Foreword
We live at a time when issues about how food is produced, marketed, and consumed are matters of unprecedented personal as well as public interest. And why not? Food influences the lives of every person on Earth. On the personal side, everyone eats, and what we eat – in quantity and quality – greatly affects our health. On the public side, food has extraordinary economic importance. In the United States alone, the food industry encompasses about 2 million farms and nearly 600,000 food processing, wholesale, retail, and service companies. Together, these components of the nation’s food system generate more than a trillion dollars in sales each year, account for about 12 percent of the Gross National Product, and employ about 17 percent of the workforce. Anything this big deserves serious attention on its own, but the US food industry does not exist in isolation. We imported about $80 billion worth of agricultural products and seafood in 2007, and we exported nearly as much. The American food system is inextricably linked to the global food economy. The interconnectedness of the world’s food systems can be illustrated by matters as seemingly diverse as the pet food recalls of 2007 and by rising food prices. The pet food incident began with a few sick cats but soon developed into an international crisis in food safety and trade relations. Toxic ingredients had been produced in China, shipped to the United States and Canada, incorporated into hundreds of brands of pet foods, and recycled into feed for pigs, chickens, and fish intended for the human food supply. Some of the adulterated food and feed was exported to countries abroad. Today’s national and international food systems are so interwoven that food intended for pets, farm animals, or people cannot be kept separate. A problem with food in one country must be expected to have international repercussions. The recent rise in food prices also has profound global dimensions. Its multiple causes may appear many steps removed from supermarket shopping carts: increasing demands for meat and cooking oils among populations in developing countries and, therefore, for feed grains and oil seeds; Middle East conflicts leading to reductions in the supply of fuel oil, thereby increasing the costs of fertilizer and transportation; and American incentives for Midwestern farmers to grow corn to produce ethanol rather than feed. Throughout history, food shortages have threatened the stability of governments. Today, they pose a threat to world security. These interconnections are complex and the “big picture” is often hard to fathom. That is why The Atlas of Food is such an invaluable resource. Here, in one place, beautifully illustrated, is the global food system available to anyone at the mere turn of a page. The Atlas maps provide rich material. Millstone, Lang and colleagues make the prodigious amount of research that went into creating them look easy. The maps tell the story at a glance. This Atlas is a generous gift to the world community of people who care about food in any of its dimensions, from farming to advocacy. We owe it a great round of applause. Marion Nestle Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University and author of Food Politics, Safe Food, and What to Eat.
Contributors
The authors would like to thank the following people for their contributions on specific topics: Lukasz Aleksandrowicz (University of Guelph) 8 Contamination Steven Allender and Mike Rayner (Department of Public Health, University of Oxford) 7 Over-Nutrition Peter Backman (Horizons FS Limited) 36 Eating Out David Barling (Centre for Food Policy, City University, London) 21 Agricultural Biodiversity Simone Baroke (Centre for Food Policy, City University, London) 33 Retail Power Paul Brassley (University of Plymouth) 9 Mechanization David Buffin (Centre for Food Policy, City University, London) 15 Pesticides Charlie Clutterbuck (Environmental Practice@Work) 16 Fertilizers; 23 Greenhouse Gases; 40 Citizens Bite Back Alizon Draper and Veronica Tuffrey (Centre for Public Health Nutrition, School of Integrated Health, University of Westminster, London) 6 Nutritional Deficiencies; 30 Staple Foods; 31 Changing Diets Axel Drescher and Johanna Jacobi (University of Freiburg, Germany) 19 Urban Farming David Goodyear (Fairtrade Foundation, London) 29 Fair Trade Jannet King (Myriad Editions) 1 Current Concerns; 4 Environmental Challenges; 5 Water Pressure; 12 Animal Diseases; 17 Working the Land; 20 Fishing and Aquaculture; 22 Organic Farming; 29 Fair Trade; 37 Fast Food; 34 Organic Food; 40 Citizens Bite Back Tim Lobstein (SPRU – Science and Technology Policy Research, University of Sussex) 39 Advertising Becky Price (GeneWatch) 13 Agricultural R&D; 14 Genetically Modified Crops Geof Rayner (Centre for Food Policy, City University, London) 38 Alcohol Peter Stevenson (Compassion in World Farming) 10 Industrial Livestock Production; 25 Live Animal Transport
Investigating what we eat, where we eat and how we eat, who goes hungry and why, reveals a remarkable world of contrasting food and drink cultures. These complex but intelligible patterns are what we set out to represent graphically in this atlas. For all the contributors to The Atlas of Food, the modern world of food is not a random series of “facts” or “events”. The food system is an ever-changing web of industrial, technological, economic, social and political factors that impact on the journey food takes from its production on the farm to the eventual consumers. The picture this atlas presents is troubling. It raises some old and some new questions. Why is food such a political problem for humankind? Why have we not managed to feed ourselves well, equitably, healthily, and within environmental limits? Why does the food system keep provoking political, economic and nutritional crises? In 2007 and 2008, after a period of relatively stable or slowly declining food prices since the last great oil and energy crisis in the early 1970s, the price of many staple foodstuffs rose in national markets around the world, provoking unrest in many countries. Over 50 governments imposed price or export controls, adding to instability elsewhere. Some commentators said these problems would be temporary, that higher prices would encourage production and all would be well if only more food were produced. In fact, food prices did drop briefly but then rose again. By late 2012 they had almost matched the peak of 2007 to 2008. The OECD, FAO and most analysts now expect future prices to be volatile and rising, and food security has become a hot political topic one again, not least because of the drought that affected 80 percent of US agricultural land in 2012, and the consequent poor harvest. In truth, the issue of food security never disappeared, though politicians lost interest. For three decades or more, governments assumed that food could best be managed with the application of neo-liberal economic policies. But in an unregulated market, food is consumed not by those who need it most, but by those whose consumption is most profitable to the large agro-business corporations. Instead of the market serving consumers globally, consumers in wealthy countries and communities are increasingly over-consuming unhealthy diets, while poor communities and countries continue to suffer under-nutrition, hunger and starvation. Policy-makers need to guide changes in the ways food is produced, distributed, consumed and wasted, as well as how much is produced, because chronic hunger is not simply a consequence of scarcity; it is a consequence of poverty and powerlessness. Ending global hunger is not just about improving access to, and control of, material resources, but also about poverty, justice, rights and democracy. This wider perspective, linking production and consumption, environment, health and economy, power and distribution, is reflected in this atlas. Attempting to engage with this more complex analysis, some orthodox institutions have proposed including some concern for environmental sustainability in their new push for increasing production as the answer to future problems. The phrase “sustainable intensification” is frequently invoked, though its meaning remains vague and contested. We contend, however, that the problems of the food system cannot be understood merely as problems of production; the perspectives of consumers are at least as relevant as those of producers. We therefore understand the goal of “food security” in far broader terms as encompassing considerations
