Week 5 - learning about the food fight

This week I went to a special 5x15 event.  For those of you who have never been to 5x15, the concept is simple: 5 speakers, 15 minutes each - on all sorts of inspiring and entertaining topics.  However, this one was focused on just one thing: food and more specifically, the current fight with the food industry.

I can pretty much sum up the whole evening in 3 short sentences: children are eating too much sugar.  Everyone is getting diabetes.  The NHS is going to implode.  The end.  (well, save for a little light relief from my new favourite person, A.A. Gill.  But more on him later).

I was really excited about hearing the 5 speakers talk because I am constantly frustrated about how bad the food education is in this country and wanted to hear what they had to say.  It baffles me that in this day and age schools and parents are still letting their children drink copious amounts of fizzy drinks, eat sweets and sugar. But also they are not being taught how to cook and I mean really how to cook - learning about how food grows, where it comes from and actually picking it and then cooking it from scratch.  

The first person to speak was Professor Phil James who is the President of the International Association for the Study of Obesity.  He persuaded Tony Blair to create the UK Food Standards Agency and he wrote some of the very first reports on obesity for the WHO.  You know how this is going....... Professor James told us that in the UK, a third of children are overweight and 1 in 5 are now obese. In his words "this is going to break the NHS".  There are now 4 million diabetics in the UK and it costs the NHS £8 billion per year.  This is just astounding to me.  £8 billion a year - on diabetes alone?!!  Excuse my French but What the Fuck?!!  Its pretty much been since the 1980's that obesity has become such a problem. Why?  Well, of course we know its because people do so much less exercise with the advancement in technology and so many cars and also so many computers.  

But thats not the whole story.  Professor James went on to say that since we all starved during World War II, the government implemented a total change of the agricultural system to make sure that we would always have plenty of energy.  This means producing lots of fat, meat and sugar.  Sugar and fat are both so cheap that these days they are chucked into everything, especially sugar and that is the real problem.  The food industry is incredibly manipulative and the companies know how to make people buy certain products.  Apparently 40% of all food is now bought from promotion.  We all like to think we're clever shoppers but only 5% of our choices are conscious.  Food companies know this and do everything they can to make us buy things - from changing the labels, to manipulating flavours, putting products at certain eye-level and at the end of the rows.  We are in a mega-crisis and we should do things like follow France where every food follows a health warning.  

Next up was George Monbiot, a political and environmental activist, and a very confident speaker,  as I imagine any activist would be.  He began by talking about a river in a beautiful part of Devon that he happened to pass last year and noticed that it was full of sewage.  After following the river he discovered it was the slurry from a dairy farm that was being dumped into this river and as a result of the pollution, the river was totally devoid of any life.  He looked into it and contacted the environmental health agency and as he soon discovered, there is very little they can do about it because farmers don't like it!!!  Unless it is completely chronic, it is left alone and so great areas of our countryside are being ruined by the unregulated livestock industry.  Apparently there is hardly any other industry that has a higher ratio of destruction to production.  Farming is causing massive problems.

Perhaps a little bit smug, George went onto say that after that realisation he completely cut out all farmed products.  No more meat and no more dairy.   George said that after a short while. he stopped having any cravings for high energy foods.  This search that so many of us have for this dopamine-reward high is so prevalent now that it is so utterly exploited by the food industry that George points out is becoming more and more like the tobacco industry.

What is quite compelling is that rats are habituated to both cocaine and sugar but tests have shown that they would prefer to go for the sugar because it hits the reward pathway a lot harder than the cocaine.  It is so much harder to fight the craving for sugar because the body changes and becomes so used to it that it starts fighting to keep the craving.  That is why it is so much harder for obese people who loose lots of weight to then keep it off because the body is fighting to get back to its equilibrium.  

Sucrose and fructose and their addictive qualities are being overloaded into all our food by the corporations and as health-warning labelling is voluntary, of course, they neglect to include the information and continue to mass market to the susceptible individuals.  These types of products are being pushed and pushed onto us all the time - its a multi-billion pound industry. 

All this sugar stuff, really I knew already, but it was the facts about the farming that really shocked me.  Livestock farming is now the leading cause of livestock extinction worldwide and also the leading cause of habitat destruction worldwide.  So essentially, we are not only killing ourselves but we are also killing our planet.  Harsh.

Now onto a little light relief and quite frankly, one of the best speakers I've ever heard.  Mr Adrian A. Gill.  What a joy.  I had no idea how utterly brilliant that man is.  I've never seen anything he's done on TV - I only read his restaurant reviews in the Sunday Times and even then I skip to the end because he spends the majority of the article lambasting, postulating and deriding.  But oh how wonderful he is and hilarious.  He didn't even speak for the first 15 seconds and somehow I was compelled. His job wasn't to feed us with facts and statistics and health concerns.  For him, food is the antithesis of this - "nothing about food is rational", he said.  Food is about love and comfort and smell and memories, not medicine.  

He had such a unique take on looking at our food culture and how it has changed.  For him, the person who invented a pot changed everything because that's when proper cooking began, mixing two ingredients together.  But then, the person who invented a bag was revolutionary, making it possible to hold more than just what your hands could carry.  However, the most important discovery for food according to A.A Gill was a table.  Everything about our lives that is worth doing, saying or knowing, we have learnt around tables.  Any big idea starts around a table.

Basically his argument against the other four speakers is that he doesn't ever want a Government or anyone else for that matter telling him how to eat and what to eat.  Eating is too important for him and its been going on since the dawn of time.  Food is about pleasure and who we are and how we get on with each other and interact.  The most important thing we do is sit around a table with others and eat.  I know of agree.

A.A Gill had some basic rules for us to live by so that we don't have all this drama with obesity and diabetes and everything else.  Essentially you should never finish everything on your plate, never eat standing up, never eat with disposable crockery, never eat from a packet, never eat in front of a screen, always eat at a table and always eat with a knife and fork.  In other words - eat mindfully and enjoy your food but savour it.   

He ended with some wise words: "Diets are nonsense."  Who doesn't love that?  Plus he told us an anecdote about a bull-frog and his cock.

I feel bad as I'm not going to give much page space to either Michael Moseley or Jamie Oliver, but sort of for good reason.  Michael Moseley invented the 5: 2 diet and has written a new diet book called "The 8-week blood sugar diet".  He pretty much said everything that Professor James and George Mobiot said.  Sugar is killing us.  The NHS can't cope.  There are now 7000 amputations from diabetes in the UK per year.  The corporations are evil.  We should be eating a Mediterranean diet and always take the stairs!

Jamie Oliver I felt really sorry for.  He was last to speak and clearly struggled as the other speakers had said everything he wanted to say.  He's not a great public speaker, he never finishes his sentences and jumps from thought to thought.  However, there is no denying what he has done for this country and continues to do in the fight against childhood obesity and bad food education.  He ended by saying that he has never met a child who hasn't loved and eaten what they have grown themselves.  Actually, that is what he should have talked about - children learning to grow and pick and forage and cook from scratch.  That is what my friend Cassia does who I took with me to 5x15.  She has the most wonderful company called Root Camp that teaches 14-21 year olds how to cook from field to table.  I could see her genuinely struggling and being utterly frustrated, listening to everything we heard.  It is truly a horrendous state of affairs and we all need to do something about it.