In this extract from his compelling new book John Humphrys reveals how Britain's eating habits have been transformed by our mistrust of intensive farming and why a safe supper doesn't have to cost more than the one that might kill you.
In the early Nineties when the full horror of BSE was becoming apparent many people were beginning to ask serious questions about the food on our tables and to worry about food in a way we had not done in our recent history. I thought then that we needed a proper national debate which addressed the most fundamental questions. Sadly, it took another great farming crisis to bring that debate about and it is unfolding now.
That crisis is, of course, the foot and mouth epidemic. The question on which it has focused attention - and which should have been addressed a long time ago - goes to the heart of Britain's food policy since the Second World War. Has the relentless drive for more and more cheap food proved to be a mistake?
The most powerful voices in the food industry scoff at even a hint of doubt. They tell us it is naive to raise the question. They remind us that choice is more varied and shopping for food has never been more convenient. Above all, they say, food is cheaper than it has ever been. The only alternative to the way we have been farming, producing and distributing our food for half a century is to return to some primitive form of agriculture and food production that would lead to desperate shortages, sky-high prices and disease-ridden animals. We would be back in the Middle Ages. Some talk darkly of malnourished children, even the return of diseases such as rickets.
Most of that is hysterical, self-serving nonsense. Malnutrition is a function of poverty or ignorance or both, not of the availability of food. I have spoken to doctors who worry about some of their young patients because they are fed a diet of junk food. Their parents have never cooked them a meal of fresh meat and vegetables in their short lives. That has nothing to do with the price of food. On the contrary, processed food is invariably more expensive than fresh vegetables. It is, to use the jargon of the day, a 'lifestyle' choice and one that is encouraged by the industry. Quite simply, there is more profit in a bag of crisps than in a pound of potatoes.
Nor is a return to 'primitive' farming practices the only alternative to factory farming and highly intensive agriculture. That is a gross insult to all those farmers who care deeply for the welfare of their animals and do not regard them as mere units of production. It also ignores the advances made in less intensive farming technologies. A growing number of farmers are finding ways of achieving good yields without tearing open yet another drum of chemicals or bag of synthetic fertiliser.
But the big question the industry and most politicians have been so reluctant to address is whether 'cheap' food is really cheap. To do so is to raise doubts about their judgment or even their motives. What price, for instance, should society put on the destruction of so much of our rural heritage, the loss of our water meadows and ancient hedges, the disappearance of so many songbirds?
It may be impossible to calculate that sort of thing in hard cash, but much else can be quantified. There are the taxes we pay to finance farming subsidies. There is the cost of cleaning chemical pollution from our drinking water. There are the consequences for the National Health Service of factory farmers abusing antibiotics. There is the possible impact on our health of chemical residues in our food.
There are the long-term effects of soil erosion and declining soil fertility. There is the terrible impact and vast cost of a tragedy such as BSE. And now, as I write, we are in the midst of another epidemic, foot and mouth disease. It would not be fair to say it is the direct result of intensive agriculture. But modern practices of food production and supply have enabled it to spread at a terrifying speed across the entire country.
Is it naive to raise questions about a food policy that has created such a legacy? I think not. But this is not a counsel of despair. There are many farmers and food producers and even politicians who accept that mistakes have been made and are searching for better ways of doing things. I believe the British people will insist on it. We are no longer prepared to take our food for granted. The nation wants a serious debate and there is no way of stopping it.
When the Chinese leader, Chou En-lai (1898-1976), was asked for his assessment of the effect of the French Revolution he paused for a moment and then said: 'It's too early to tell.' He may have been a shade too cautious, but you can see his point; history takes a long time to settle down. We think a particular action will have a particular consequence and years later, for a hundred reasons we had not even considered at the time, we discover we were wrong. There was a revolution in agriculture after the war - the birth of factory farming and industrial agriculture - and we are still assessing its effects because they continue to this day. But there has also been a counter-revolution of sorts in the past 15 years in the food industry. It is going to take a very long time before we can be sure of its effects because it, too, is still in progress. It is the organic revolution.
In 1981 it was just about possible to buy organic food in a Safeway supermarket - assuming you knew there was such a thing and assuming you wanted it very badly indeed. Four years later if you looked hard enough in one or two Sainsbury's or Waitrose stores you might find a few bruised apples or limp carrots with bits of soil still clinging to them on sale at silly prices. You wondered why the supermarket bothered and you wondered who would dream of buying the stuff.
Most supermarket managers looked on with a mixture of amusement and contempt. They said the days of muck and mystery had disappeared a long time ago and shoppers wanted their fruit and vegetables to be pristine, uniform and cheap. They did not want their apples to have blemishes on their skin; they had to be clean and shiny. Some supermarket bosses said sniffily that the quality of organic food could not be guaranteed. But 10 years later all the supermarkets were taking a serious interest. Within another five years they were fighting each other for a share of a market that was growing faster than any other sector in the industry. So what had happened to change things so dramatically?
It's easy enough to say what did not happen. There was no encouragement from our political leaders. They either did not know what was beginning to happen or they did not care. There was no great marketing drive by the big retailers. Any marketing expert will tell you that it's not difficult to persuade us to buy things if the budget is big enough. Not until many years later did the retailers start using organic food in their advertisements to tempt fickle shoppers. In terms of marketing, this was the quiet revolution.
As even Chou En-lai would concede, revolutions can succeed only if they have the support of a significant section of the population. They do not receive that support unless the people are unhappy with the status quo. So it was with food. There were enough people becoming a little uneasy about the quality and safety of the food they were buying from the supermarkets to spot that something was starting to happen. The reasons for the unease were mixed. Some people were worried about the use of pesticides. Some were offended by the worst excesses of factory farming and the effects it was having on the animals who suffered under it. Some were nervous about the growing number of food scares. And when those people saw organic food being offered in the supermarkets they winced at the higher cost but took a few apples or carrots home with them.
But they were still relatively few. Organic food had yet to break out of its niche market. It was growing, but it was still only for the more eccentric customers. It was hardly a subject that dominated the board meetings at Tesco or Sainsbury's. And then, one March afternoon in 1996, the Secretary of State for Health, Stephen Dorrell, stood up in the House of Commons to make a statement which would shatter the nation's confidence in our food. This was to prove the turning point. The quiet revolution was about to explode.
Four months earlier Mr Dorrell had been asked on television whether there was any connection between BSE and a new variant of an old disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease or CJD. He had said no there was no conceivable risk from eating British beef. Almost five years later Mr Dorrell was to tell me on the Today programme that he regretted ever having given that interview because he'd got it wrong. The message he delivered on that spring afternoon was a very different one indeed.
He told a packed and worried House that the 'most likely explanation' for the cases of CJD was indeed a link to BSE. MPs had been expecting bad news, but this was devastating. The implication was immediately obvious to everyone who heard him. Not only was mad cow disease wreaking havoc in the nation's dairy herds; there was a human equivalent of the disease and it was even more terrible. Every time we had eaten British beef in the past 10 years or more we had been putting our health at risk. There was no cure for the disease and it was always fatal. CJD could lie dormant in our unsuspecting bodies for a very long time. It might take 10, 15, 20 years or even longer to make its malignant presence felt. No one could predict how many people were already infected. It might be a handful. It might be a million.
Even now, all these years later, it is hard to forget the impact of that statement. Many of us remembered with a shudder the steaks we had grilled or the Sunday joints we had enjoyed. Far worse, we looked at our children and thought of the mincemeat we had made into sauces for their spaghetti or the hamburgers we had treated them to on a Saturday afternoon shopping expedition. Could we really have been poisoning our own children, condemning them to die from some hideous disease that we had never even known existed? It was scarcely credible.
The initial reaction was anger. We cursed the farmers who had forced their cows to behave like cannibals, then we cursed the arrogance and greed of the feed manufacturers and the renderers who had turned nature on its head by producing the wretched feed and not even telling the farmers what was in it unless they asked. Then we cursed the politicians and their civil servants who had been either uncaring or incompetent or secretive or all three.
It was at that point that many people decided they could no longer trust the food they were buying. Connections were made between cost and quality. There was one reason and one reason only for feeding ruminants on the ground-up brains and spines and bones of other animals. It was profit. The left-over bits of slaughtered animals cost the manufacturers relatively little and contained lots of protein. A cow fed on only her natural diet of grass and cereals produced nothing like as much milk as one fed on the concentrated food made from the left-overs of an abattoir. The manufacturers made more money and the farmers sold more milk and the price of food kept falling.
© 2001 by John Humphrys.
Read the second part of John Humphrys' article here
