Biting
back: good food in hard times
Geoff
Andrews
Geoff
Andrews on food habits after the crunch Biting back: good food in hard times
©
Geoff Andrews 2009
Some have depicted this year’s festive season as the ‘tight Christmas’,
with spending only half that of last year. In difficult times, food is normally
the first sacrifice. Will that inevitably mean shifting to an inferior diet,
while weakening our ecological consciousness? With the credit crunch kicking
in, many believe consumers will increasingly look for the cheapest deals,
with quality, seasonality and sustainable consumption the biggest losers.
Sales of organic produce are already declining while the cheapest supermarkets
are engaged in prolonged price wars.
If this is the case then perhaps we should not be too surprised. After all,
Britain is not a country renowned for inspired foodies in search of fine
dining. It has not offered much resistance to the takeover of high streets
by global corporations, nor shown much serious intention of reversing the
rapid decline in agriculture, or cultivated regional food traditions. The
pleasures of food are still widely regarded here as an ‘elitist’ extravagance;
Bill Bryson’s observation that the peculiarly British idea of pleasure amounts
to a milky tea and a chocolate digestive still holds good.
However,
there is another food story emerging in Britain. Admittedly, like some of
the nation’s widely admired artisan cheeses, it has taken time to mature.
This story gives a different perspective on the implications of the credit
crunch for the nation’s eating habits. From the rise of farmers’ markets,
which now number more than 500, to the Guerrilla Gardeners, an anarchist
food group which has taken over London wasteland to cultivate vegetables,
there are a range of responses on offer.
Moreover, this new mood challenges the assumption that the promotion of
good, healthy and seasonal food is an elitist concern. You do not have to
go far now to find farmers’ markets, which stretch in London alone from
Walthamstow to Hackney and Peckham. The winner of the best local market
at this year’s BBC Food and Farming awards was Bury in Lancashire, while
best local food retailer was the Unicorn co-operative grocery store in Manchester;
hardly the epicentres of privilege. More discerning consumers are making
choices over quality, while concern for their wallets does not mean abandoning
environmental commitments.
Whatever
we think of Jamie Oliver, his TV programmes have made the important argument
that good local food at reasonable cost should be available to everyone.
His Ministry of Food scheme now has a presence in 11 council boroughs, while
Waltham Forest has had the confidence to restrict fast food outlets from
the vicinity of local schools. Oliver’s intervention was crucial, but many
similar grassroots initiatives already exist. The environmentalist pressure
group Sustain; the alliance for better food and farming is involved in many
local schemes to encourage greater access to quality food, including the
‘Good Food on the Public Plate’ and the Real Bread Campaigns. The central
argument here is that the pleasures of healthy eating need not be sacrificed
even at times of economic hardship.
Part of the problem in such discussions is that pleasure is regarded as
synonymous with luxury. This misunderstanding now dominates most discussions
– including many academic ones – of food politics in Britain. William Morris
knew the difference better than most. ‘Luxury’, he argued over 100 years
ago, is the ‘sworn foe of pleasure’, because in the race to provide more
goods for the rich it spoilt natural beauty and produced ugliness and waste.
Pleasure, on the other hand, was to be found in the artistic skills and
produce of craftsmen; these simple pleasures, for Morris, were further dependent
on a sustainable environment.
The Slow Food movement is one organisation which has tried to reconcile
the simple pleasures of food with environmental responsibility. Its founder,
Carlo Petrini, has described a gastronome who doesn’t consider the environment
as stupid and the environmentalist uninterested in gastronomic pleasure
as sad. The movement has gone beyond its origins in Italy and found a resonance
in the counter-cultural Slow Food Nation event, dubbed ‘the Woodstock of
the food movement’, held in San Francisco this year. In Britain, after suffering
from a period of inertia, Slow Food is at last being revived under a youthful
new leadership.
These
developments will not prevent the price war between supermarkets, the consumption
of £2.99 chickens or claims that eating well with an eye to the environment
is a middle class concern. However, they do suggest that there are many
alternatives to cheap tasteless food that has travelled many miles. As the
writer Jeanette Winterson, who also owns a grocery shop in Spitalfields,
put it on Radio 4’s Food Programme recently: ‘I get very bored with the
argument that we cannot afford to eat real food, when a chicken costs less
than a cinema ticket’. Or, as Michael Pollan, the author of In Defence
of Food has argued in his eater’s manifesto: ‘Eat real food. Not too
much. Mostly plants’.
Geoff Andrews is the author of The Slow Food Story: Politics and Pleasure,
recently published by Pluto Press
www.sustainweb.org
www.guerrillagardening.org
www.slowfood.org.uk
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