Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives (8 page)

Worldwide food shortages during the First World War meant there were huge profits to be made from grain, and even marginal farmland
in America was ploughed up in order to increase production. American farmers grew rich, but slowly, surely, the land was being exhausted. Stripped of its natural vegetation and continuously exploited year after year, the topsoil was being sucked dry of humus and losing its capacity to retain moisture. Then, during the 1930s, the worst possible thing happened: the rains failed. Eight years of drought turned the Great Plains into a desert. Without any plant fibres to hold it down, the topsoil simply blew away in a series of devastating dust storms known as ‘black blizzards’. Four hundred thousand farmers – the ‘Okies’ of John Steinbeck’s
Grapes of Wrath
– lost everything, and were forced to migrate west in search of work.

The Dust Bowl was a massive body blow to the brave new world of commercial farming. Franklin D. Roosevelt responded by setting up the US Soil Conservation Service in 1935, the first such body in the world. The disaster had repercussions across the Atlantic too. It inspired Lady Eve Balfour, one of the first women to graduate from agricultural college, to set up the first comparative study of organic and chemical-based farming methods on her farm at Haughley, Suffolk, in 1939. She ran two mixed farms side by side, one as a closed organic system, and the other using chemical inputs. The experiment confirmed what Justus von Liebig had suspected a century earlier. Balfour found that while the organic farm developed a robust cycle in which soil nutrients peaked naturally during the growing season, the fertilised farm developed a dependency on its chemical ‘fix’, in what she described as ‘a manner suggestive of drug addiction’.
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Not only did the organic farm maintain nutrient levels as high as those of the fertilised one, but, according to Balfour, the cows that grazed it were ‘noticeably more contented’ than their chemically dosed-up counterparts, producing 15 per cent more milk. Balfour’s account of her findings, published as
The Living Soil
in 1943, remains a classic text of the organic movement, and she went on to co-found the Soil Association three years after its publication.

Soil fertility is not the only perennial source of vexation to farmers. Another is pests. For millennia, farmers have tried everything to control them. The Chinese harnessed ant power in the battle against aphids; the Romans used sulphur to beat the
bestiolae
. Such methods worked to a degree, but eventually the bugs always seemed to get the upper hand. Until, that is, the discovery just before the Second World War of a chemical capable of delivering insect Armageddon: dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, or DDT. The chemical was first manufactured as early as 1873, but its spectacular pesticidal qualities were only discovered in 1939 when the Swiss scientist Paul Hermann Muller had the idea of using it to control insect-borne diseases such as malaria; a piece of work that earned him the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine. Throughout the war, DDT was used by Allied troops to kill mosquitoes and nits. It was only later that people would think of using it on crops.

On the eve of war, farming in Britain remained essentially its old nineteenth-century self. With cheap food imports available from overseas, British farmers had coasted along for years, and the nation’s half-million farms were mostly of the small-scale ‘Old McDonald’ variety, with a few cows, pigs and chickens and some arable land. The nearest most came to progress was a carthorse; there were still 640,000 working the land in 1939, as opposed to just 100,000 tractors.
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But when German U-boats cut off Atlantic supply lines, the inadequacies of British farming were made all too apparent. The country suffered its worst food shortages in more than a century. The famous ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign, in which patches of land as unlikely as Kensington Gardens went under the plough, got the nation through the crisis, but after the war, the Attlee government was determined that Britain should never be as vulnerable again. The 1947 Agriculture Act was the result: a licence to slash, dump and spray in the name of increased productivity.

The last great transformation of the British countryside now took place, as the land was cleared of obstacles, enriched with fertilisers and doused in DDT in a bid to make the nation self-sufficient in food. In the 50 years after the war, Britain lost an estimated 190,000 miles of
hedgerow, 97 per cent of its flower meadows and 60 per cent of its ancient woodlands.
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But dramatic though the changes were, they were only half the story. The rest became apparent in 1962 with the publication of
Silent Spring
, an explosive investigation into the effects of DDT by the American biologist Rachel Carson. Carson showed that by indiscriminately killing off virtually all insect life, DDT had a devastating effect not only on its intended victims, but on the rest of the food chain too, passing directly into birds and eventually into humans, causing cancers and other diseases. Carson argued that in the future, the spring would be silent, because there would be no birds left to sing.

The book brought the predictable howls of protest from the chemical lobby, led by the US biochemical company Monsanto, which published a pamphlet entitled
The Desolate Year
, rubbishing
Silent Spring
and describing the devastation that would be caused if pesticides were
not
used. However, Carson’s evidence was enough to persuade the American and European governments to ban the use of DDT on crops – which, had this been Hollywood, should have been the end of the story. Instead, it was just the beginning. Far from waning, the use of indiscriminate pesticides, including DDT, has increased in the developing world, with all the predictable side effects. According to the World Health Organisation, between one and five million pesticide poisonings take place every year, leading to 20,000 deaths, virtually all in developing countries.
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For 40 years after the war, British consumers enjoyed ever-cheaper food, blissfully unaware of the crises brewing in the farming industry. Tough times make for tough attitudes, and for a nation recovering from austerity, the prospect of cheap food was too attractive to quibble about how it was produced. Battery farming was introduced with barely a murmur of public protest; the fact that animals were being pumped full of hormones and antibiotics – and fed the ground-up remains of their fellows – went unnoticed. British farming had entered its post-industrial, invisible phase.

For a while, as yields rose and prices fell, everything in the garden seemed rosy. But then it was payback time. From Edwina Currie’s salmonella-infected eggs in 1988, to BSE in 1992 and the foot and mouth epidemic in 2001, British farming was hit by a series of scandals and plagues of truly biblical proportions. The crises couldn’t have come at a worse time for British farmers, already struggling to survive in the global market, but the Policy Commission on the Future of Food and Farming, chaired by Sir Donald Curry in 2001, wasn’t very sympathetic. The Commission delivered a damning verdict on the state of British farming, calling it ‘dysfunctional’ and ‘unsustainable’, and blaming subsidies from the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) for masking its inefficiencies. The CAP should be abolished, the report concluded, and farmers left to sink or swim in the global market. Farmers would have to adapt: become entrepreneurs, salesmen, land managers. Not exactly the skills your typical dairyman or herdsman went into the business for 40 years ago – which is roughly when most of them did. The average age of a British farmer today is 59.

These days, few people outside France have much good to say about the CAP. Set up in 1960 in the aftermath of postwar recovery, it was concerned primarily with ensuring food security in Europe. But the policy was soon attracting critics. Subsidies encouraged farmers to overproduce, creating the notorious ‘wine lakes’ and ‘butter mountains’ of the 1970s. By 1975, the Common Market had half a million tonnes of unshiftable butter on its hands: enough, as the Monster Raving Loony Party pointed out, to make a ski slope for Eddie the Eagle.
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There was a more sinister side to the surpluses too: export subsidies were used to encourage farmers to ‘dump’ surplus food on developing nations at cut-price rates, so putting their competitors out of business. Subsequent decades saw various attempts to reduce food surpluses in Europe: limits on production were first introduced during the 1980s, and in the 1990s ‘set-aside’ payments were made to farmers to let their land lie fallow.

For all its labyrinthine muddle, the main effect of the CAP in Britain over the past two decades has been to disguise the fact that the government has lost interest in preserving food production in this country. That has left supermarkets free to engage in a cut-throat ‘race
to the bottom’, screwing farmers to the point of bankruptcy. In the 10 years to 2005, more than half the dairy farmers in Britain went out of business, and livestock producers are finding it increasingly uneconomic to farm here. Much of our meat now comes from Brazil, Argentina and Thailand, where lower welfare standards and cheap labour costs make it up to five times cheaper to produce.
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Unless something changes soon, there won’t be any livestock left in Britain – or any farmers either.

The question of how Europe should feed itself remains unclear. To keep local farmers going by subsidising them to produce mountains of food doesn’t make much sense. The trouble is, neither does simply abandoning food production to the global market. Apart from the obvious wastefulness of ‘food miles’ (and the oft-forgotten issue of food security), urban demand for cheap food is destroying the planet. While producer nations fiercely defend their right to exploit their natural resources, just as we did in the West, the scale of destruction involved in farming today is of an entirely new order. Modern agribusiness is all to do with short-term profit, and nothing to do with stewardship of the land. As the Amazonian rainforest goes up in smoke to make way for beef and soya, or the forests of Borneo (the last natural habitat of the orang-utan) are destroyed to create palm-oil plantations, our cheap food is costing us far more than money. An estimated half of the world’s species of anything you care to mention lives in tropical rainforest, including all the countless nameless things we haven’t discovered yet. Who is to say what obscure Amazonian toad or Bornean fungus might not possess a natural cure for cancer? It is not just native tribespeople and orang-utans we are destroying, but all the unknown things that live alongside them – all the unknown unknowns, as Donald Rumsfeld might say.
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Free trade may have a beautiful economic logic to it, but as history tells us, beautiful economic logic doesn’t necessarily make for a beautiful world. Rather the opposite, in fact. An estimated 1.7 million hectares of Amazonian rainforest are currently lost to farmland every year, and a staggering 20 million hectares of existing arable land to salination and soil erosion. Yet despite all that destruction, we aren’t managing to feed the world. During the second half of the twentieth
century, global food production increased by 145 per cent – the equivalent of 25 per cent extra per person worldwide – yet 850 million people face hunger every day.
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It doesn’t make much sense, but then very little about the modern food industry does.

If you look at Britain from the air, it seems inconceivable that we don’t produce most of our own food here. The landscape is overwhelmingly green; the cities tiny in comparison with the irregular patchwork of fields stretching from coast to coast. Seventy per cent of the nation consists of farmland – so if we’re not going to grow food in it any more, what exactly are we going to do with it? One answer, according to the Curry Report, is to make it somewhere nice for city-dwellers to spend their weekends:

In a small island, a rich and varied countryside is a precious resource for us all – including those who are not privileged to live there. An antidote to busy modern life. A place for Sunday walks; a chance to ‘recharge the batteries’ surrounded by nature.
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All well and good – except that, after years of being adapted to produce large quantities of food as cheaply and efficiently as possible, the British countryside doesn’t have a huge amount of ‘nature’ left in it:

Beyond any doubt the main cause of this decay has been the rise of modern, often more intensive, farming techniques. Agriculture was once environmentally benign, and a healthy and attractive countryside was a relatively cost-free by-product. The practices that delivered this benefit for society are often not now economic. Farming practice and the familiar English landscape have diverged.
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The solution, concluded the report, was to stop subsidising farmers to produce food, and pay them to manage the countryside instead.
Which is where we are now. In 2005, the government ‘decoupled’ farming subsidies from food production. From now on, instead of being paid to grow food, farmers would be paid to prettify the countryside and encourage wildlife. They would be given a flat rate according to the size of their farm, and could apply for bonus payments for providing wildlife habitats, planting woodland and hedgerows and so on. So there you have it. In modern Britain, an attractive countryside is worth paying for, but local food isn’t.

Which, when you think about it, makes no sense at all. The British countryside is a working landscape, the product of countless agricultural revolutions driven by urban demand. It is a landscape made by food, and those parts of it we find pretty are mostly the accidental by-products of the way we farmed in the past. The Curry Report insists that ‘the countryside is not a rural Disneyland’, yet its recommendations are likely to produce just that. It is all very well – indeed highly desirable – to have a rural landscape teeming with wildlife, but without food production alongside it, such a landscape would not only be fake, it would be unsustainable. The report says it wants to reconnect food production with the countryside, but is silent on the question of how that is to be achieved, when most of the food we eat in Britain today produces anything but beauty – hell on earth, more like. If we want a rich and varied landscape on our doorstep, we are going to have to start eating as though we mean it.