Felicity Lawrence, Not On The Label

'Tell me what's on your plate and I'll tell you who you are'.

Judging from our collective plate these days, we are a bunch of bland, gullible, self-destructive individuals with a sadistic streak. 

Bland, because the quest for endless shelf life has rid our food of any taste.  Gullible, because we allow advertisers to persuade us to buy the junk they're selling.  Why self-destructive?  Just check out health statistics when it comes to diet-related ailments.  And 'sadistic' refers to our treatment of people working at the far end of the food chain.  Those who actually produce the stuff that ends up on our plates... 

Felicity Lawrence's Not On The Label is a superb piece of investigative journalism.  Her muckraking exposes numerous shortcomings of our food supply system.  The victims are introduced, the villains named, the solutions suggested. 

Many books have been written about modern food industry.  As I see it, you can go around such an investigation in two ways.  You can speak to the big business, or to its victims.  The first approach may be more impressive, with big names gracing the pages of the book (and probably better dinners served to the investigator).  The resulting account will probably be very coherent and smooth.  After all, the PR people are paid to tell you nice stories.  'We are trying very hard to find solutions and please customers'.  'It's all about efficiency in bringing you the best'.  'Any incidents in our noble quest are unfortunate, but unavoidable'.  That sort of stuff...

Or you can talk to the victims and get a completely different picture, as Lawrence proves.  She interviews a whole range of people on the less lucky end of food supply chain.  Suppliers terrorised by supermarket buyers.  Farmers forced to sell their produce below cost or go out of business.  Migrant workers living in inhuman conditions.  People from environmentally devastated areas, sacrificed on the altar of unsustainable efficiency.  The picture emerging is not funny. 

Did I forget something?  Oh yes, pesticide residues.  Funky additives to processed foods.  Air miles and carbon emissions.  Food deserts.  Plant and animal diseases spread by industrial cultivation.  Excessive (and polluting!) packaging.  Inequality between developed and developing countries.  Food adulteration (you thought horse in your beef steak is so unusual?  Think again).  Good food going to waste for business reasons. 

To summarise, Not On The Label is one angry book.  So it should be. 

Michael Moss, Salt Sugar Fat

Processed foods are increasingly singled out as the main culprit in the global obesity epidemic.  Food manufacturers pursue profit at any cost, waists grow, diabetes rates reach the all-time high. 

Producers produce, consumers consume, but once in a while someone publishes a book intended to question our eating habits.  Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation immediately springs to mind, or Michael Pollen's The Omnivore's Dilemma.  This year, Michael Moss's Salt Sugar Fat proudly joins the selective club. 

The very title tells us a lot about Moss's strategy in challenging the processed food industry.  His notion is simple.  We eat too much salt.  Too much sugar.  Too much fat.  Overabundance of those three ingredients quite visibly makes us sick.  Unfortunately, the same unholy trio is also responsible for making our food taste great.  The heavier, the sweeter, the saltier it is, the more we like it.  The more of it we buy - and food manufacturers want us to buy more, always more. 

Moss digs deep into processed food industry to expose all the tricks compelling us to eat high-calorie products.  He provides tons of data on food science, marketing strategies, government regulations (lack of, usually), sales figures, health statistics, interviews with food corporation executives, you name it.  Salt Sugar Fat is a goldmine for food research reference.  As is usually the case in this type of publication, pretty much every sentence is documented.  Food industry employs expensive lawyers which, I'm guessing, is the main reason for such scrupulosity.  It does, however, enhance the book's reliability and makes further exploration that much easier. 

Even with all the safeguards in place, Moss's wording is very careful.  Salt Sugar Fat is not an all-out crusade against processed foods, not obviously so.  Yes, the dangers of overdose of each targeted ingredient are outlined in detail, but so are the efforts of major companies to minimize the negative impact (whether apparent or real).  We are introduced to numerous 'good guys' in the food industry and shown amazing science facilities dedicated to making food not only tastier, but also healthier.  We are told how devastating any limits on salt, sugar, fat would be for the end product.  Sure, criticism of greedy corporations is there, but it is offset with their efforts to make it all better. 

Perhaps it is just journalistic objectivity (which always deserves praise), but I am not sure if in its present form the book serves its avowed purpose.  Reading of all the greasy, sugary deliciousness, I felt an overwhelming urge to go out there and get some junk food, something I normally avoid.  I also got confused as to who is the bad guy in this story.  Because if the executives are trying so hard, whom should I actually blame for the raging obesity epidemic?  If Moss is pointing a finger, he does it very half-heartedly. 

The conclusion of Salt Sugar Fat is simple, true and similar to the findings of Schlosser, Pollen etc.  Only you, dear eater, can save yourself from your diet.  No government will do this for you, no big business will suddenly ditch making money and switch to saving humanity.  Consumer's choices are the only way out of the current food-induced health crisis. 

Amen. 

Michael Pollan, In Defence of Food

'Eat food.  Not too much.  Mostly plants'.

This is the first proper sentence in In Defence of Food, and to be frank, this is where the book could end if you ask me.  Ok, you might add half a page for explaining that by 'food' Michael Pollan means genuine food, not chemical-laced substitutes we are being bombarded with today.  As to the rest...  Superfluous. 

Not that I think that there's anything wrong with the above advice.  Just the opposite - it's probably the best dietary tip you could get.  I just find it funny that the author criticises 'the age of nutritionism', rants about unhealthy obsession with healthy food and follows up with two hundred pages of...  nutrition gossip, dietary advice and history of food science/politics.  True, he does it only to drive his point home, and he's fully aware of his self-contradicting tendencies, but I still think that the rest of the book serves only to dilute his message. 

In Defence of Food is a skinny volume, barely two hundred pages of large print.  Metaphorically speaking, it is an angry accusatory finger directed at the Western diet. 

There's no escaping the fact that our food kills us (I speak as a Westerner to Westerners, I apologise to - and congratulate! - anyone not belonging to this food tradition).  I don't really need Pollan to report stories of the Aborigines going back into the wild and miraculously shedding their medical conditions to know this much.  It's enough to go outside and look around.  People in the so-called developed world do not look healthy.  Most of them are overweight or worse.  My own health deteriorated fast when I moved from Eastern Europe to Ireland some years ago.  I know people whose knees gave up at the age of 18(!) in protest against the huge weight of bodies they were forced to carry around.  I could probably fill another book with all the horror stories, but so, I'm sure, could you. 

According to Pollan - and I wholeheartedly agree - this sorry state of affairs is all attributable to the industrialisation of food production.  Processed foods are the most profitable, so they get pushed onto gullible masses.  Large scale agriculture leads to nutrient deficiencies in edibles.  People gorge on empty calories and in consequence become both fat and undernourished. 

Well, what is to be done? 

'Eat food.  Not too much.  Mostly plants'...

That's the crux of it.  To find more sensible advice, track down a copy of In Defence of Food and read it.  Thoroughly.