Читать книгу A Greedy Man in a Hungry World: How - Jay Rayner, Jay Rayner - Страница 9

The spring of 2011 in Britain was marked by an unusually warm, sunny spell of blue skies and soft breezes, and in the plum orchards of Kent the white blossoms bloomed full and heavy. It promised a solid harvest with yields up on the year before. There would, as there had so often been, be lots of domestic plums to meet demand. Britain is good at growing plums. Which is not really surprising. We have been growing them for a very long time. There is evidence of plums being used in cookery during the Roman occupation. By the medieval era they were so dominant that the word ‘plum’ had become a synonym for all sorts of dried fruits, the famed plum pudding served at the Victorian Christmas a mark of its lasting popularity.

Certainly when the technologists for the major supermarkets began talking to plum farmer Peter Kedge early in 2011, he was able to reassure them that he would have lots and lots of fruit for them to buy, punnet after punnet of Marjorie’s Seedling, Reeves and Victoria, as much as 260 tonnes. The technologists monitor the levels of produce supply, to ensure the big multiples can keep their shelves stocked. ‘The message I was getting back from the supermarkets was that they could take everything we would grow,’ says Kedge, who has been a farmer of apples and plums since 1988, when he joined his wife’s family business. ‘Mind you,’ he says with a weary air, ‘they always say that.’ Even so, early in 2011 Kedge had no reason to think the harvest would be anything other than a roaring success.

And it might have been were it not for an 83-year-old woman, who was admitted to hospital in the north-west German state of Lower Saxony on 15 May, suffering from bloody diarrhoea. On Saturday 21 May she died, becoming the first of fifty people across Europe – more than forty of them in Germany – to lose their lives to a virulent strain of shiga toxin-producing E. Coli. It’s a complicated name for a vicious bug that shreds your kidneys and turns your blood poisonous. As well as the fifty deaths there would be 4,000 other serious cases across Europe, an outbreak that initiated the scientific version of a manhunt for a serial killer. Like all proper detective stories the search came complete with blind alleys, false leads and undeserving suspects. Prime among the innocent were cucumbers from Spain which, on 26 May, were fingered as the cause by German health officials. The next day a Europe-wide alert was issued calling for the withdrawal from sale of all organic Spanish cucumbers. Shortly afterwards the Robert Koch Institute, the German state body with responsibility for disease control and prevention, issued guidance warning against the consumption of not just cucumbers but also raw tomatoes and lettuce. It was a bad month for salad.

The consumer response was all but instantaneous. Even in Britain, where nobody had died, and where the only people who had contracted the illness had visited Germany, sales of cucumbers simply halted, regardless of where they had come from. Health officials in Britain tried to reassure the public that the cucumbers on sale here were safe; even so a glut built up and tonnes had to be dumped. (So much so that on Friday 10 June I found myself interviewing chef Jamie Oliver live on BBC1’s The One Show about the best way to use up cucumbers. He demonstrated a killer twelve-hour pickling recipe.)

In time the German authorities would absolve the innocent cucumbers of blame. Attention would shift swiftly to a bean-sprout farm in Lower Saxony, and from there back down the food chain to a 15,000-kilogram consignment of seeds that had left the port of Damietta in Egypt almost two years earlier on 24 November 2009. But by then the damage had been done. German consumers hadn’t simply turned against cucumbers or even just salad vegetables in general. They had pretty much started boycotting all produce from Spain. What had begun with the death of one octogenarian German lady would, by the middle of that summer, have become a full-blown political and economic crisis, with the Spanish authorities estimating that it had cost Spain’s agriculture sector over a quarter of a billion dollars.

And that’s where it became a problem for Peter Kedge.

Because among the produce Spanish farmers could no longer sell to the Germans were plums. An enormous number of cricket-ball-sized, blemish-free, sun-ripened plums. For the Spanish farmers this was, as it happened, not much of a problem. In Britain farmers generally don’t get paid in full for their produce until the supermarkets take delivery, a major issue we will come to later. In Spain, however, the agents, who act as middlemen, pay for the plums before they’re harvested, and then profit when they finally sell on. In Spain there was now a major glut of plums which the agents had to find some way to sell, in a manner which might literally cut their losses. What they needed were customers, and in the British supermarkets that was exactly what they found.

‘It was just as we were about to harvest,’ Peter Kedge says. ‘All of a sudden we got a message from our agents telling us the supermarkets we normally supply had decided to bring in foreign plums.’ It didn’t matter that the orchards of Kent were bulging with the things, that Britain has an ancient and venerable plum-growing history, or that for years a debate had been growing around the importance of sourcing local produce where possible to cut down on food miles. The supermarkets were going to follow the money. British growers estimated that they had to sell each punnet of plums to the supermarkets at 65p to break even. Spanish agents were offering their plums at 45p a punnet, simply to get them moving. ‘We couldn’t pick and pack our plums for that money.’

And so Kedge did the one thing which to him made any economic sense. ‘We decided not to pick them all, to just leave a significant amount to rot in the orchards.’ Dozens of tonnes of perfect British plums fell from the trees and decayed where they lay, until the air in the orchards was heavy with the boozy smell of rotting fruit and they buzzed with the sound of happy fruit flies. ‘It’s hard to describe what it’s like watching your harvest literally go to waste,’ Kedge said. ‘It’s horrible. There’s nothing worse.’

Peter Kedge’s family originally planted fifty acres of plum orchards back in 1999. Over the years, as supermarkets’ buying policies had bitten hard, that had been reduced to thirty-five acres, as trees were ‘grubbed out’. In the wake of the disaster of 2011 the farmer once again made plans to grub out trees – to destroy the capacity of his orchards. It was, according to the National Farmers Union (NFU), a story repeated across Britain: tonne after tonne of perfect plums left to rot, prime trees cut down, orchards emptied.

This is one of the complications of the fruit-growing business. If you are in arable crops – wheat or barley or maize or rapeseed – you can follow the ups and downs of supply and demand, changing your crop from one year to the next depending upon who wants what. Fruit farmers can’t do that. ‘Planting a plum tree is a major investment,’ Kedge says. ‘It takes about six years from initial planting to recoup the investment. And after that you might have another ten years in which to make money.’ The killing of trees simply ends that story. A little bit more of Britain’s ability to feed itself also dies.

The brutal, clear-eyed, wake up and smell the prime, Grade A, dark roast Taste the Extra Special Finest Difference coffee is: this is just business. This is what supermarkets do. Complaining about a supermarket chasing the cheapest price is like wandering into a brothel and complaining about all the shagging going on in there. And it’s true, up to a point. These corporate behemoths have shareholders to think about and profits to make. In the short term that is exactly what they do, and they do it extraordinarily well. Tesco made £1.9 billion in the first six months of 2011, up 12.1 per cent on the previous year. Sainsbury’s made £395 million, up 6.6 per cent. Asda made £803 million, and that was a drop of over 10 per cent. But there is a bigger, dirtier picture. The business of food supply is full of consequences, and some of them are very serious indeed.

Consider the dodo. A butcher trading in prime dodo meat – such lovely animals, all free-range, look at the drumsticks on that – would have been laughing all the way to the bank in 1620. He would have had access to all the dodo he could possibly want. By 1681, however, when the last dodo was killed by the last scurvy-ridden Dutch sailor to feed himself, it might not have looked like such a smart business model. Right now it feels like the big supermarkets are in the dodo extinction business.

The buyers drive such hard bargains, under such extraordinarily unfair terms, that British farming is being decimated. (And the way is being opened to fraud. The scandal around horsemeat being found in processed food products labelled as beef, which first broke across Britain and then Europe in January of 2013, was attributed by many to pressures on price. With beef at an all time high of £2.75 a kilo deadweight on the international markets and horsemeat at around £1.85, the substitution by unscrupulous traders made economic sense in the face of profit margins cut to the bone by supermarket buyers.) In the summer of 2011 food journalist Alex Renton tried to get farmers to talk, on the record, about their dealings with the supermarkets. Most of them refused. They demanded anonymity. They insisted upon off-the-record briefings. Whilst they are obviously lawful companies, the supermarkets did come across less as food retailers and more like mafias, hell-bent on extortion. Anybody who has done business with them might not think the comparison over-blown: the supermarkets would insist upon legally binding contracts that would tie producers into supplying them, but without a specified price. The supermarkets could, with little or no warning, simply reject a consignment of produce, insisting it didn’t hit quality thresholds. The producers would be required to carry the cost of any two-for-one and discounting offers. They would have to get their harvests packaged at plants designated by the supermarkets, often at twice the price it might cost to get the job done independently. (In June 2011 Peter Kendall, chairman of the NFU, told a parliamentary committee that some of these packers and processors pay a portion of the premium extracted from the farmers to the very supermarkets who had enforced the extra charge, as a kind of kickback.)

Most of all there is the issue of price. The best-known sector of British farming to suffer is dairy. Not long ago I spent a day working on a dairy farm in Cornwall. It’s not easy. I got up at four o’clock in the morning, which surely must be regarded as cruel and unusual punishment in itself. I did so, merely so I could stand in a cow shed and dodge plumes of steaming shite being fired out of big animals under pressure. A lot of the job seems to involve shit – dodging it, hosing it off, scraping it up. I weaved my way around the stamping, clanking hooves to wipe down teats with disinfectant. I felt the suck and pull of the automated milking system as the rubber plugs went on. I washed floors, scraped yards, piled hay, interacted with more shit, and then gave thanks to the gods that my day job mostly involves sitting at tables, either eating or writing about what I’ve eaten or feeling smug about what I’ve written about what I’ve eaten while wondering what I’ll eat next.

For all this – the brutal, grinding hard labour of milk production – the supermarkets were at that point willing to pay, through their intermediaries, the princely sum of 25p a litre. The cost of producing milk is around 27p a litre. It’s not a brilliant business model, is it? It’s not even on nodding terms with a brilliant business model. The majority of dairy farmers had, courtesy of supermarket buying policies, been sentenced to make a loss on every litre of milk they sold. The farmer who let me onto his farm as the worst work-experience student in world history said he hoped they might make enough to keep their heads above water by renting out holiday accommodation or selling the calves from their herd for beef. In short, the only way he might make money as a producer of milk was not by producing milk at all, but from other things.

Having spent that day working on a traditional dairy farm, to me it was no surprise at all that one dairy farmer was leaving the industry every week, simply because they couldn’t make it pay. Obviously, a lot of farmers do what they do because they love it. There are easier ways to make money, most of which don’t involve close proximity to animal faeces. But eventually even that sort of loving relationship can get dysfunctional, especially when it occurs to you that you’re not making money any more. Britain, a country full of green grassy fields, a place that could hardly have been more expertly engineered for grazing cows and producing milk, was losing its capacity to do so. At the peak of milk production in Britain, in 2001, there were, according to DairyCo, which represents British dairy farmers, 2.25 million cows producing five billion litres of milk a year, but their numbers were dwindling, down to 1.8 million cows in 2012. We had always been self-sufficient in liquid milk and yet by 2010 we were finally having to import the stuff from elsewhere to top up our own supply.

It’s the same story in a branch of farming which is close to my animal-fat-drenched heart: pigs. It’s close to my heart because I very much like eating them. A couple of years ago, pig farmers took out full-page newspaper adverts announcing that they were being paid less by the supermarkets than the cost of production for their animals. As a result, like dairy farmers, pig farmers were simply giving up. Jamie Oliver dedicated a whole hour of (distinctly unsexy) television to the problem. It had a snappy title, Save Our Bacon, but came down to sixty minutes of stolid, grumpy, whingeing farmers. And who wants to watch that? In any case the supermarkets really didn’t regard this as such a huge problem because they could buy in from elsewhere – Denmark, for example, or the Netherlands – where animal welfare standards are much lower. In this country it’s illegal to put sows in tightly confined stalls, which make it impossible for them to move around while they wean their litters. On the continent the practices continue. BPEX, the body which represents British pig producers, estimates that two-thirds of the imported pork and pork products consumed in Britain are produced in conditions that would be illegal in this country.

And yet, because of the power of the supermarkets, the industry seems incapable of mounting anything other than the most feeble of fightbacks. In the autumn of 2011 I was approached by BPEX to see if I would front a campaign for them. They wanted consumers to sign up to take a pledge, committing themselves only to buying pork which carried the British red tractor label. If you stick to that simple rule then you know that the meat you are eating has been raised under higher welfare standards. It sounded like a good campaign. After all, I had been arguing for exactly this for a while. Plus the campaign was on behalf of a trade body rather than a specific producer, so it wasn’t a product endorsement. We agreed a fee. We discussed what they wanted me to do: photo calls, a series of media interviews, lending my name and image to the campaign. All fine and dandy. It’s rather agreeable to be paid to say what you have already been saying for free.

There was just one thing. Obviously, getting consumers to buy the right kind of pork is important. It’s vital. But I had to be able to say during the interviews that the supermarkets also had a massive responsibility to pay British pork producers a viable price for their meat, and to support British producers so that they stopped going out of business. So that, in turn, the supermarkets didn’t have an excuse to import the stuff from animals tortured on the continent.

The PR company started wringing their hands. ‘You are right,’ they said, in response to my email, ‘supermarkets are part of the issue because the price paid to farmers is not reflective of the conditions in which farmers work and the cost of raising pigs in the UK versus abroad because of the higher welfare standards. However, BPEX is working with the supermarkets to lobby on the issues and we can’t be seen to rock the boat. Therefore we are utilizing customers to create demand.’ Great. Put it all back on the punters and let the supermarkets off the hook.

I said it was a deal breaker. I said that I had to be able to talk about the supermarkets. The PR people went silent for twenty-four hours and then announced that they had, after much thought, decided to go with a different person altogether. Funny that.

Witness the power of the supermarkets.

Witness it in numbers. By the mid-nineties, if you added up everything Britain grew and exported – British seafood and beef have always been big sellers, for example – against everything the country imported, it was over 70 per cent self-sufficient in food. By 2011 British self-sufficiency had dropped, according to figures from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), to around 58 per cent and there were many in the food policy world who believed that it was much lower than that; that we were slipping inexorably towards a point where we could supply barely 50 per cent of our food needs. And all because the damned evil supermarkets had undermined the British agricultural base.

What’s more, they had been given British government encouragement to do so. In a Defra paper published in December 2006, the government’s position on food security was articulated thus: ‘Poverty and subsistence agriculture are root causes of national food insecurity. National food security is hugely more relevant for developing countries than the rich countries of Western Europe.’ In short, all that really mattered was free trade, and access to foodstuffs from wherever they might be available across our fecund globe.

In academic food policy circles, within universities and institutes, this paper was nicknamed the ‘Leave it to Tesco’ report. Food security wasn’t an issue for the rich, industrialized nations. We had big fat wallets. We could always buy our way out of trouble. So stop whining and whingeing, and crack open another Chicken Jalfrezi ready meal made with hen from Brazil, tomatoes from Morocco and palm oil from some poor benighted orang-utan’s last remaining bit of virgin forest. And how about an apple pie to finish, made with pristine apples from China, each individually picked and wrapped by a Chinese peasant with their eyes on the main prize of a Western-style industrialized, urban lifestyle?

Then 2008 happened. It happened like one of those awful slow-motion car crashes, with screeching tyres and the smell of burning brakes and the knowledge even as you watched it that nothing would ever be quite the same again. The causes were obvious and predictable, but still it took people by surprise: a bad harvest in Australia, a cyclone in the Bay of Bengal, a set of bizarre US government policies which then saw 20 per cent of the perfectly edible corn harvest being directed towards the manufacture of bioethanol (a policy which was meant to be impeccably green, but really wasn’t), those damn Chinese peasants getting a taste for beef that required seven kilos of grain for every kilo of meat produced, a hike in oil prices which, in turn, made petrochemical-based fertilizers much more expensive, the rise and rise of commodity trading. And then there was a failure to keep reserves of basic foodstuffs. Where once a nation might have four months of wheat backed up, in our just-in-time culture, meaning it is delivered only when needed, reserves have fallen to only a matter of a few days. All of these factors we will come back to in detail. What matters is the impact they had on food prices: they went up.

And up.

Between 2006 and 2008 the price of rice rose 217 per cent. Wheat went up by 136 per cent, corn by 125 per cent and soya beans by 107 per cent. Countries like Brazil, Thailand and India temporarily banned the export of certain varieties of rice. There were food riots all over the world, including in Bangladesh, Cameroon and Ivory Coast – and those are only the countries in the first part of the alphabet where there was civil unrest. In Mozambique people were killed in riots over the cost of food. Food prices would later be blamed for a second wave of civil unrest that started in Tunisia on 18 December 2010 and soon spread across the region in what was to become known as the Arab Spring. While events like the downfall of Colonel Gaddafi in Libya, the end of Hosni Mubarak’s thirty-year reign in Egypt, and the strife in Yemen and the civil war in Syria were clearly caused by a multitude of different competing pressures, there is a growing body of opinion that the one thing which united them was societal outrage over food prices.

Countries across the Middle East and North Africa had long suffered from low agricultural productivity and a huge reliance on imports, with governments attempting to placate their populace through endless unsustainable subsidies. The food price rises of 2007–8 simply pushed the situation over the edge. As David Rosenberg, a Senior Fellow on Economic Issues at the GLORIA Center, a foreign affairs think-tank based in Jerusalem, put it in a paper on the Arab Spring, ‘virtually all the countries of the region are contending with a food crisis of one kind or another’. It was a crisis so deep and intense and severe that it caused civil wars and overthrew governments.

And in Britain in 2008? That rich, Westernized, mine’s-a-prawn-ring-from-Iceland-for-£5.99-thank-you-very-much Britain? We felt it. We felt it like footballers feel a blown Achilles tendon. By August 2008 food price inflation was running at nearly 14 per cent. The cost of fat and oil had risen by 29 per cent, of meat by 16.3 per cent. This had begun to hurt. Finally the government began to wake up. New reports on food security were being published, declaring the challenges posed by a rising global population – expected to reach nine billion by 2050 – and by climate change potentially taking once productive slabs of land out of use. Suddenly Defra, a ministry which actually had the word ‘Food’ in its title, seemed to think that food production was important.

There was one issue, however, that they didn’t want to deal with: the bastard supermarkets. They didn’t appear anywhere in the equation. For years pressure groups and farmers’ representatives had been campaigning for some sort of ombudsman with real powers who could intervene in the relationship between the supermarkets and the producers to ensure a fair price was achieved, so that plum farmers didn’t grub up their trees. For years successive governments dragged their feet. The market was the thing. The market would see us right. A code of conduct was introduced, and yet there was no one to oversee it. In the run-up to the 2010 General Election the Liberal Democrats suddenly announced a policy for a grocery ombudsman, if they should win the vote. In what was looking like an increasingly close race, both Labour and the Conservatives followed suit, announcing various plans for a new body which would have some ill-defined powers.

After the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition came to power in May 2010, nothing happened. And then a lot more of nothing happened. The agriculture ministers in Defra made noises, said there would be a paper proposing a new ombudsman, just as soon as they had cleaned the oven and sorted through their sock drawer, or whatever else it is government departments do when they are stalling for time. In February 2011 I was invited to sit on a panel at the NFU’s annual conference, alongside Jim Paice MP, himself a one-time farmer and now agriculture minister. Asked to make some opening comments to the 750-strong audience, I pointed out that we were still waiting for news of a supermarket ombudsman, that the way things were going the bill wouldn’t be before Parliament for at least a year, which would mean it would be at least two or three years before any such office would be established.

Paice attacked me. He shouted me down like I was a stupid schoolboy, said the bill would be along within a few weeks, that frankly I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. I was baffled. I hadn’t made it up: I had been talking to reporters on Farmers Weekly. I had been having off-the-record discussions with officials within the NFU who liaised with Parliament. Now it appeared I had got it wrong. It was a humiliating experience.

I hadn’t got it wrong. The first paper proposing a new ombudsman did not appear until late autumn of that year, and even then it was roundly attacked by everybody in the farming world for being nowhere near robust enough. As I prepared to address the NFU conference again in February 2012 there was still no news of when the bill would come before Parliament. And if the bill still hadn’t come before the House there was no way an ombudsman to oversee the supermarkets and make sure they didn’t screw the farmers could be established before 2013 at the very earliest. The supermarkets were free to carry on destroying the dairy, pig and plum industries. They were free to carry on undermining the agricultural base. They were free to carry on making Britain less and less self-sufficient.

Result!

A dull weekday afternoon, and I am running for my life. This is what I tell myself as my feet thud, like slimy, dead fish, on the treadmill. I am in the gym running to stay alive; or, more to the point, so that I can carry on living in a way which makes me happy. Lunch makes me happy. So does dinner. Being hugely overweight does not. As a result, three, four or sometimes even five times a week I am on the treadmill in my local gym beating out the miles. Or I’m in a brightly lit, reconditioned railway arch, being ordered to do strenuous things by an irritatingly cheerful personal trainer called Jonny. I pay to experience this pain. But then I am motivated. For good or ill, some of my working life now takes place in front of television cameras. I do not want to have to watch these appearances from behind a cushion, or feel the stab of childish hurt when somebody tweets about my ‘generous moobs’. As they have.

Run, fat boy, run.

There is one way of telling this tale which positions me less as culprit than as victim. In this version of the story it is the supermarkets, with their endless largesse, which have made me fat. It’s all their fault for being stocked with so much irresistible fat and sugar and general starchy carbs. In my case it’s simply not true. I have always been fat. I was a fat little boy and a fat adolescent and a fat twenty-something. In my house, when I was growing up, diets – as against diet – were a regular feature. There was one which required the eating of nine eggs a day and not much else. It made my breath smell of the entire world’s farts. I was 8 years old. There was another which applied units to foodstuffs and demanded endless counting and calculation so you didn’t exceed a daily total. I dieted in my teens and again in my twenties and thirties. Becoming a restaurant critic was not a turning point in my life. It was simply a coming together of greed and earning potential. I had always spent my own money in restaurants. I had always read restaurant reviews. Now I could write them too.

This did have consequences, most of them measurable in inches. A few years ago I wrote a book about the growth of the global luxury restaurant industry. I travelled the world, telling the stories of seven great cities – Las Vegas, Moscow, Dubai, Tokyo, and so on – through their gastro palaces. In the last chapter, as my doubts about the whole business of big-ticket dining began to grow, I went to Paris to experience the high-end version of Morgan Spurlock’s film Supersize Me. In this, Spurlock ate at McDonald’s every day for a month, and if asked whether he wished to supersize his meal, he had to say yes. Doctors monitored his progress and at the end he had the fatty liver of a foie gras goose.

In the luxury version I went to Paris and ate in a Michelin three-star restaurant every day for a week; if they offered me the tasting menu I had to say yes.

I too received the once-over from a doctor. Although I managed not to put on any weight – I tended to eat just the fancy restaurant meal and nothing else each day – it didn’t much matter. My weight was already out of control. My waist was north of forty-four inches much as Edinburgh is north of Madrid. My chest was beyond fifty-two inches and I was well over twenty stone. I had avoided checking my weight. I didn’t want to know. Now, courtesy of the experiment, I knew. I was so large I had my own gravitational pull; planets were slipping out of alignment because of me. Something had to be done. I had always worked out, but only a couple of times a week; now I went five or six times a week. I dropped a lot of the carbohydrate from my diet and the weight did begin to come off. A woman working at the gym told me one day that they had nicknamed me ‘Candle Man’ because I was melting. Eventually I would shift nearly four stone. Hurrah for me.

The change didn’t go unnoticed. One of my editors at the Observer saw there was less of me and, convinced that all personal experiences could be processed into good copy, asked me to write about my gym habit and what had motivated it. I resisted. She asked again. I still said no. I hate self-congratulatory diet pieces. After all, nobody had forced me to eat the pork belly–langoustine combo. Or the truffled pommes purées. Or the millefeuilles of chestnuts and Chantilly cream. I did it all to myself. I was my own special creation. Plus there was always the risk that I wouldn’t keep the weight off. I had done the job, but for how long exactly? Inside this newly thinner man was that old fat bloke desperate to get out again. (A reasonable fear: some, though by no means all, has indeed crept back on.) But my editor was persistent and wore me down. I finally agreed to write the article on one condition: that she hire the most expensive photographer she could afford, so that I would have a killer set of pictures to look back on when my body had degenerated into a garish flesh atrocity of the sort Francis Bacon liked to paint. Gazing at those pictures – me, in the gym, lifting weights – I could say, ‘There was a moment, perhaps just an afternoon, when I looked OK.’ I posed for those pictures only for me. The fact that they were published in a national newspaper with a circulation of hundreds of thousands was neither here nor there.

After the article appeared I was told by a number of my female friends that my behaviour was curiously feminized; that by having focused so tightly on food and body image in this way I was heading more into the chromosomal column marked xx than xy. I didn’t take offence. For all the big hair and the beard and the moustache, I accept I am indeed a feminized male. My hands may be large but they are bizarrely smooth and soft. I always say I have the hands of a male-to-female transsexual, after the hormones have kicked in. My chest is so hairless I have been accused of waxing. I don’t. (I did once, but only for money; it was for a piece of journalism. It seriously bloody hurt.) I hate football. Actually, I have no interest in any sports. I like musicals. I work out to them. I prefer wine to beer and will nurse a glass of rosé without embarrassment. My wife once called me the gayest straight man in London. A very gay male friend of mine once called me a male lesbian. I said: a what? He said: ‘You’d make a great gay man if it wasn’t for the fact you’re so obviously into women.’ I wear all of this as a badge of honour. I can’t do bloke and I’m proud of the fact.

Still, I was bemused to hear that there might be anything about my relationship with food which was especially female. Because there is a particular kind of female response to food which, to me, has always looked at best exhausting and at worst completely dysfunctional; a desperate mixture of fear, guilt and shame for which I have neither time nor understanding. There is an industry to serve it. Put the words ‘healthy eating’ into amazon.com and you will get over 25,000 references. There are more than 170 books with the word ‘skinny’ in the title and 129 using that filthy four-letter word ‘thin’. There’s Cook Yourself Thin, Cook Yourself Thin, Faster and Soup Can Make You Thin. There’s The Skinny Rules, Naturally Thin: Unleash Your Skinnygirl and Free Yourself from a Lifetime of Dieting, not forgetting The French Don’t Diet Plan: 10 Simple Steps to Stay Thin for Life. There’s Hungry Girl to the Max!: The Ultimate Guilt-Free Cookbook. Pitch: ‘In Hungry Girl to the Max!, Lisa Lillien has created a book that is a must-have for anyone who craves insanely delicious food without the high-calorie price tag!’ Beware any book with exclamation marks in the title.

Over the years, of course, many of these books, and others like them, have been sold in supermarkets, alongside racks of magazines promising to show you how to ‘Slim Down in Just 24 hours’ (Women’s Fitness) ‘Eat, Drink and Still Shrink’ (Women’s Health) and ‘How to Spot a Healthy Canapé’ (Zest). It’s clear that for a certain type of woman the supermarket has become a one-stop shop, not merely for their groceries but also for desperate self-loathing. You can buy both the foods to make you hate yourself, and the holy texts through which, with enough commitment and devotion, you can atone for that sinful behaviour. Quite so: after all, supermarkets are built for convenience.

It all plays to a strongly held notion that the supermarket is part of a new-fangled modern way of living which, slowly but surely, is killing us. We are, it seems, the victims of a massively over-processed, fat-saturated, sugar-coated, super-sized, under-exercised food conspiracy. And this is where it gets very complicated indeed. Because there are many statistics you can deploy to show that modern life is not actually killing us at all. Indeed, you can prove it is doing precisely the opposite. It is making us live much, much longer very fast. Between 1991 and 2009 male life expectancy in the UK rose from 73.37 to 77.85 years. Female life expectancy rose from 78.86 to just over 82 years. Those are significant rises. Life expectancy in the US has risen by roughly similar amounts. At the same time, while the incidence of cancers in the UK has risen by a third since the seventies, the figure has actually been fairly stable since the late nineties, which is remarkable given that an increasingly ageing population should present more in the way of cancers. In the US the rates of a number of key cancers have been falling (especially bowel cancer, which has dropped from just over 63 cases per 100,000 men in 1995 to just over 48 per 100,000 men now.)

That, however, is not the full story, for there are other key indicators which matter here and they are around obesity and, even more importantly, the lifestyle-related incidence of Type 2 diabetes. There the story is bleak. Nobody publishes zappy self-help books about that; glossy magazines don’t have shouty, cheery cover-lines drawing you into stories on the subject. Between 1996 and 2012 the number of people in the UK with Type 2 diabetes rose from 1.4 million to 2.9 million. (In the US the picture is, if anything, worse. Between 1980 and 2008 the number of people with the disease rose from 5.6 million to 18.1 million.) Funnily enough, all those fretting, guilt-ridden young women with the money to buy copies of Soup Can Make You Thin and The Skinny Rules – and, according to the publishing industry, these books generally are aimed at those young women – are unlikely to be the ones developing Type 2 diabetes. For it is a disease both of age – the older the population the more diabetes there will be – and of poverty.

And it is where the most dire poverty is concerned that the supermarkets score the most badly. A few years ago I sat down with Heston Blumenthal of the Fat Duck to taste-test products from the supermarket value ranges, the very cheapest of the cheap, the lowest of the low. It was a truly humbling experience. As we studied the prices, all of them measured in pence rather than pounds, we swiftly concluded that whatever aesthetic considerations we might want to bring to bear – Did this stuff taste nice? Was it well made? – were irrelevant. Nobody bought these products because they liked them: they bought them because economic circumstance forced them to do so. And as the banking crisis of 2007 turned into a deep, lengthy recession, more and more people found themselves having to do the same. The big supermarkets were quickly reporting that, while the sales of their premium ranges were dropping, sales of their own-brand budget ranges were rising by over 40 per cent.

So what do you get for your money? Not an awful lot. For a TV investigation I did a forensic job on the cheapest supermarket products. What would you say to a beef pie that was only 18 per cent beef, and a few more per cent ‘beef connective tissue’ – or gristle, collagen and fat, as it’s more commonly known? How about a pork sausage that’s just 40 per cent pork, with a slab of pig skin chucked in for bulk? Or an apple pie with so little apple – a mere 14 per cent – that you can’t help but wonder whether it really deserves the name? I suspect, like me, you would say ‘No thanks’ and pull a ‘What do you take me for?’ face. Then again, I have a choice. I don’t have to buy cheese slices with half the levels of calcium of the more expensive variety or chicken breasts that have been bulked up with 40 per cent water to give you the impression you are getting more for less. The people who are buying these products generally don’t have that choice. They have to take what the supermarkets deign to give them. Which raises the question: is what the supermarkets give them good enough?

Only the most callous could argue that it is. Across the world the big supermarkets have been given all but unfettered access to the massive food retail market. But with that unfettered access must come responsibilities – and surely that should include improving the quality of the food sold to the very poorest in society? We can fight long and hard about what the word ‘quality’ means. The supermarkets will argue that their budget ranges aren’t in any way harmful and point out – rightly – that in recent years great efforts have been made to reduce the levels of salt and sugar in very cheap bread. The age of rickets is over. But that still leaves them selling products that contain animal products that the vast majority of us would actually throw away rather than cook with. Pig skin is apparently quite high in protein, but would you really choose to have it minced up and put in your sausages simply because it’s cheap?

As part of the TV show I worked on, I asked food technologist David Harrison to re-engineer some standard value-range products. I didn’t want him to make a gourmet beef pie. That would be easy. Just throw money and some quality sirloin at the problem. I wanted Harrison to make a better pie, keeping within reasonable financial parameters. He started by analysing all the cheapest pies on the market and found that, on average, they had just 18 per cent beef plus a few more percentage points of that connective tissue. (It can go much lower: I came across a minced beef and onion pie that declared a beef content on the label of just 7 per cent.) Harrison upgraded our generic recipe to produce one that had no connective tissue and 25 per cent beef. The extra cost, to increase the meat content by 38 per cent? A penny a pie. To remove the pig skin from a budget pork sausage and lift the meat content from 40 per cent to 54 per cent cost 0.7p per sausage. To increase the amount of apple in an apple pie by more than 40 per cent cost 0.8p. As the cost of raw ingredients is only a quarter of the finished product’s retail price, these really are tiny amounts. All of these improvements, even represented as double-digit percentages, may look marginal, but the differences in the finished product were discernible. We did a series of blind taste tests and the overwhelming majority of people identified our new improved products and preferred them. And if that sounds like banal advertising patter, so be it.

Obviously companies need to make money, or they wouldn’t be able to invest in their business, which in turn means they wouldn’t be able to serve their customers. But if absorbing the expense to make these improvements meant Tesco’s 2011 half-yearly profits went from £1.95 billion to, say, £1.85 billion, and if Sainsbury’s made not £395 million but £390 million, who exactly would weep? Not me.

Let’s be clear. A 25 per cent meat pie is still not a fabulous item. Nor would Blumenthal and I have swooned over a 54 per cent pork sausage. Likewise, we can lecture those in dire straits on the need to eat more fresh fruit and vegetables – where the value ranges happen to score well – though patronizing people who are struggling to make ends meet has always left me with a nasty taste in the mouth. The fact is that the items I looked at are invariably going to be a part of the diet, and that leads to simple questions of respect; of the supermarkets, which do so well out of us in good times, not forcing the very poorest to eat dross when the bad times come.

Because that’s what we have been living through recently. A survey in late 2012 by the market research company Kantar Worldpanel found that the households on the lowest incomes in Britain were spending more and more money on the very cheapest processed foods, because they were perceived to be more filling. They were buying exactly the grim products that we had trawled through, shoving the country into what was being described as a ‘nutritional recession’. It was presented as a trend, a function of short-term food price rises and falling incomes.

But what happens to the total crap pedalled by the supermarkets to the people with the least choice when, as a result of their own brutal buying policies, the supply chain breaks down? When the prices for absolutely everything go through the roof? When producers from abroad no longer wish to supply the supermarkets and there isn’t enough agricultural production left at home to pick up the slack?

What happens then?

One evening late in 2011 I found myself at a private dinner, sitting next to a very senior board-level executive from one of the big supermarkets. Although I had written positive pieces about the supermarkets in the past, and had explained patiently why they weren’t necessarily evil, my relationships with the big multiples had become increasingly strained. I rarely got an answer from them when, as a journalist, I asked questions. And yet, here I was, sitting next to one of the big beasts. It was an opportunity.

And so, very intently, while filling up the exec’s wine glass, I began to explain my over-arching theory of everything: that by giving the big supermarkets unfettered access to the retail food market we had allowed them to completely destroy farming; that we were becoming increasingly less self-sufficient in food because so many farmers were quitting in the face of horrible business practices. All of this mattered, I said, because of the global food security situation. Some of the price spikes of 2008 might have eased, but it was only a moment’s respite. Those issues would come back to haunt us. Countries like China, India and Brazil would be competing for the resources we wanted and when prices spiked again we would no longer be able to afford them. And when we turned back to Britain for our food needs the supply simply wouldn’t be there. In short, I said, supermarkets had to start paying producers more so they could invest in agriculture and reinforce our food supply system.

I said it all very cleverly with my special, non-patronizing explaining face.

There was a pause. The executive looked at me. The big beast of the supermarket world said, ‘Is this off the record?’ I said yes. (Look how I’m not even giving them a gender to protect their identity. It could be a woman. It could be a man. It could be a man dressed as a woman. It isn’t. But it could be.)

The executive nodded slowly and said, ‘I entirely agree with you.’

I opened my mouth and closed it again. That, I hadn’t expected.

My dining companion did go on to say that it was their life’s mission to secure a means of food supply so that the supermarket they worked for could source everything they need for decades to come, but still, the point had been made. We are facing a very serious crisis. A global crisis, one in which the supermarkets are complicit.

And to fully understand it, we need to get out a bit. We need to travel. So let’s start in Rwanda, a country in central East Africa with a dark history and a complicated present, which also happens to have a lot to tell us about global food supply. And perhaps even more to tell me about the knotty business of being a greedy man in a hungry world.