when the single crop happens to fail – as the Irish potato famine demonstrated in the nineteenth century. Thanks to the opening up of new global markets, east Asian countries such as Vietnam have now been able to diversify into wheat and potatoes, which bestows greater food security as well as more varied nutrients.
But in most places, the new global diet has involved a narrowing down of what people eat. Our world contains around seven thousand edible crops, yet 95 per cent of what we eat comes from just thirty of those crops. As omnivores, humans are designed to eat a varied diet, so there’s something strange and wrong when, as a species, we become so limited in our choice of foods.28
It might surprise you to learn (it did me) that the most average place in the world, food-wise, is not the United States, which is actually pretty extreme in the composition of its diet. To take one example, Americans have access to around twice the global average calories from meat (around 1,000 calories as against 500). Americans also consume far more sugar and sweeteners than the global mean.
To find the most average eaters in the world, you need to look to some of the middle-income countries of the developing world, especially in Latin America. These countries seem to hold up a mirror to the way food consumption is now shifting to a global mean. Purely in terms of the crops consumed, one of the most average places in the world for food is Colombia. Here, the top four sources of calories used to be maize followed by animal products followed by sugar and rice. Now the order is changed. Top of the list of Colombian foods are animal products (518 calories) followed by sugar (404 calories), then maize (368 calories) and rice (334 calories). Compared with the 1960s, people in Colombia have access to far more wheat and sugar and more refined oils.29
The idea that Colombians eat in anything like an average way would once have seemed laughable. Until recently, Colombians’ food habits were not merely different from those of Europe and the US, but distinct to the point of eccentricity from the rest of Latin America. There is nothing ‘average’ about a country where people eat milk soup with eggs for breakfast, garnished with spring onions and coriander leaf. Called changua, to those reared on it this soup is as soothing as congee or chicken soup. Another distinctive element of Colombian food was its unique and abundant range of tropical fruits.
On a trip to Spain in the spring of 2017, I got into conversation with the best-selling Colombian writer Héctor Abad (author of the magical and strange book Recipes for Sad Women). We strolled through the city of San Sebastián just before sunset and Abad told me of his love of old books and old ways. He recalled that when he first travelled from Colombia to Italy, he was astonished to find that Italians ate fruit at the end of the meal rather than at the start. In the Colombia of Abad’s youth, local fruit was the opening of every dinner for those who could afford it. The fruits of Colombia range from succulent pink guavas to guanábanas, which Abad later described to me in an email as ‘a fruit with the peel of a dinosaur, and the meat a sweet humid cotton that you can easily chew’.
When Abad was eight years old, in the 1960s, an American student called Keith came to visit his family. Keith ‘almost vomited’ when Héctor’s mother offered him changua soup for breakfast. Keith was also no fan of arepas, the Colombian corn bread which used to be ground and roasted and baked fresh every day. Keith complained that in the city of Medellín there was not one place to get a hamburger. Abad was a teenager before he first tasted ‘that strange and very caloric thing called pizza’.
These days, Abad and his wife still eat the good old foods of Colombian cuisine, or as many of them as they can find. They cook a lot of soups and fish or hearty dishes of meat, rice and vegetables. But such dishes are no longer the norm for Colombians. Abad is convinced that if Keith came back to Colombia now, he would have no problem finding foods just like the ones he ate back home in Los Angeles.
Abad has noticed that young Colombians no longer eat the way that he does and that the change has happened lightning fast – ‘maybe five years, maybe ten’, he tells me. He sees young Colombians abandon the old corn arepas for breakfast in favour of Westernised sliced wheat bread. He watches as they eat hamburgers and avoid the old rice and beans. He sees them sipping not fresh fruit juices but fizzy drinks, ranging from 7 Up to Colombiana – a local drink that Abad describes as ‘sweeter than syrup’. He feels sad that the country seems to have lost its pride in the old foods. Abad’s 94-year-old mother still makes changua for herself when she is ill, but he doesn’t know anyone else who does.
What’s happening in Colombia is happening in most other countries too. Children around the world are now eating weirdly similar food to each other. You wouldn’t expect a child in Portugal and a child in China to consume the same after-school snack. But a study conducted from 2011 to 2013 across twelve countries based on interviews with more than seven thousand nine- to eleven-year-olds found that there were very similar patterns of eating across all twelve. In particular, those children who had an ‘unhealthy’ pattern of eating tended to consume near-identical foods: packaged cookies and cereal bars, branded sweets, chocolates and crackers.30
Whether the children were in Australia or India, Finland or Kenya, they knew and devoured much the same things, which had nothing to do with the traditional cuisine of their country or even whether they were rich or poor. The children ate French fries and drank fizzy drinks; they ate doughnuts and crisps, cakes and ice cream. The nine-year-old in Bangalore and his or her counterpart in Ottawa had access to the same fizzy drinks, the same breakfast cereals, many of the same bagged savoury snacks. Across all the countries, the more healthy-eating children also shared similar patterns (except for the fact that children in India drank whole milk whereas those in Finland and Portugal drank skimmed milk). Children of all countries who ate ‘healthily’ ate dark leafy vegetables, orange vegetables and beans; fish and cheese; and fruit, especially bananas.31
If any single food illustrates the monotony of modern global diets, it is the banana. The Cavendish banana has found its way into kitchens around the world without having a great deal to recommend it as a fruit. Those soft yellow crescents have become an emblem of our food system’s lack of biodiversity. They are now not only the most popular fruit in the world but the tenth most consumed food of any kind.32
The mythical banana kingdom of Iceland
The unlikeliest bananas in the world grow in Iceland, a couple of hundred miles from the Arctic Circle. Iceland is not, to put it mildly, an obvious location in which to grow tropical fruit. Winter days in this part of Scandinavia sometimes have just four hours of sunlight and temperatures regularly drop below freezing. But near the city of Hveragerði in the south of the country there is a lava field that produces enough geothermal heat to power greenhouses where Nordic bananas grow.33
Home-grown Icelandic bananas are a magical proposition, one which seems to buck the trend for increasingly global, faceless modern food. Around the turn of the millennium, rumours circulated that Iceland had become ‘the largest banana republic in Europe’. Others spoke of Iceland attempting to become self-sufficient in the yellow-skinned soft fruits.34
Sadly, the ‘mythical banana kingdom of Iceland’ turned out to be just that, a myth. Bananas may grow in Iceland – a fact which is amazing enough in itself – but that does not mean that they can be grown on a commercial scale. Back in the 1940s, when plant scientists first discovered that bananas could be grown in Iceland, there were experiments with banana farms all over the country, but they were never profitable. The growing season for Icelandic bananas is short, with harvests lasting only from April to June. Soon, the Icelandic banana entrepreneurs gave up and donated their remaining plants to the Agricultural University at Hveragerði. You won’t find a geothermal banana in any local shop because the university is a publicly funded body that is not allowed to sell anything for profit. The tiny crop of bananas produced each year – about a ton – are enjoyed
