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Average energy use versus average energy need: this graph shows the vast rise in the oversupply of food in most countries since 1990.
In the early 1990s, European governments were still subsidising farmers to churn out mountains of food, surpluses of which often found their way onto the world market where they made it hard for producers from poorer countries to compete. In 1995, the World Trade Organisation was founded. Its aim was to end the unfair subsidies and remove trade restrictions, to give the developing world more of a level playing field. But the new liberalised global markets were not necessarily any fairer than the system that came before and they certainly did not result in better diets. The richer countries carried on subsidising their own local farmers but also benefited from relaxed subsidies overseas, enabling their farmers to enter new markets in the developing world. Meanwhile, rules on investing in the food markets of poorer countries were radically liberalised, which led to a huge wave of foreign investment from companies selling highly processed foods. This paved the way for the nutrition transition to happen in Asia and South America.46
Western eaters have been living in the sugary abundance of stage four for decades. The difference now is that so many other, poorer countries are galloping to join us. In wealthy countries, the key decades of dietary change were the 1960s and 1970s, when people shifted en masse to diets higher in sugary drinks and highly processed foods. As far back as 1980, the average Canadian was already getting more than a thousand calories a day from animal products, chiefly meat, and more than three hundred calories each from oils and sugars. The great food revolution of our times is that people across the entire globe are starting to eat this type of oil-heavy, ultra-processed diet.47
One of the frightening aspects of stage four is how fast it has happened. It took thousands of years to get from a hunter-gatherer society to one based on farming (from stage one to stage two). The effects of the Industrial Revolution in Europe and the US took only a couple of centuries (stage two to stage three). But the new shifts in the West away from home-cooked meals and tap water and on to packaged snacks and sugary drinks were speedier still, taking only a couple of decades. In Brazil and Mexico and China and India, the change is happening even faster, in the space of ten years or less. For South America, the peak decade of nutritional change was the 1990s. Over just eleven years, from 1988 to 1999, the number of overweight and obese people in Mexico nearly doubled, from 33.4 per cent of the population to 59.6 per cent.48
Mexican diets have changed at tumultuous speed. After the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed by the United States, Mexico and Canada in 1994, it spelled the end of subsidies for home-grown Mexican corn and the Mexican market was flooded with cheap yellow corn from the US which did not have the same qualities as the old corn, either in taste or nutrition. Traditional Mexican tortilla were made from locally adapted landrace corns of diverse species, each of which had its own distinct flavour and nutritional properties. Before it was cooked, the corn was ‘nixtamalised’: soaked in an alkaline solution which increases the nutritional properties of the grain. The old tortillas were eaten with beans, a culinary arrangement which also reflected agricultural practice. Traditionally, in Mexico, corn and beans were intercropped, to enrich the soil. Now, corn and beans are not necessarily seen together either in the soil or on the plate in Mexico. Refried beans have been edged out by ultra-processed foods, whose sales expanded at a rate of 5–10 per cent a year from 1995 to 2003.49
As in South Africa, the pattern of eating in Mexico has changed, radically and fast. We are not talking here about the occasional fizzy drink or a Friday night plate of fried chicken but a near total transformation of the food supply, which has gone hand in hand with disastrous changes to the population’s health since the 1990s. From 1999 to 2004, 7-Eleven doubled its number of stores in Mexico. There are Mexican towns where running water is sporadic and Coca-Cola is more readily available than bottled water. Meanwhile, the prevalence of overweight and obesity among people in Mexico rose 78 per cent from 1988 to 1998 and by 2006, more than 8 per cent of Mexicans were suffering from type 2 diabetes.50
A changing plate of food in China and Egypt in 1961 and 2009.
A similarly tragic nutrition transition is currently playing out in Brazil, where much of the population is both malnourished and obese. Throughout Brazil there are ‘dual burden households’ where some family members (usually the children) are underweight and stunted and others (usually the mothers) are obese.51 Many adolescent girls in Brazil are both anaemic and obese, suggesting that their diets, though plentiful, are low in crucial micronutrients, especially iron.52
To Americans, junk food is nothing new. Cracker Jack, a sticky packaged confection made from popcorn, syrup and peanuts, was first sold in Chicago in 1896. The difference now is the sheer global reach of branded processed items, which have succeeded in travelling to some of the remotest villages in Africa and South America. From the late 1990s onwards, the multinational food companies worked hard to get their products into even the tiniest village food stores in Africa. As soon as electricity reached a given region, Coca-Cola would be there, offering free coolers and kiosks to shopkeepers who would stock their products. But now, food companies have taken this marketing a stage further, employing travelling salespeople to bring branded processed foods right into individual homes.53
In 2017, reporters from the New York Times followed some of the women who act as door-to-door salespeople for Nestlé in Brazil. Items such as chocolate pudding, sugary yoghurts and heavily processed cereals are sold door-to-door to consumers who may believe they are doing the best for their families by buying these products, which often boast that they are fortified with vitamins and minerals. In the poorer regions of Brazil, door-to-door sales enable multinational food companies to reach households they could never otherwise have penetrated.54
A report on the Nestlé website in 2012 boasted about door-to-door sales as a form of ‘community engagement’ because the foods being sold were fortified with vitamins. What the report doesn’t mention is that these fortified foods contain excessive amounts of sugar and refined starch and are displacing other, more nourishing foods from the Brazilian diet. The company currently had 7,000 saleswomen going door-to-door in Brazil, but aimed to expand this number to 10,000. Nestlé claimed that the initiative brought a sense of ‘independence’ as well as valuable income to the female sellers. Needless to relate, the company said nothing about the fact that most of these women – like their customers – were now grappling with diet-related ill health. A reporter for the New York Times spoke to Celene da Silva, a 29-year-old seller for Nestlé, who weighs more than 200 lb and has high blood pressure. She drinks Coca-Cola at every meal.55
This is a story not just about the food industry but about social change. The rise of the big multinational food companies in Brazil and elsewhere is part of a bigger picture which includes rising incomes, changing patterns of work, urbanisation, electronic kitchen gadgets and a growth in TV, computer and mobile phone ownership. Mass media is one of the drivers of the nutrition transition that we often forget about. In China in 1989, only 63 per cent of households owned a TV set and of these, half owned a black and white set. By 2006, 98 per cent of Chinese households owned a TV, and almost all of them showed a full colour picture. TV watching not only encourages people to be less active than ever before, but it also allows direct marketing of novel processed foods, particularly to children. Almost all the food advertised in the world on TV is what nutritionists call ‘noncore’: inessential, sugary or salty snack foods rather than those served for a main meal. The aim of the adverts is to create a preference for these unhealthy foods in children which, the manufacturers hope, will last a lifetime.56
It’s not that electronic entertainment or labour-saving kitchens and city life are bad
