for myself, I would hate to go back to a life before Spotify – never mind before refrigeration and colour TV. So many of the social changes that have gone along with the nutrition transition have enabled people to lead fuller, easier, more comfortable lives. In the spring of 2018, when I visited Nanjing, one of the biggest cities in China, I walked on ground that would have been farmland ten years ago, full of workers doing back-breaking labour in the fields. Now, these neighbourhoods were full of glitzy high-rise malls where young people whose grandparents had lived their youth in toil and hunger sat in air-conditioned branches of Starbucks nibbling fluffy cakes flavoured with green matcha tea. Older Nanjing residents who would once have struggled to afford exotic fruit such as durian or lychees more than once or twice a year could now buy these fruits every week, and carry them home on a super-fast metro train.
In a way, the modern global food industry is a miraculous achievement. It can grow anything, transport anything, sell anything (so long as that anything can be neatly packaged and placed on a supermarket shelf). The system can produce fresh green beans and perishable meat in a far-flung corner of one country and distribute them, still in an apparently fresh state, to hungry eaters anywhere on the planet in a matter of days. For those with the cash to buy them, there are summer fruits in winter and sweet cups of piping-hot chocolate topped with whipped cream all the year round. Where our ancestors worried intensely about the safety of dairy products, we can now buy fresh refrigerated cold milk, mostly free of pathogens, whenever we feel like it.
The food transformations of stage four are unlike anything else the world has seen. Sometimes, I look at my three children and think how extraordinarily fortunate much of this generation is, never having to doubt whether there are things to eat in the shops. Fresh fruit is almost like running water to them. When stuff in our refrigerator runs out, we know there is plenty more where it came from. My children have never known empty shelves or rationing. Nor have I, come to that.
Needless to say, it still isn’t possible for all children, everywhere, to rely on this diet of abundance, even now. The terrible food shortages in present-day Venezuela are a bleak reminder that we cannot necessarily count on this era of plenty lasting for ever. It’s also the case that many children, even in rich countries, are not sharing in the plenty to the same extent, with one in five American children suffering from food insecurity. Stage four has seen the emergence of new forms of social and economic inequality around food. Some children have never tasted a strawberry, except for the fake strawberry flavour in a fast food milkshake. Others – from wealthier families – are given organic oats and farmers’ market berries for breakfast. The gap in quality between the diet of the poorest and that of the richest is wide and widening. The poorest families in America may not look hungry in the way that Victorian orphans looked hungry but they eat fewer dark green vegetables, fewer wholegrains and fewer nuts.57
The great question held out by stage four is whether it is possible to enjoy the advantages of modern eating without the downsides. The post-war food system succeeded in delivering a vast surplus of calories. What it has not delivered thus far – at least not in most countries – is food for the masses that won’t make people unwell.
Bending the curve
Experts in development studies talk about ‘bending the curve’ of the nutrition transition, meaning changing its direction to a healthier pattern of eating. In an ideal world, we would be able to enjoy the convenience, variety and pleasure of modern food without the chronic illness that so often seems to be its corollary. Can the curve be bent away from junk food and towards vegetables? If so, where has this ever happened?
One country – South Korea – comes up again and again when we consider these questions. South Korea managed to pass from stage three to stage four of the nutrition transition in lightning time without experiencing anything like the same consequences of a changing diet seen in Brazil and Mexico and South Africa. Almost alone in the world, South Korea bent the curve.
From the early 1960s to the mid-1990s, the South Korean economy was completely transformed. Between 1962 and 1996, per capita GNP increased an astonishing seventeenfold. Meanwhile, life expectancy had increased from 52.4 for Korean males in 1960 to 82.16 in 2015. As elsewhere, this growing wealth went along with demographic changes, as populations rapidly moved away from the countryside and into cities. South Koreans acquired TVs and microwaves and electric rice cookers. In 1988, the city of Seoul hosted the Olympic Games and became exposed to international influences as never before.
As we might expect, these economic and social changes went along with huge adjustments to the South Korean diet. Household food consumption surveys suggest that Korean meat eating increased tenfold between 1969 and 1995 – not exactly a trivial change. Previously, a dish such as spicy bulgogi – made from shredded beef marinated in soy sauce and sesame oil – might have been a special meal. Now, with rising incomes and falling food prices, it was an everyday midweek supper for middle-class families. Meanwhile, the consumption of cereals (majoring on rice) plummeted from 558 grams per person in 1969 to 308 grams in 1995.
Given how rapidly South Korea moved from poverty to wealth and became exposed to new world markets, you would expect the country to have moved equally rapidly to an obesogenic diet high in sugar, new fats and packaged foods. But compared to people in other rapidly developing nations, Koreans retained their traditional diet to a much greater extent. When researchers examined the data for South Korea from the 1960s to the 1990s, they were startled to find that South Korean fat consumption was still reletively low. In 1996, the typical South Korean ate less fat than the average Chinese person, even though the GNP of South Korea was at that time fourteen times higher than China’s.58 Meanwhile, levels of obesity in South Korea were also markedly lower than would have been expected from the nation’s level of economic development. As of 1998, just 1.7 per cent of men and 3 per cent of women in South Korea were obese.59
The area where South Korea bends the curve most of all is in vegetable consumption. In 1969, the average South Korean ate 271 grams of vegetables, fresh and processed, every day. In 1995, despite all the other changes to Korean society – from the strange vogue for bubble tea to the invention of K-pop, a fusion of Western and Asian pop music – the amount of vegetables Koreans ate had actually gone up slightly, to 286 grams. The city-dwelling Koreans of the 1990s led completely different lives from Korean villagers in the 1950s, yet they continued to eat their greens. The example of Korea shows that it is possible to be a modern person who is not disgusted by cabbage.60
How did South Korea manage to retain its vegetable-eating ways, despite all the other transformations and pressures of modern life? Part of the explanation is cultural. South Koreans see vegetables as something delicious rather than merely healthy, as we all too often see them in the West. Koreans enjoy a greater variety of flavoursome vegetables than most eaters in other countries, from bean sprouts to spinach. In rural Korea, it has been estimated that as many as three hundred different vegetables are eaten, each prized for its distinctive flavour and texture. King of all vegetable dishes in Korea is kimchi, a kind of fermented and highly spiced cabbage, which is not just a condiment but a staple food, the most consumed single item in the diet after rice, as of 2002.61
If Korea was helped by its vegetable-loving food culture, it also benefited from a range of government initiatives which consciously set out to soften the blow of the nutrition transition. In contrast to other developing countries, South Korea made a more concerted effort to protect its own cooking against the new globalised diet. From the 1980s onwards the Rural Living Science Institute trained thousands of workers to provide free cooking workshops educating families in how to make traditional dishes such as steamed rice, fermented soybean foods and kimchi.62 In addition, there were mass media campaigns to promote local foods, with TV programmes emphasising the higher quality of local food and the benefits of supporting home-grown produce and local farmers. When most children in the 1980s switched on the TV, they would be greeted by adverts for sweets and treats,
