludicrous, doesn’t it? It’s quite clear that I’m a patronizing schmuck. What’s so amazing about balsamic vinegar in a Blackpool supermarket? But that’s the thing. In the nineties – less than twenty years ago – everything was amazing about this. I left that Asda clutching my bottle of balsamic – and my fresh basil, and my glistening anchovies – feeling like the country in which I lived was suddenly a better place. And it was suddenly a better place because a supermarket had decided to stock the things I wanted to eat.

Why had this happened? Because food media in Britain, as elsewhere around the world, had exploded.

A SHORT HISTORY OF A FOOD REVOLUTION

Just as we have to acknowledge the part that the supermarkets have played in revolutionizing the way we eat, so we also have to swallow hard and accept that the key people responsible for changing the way we eat in Britain are those renowned gourmands Margaret Thatcher and Rupert Murdoch.

I’ll say that again: Margaret Thatcher and Rupert Murdoch. Or, to give them their full job descriptions, arguably Britain’s most divisive post-war Prime Minister, and a media mogul now generally regarded as having been at the head of a company whose employees routinely engaged in phone hacking.

Let’s go back a bit. Whenever you hear Britain’s Dordogne-loving middle classes engage in eye-rolling about the state of food culture in their own country and extolling the virtues and marvels of France, where every small town and village supports a perfect restaurant, and where they do not object to spending reasonable sums of money on food, and a family bonding experience involves slaughtering a whole pig and butchering it down so that everything other than the oink can be eaten, it is worth reminding them of this: during the Second World War the French quickly decided the game was up, laid down their arms and got on with their lives. Or lunch, as they called it.

When that great historian and social commentator Bart Simpson described the French as ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’ he was obviously being shamelessly provocative.

On the other hand, as with all great gags, there was more than a grain of truth in it. The French do eat an awful lot of cheese. Witness General de Gaulle’s great gastronomic boast, disguised as despair, about the impossibility of successfully ruling a country that has ‘246 different kinds of cheese’. And, well, they did actually surrender. Quite a lot.

Britain, meanwhile, locked in a war of national survival, industrialized its food-production system and introduced rationing on a vast scale. (And yes, of course, there was also some rationing in France during the twentieth century, but nothing like on the scale of that in Britain.) It is hard to overstate the damage that this war did to Britain’s food culture. A whole generation forgot how to cook. Likewise, a genuine fight for survival, combined with an ingrained Puritanism which regarded the spending of anything more than necessary on food as plain wrong, made completely redundant any sort of interest in food beyond its importance for basic nutrition.

There were, of course, torch-bearers in post-war Britain who fought the good fight. Raymond Postgate launched The Good Food Guide in 1951, identifying the few places worth eating in by soliciting reviews from diners around the country; it was an early example of the kind of crowdsourcing the web would make de rigueur half a century later. A few chefs and restaurateurs – George Perry-Smith at the Hole in the Wall in Bath, for example, Joyce Molyneux at the Carved Angel in Dartmouth, or Brian Sack and Francis Coulson at Sharrow Bay in the Lake District – worked hard to introduce a select band of people to a better way of eating. But it was a minority sport for what was regarded as a decadent, over-indulged minority. Hell, in the early seventies most people had to live with the lights going off half the time. Against that a dish of salmon en croute with a sorrel sauce wasn’t merely a luxury; many people thought it was nothing less than an obscenity.

It took Margaret Thatcher’s second election victory in 1983, and the boom that followed, to solve that problem. Suddenly having money was OK. It was better than OK. In the famous words of Oliver Stone’s creation Gordon Gecko in the movie Wall Street, greed was good. So we spent money on houses and on cars and on shares, and on awful double-breasted suits with big shoulders and sleeves baggy enough so we could roll them up. Oh, the shame.

Eventually we were going to need something else to spend our money on, and food was the solution. It is no coincidence that some of the key restaurants of Britain’s first restaurant boom – Bibendum, Kensington Place, The River Café and Harvey’s, with a young chef called Marco Pierre White at the stove – all opened in 1987.

At the same time something else happened, something absolutely vital. Rupert Murdoch went to war with the print unions, to free himself from the labour restrictions that were stopping the introduction of new technology. Others had been involved in this struggle, most notably Eddie Shah, who finally launched the all-colour Today tabloid newspaper in 1986. But it was Murdoch’s decision later in the same year to lock out the unions and move production of his papers – the Sun, the News of the World, The Times and the Sunday Times – from Fleet Street to a wholly new computerized plant in Wapping which changed everything for the newspaper business. It made the industry cheaper. It made it quicker. And it made the newspapers bigger. Suddenly, printing multiple sections was not only doable. It was necessary. After all, the economy was booming and advertisers were gagging to buy space. There was only one problem: what the hell to put in that space?

The success of glossy magazines like ID and The Face, launched in the early eighties, alerted older national newspaper editors to something their younger magazine brethren had long known: there was this thing called lifestyle, and it sold copies. These newspaper supplements quickly filled up with pages of property, fashion and, of course, food. There is an assumption that there have been restaurant critics on Britain’s national newspapers for decades. It’s not so. Jonathan Meades was one of the first to be appointed, to a column on The Times, but not until 1986. Likewise, today the profession of restaurant PR is firmly established. However did we get by without them? Presumably restaurants used to just unlock the doors and wait for people to come and be fed.

The first public relations man solely dedicated to the dark arts of promoting restaurants and chefs was a former music business PR with a mop of blond hair, a neat line in patter and a taste for the hard stuff. Alan Crompton-Batt single-handedly invented the restaurant PR industry in 1987 when he began pushing a young Yorkshire-born cook with lots of black hair, piercing eyes and a talent for rock-star antics called Marco Pierre White. If Marco hadn’t existed it’s entirely possible those acres of newsprint crying out for content would have had to invent him. Indeed, it’s arguable they actually did. And quickly this spread from print to television. Where once food on TV was presented by essentially domestically orientated cooks and food writers like Fanny Craddock and Delia Smith, suddenly there was a bunch of intense-looking men in whites emerging from behind their restaurant ranges. Take Six Cooks, three series of which ran on the BBC in the mid- to late eighties, introduced the British public to a whole new set of combustible, distinctly uncosy personalities like Raymond Blanc, Nico Ladenis, Marco, and a very young Gary Rhodes.

Witness the birth of the celebrity chef. Britain’s food revolution was under way.

Britain’s supermarkets were brilliantly placed to cash in on it. A classically Thatcherite relaxation of the planning laws, combined with an abundance of capital on the markets, had enabled the biggest supermarkets to grow and prosper. They abandoned city centres where there was not enough space – many of the original self-service supermarkets were in disused cinemas, the only buildings big enough to accommodate them on the high street – for purpose-built retail sheds on the edges of residential areas. With this expansion came a greater responsiveness. If a big-name cook named a must-have ingredient on TV, the supermarkets could have it on the shelves within days.

Over the years Delia Smith has moved the market in liquid glucose, cranberries, and even something as basic as eggs. In more recent years supermarkets have rushed to stock ingredients as diverse as crab, rabbit, fresh herbs and wild mushrooms in response to recipes from the likes of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Gordon Ramsay and Nigella Lawson.

But the relationship between big-name chefs and the supermarkets goes much further. Many chefs like Rick Stein or Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall may well make a point about the imperative to support local food producers and suppliers. Rick Stein has included at the back of some of his books long lists of contact information for these suppliers. The implication – and sometimes the overt message – is that the spread of supermarkets is something that must be resisted. And yet, increasingly, it is the very same supermarkets which are responsible for making these books best-sellers. Publishers are unembarrassed about it. They will tell you this: unless a big, glossy cookbook from a big, glossy Celeb Chef has supermarket support, it simply will not do well. As to the supermarkets, they really don’t care what message is being handed out as long as it sells. In 2004 Felicity Lawrence’s Not on the Label, which took absolutely no prisoners in explaining the evils of supermarkets, began selling so well that Tesco simply couldn’t resist. They just had to start stocking it. And so the sales increased even further.

This is the reality. It is fashionable to slag off supermarkets (even as, sheepishly, we slope off to them to do our weekly shop). It seems no discussion of British food culture can ever be complete unless it includes a complete trashing of the awfulness of these food retail leviathans. And yet, if they did not exist, if they were not such sophisticated, complex, customer-focused businesses, the food revolution of which this whole discussion is a part simply wouldn’t have happened. They have become a vital part of our national life, and have benefited us hugely.

And all of this would be a glorious and marvellous thing. We should be moved to write prose poems about our supermarket sector, compose rousing anthems, erect monuments in its honour. We should, at the very least, be hugely thankful for what we have and its impact on the modern way of life. Were it not for one thing, which is …

3.
SUPERMARKETS ARE EVIL

The spring of 2011 in Britain was marked by an unusually warm, sunny spell of blue skies and soft breezes, and in the plum orchards of Kent the white blossoms bloomed full and heavy. It promised a solid harvest with yields up on the year before. There would, as there had so often been, be lots of domestic plums to meet demand. Britain is good at growing plums. Which is not really surprising. We have been growing them for a very long time. There is evidence of plums being used in cookery during the Roman occupation. By the medieval era they were so dominant that the word ‘plum’ had become a synonym for all sorts of dried fruits, the famed plum pudding served at the Victorian Christmas a mark of its lasting popularity.

Certainly when the technologists for the major supermarkets began talking to plum farmer Peter Kedge early in 2011, he was able to reassure them that he would have lots and lots of fruit for them to buy, punnet after punnet of Marjorie’s Seedling, Reeves and Victoria, as much as 260 tonnes. The technologists monitor the levels of produce supply, to ensure the big multiples can keep their shelves stocked. ‘The message I was getting back from the supermarkets was that they could take everything we would grow,’ says Kedge, who has been a farmer of apples and plums since 1988, when he joined his wife’s family business. ‘Mind you,’ he says with a weary air, ‘they always say that.’ Even so, early in 2011 Kedge had no reason to think the harvest would be anything other than a roaring success.

And it might have been were it not for an 83-year-old woman, who was admitted to hospital in the north-west German state of Lower Saxony on 15 May, suffering from bloody diarrhoea. On Saturday 21 May she died, becoming the first of fifty people across Europe – more than forty of them in Germany – to lose their lives to a virulent strain of shiga toxin-producing E. Coli. It’s a complicated name for a vicious bug that shreds your kidneys and turns your blood poisonous. As well as the fifty deaths there would be 4,000 other serious cases across Europe, an outbreak that initiated the scientific version of a manhunt for a serial killer. Like all proper detective stories the search came complete with blind alleys, false leads and undeserving suspects. Prime among the innocent were cucumbers from Spain which, on 26 May, were fingered as the cause by German health officials. The next day a Europe-wide alert was issued calling for the withdrawal from sale of all organic Spanish cucumbers. Shortly afterwards the Robert Koch Institute, the German state body with responsibility for disease control and prevention, issued guidance warning against the consumption of not just cucumbers but also raw tomatoes and lettuce. It was a bad month for salad.

The consumer response was all but instantaneous. Even in Britain, where nobody had died, and where the only people who had contracted the illness had visited Germany, sales of cucumbers simply halted, regardless of where they had come from. Health officials in Britain tried to reassure the public that the cucumbers on sale here were safe; even so a glut built up and tonnes had to be dumped. (So much so that on Friday 10 June I found myself interviewing chef Jamie Oliver live on BBC1’s The One Show about the best way to use up cucumbers. He demonstrated a killer twelve-hour pickling recipe.)

In time the German authorities would absolve the innocent cucumbers of blame. Attention would shift swiftly to a bean-sprout farm in Lower Saxony, and from there back down the food chain to a 15,000-kilogram consignment of seeds that had left the port of Damietta in Egypt almost two years earlier on 24 November 2009. But by then the damage had been done. German consumers hadn’t simply turned against cucumbers or even just salad vegetables in general. They had pretty much started boycotting all produce from Spain. What had begun with the death of one octogenarian German lady would, by the middle of that summer, have become a full-blown political and economic crisis, with the Spanish authorities estimating that it had cost Spain’s agriculture sector over a quarter of a billion dollars.

And that’s where it became a problem for Peter Kedge.

Because among the produce Spanish farmers could no longer sell to the Germans were plums. An enormous number of cricket-ball-sized, blemish-free, sun-ripened plums. For the Spanish farmers this was, as it happened, not much of a problem. In Britain farmers generally don’t get paid in full for their produce until the supermarkets take delivery, a major issue we will come to later. In Spain, however, the agents, who act as middlemen, pay for the plums before they’re harvested, and then profit when they finally sell on. In Spain there was now a major glut of plums which the agents had to find some way to sell, in a manner which might literally cut their losses. What they needed were customers, and in the British supermarkets that was exactly what they found.

‘It was just as we were about to harvest,’ Peter Kedge says. ‘All of a sudden we got a message from our agents telling us the supermarkets we normally supply had decided to bring in foreign plums.’ It didn’t matter that the orchards of Kent were bulging with the things, that Britain has an ancient and venerable plum-growing history, or that for years a debate had been growing around the importance of sourcing local produce where possible to cut down on food miles. The supermarkets were going to follow the money. British growers estimated that they had to sell each punnet of plums to the supermarkets at 65p to break even. Spanish agents were offering their plums at 45p a punnet, simply to get them moving. ‘We couldn’t pick and pack our plums for that money.’

And so Kedge did the one thing which to him made any economic sense. ‘We decided not to pick them all, to just leave a significant amount to rot in the orchards.’ Dozens of tonnes of perfect British plums fell from the trees and decayed where they lay, until the air in the orchards was heavy with the boozy smell of rotting fruit and they buzzed with the sound of happy fruit flies. ‘It’s hard to describe what it’s like watching your harvest literally go to waste,’ Kedge said. ‘It’s horrible. There’s nothing worse.’

Peter Kedge’s family originally planted fifty acres of plum orchards back in 1999. Over the years, as supermarkets’ buying policies had bitten hard, that had been reduced to thirty-five acres, as trees were ‘grubbed out’. In the wake of the disaster of 2011 the farmer once again made plans to grub out trees – to destroy the capacity of his orchards. It was, according to the National Farmers Union (NFU), a story repeated across Britain: tonne after tonne of perfect plums left to rot, prime trees cut down, orchards emptied.

This is one of the complications of the fruit-growing business. If you are in arable crops – wheat or barley or maize or rapeseed – you can follow the ups and downs of supply and demand, changing your crop from one year to the next depending upon who wants what. Fruit farmers can’t do that. ‘Planting a plum tree is a major investment,’ Kedge says. ‘It takes about six years from initial planting to recoup the investment. And after that you might have another ten years in which to make money.’ The killing of trees simply ends that story. A little bit more of Britain’s ability to feed itself also dies.

The brutal, clear-eyed, wake up and smell the prime, Grade A, dark roast Taste the Extra Special Finest Difference coffee is: this is just business. This is what supermarkets do. Complaining about a supermarket chasing the cheapest price is like wandering into a brothel and complaining about all the shagging going on in there. And it’s true, up to a point. These corporate behemoths have shareholders to think about and profits to make. In the short term that is exactly what they do, and they do it extraordinarily well. Tesco made £1.9 billion in the first six months of 2011, up 12.1 per cent on the previous year. Sainsbury’s made £395 million, up 6.6 per cent. Asda made £803 million, and that was a drop of over 10 per cent. But there is a bigger, dirtier picture. The business of food supply is full of consequences, and some of them are very serious indeed.

Consider the dodo. A butcher trading in prime dodo meat – such lovely animals, all free-range, look at the drumsticks on that – would have been laughing all the way to the bank in 1620. He would have had access to all the dodo he could possibly want. By 1681, however, when the last dodo was killed by the last scurvy-ridden Dutch sailor to feed himself, it might not have looked like such a smart business model. Right now it feels like the big supermarkets are in the dodo extinction business.

The buyers drive such hard bargains, under such extraordinarily unfair terms, that British farming is being decimated. (And the way is being opened to fraud. The scandal around horsemeat being found in processed food products labelled as beef, which first broke across Britain and then Europe in January of 2013, was attributed by many to pressures on price. With beef at an all time high of £2.75 a kilo deadweight on the international markets and horsemeat at around £1.85, the substitution by unscrupulous traders made economic sense in the face of profit margins cut to the bone by supermarket buyers.) In the summer of 2011 food journalist Alex Renton tried to get farmers to talk, on the record, about their dealings with the supermarkets. Most of them refused. They demanded anonymity. They insisted upon off-the-record briefings. Whilst they are obviously lawful companies, the supermarkets did come across less as food retailers and more like mafias, hell-bent on extortion. Anybody who has done business with them might not think the comparison over-blown: the supermarkets would insist upon legally binding contracts that would tie producers into supplying them, but without a specified price. The supermarkets could, with little or no warning, simply reject a consignment of produce, insisting it didn’t hit quality thresholds. The producers would be required to carry the cost of any two-for-one and discounting offers. They would have to get their harvests packaged at plants designated by the supermarkets, often at twice the price it might cost to get the job done independently. (In June 2011 Peter Kendall, chairman of the NFU, told a parliamentary committee that some of these packers and processors pay a portion of the premium extracted from the farmers to the very supermarkets who had enforced the extra charge, as a kind of kickback.)

Most of all there is the issue of price. The best-known sector of British farming to suffer is dairy. Not long ago I spent a day working on a dairy farm in Cornwall. It’s not easy. I got up at four o’clock in the morning, which surely must be regarded as cruel and unusual punishment in itself. I did so, merely so I could stand in a cow shed and dodge plumes of steaming shite being fired out of big animals under pressure. A lot of the job seems to involve shit – dodging it, hosing it off, scraping it up. I weaved my way around the stamping, clanking hooves to wipe down teats with disinfectant. I felt the suck and pull of the automated milking system as the rubber plugs went on. I washed floors, scraped yards, piled hay, interacted with more shit, and then gave thanks to the gods that my day job mostly involves sitting at tables, either eating or writing about what I’ve eaten or feeling smug about what I’ve written about what I’ve eaten while wondering what I’ll eat next.

For all this – the brutal, grinding hard labour of milk production – the supermarkets were at that point willing to pay, through their intermediaries, the princely sum of 25p a litre. The cost of producing milk is around 27p a litre. It’s not a brilliant business model, is it? It’s not even on nodding terms with a brilliant business model. The majority of dairy farmers had, courtesy of supermarket buying policies, been sentenced to make a loss on every litre of milk they sold. The farmer who let me onto his farm as the worst work-experience student in world history said he hoped they might make enough to keep their heads above water by renting out holiday accommodation or selling the calves from their herd for beef. In short, the only way he might make money as a producer of milk was not by producing milk at all, but from other things.

Having spent that day working on a traditional dairy farm, to me it was no surprise at all that one dairy farmer was leaving the industry every week, simply because they couldn’t make it pay. Obviously, a lot of farmers do what they do because they love it. There are easier ways to make money, most of which don’t involve close proximity to animal faeces. But eventually even that sort of loving relationship can get dysfunctional, especially when it occurs to you that you’re not making money any more. Britain, a country full of green grassy fields, a place that could hardly have been more expertly engineered for grazing cows and producing milk, was losing its capacity to do so. At the peak of milk production in Britain, in 2001, there were, according to DairyCo, which represents British dairy farmers, 2.25 million cows producing five billion litres of milk a year, but their numbers were dwindling, down to 1.8 million cows in 2012. We had always been self-sufficient in liquid milk and yet by 2010 we were finally having to import the stuff from elsewhere to top up our own supply.

It’s the same story in a branch of farming which is close to my animal-fat-drenched heart: pigs. It’s close to my heart because I very much like eating them. A couple of years ago, pig farmers took out full-page newspaper adverts announcing that they were being paid less by the supermarkets than the cost of production for their animals. As a result, like dairy farmers, pig farmers were simply giving up. Jamie Oliver dedicated a whole hour of (distinctly unsexy) television to the problem. It had a snappy title, Save Our Bacon, but came down to sixty minutes of stolid, grumpy, whingeing farmers. And who wants to watch that? In any case the supermarkets really didn’t regard this as such a huge problem because they could buy in from elsewhere – Denmark, for example, or the Netherlands – where animal welfare standards are much lower. In this country it’s illegal to put sows in tightly confined stalls, which make it impossible for them to move around while they wean their litters. On the continent the practices continue. BPEX, the body which represents British pig producers, estimates that two-thirds of the imported pork and pork products consumed in Britain are produced in conditions that would be illegal in this country.

And yet, because of the power of the supermarkets, the industry seems incapable of mounting anything other than the most feeble of fightbacks. In the autumn of 2011 I was approached by BPEX to see if I would front a campaign for them. They wanted consumers to sign up to take a pledge, committing themselves only to buying pork which carried the British red tractor label. If you stick to that simple rule then you know that the meat you are eating has been raised under higher welfare standards. It sounded like a good campaign. After all, I had been arguing for exactly this for a while. Plus the campaign was on behalf of a trade body rather than a specific producer, so it wasn’t a product endorsement. We agreed a fee. We discussed what they wanted me to do: photo calls, a series of media interviews, lending my name and image to the campaign. All fine and dandy. It’s rather agreeable to be paid to say what you have already been saying for free.

There was just one thing. Obviously, getting consumers to buy the right kind of pork is important. It’s vital. But I had to be able to say during the interviews that the supermarkets also had a massive responsibility to pay British pork producers a viable price for their meat, and to support British producers so that they stopped going out of business. So that, in turn, the supermarkets didn’t have an excuse to import the stuff from animals tortured on the continent.

The PR company started wringing their hands. ‘You are right,’ they said, in response to my email, ‘supermarkets are part of the issue because the price paid to farmers is not reflective of the conditions in which farmers work and the cost of raising pigs in the UK versus abroad because of the higher welfare standards. However, BPEX is working with the supermarkets to lobby on the issues and we can’t be seen to rock the boat. Therefore we are utilizing customers to create demand.’ Great. Put it all back on the punters and let the supermarkets off the hook.

I said it was a deal breaker. I said that I had to be able to talk about the supermarkets. The PR people went silent for twenty-four hours and then announced that they had, after much thought, decided to go with a different person altogether. Funny that.

Witness the power of the supermarkets.

Witness it in numbers. By the mid-nineties, if you added up everything Britain grew and exported – British seafood and beef have always been big sellers, for example – against everything the country imported, it was over 70 per cent self-sufficient in food. By 2011 British self-sufficiency had dropped, according to figures from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), to around 58 per cent and there were many in the food policy world who believed that it was much lower than that; that we were slipping inexorably towards a point where we could supply barely 50 per cent of our food needs. And all because the damned evil supermarkets had undermined the British agricultural base.

What’s more, they had been given British government encouragement to do so. In a Defra paper published in December 2006, the government’s position on food security was articulated thus: ‘Poverty and subsistence agriculture are root causes of national food insecurity. National food security is hugely more relevant for developing countries than the rich countries of Western Europe.’ In short, all that really mattered was free trade, and access to foodstuffs from wherever they might be available across our fecund globe.

In academic food policy circles, within universities and institutes, this paper was nicknamed the ‘Leave it to Tesco’ report. Food security wasn’t an issue for the rich, industrialized nations. We had big fat wallets. We could always buy our way out of trouble. So stop whining and whingeing, and crack open another Chicken Jalfrezi ready meal made with hen from Brazil, tomatoes from Morocco and palm oil from some poor benighted orang-utan’s last remaining bit of virgin forest. And how about an apple pie to finish, made with pristine apples from China, each individually picked and wrapped by a Chinese peasant with their eyes on the main prize of a Western-style industrialized, urban lifestyle?

Then 2008 happened. It happened like one of those awful slow-motion car crashes, with screeching tyres and the smell of burning brakes and the knowledge even as you watched it that nothing would ever be quite the same again. The causes were obvious and predictable, but still it took people by surprise: a bad harvest in Australia, a cyclone in the Bay of Bengal, a set of bizarre US government policies which then saw 20 per cent of the perfectly edible corn harvest being directed towards the manufacture of bioethanol (a policy which was meant to be impeccably green, but really wasn’t), those damn Chinese peasants getting a taste for beef that required seven kilos of grain for every kilo of meat produced, a hike in oil prices which, in turn, made petrochemical-based fertilizers much more expensive, the rise and rise of commodity trading. And then there was a failure to keep reserves of basic foodstuffs. Where once a nation might have four months of wheat backed up, in our just-in-time culture, meaning it is delivered only when needed, reserves have fallen to only a matter of a few days. All of these factors we will come back to in detail. What matters is the impact they had on food prices: they went up.

And up.

Between 2006 and 2008 the price of rice rose 217 per cent. Wheat went up by 136 per cent, corn by 125 per cent and soya beans by 107 per cent. Countries like Brazil, Thailand and India temporarily banned the export of certain varieties of rice. There were food riots all over the world, including in Bangladesh, Cameroon and Ivory Coast – and those are only the countries in the first part of the alphabet where there was civil unrest. In Mozambique people were killed in riots over the cost of food. Food prices would later be blamed for a second wave of civil unrest that started in Tunisia on 18 December 2010 and soon spread across the region in what was to become known as the Arab Spring. While events like the downfall of Colonel Gaddafi in Libya, the end of Hosni Mubarak’s thirty-year reign in Egypt, and the strife in Yemen and the civil war in Syria were clearly caused by a multitude of different competing pressures, there is a growing body of opinion that the one thing which united them was societal outrage over food prices.

Countries across the Middle East and North Africa had long suffered from low agricultural productivity and a huge reliance on imports, with governments attempting to placate their populace through endless unsustainable subsidies. The food price rises of 2007–8 simply pushed the situation over the edge. As David Rosenberg, a Senior Fellow on Economic Issues at the GLORIA Center, a foreign affairs think-tank based in Jerusalem, put it in a paper on the Arab Spring, ‘virtually all the countries of the region are contending with a food crisis of one kind or another’. It was a crisis so deep and intense and severe that it caused civil wars and overthrew governments.

And in Britain in 2008? That rich, Westernized, mine’s-a-prawn-ring-from-Iceland-for-£5.99-thank-you-very-much Britain? We felt it. We felt it like footballers feel a blown Achilles tendon. By August 2008 food price inflation was running at nearly 14 per cent. The cost of fat and oil had risen by 29 per cent, of meat by 16.3 per cent. This had begun to hurt. Finally the government began to wake up. New reports on food security were being published, declaring the challenges posed by a rising global population – expected to reach nine billion by 2050 – and by climate change potentially taking once productive slabs of land out of use. Suddenly Defra, a ministry which actually had the word ‘Food’ in its title, seemed to think that food production was important.

There was one issue, however, that they didn’t want to deal with: the bastard supermarkets. They didn’t appear anywhere in the equation. For years pressure groups and farmers’ representatives had been campaigning for some sort of ombudsman with real powers who could intervene in the relationship between the supermarkets and the producers to ensure a fair price was achieved, so that plum farmers didn’t grub up their trees. For years successive governments dragged their feet. The market was the thing. The market would see us right. A code of conduct was introduced, and yet there was no one to oversee it. In the run-up to the 2010 General Election the Liberal Democrats suddenly announced a policy for a grocery ombudsman, if they should win the vote. In what was looking like an increasingly close race, both Labour and the Conservatives followed suit, announcing various plans for a new body which would have some ill-defined powers.

After the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition came to power in May 2010, nothing happened. And then a lot more of nothing happened. The agriculture ministers in Defra made noises, said there would be a paper proposing a new ombudsman, just as soon as they had cleaned the oven and sorted through their sock drawer, or whatever else it is government departments do when they are stalling for time. In February 2011 I was invited to sit on a panel at the NFU’s annual conference, alongside Jim Paice MP, himself a one-time farmer and now agriculture minister. Asked to make some opening comments to the 750-strong audience, I pointed out that we were still waiting for news of a supermarket ombudsman, that the way things were going the bill wouldn’t be before Parliament for at least a year, which would mean it would be at least two or three years before any such office would be established.

Paice attacked me. He shouted me down like I was a stupid schoolboy, said the bill would be along within a few weeks, that frankly I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. I was baffled. I hadn’t made it up: I had been talking to reporters on Farmers Weekly. I had been having off-the-record discussions with officials within the NFU who liaised with Parliament. Now it appeared I had got it wrong. It was a humiliating experience.

I hadn’t got it wrong. The first paper proposing a new ombudsman did not appear until late autumn of that year, and even then it was roundly attacked by everybody in the farming world for being nowhere near robust enough. As I prepared to address the NFU conference again in February 2012 there was still no news of when the bill would come before Parliament. And if the bill still hadn’t come before the House there was no way an ombudsman to oversee the supermarkets and make sure they didn’t screw the farmers could be established before 2013 at the very earliest. The supermarkets were free to carry on destroying the dairy, pig and plum industries. They were free to carry on undermining the agricultural base. They were free to carry on making Britain less and less self-sufficient.

Result!

A dull weekday afternoon, and I am running for my life. This is what I tell myself as my feet thud, like slimy, dead fish, on the treadmill. I am in the gym running to stay alive; or, more to the point, so that I can carry on living in a way which makes me happy. Lunch makes me happy. So does dinner. Being hugely overweight does not. As a result, three, four or sometimes even five times a week I am on the treadmill in my local gym beating out the miles. Or I’m in a brightly lit, reconditioned railway arch, being ordered to do strenuous things by an irritatingly cheerful personal trainer called Jonny. I pay to experience this pain. But then I am motivated. For good or ill, some of my working life now takes place in front of television cameras. I do not want to have to watch these appearances from behind a cushion, or feel the stab of childish hurt when somebody tweets about my ‘generous moobs’. As they have.

Run, fat boy, run.

There is one way of telling this tale which positions me less as culprit than as victim. In this version of the story it is the supermarkets, with their endless largesse, which have made me fat. It’s all their fault for being stocked with so much irresistible fat and sugar and general starchy carbs. In my case it’s simply not true. I have always been fat. I was a fat little boy and a fat adolescent and a fat twenty-something. In my house, when I was growing up, diets – as against diet – were a regular feature. There was one which required the eating of nine eggs a day and not much else. It made my breath smell of the entire world’s farts. I was 8 years old. There was another which applied units to foodstuffs and demanded endless counting and calculation so you didn’t exceed a daily total. I dieted in my teens and again in my twenties and thirties. Becoming a restaurant critic was not a turning point in my life. It was simply a coming together of greed and earning potential. I had always spent my own money in restaurants. I had always read restaurant reviews. Now I could write them too.

This did have consequences, most of them measurable in inches. A few years ago I wrote a book about the growth of the global luxury restaurant industry. I travelled the world, telling the stories of seven great cities – Las Vegas, Moscow, Dubai, Tokyo, and so on – through their gastro palaces. In the last chapter, as my doubts about the whole business of big-ticket dining began to grow, I went to Paris to experience the high-end version of Morgan Spurlock’s film Supersize Me. In this, Spurlock ate at McDonald’s every day for a month, and if asked whether he wished to supersize his meal, he had to say yes. Doctors monitored his progress and at the end he had the fatty liver of a foie gras goose.

In the luxury version I went to Paris and ate in a Michelin three-star restaurant every day for a week; if they offered me the tasting menu I had to say yes.

I too received the once-over from a doctor. Although I managed not to put on any weight – I tended to eat just the fancy restaurant meal and nothing else each day – it didn’t much matter. My weight was already out of control. My waist was north of forty-four inches much as Edinburgh is north of Madrid. My chest was beyond fifty-two inches and I was well over twenty stone. I had avoided checking my weight. I didn’t want to know. Now, courtesy of the experiment, I knew. I was so large I had my own gravitational pull; planets were slipping out of alignment because of me. Something had to be done. I had always worked out, but only a couple of times a week; now I went five or six times a week. I dropped a lot of the carbohydrate from my diet and the weight did begin to come off. A woman working at the gym told me one day that they had nicknamed me ‘Candle Man’ because I was melting. Eventually I would shift nearly four stone. Hurrah for me.

The change didn’t go unnoticed. One of my editors at the Observer saw there was less of me and, convinced that all personal experiences could be processed into good copy, asked me to write about my gym habit and what had motivated it. I resisted. She asked again. I still said no. I hate self-congratulatory diet pieces. After all, nobody had forced me to eat the pork belly–langoustine combo. Or the truffled pommes purées. Or the millefeuilles of chestnuts and Chantilly cream. I did it all to myself. I was my own special creation. Plus there was always the risk that I wouldn’t keep the weight off. I had done the job, but for how long exactly? Inside this newly thinner man was that old fat bloke desperate to get out again. (A reasonable fear: some, though by no means all, has indeed crept back on.) But my editor was persistent and wore me down. I finally agreed to write the article on one condition: that she hire the most expensive photographer she could afford, so that I would have a killer set of pictures to look back on when my body had degenerated into a garish flesh atrocity of the sort Francis Bacon liked to paint. Gazing at those pictures – me, in the gym, lifting weights – I could say, ‘There was a moment, perhaps just an afternoon, when I looked OK.’ I posed for those pictures only for me. The fact that they were published in a national newspaper with a circulation of hundreds of thousands was neither here nor there.

After the article appeared I was told by a number of my female friends that my behaviour was curiously feminized; that by having focused so tightly on food and body image in this way I was heading more into the chromosomal column marked xx than xy. I didn’t take offence. For all the big hair and the beard and the moustache, I accept I am indeed a feminized male. My hands may be large but they are bizarrely smooth and soft. I always say I have the hands of a male-to-female transsexual, after the hormones have kicked in. My chest is so hairless I have been accused of waxing. I don’t. (I did once, but only for money; it was for a piece of journalism. It seriously bloody hurt.) I hate football. Actually, I have no interest in any sports. I like musicals. I work out to them. I prefer wine to beer and will nurse a glass of rosé without embarrassment. My wife once called me the gayest straight man in London. A very gay male friend of mine once called me a male lesbian. I said: a what? He said: ‘You’d make a great gay man if it wasn’t for the fact you’re so obviously into women.’ I wear all of this as a badge of honour. I can’t do bloke and I’m proud of the fact.

Still, I was bemused to hear that there might be anything about my relationship with food which was especially female. Because there is a particular kind of female response to food which, to me, has always looked at best exhausting and at worst completely dysfunctional; a desperate mixture of fear, guilt and shame for which I have neither time nor understanding. There is an industry to serve it. Put the words ‘healthy eating’ into amazon.com and you will get over 25,000 references. There are more than 170 books with the word ‘skinny’ in the title and 129 using that filthy four-letter word ‘thin’. There’s Cook Yourself Thin, Cook Yourself Thin, Faster and Soup Can Make You Thin. There’s The Skinny Rules, Naturally Thin: Unleash Your Skinnygirl and Free Yourself from a Lifetime of Dieting, not forgetting The French Don’t Diet Plan: 10 Simple Steps to Stay Thin for Life. There’s Hungry Girl to the Max!: The Ultimate Guilt-Free Cookbook. Pitch: ‘In Hungry Girl to the Max!, Lisa Lillien has created a book that is a must-have for anyone who craves insanely delicious food without the high-calorie price tag!’ Beware any book with exclamation marks in the title.

Over the years, of course, many of these books, and others like them, have been sold in supermarkets, alongside racks of magazines promising to show you how to ‘Slim Down in Just 24 hours’ (Women’s Fitness) ‘Eat, Drink and Still Shrink’ (Women’s Health) and ‘How to Spot a Healthy Canapé’ (Zest). It’s clear that for a certain type of woman the supermarket has become a one-stop shop, not merely for their groceries but also for desperate self-loathing. You can buy both the foods to make you hate yourself, and the holy texts through which, with enough commitment and devotion, you can atone for that sinful behaviour. Quite so: after all, supermarkets are built for convenience.

It all plays to a strongly held notion that the supermarket is part of a new-fangled modern way of living which, slowly but surely, is killing us. We are, it seems, the victims of a massively over-processed, fat-saturated, sugar-coated, super-sized, under-exercised food conspiracy. And this is where it gets very complicated indeed. Because there are many statistics you can deploy to show that modern life is not actually killing us at all. Indeed, you can prove it is doing precisely the opposite. It is making us live much, much longer very fast. Between 1991 and 2009 male life expectancy in the UK rose from 73.37 to 77.85 years. Female life expectancy rose from 78.86 to just over 82 years. Those are significant rises. Life expectancy in the US has risen by roughly similar amounts. At the same time, while the incidence of cancers in the UK has risen by a third since the seventies, the figure has actually been fairly stable since the late nineties, which is remarkable given that an increasingly ageing population should present more in the way of cancers. In the US the rates of a number of key cancers have been falling (especially bowel cancer, which has dropped from just over 63 cases per 100,000 men in 1995 to just over 48 per 100,000 men now.)

That, however, is not the full story, for there are other key indicators which matter here and they are around obesity and, even more importantly, the lifestyle-related incidence of Type 2 diabetes. There the story is bleak. Nobody publishes zappy self-help books about that; glossy magazines don’t have shouty, cheery cover-lines drawing you into stories on the subject. Between 1996 and 2012 the number of people in the UK with Type 2 diabetes rose from 1.4 million to 2.9 million. (In the US the picture is, if anything, worse. Between 1980 and 2008 the number of people with the disease rose from 5.6 million to 18.1 million.) Funnily enough, all those fretting, guilt-ridden young women with the money to buy copies of Soup Can Make You Thin and The Skinny Rules – and, according to the publishing industry, these books generally are aimed at those young women – are unlikely to be the ones developing Type 2 diabetes. For it is a disease both of age – the older the population the more diabetes there will be – and of poverty.

And it is where the most dire poverty is concerned that the supermarkets score the most badly. A few years ago I sat down with Heston Blumenthal of the Fat Duck to taste-test products from the supermarket value ranges, the very cheapest of the cheap, the lowest of the low. It was a truly humbling experience. As we studied the prices, all of them measured in pence rather than pounds, we swiftly concluded that whatever aesthetic considerations we might want to bring to bear – Did this stuff taste nice? Was it well made? – were irrelevant. Nobody bought these products because they liked them: they bought them because economic circumstance forced them to do so. And as the banking crisis of 2007 turned into a deep, lengthy recession, more and more people found themselves having to do the same. The big supermarkets were quickly reporting that, while the sales of their premium ranges were dropping, sales of their own-brand budget ranges were rising by over 40 per cent.

So what do you get for your money? Not an awful lot. For a TV investigation I did a forensic job on the cheapest supermarket products. What would you say to a beef pie that was only 18 per cent beef, and a few more per cent ‘beef connective tissue’ – or gristle, collagen and fat, as it’s more commonly known? How about a pork sausage that’s just 40 per cent pork, with a slab of pig skin chucked in for bulk? Or an apple pie with so little apple – a mere 14 per cent – that you can’t help but wonder whether it really deserves the name? I suspect, like me, you would say ‘No thanks’ and pull a ‘What do you take me for?’ face. Then again, I have a choice. I don’t have to buy cheese slices with half the levels of calcium of the more expensive variety or chicken breasts that have been bulked up with 40 per cent water to give you the impression you are getting more for less. The people who are buying these products generally don’t have that choice. They have to take what the supermarkets deign to give them. Which raises the question: is what the supermarkets give them good enough?

Only the most callous could argue that it is. Across the world the big supermarkets have been given all but unfettered access to the massive food retail market. But with that unfettered access must come responsibilities – and surely that should include improving the quality of the food sold to the very poorest in society? We can fight long and hard about what the word ‘quality’ means. The supermarkets will argue that their budget ranges aren’t in any way harmful and point out – rightly – that in recent years great efforts have been made to reduce the levels of salt and sugar in very cheap bread. The age of rickets is over. But that still leaves them selling products that contain animal products that the vast majority of us would actually throw away rather than cook with. Pig skin is apparently quite high in protein, but would you really choose to have it minced up and put in your sausages simply because it’s cheap?

As part of the TV show I worked on, I asked food technologist David Harrison to re-engineer some standard value-range products. I didn’t want him to make a gourmet beef pie. That would be easy. Just throw money and some quality sirloin at the problem. I wanted Harrison to make a better pie, keeping within reasonable financial parameters. He started by analysing all the cheapest pies on the market and found that, on average, they had just 18 per cent beef plus a few more percentage points of that connective tissue. (It can go much lower: I came across a minced beef and onion pie that declared a beef content on the label of just 7 per cent.) Harrison upgraded our generic recipe to produce one that had no connective tissue and 25 per cent beef. The extra cost, to increase the meat content by 38 per cent? A penny a pie. To remove the pig skin from a budget pork sausage and lift the meat content from 40 per cent to 54 per cent cost 0.7p per sausage. To increase the amount of apple in an apple pie by more than 40 per cent cost 0.8p. As the cost of raw ingredients is only a quarter of the finished product’s retail price, these really are tiny amounts. All of these improvements, even represented as double-digit percentages, may look marginal, but the differences in the finished product were discernible. We did a series of blind taste tests and the overwhelming majority of people identified our new improved products and preferred them. And if that sounds like banal advertising patter, so be it.

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 malnourishment. 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.

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.

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