I suppose most people are familiar with the old joke about the guy who asks for directions and is told, “If I was going there I wouldn’t start from here”. I guess I feel that way about a lot of things in the twenty first century, but the things that get me personally excited are mainly connected to food and the environment. I like all aspects of food: growing it, cooking it, eating it and talking about it. But in this interconnected world you can’t ignore the fact that food is a thorny subject.
Half the world is battling obesity while the other half faces a daily struggle to get enough to survive. Supermarket chains and the big food companies dominate the entire supply chain linking a housewife in Manchester to a poor banana grower in Costa Rica or a cocoa farmer in Ghana.
Many traditional sources of food are under pressure or endangered, especially fish and other marine animals.
The TV is dominated by celebrity chefs, many sponsored by supermarkets, telling us how to eat better. While as consumers we are bombarded with messages about GM, saturated fats, transfats, free-range, Fair Trade, food miles, global warming, sugar, sodium, allergy advice and so on. Meanwhile global food prices continue to rise and even in the rich west real incomes are static or declining. Shortages and prices rises have resulted in riots all around the world and are even credited with sparking the Arab Spring, yet the world population is forecast to rise to 9 billion by 2050. Feeding those people, in a time of climate change, without further accelerating the already alarming rate of environmental degradation and species loss is to me the greatest challenge the world will face in the next twenty years.
Frankly I am not optimistic, but one thing I hope to explore in this blog is how one individual like me affects the overall picture, and what I can do to be a good world citizen and still eat well. In so many ways I wouldn’t have chosen to start from here, but ultimately the destination, and in fact the journey you choose to take are more important than where you begin.
That said I am only human. I’m more driven by taste than trade issues, more interested in hedonism than hectoring. There will be meat and fish in this blog, as well as chocolate and bananas from time to time. There is room for alcoholic beverages and I hope there will be some fun and even joy to leaven the worthiness. I don’t dress for dinner, but neither do I don a hair shirt!
Beyond that, I have no idea where this blog will take me, so let’s just tuck in our bibs and start chewing…
