The meaning and purpose of food: Bafflement Essay #10

What does food mean to you?

Now I know that some people are very interested in food, while others are less interested. At one end of the spectrum are those for whom the creation and appreciation of food is a life purpose, the chefs and the cooks, the restaurant critics and the food writers. At the other end of the scale are those who seem not to enjoy eating and profess to consider the consumption of food as a boring necessity. Sitting on the foodie end of the middle ground, I struggle to understand this group as I've only ever, briefly, been uninterested in food when ill or recently bereaved. And although around the world, meals and the customs around them vary enormously, there is no culture on earth that does not value food.

Whatever the meaning of food, its purpose – successful breatharians excepted – is undeniable. Food is the building block of life and health. Food is not just part of the human experience, it's the condition for it.

And yet it seems that food has become controversial. Farming is a 'problem' and should be reduced or abolished. Eating preferences have become a matter of morality and people need to be educated into making the correct choices.

The farmers protests that have been going on in various European countries for the past two years –barely covered in the mainstream media – are a symptom of this. Recently, with British farming under threat, tractors finally reached Westminster. Almost half the country's fruit and veg producers fear they will go out of businesses within the next year, according to this research, and the government is actively encouraging farmers to stop farming with pay-offs of up to £100 000.

It is all most baffling. How is it that advanced societies have become so confused about food? Of all the things we humans have known how to do during our time on this planet, it is surely how to eat, and our survival is proof of our resourcefulness in finding food in the most difficult conditions. Yet these days it seems that how and what we feed ourselves is suddenly up for question in a manner that has never happened before.

What is going on?

I

To get a better handle on the nature of this confusion, let's take a look at the two ends of the spectrum of food production.

The first is the local and small, the human-scale and down-to-earth. This is the food grown in back gardens and on window sills, on allotments and community projects. This form of food production is both a traditional aspect of life in Western society and part of a counter-culture that has emerged in response to an increasingly industrialised agricultural system producing processed food sold by big corporations.

At the other end of the spectrum is a vision of a high-tech 'solution' to the problem of human nutrition, one that involves using technology to create new food stuffs. While this model of food production grows out of Big Ag, it has ambitions that extend far further, to the development of a new approach which changes our relationship to food at a fundamental level. A report by Sainsbury's published in 2022 exemplifies its aspirations.

Sainsbury's 'Future of Food' report envisions how the average person will get their food in 2025, 2050 and 2169 through a series of imaginary case studies. In 2025, eco-health student Julia is cooking a celebratory meal for her family. Determined to overcome her dad's preference for steak, she prepares an vegan meal out of seaweed and vegetables, the latter grown at Sainsbury's in-store hydroponic shelves. Everything is ordered and paid for by app; all Julia has to do is pick them up her shopping, presumably by scanning herself through digital barriers, but the report doesn't mention this). Julia's dinner party is part of 'ecological public health', explains Sainsbury's Head of Quality and Innovation, one which involves getting 'beyond meat and fish' and developing alternative proteins such as algae and insects. Sainsbury’s, she adds, was ‘the first UK supermarket to introduce snack-packs of insects through the brand, Eat Grub’.

By 2050, Julia has her own business producing 'environmentally friendly proteins' where meat is grown in a vat and 'assembled' via 3D technology. Customers, which include her local councillor, are welcome to come to the plant and watch their dinner being printed out.

Coming to a Sainsbury’s near you

Perhaps at this point you're feeling a sense of unease. I know I am. Sainsbury's has long held a special place in my heart. Some of my earliest memories are of accompanying my mother on the weekly trip to the orange store where aisles of crisps and sweets offered both familiarity and excitement. The mere sight of the brightly-coloured packaging would make me forget the promise not to ask for treats, and an argument would ensue. A few years later, I was impressed by the brio with which my mother regularly asked to speak to the manager (imagine Mrs Beeton crossed with an Amazon). The resulting conversation usually concerned what should be in stock and was a sign of the good relationship between the store and a regular customer.

My mother was on the 'foodie' end of the food interest spectrum, cooking two meals a day from scratch. She and my father grew most of the family's fruit and veg in the garden, storing the produce for year-round consumption in chest freezers. Milk was delivered daily and eggs brought to the door by the farmer's wife. The weekly Sainsbury's shop co-existed quite comfortably with a local, natural way of sourcing food. Trusting and conventional, my mother readily supplemented her cuisine with convenience foods. She had no idea how powerful Big Food was to become.

Decades later, despite my disenchantment with Sainsbury's prices and packaging, I couldn't quite kick the habit of an occasional visit to my local store where I often ran into people I knew. The staff were long-standing and on friendly terms with their customers and the air around the long row of checkouts rang with happy chatter. At a time when supermarket shopping was becoming more and more impersonal, my local Sainsbury's was an exception.

One day in early 2020, a curious silence reigned inside the store. Half the checkouts had been removed and replaced with self-service points. Some of the staff were standing around, disconnected from their usual posts and roles, and their faces wore rattled, almost scared expressions. They'd been told they would still have jobs, one told me, but their roles would consist of helping customers 'on the floor'.

It wasn't true, of course: the last time I went to my local Sainsbury's the two remaining checkouts were closed, a red band drawn firmly across the place where customers stood. A single harried-looking woman was running between the self-service points helping people in difficulty. There was no chatter: all the customers were focused firmly on the task of inputing data into the screens in front of them. I put down my shopping basket and left.

Returning to Britain after two years away, I was shocked to see how automated supermarkets had become. The change was accompanied by levels of surveillance I had never expected to see in everyday life, with close-up cameras filming customers' every move as they scanned their 'items'. In smaller stores in central London, complicated queuing systems corralled people into lanes while uniformed men in black looked on. The process of buying groceries had become a high-security operation resembling that of an airport (post-9/11).

There are many reasons to object to this – the job losses, the lack of social contact, the way it gives corporations unprecedented new levels of information about our spending, preferences and location. But the main problem for me comes in the form of a vaguer feeling that there’s something fundamentally anti-human about this way of meeting our basic needs.

And then there’s another thought lurking at the back of my mind. It lives with a memory of how the supermarkets were in 2020 and 2021, the zeal with which they covered the floors with stickers about staying away from other humans and played continual announcements about danger. I can’t quite forget that in some Western countries ‘the unvaccinated’ were banned from everywhere except grocery stores: what if the next step had been taken? Even now, supermarkets are introducing more requirements for shopping: ‘membership’ schemes for better prices and barrier gates that only open if you scan your receipt. What if one day a condition for food shopping were introduced that you couldn’t or really didn’t want to meet?

What I'm getting round to saying is that we – the people – have a problem. The opposition between the automated, global food supply system and one which allows for the human, the local and the natural is becoming ever starker. It's increasingly difficult to experience them as two, complementary ways of sourcing food because, once you start to look at the bigger picture, it looks as if a kind of take-over is in progress, one in which Big Food is attempting to squeeze out the competition by any means it can. Supermarkets are at the heart of this struggle. But to get a real sense of what it's about, we need to broaden our scope.

II

The global food system established after the Second World War which now dominates the way most people in the West get their food is in rapid acceleration.

I'm going to take an initiative from the World Economic Forum as my next example of how this is happening and the direction the leading players in this trend want to take things. There's a lot of noise about the WEF, so I want to make it clear what I think the WEF is. It’s essentially a business organisation, a lobbying body whose purpose is to promote the interests of its members. You can get an idea of the kinds of companies it represents via its list of ‘partners’ here.

The existence of such an organisation is not in itself problematic, nor is it unusual for politicians to talk to people in business and industry. The problem lies with the vested and conflicts of interests which, until recently, were understood as anathema to democracy. The WEF is quite clear that it wants to be far more than a members' interest group; it seeks, in its own words, to work with 'political, business, academic, civil society and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas'. Governments and international organisations can join and the WEF's board of trustees includes the Deputy Prime Minister of Canada, along with the heads of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Representatives from over a hundred governments attend its annual meeting at Davos and the man who will likely become Britain's next Prime Minister has publicly said he prefers 'prefers Davos to Westminster'.

A phrase on the WEF website that crops up repeatedly could easily be dismissed as an innocuous piece of corporate jargon. But 'global public-private' – the WEF's stated approach to 'shaping' society – announces the advent of something the world has never known before: a partnership of government and business in which corporations and state work together to run the world.

Without any public debate and with the manifest enthusiasm of many Western politicians, a new kind of governance is being forged under our very noses. The areas of life the WEF aspires to 'shape' include financial systems, the economy, health, energy, technology, urban planning and, of course, food.

The WEF launched its Food Innovation Hubs programme in 2021 with funding from the Dutch government, establishing offices for the scheme in the Netherlands. The programme aims to transform the food supply system using technology and innovation; the press release features comments from endorsements from the likes of of PepsiCo and Unilever. Some hubs have already been set up around the world, with the focus on poorer regions such as Africa and India where agriculture tends to be small-scale. So we have a government using public money to support private businesses in their aspiration to monopolise the world food market. This is the ‘global public-private’ approach.

A curious organisation in the Netherlands illustrates the nature of the new approach to food. Initially I found it difficult to fathom exactly what Foodvalley NL was. Growing out of a partnership between a Dutch university, regional government and food companies, the organisation seems to be a cross between a promotional body and a business network. Its website describes its purpose as 'accelerating' the 'journey' to a new food system by 2050. The 'transition' is 'urgently needed' and the development of alternative proteins such as cultured meat and insect proteins are one of its main 'innovation fields'. Foodvalley has five hundred partners which include food tech startups, accelerators, R&D labs, marketing companies and multinationals such as Nestle and Unilever. ‘Green’ and ‘Bio’ dominate their names, making it hard to see what they actually do.

Thanks to years of wrestling clarity out of corporate jargon, the mists eventually cleared. Foodvalley sounds like the child of the WEF because it is, a sub-body specialising in one aspect of the corporate aspiration to shape the world. Its aim is to develop a new way for the human species to feed itself, one which depends, like never before, on technology and the melding of the natural with the artificial. This is the world of genetic modification, crop vaccines, farming conducted by data and drone. Industrial Food will require less agriculture and more production, a shift from soil and land to plants and factories. Corporations rather than farmers will become the producers and providers and decisions about what is produced and how will be determined by computers run by governments and 'international organisations'.

And because less land will be needed to grow food, it can be allocated for other purposes. 'When we reduce meat and dairy consumption and increase crop yields we need less agricultural land; forests and natural habitats can regrow on this abandoned farmland,' writes Hannah Ritchie on the WEF website.

Those advocating the re-allocation of land don’t get into the question of who would then own it, but a clue comes from the fact that corporations and wealthy individuals have been buying up large swathes of agricultural land for some time. The Great Food Reset, as Thomas Fazi puts it, is underway.

“They eat insects and we profit. Yay!”

The project of shifting the world to Industrial Food extends way beyond the aspirations of the particular organisations I've taken here as exemplars. It’s an extension of the direction we've been going in for some time, accelerated by the capacities opened up by genetic and digital technologies and new levels of government support.

It’s also well supported by the media: a cursory internet research yields a host of enthusiastic pieces about the benefits of food produced through technological experimentation. These days, the Guardian, the paper I used to read for recipes and tips on gardening, runs pieces highlighting the benefits of Industrial Food. Genetically engineering crops to be more colourful could make weeding easier, suggests this article, while this writer salivates at the sight of lab-grown sausages 'sizzling in a pan of foaming margarine' at the Dutch startup Meatable.

III

It's crept up on us, this very different relationship to what we eat and how we get our food, and works at a psychological and social level. I blame America.

Of course, I'm (half) joking when I refer to the creation and mass-marketing of processed foods in the second half of the twentieth century, especially 'treat' foods. The trend soon came to Britain which, perhaps because the Industrial Revolution had broken people's relationship with the land more completely than in Europe, was particularly susceptible to novel products. Growing up in the 1970s, I was part of the generation that breakfasted on sweetened cereals, entranced by the cartoon characters on the outside of the packets and the promise of plastic gifts inside.

As an adult, I can see how the clever and ubiquitous marketing targeted children while reassuring the parent with talk of cereals fortified with vitamins. The new food stuffs exploited our natural predilection for sugar, salt and fat – I can still recall being that five-year-old in the supermarket, driven into a frenzy of longing by the sight of a packet of Quavers – and set us up for habits that are hard to break. While I've long left sweetened cereals behind, there are still foods from my childhood that have an enduring appeal. Bovril (thank you, Unilever) lives on in my cupboard. Early emotional attachment, once formed, is very hard to break and the food companies know this.

In twenty-first century America, the Center for Disease Control calculates that nearly 42 per cent of adults are obese while official figures in the UK put the number at 64 per cent. For a while, hooked into the story that whole foods such as butter and cream were bad for you, some of us were puzzled by how French women 'didn't get fat' despite their regular consumption of butter, cheese and cream. But here's a strange thing: just as we figure out that the problem is not with fat per se but with processed food, along comes another story that helps us to keep on consuming: fat positivity. A recent investigation in the Washington Post found that some of the influencers pushing the idea of #NoBadFoods were working in partnership with the big food companies selling highly sweetened processed foods.

You can see the psychology within the marketing. A diet of processed food and treats has become a matter of identity, something to be defended with defiance: 'being fat is part of my identity, so there'.

In the wider culture, even everyday food has become entertainment. It's now almost impossible to get an ordinary plate of food in the rural market town where I lived for a while. There are eateries galore, but they consist of trendy restaurants and gastro-pubs while the cafes serve panini and cake. Surely the modest little cafe in the middle of nowhere would still serve soup or a baked potato? No, said the woman standing over the packaged sandwiches and confectionary. But soon the cafe would be getting an 'exciting' new 'menu'. She flashed her eyes in the way of people in the food-as-entertainment business. She didn't yet have the details but thought it would involve … some meat in a bap.

Reader, I've practised a minor deception on you. Although the title suggests it's about food, this essay is in fact the first in a series of three on transhumanism. 'Transhumanism' is an off-putting word, replete with connotations of robots taking control and skulls wired up to computers. But beyond the high dystopian drama, the term raises fundamental questions about where we are headed, in this adventure of human life on earth. They concern our relationship with rapidly-developing technology and the consequences of melding the natural and the artificial. What kinds of beings will we become? What will our priorities and values be? And how are the decisions – and by whom – creating the future being made?

While I didn't want to put people off with a grand dystopian title, the main reason for starting with food is to show how we're already here, in the valley of transhumanism. The case study for 2169 in the 'Future of Food' depicts Julia's granddaughter being woken by a vibration from an implant in her wrist. The device 'notifies her nutrition drip to prepare her breakfast shot, which was dispatched last night by Sainsbury's'. Awake and fed, Jill goes on to watch the news on the inside of her eyeball and marvels at the ‘feats of humankind’.

Move over, Aldous Huxley

Writing in the Sainsbury’s report, Tim Spector (he of the Zoe app) explains: 'personal microchips and neural laces has the potential to see all of our genetic, health and situational data recorded, stored and analysed by algorithms which could work out exactly what we need to support us at a particular time in our life. Retailers such as Sainsbury’s could play a critical role to support this.'

But it's 2169, and only a made-up scenario in a report, I hear someone say at the back.

As I write, the UK government, along with most of the governments of the world, are conducting negotiations at the World Health Association to give the World Health Organisation greater powers which include access to our 'genetic, health and situational data'. There are repeated calls for digital ID and CBDCs are being developed all over the world. Both US and Canadian governments used data from private companies to track people’s locations during the Covid lockdowns. Public, private, global. Imagine what a powerful tool of control could result.

In some Amazon's stores you can already pay for groceries by scanning your palm. Once again, America leads the way.

IV

What is it to be human?

The etymology of the word takes us back, via its Proto-Indo-European roots, to the earth: 'human' means 'earthly being'. The Hebrew for man, 'adam', comes from 'adamah', meaning 'ground'.

To be human, in other words, is to be someone who dwells on the earth. And the earth provides the means for us, as physical beings needing sources of energy in material form, to live here. You could almost say there's a kind of partnership between humans and the earth, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Travelling and writing about places, what fascinates me the most about human life is its diversity. By that I don't mean the empty-sounding platitudes those in power are using to prescribe our attitudes and behaviour, but the variety of ways humans find of taking the materials and conditions around them and turning them into different ways of life. Add human creativity and resourcefulness to the geography and climate of a particular place, allow for the influence of events and other peoples over time and you’ll end up with a world so diverse it's almost as if it's composed of different planets.

We usually describe this phenomenon as 'culture' and one of its most significant expressions is food. The food of another culture is fascinates us and is a big part of the attractions of travel and tourism. Away from our own countries, we sample strange foods out of curiosity and discover delicious recipes that we try, with mixed results, to replicate at home. We may taste things that make us wonder at other humans' ability to consume what is clearly disgusting. For every half a dozen dishes from the Middle East I adore, there's one that repulses: the glutinous green soup widely served in Egypt and a cheese pudding that I passed to my eat-everything colleague when our Palestinian host wasn't looking.

The human body seems to have an innate understanding of this diversity. Years ago, I watched a programme about the longest-living peoples on earth. They were all in different parts of the world and had widely varying diets, from Mediterranean fare to one heavy in fat and light on fresh food. The conclusion ran counter to what we'd long been told by experts in the West about nutrition: food should be local and unprocessed. Humans are omnivorous and adaptable in a way that is surprising. It suggests that we have barely begun to understand what you could call the energetics of food, or its significance as one of the main channels of the relationship between earth and human.

The food aspect of the Fourth Industrial Revolution heralds changes which extend far beyond what we eat and how we obtain our food. They concern more than the ownership and use of land. Melding the natural with the artificial, they concern humans' relationship with the natural world and our own future nature.

When I look at the corporatisation of food, I see a number of causes for concern.

I see, first of all, hubris. Do they understand what they are doing, those who seek to interfere in this magical dance of human and earth, the delicate process of sustaining a unique species that has evolved over time?

I see danger. As this detailed piece about the impact of the Gates empire on food production in Africa, there is plenty of evidence of the harms done by the first generation of experimental food technologies. And yet the race to put new technologies - vaccines for lettuce, vaccines for trees - is being run faster than ever. We are on Mad Scientist territory here. But, unlike the stories of the past warning against overweening ambition, this is on a grand scale. Icarus’ flight to the sun on wings of wax and Dr Frankenstein’s creation of a being both like and unlike himself came about through individual excess. What we are now seeing unfold has the momentum of a civilisation behind it, and vast resources accumulated by powerful organisations over time. The next stage of the approach involves the permanent interposition of a third party between people and food, a mediating force composed of technology, corporation and regulation. Public. Private. Global.

I see loss. The potential loss of Industrial is not just of the culture of food in its creative diversity, but of something we are only on the threshold of understanding. It has to do with the expression on a baby’s face when he tastes something for the first time and the unspoken connection between a gardener and her plants. The mediating force that Industrial Food would stamp all over the earth would assert, once and for all, the triumph of Western scientific materialism. Under this view, nature is nothing more than inert matter in need of supplementation by The Machine.

Food is an expression of our humanity. It's no surprise, once I start to think about it, that the leaders of the transhumanist agenda have food firmly in their sights. Food’s got everything: our survival, our health, our culture, the control of resources and our relationship with nature.

V

We don't have to continue down the path of the corporatisation of food. If we're prepared to make some conscious choices away from the default dependency on supermarkets and industry, we can reclaim food and everything it means to us.

Let’s get practical.

On a personal level, it's been a relief to change my shopping habits and buy most of my food in places where trade still involves human interaction. But, as Katherine Macbean points out in this online meeting hosted by the People's Food and Farming Alliance (at 57'45”), retaining food sovereignty means reforming the relationship between farmers and consumers. She recommends a range of measures on a community level from rebuilding local infrastructure such as abattoirs to creating local buying groups direct from farmers: ‘Local action has a national impact,’ she says. ‘If you can just focus on your local community and doing what you can for one or two farmers, it will have a ripple effect.’

The video is worth watching in full for an overview of the UK's current situation food and some inspiring examples of what people are doing around the country. They include the Open Food Network (45' 28”), an e-commerce platform aiming to put food producers directly in touch with customers, and the story of My Little Farm (at 51 29), a smallholding in Sussex and co-ownership model which could be expanded across the UK.

Vaccinate that tree or we’ll take away your chocolate