Historian Benjamin Wurgaft and anthropologist Merry White’s Ways of Eating: Exploring Food through History and Culture features no images produced by a food stylist; nor does it include instructions about how to make any dish. Instead, the authors interweave stories and analyses of food — its production, its preparation and the meanings people attach to eating — to provide a fascinating cultural and historical overview.

People hunted and gathered food for thousands of years before they developed systems of agricultural subsistence. Wurgaft and White concentrate on how food was produced after agriculture’s arrival, noting the debates that rage in archaeology about its origins. Did people invent cultivation, drawing on observations of the reproductive cycles of animals and plants? Or did climatic change foster the conditions for sedentary settlements that required more intense food production?

Technological changes, migration and population pressure all contributed, and it is probably impossible to isolate any specific causal chain. But whatever the essential conditions were, the results were transformative — of landscapes, ecologies, work, crops, foods and ways of eating.

Wurgaft and White begin by exploring how the domestication of plants and animals spread across world. Drawing on James Scott’s historical analysis of state formation, they dismiss the notion of simple linear progress from nomadic barbarism to settled civilisation. Pastoral nomadism and sedentary farming coexisted for millennia. But they note that farming does appear to “encourage a particular style of cooperative work and social life” and that the material qualities of grain — it can be stored, transported and exchanged for other goods — “aided the rise of the state.” Wheat, rice and corn fed courts, armies and bureaucrats.

The relationship between imperialism and agriculture is complex and the authors succinctly summarise debates about their interaction. Roman and Persian empires, for instance, were built on the wheat that flourished in the regions they originally occupied. The Han Chinese empire was based on rice, and — as the authors write — “no other civilisation, until the rise of industrial agriculture in modernity, reached the same heights of agricultural productivity.” Deforestation, terracing and irrigation, nitrogenous fertilising and soil modification enabled intensification on a grand scale.

All along, productivity and population growth were interacting with changes in agricultural practices and cooking techniques. Deforestation, for example, meant that food preparation had to be quick in order to use a minimum amount of fuel; hence, the invention of the wok and a cuisine using small, thinly sliced meat and vegetables.

As Wurgaft and White observe, we know much more about the dining habits of the wealthy than we do of the poor. The feasts of Roman emperors, medieval courts and aristocratic households were far more likely to be documented than the everyday meals of peasants. Moreover, they were more varied and abundant. Descriptions of patrician feasts, from the Romans to the British Edwardians, reveal an astonishing range of meats, imported fruits and beverages. Patterns of consumption have always reflected economic and social status, with bread and cakes made from fine, white flour exclusively for the rich, and coarse grains providing bread and porridges for the majority. When famines strike, the poor starve.

The history of changing food and eating habits is the history of the movement of people, plants and animals across continents and between nations. During the Middle Ages, people from northern Europe encountered new foods as they waged wars and made pilgrimages. Conquerors brought back new ingredients and slaves who knew how to prepare them; pilgrims returned with a taste for “foreign” dishes and drinks. The use of rare and exotic ingredients, then as now, was indicative of wealth, social status and worldly sophistication. Spices, imported from China, India and the Middle East, were used not only to preserve food but also to display social status and cultural capital.

But the most dramatic transformation of European and Asian cuisines occurred during the “Columbian exchange” that followed the conquest and colonisation of the Americas. Historian Alfred Crosby, who coined the term in his 1972 book on the subject, revealed the complexity and extent of transatlantic exchange and the magnitude of its impact across the globe. Wurgaft and White endorse his view that this constituted a “tectonic shift” in agriculture, staple foods, national cuisines and eating habits.

Plants and foodstuffs now associated with Mediterranean cuisines, such as tomatoes, capsicums and corn, were initially treated with suspicion. Potatoes — disparaged as suitable only for peasants and their animals — were embraced by the bourgeoisie after cooks discovered their delicious flavour when combined with cream and butter. It is difficult to think of Italian food without tomatoes and astonishing to imagine the foods of Korea, India and other Asian countries without chillies.

People and plants flowed in both directions. Sugar, originally from India, was an established crop but a luxury foodstuff in Spain by the sixteenth century. Until the eighteenth century, honey remained the main culinary sweetener for rich and poor throughout Europe; then, with colonisation and the exploitation of African slave labour, sugarcane plantations flourished in the Caribbean.

English sweet puddings, German cakes, Belgian chocolate and French patisserie, all relatively recent inventions, evolved in the context of the Atlantic slave trade. Rice varieties from West Africa were introduced to feed slaves in the Caribbean and Central America, and were only gradually replaced by Asian varieties a century later. Peanuts arrived in Northern Africa from Peru and Bolivia, and were incorporated into many regional African cuisines. Creole cuisines in the southern states of America were dominated by rice and Old World vegetables, especially okra.

Ways of Eating, a broadbrush history written for a general readership, is full of fascinating stories. Vignettes interspersed between chapters describe specific food producers, foodstuffs, culinary techniques and cultural ideas about food. White, recounting a visit to a coffee plantation in Panama where the highly prized gesha beans are produced, compares her tour to a hajj, not only a signal of “a coffee person’s seriousness of intent” but also a means of gaining esoteric knowledge and status in the world of coffee connoisseurs. Gesha coffee’s apparently unique flavour ranges “from a tea-like smokiness to something like grapefruit peel.”

Novelty, rarity and heritage varieties continue to lure the gourmet and the chef. Pepper and cinnamon, once rare commodities, are now so common as to be mundane. Even so, spice’s exotic appeal persists, and for the discerning consumer Tellicherry pepper from Malabar or Kampot pepper from Cambodia are more prestigious than common black pepper, their use in a recipe lending cachet to dish and chef.

The emphasis on authenticity or the exact replication of a dish from a region or a restaurant menu is a recent phenomenon. White suggests that those who denigrate dishes that don’t match some culinary Platonic ideal make “a fetish of the social and environmental conditions that make an ingredient or dish possible.” Food has fashions and recipes have always depended on the availability of ingredients as well as the skill and imagination of cooks.

In fact, all “national” cuisines have adopted novel foreign ingredients and adapted recipes to local tastes. Japanese Hawaiians invented Spam sushi. After Senegalese soldiers in the French colonial army developed a taste for nem, sold as street food in Hanoi, some returned home with Vietnamese wives whose adaptations of the recipes using local ingredients naturalised these fried rolls. Senegalese nem are different from the Vietnamese originals — but they are not ersatz, just distinctive. The same can be said of Japanese croissants or Australian gelato. White and Wurgaft are clearly connoisseurs of food, but their book challenges ideas about refined taste, authenticity and tradition.

Colonisation, commoditisation, industrialisation and globalisation have transformed diets at an unprecedented rate. Rare and exotic ingredients that were formerly delicacies for the wealthy can now be found on supermarket shelves. Food has always provided ways of expressing cultural identity, regional differences, degrees of sophistication and economic status. Wurgaft and White trace these processes over centuries and across the globe. Their conclusions are both celebratory and thought-provoking.

Agriculture has brought humans extraordinary benefits, but it has also resulted in disastrous depletion of soils and environmental devastation. Many foods arrive in our homes with a heavy carbon footprint. The most common foods touted as “fair trade” are coffee, bananas, tea and cocoa — all grown in countries where many people, including growers, continue to live in poverty. There are ironies and paradoxes in contemporary ways of eating, and the combined forces of history and anthropology are excellent ways of thinking about them. •

Ways of Eating: Exploring Food through History and Culture
By Benjamin A. Wurgaft and Merry I. White | University of California Press | $45.95 | 256 pages

The post Making a meal of it appeared first on Inside Story.

Sure, farmers were rolled out any time we wanted to make a statement about Australian identity, but I didn’t know any. They just weren’t relevant to us, the vast majority in the city. We talked about them when there was another drought, though I can’t remember seeing them on television much — maybe the farmer look-alike in the Sydney Olympics opening ceremony riding a horse, but that was about it. Farming had nothing to do with my life and that was fine by me.

And then I met The Farmer. I suppose you could fall in love with someone and hate their occupation. I didn’t; I became thoroughly fascinated by his job. As a committed eater, who wouldn’t love a food grower? But, as you can imagine, I had some preconceptions.

My journalism started under the Hawke–Keating Labor government of the 1980s and my political writing started in the 1990s, at the beginning of the recession Australia had to have. The death of manufacturing was showing me concepts like structural unemployment and inflation — which had previously just been theories in year 12 economics — in action.

But I didn’t take much notice of the structural adjustments going on in farming. I was vaguely aware of agriculture, but it didn’t intrude into what I used to think were the exciting parts of politics, like leadership spills or factional intrigue.

It just gets so much more personal when your livelihood depends on it. The Farmer’s mixed broadacre farm is a commercial-sized operation in southern New South Wales that primarily grows sheep and wheat. It is a family farm, bought four generations ago when the large squatter blocks were carved up during one of the land reform periods. The squatters had taken it from the Wiradjuri people, who have lived here for tens of thousands of years. The descendants of those first inhabitants continue to live here and the traces their ancestors left on the land are unobtrusive but unmistakable.

The way Indigenous people fed themselves, the way they survived and thrived, was underpinned by their system of encouraging the foods they prized, and sculpting land for their long-term use. Landscape was embedded in foundational and spiritual beliefs, while intimately woven with life-giving food. The people’s mark was left on the terrain, but land was considered neither separate nor outside of the people.

I was grafted onto a farming culture that has European roots — whose development was based on an industrial model from the get-go. The colonial leaders’ first job was to feed the settlement, then to export the excess to help feed England, the mother country. Farmers were encouraged and protected in Australia, as they still are in many countries. Land was bestowed, stolen or bought, its bounty was for taking and its capacity considered infinite. Like a rubber band, we thought it could stretch without breaking because that was the economic imperative. To feed people.

So it wasn’t my plan to transplant myself from a city to a country culture on a mid-sized traditional farm, but life has a habit of getting in the way of plans. To be clear, I am a journalist, not a farmer. I don’t have an agricultural degree. I am not like a lot of women who are farmers in their own right, yet only recently recognised. Hell, I don’t even do the books. It’s not my thing. I don’t run The Farmer’s operation and he doesn’t write my books.

But somewhere in the last twenty-five years of living on a farm, and increasingly reporting on rural issues, I started to question the economic agenda that was set in train by the Hawke–Keating and Howard governments in those pivotal decades. Australia, like many countries around the world, was outsourcing anything it couldn’t produce at the cheapest possible price. But how was this going to work for food?

I decided to look at this farming caper I had been living alongside for all these years. I wanted to understand how it came to be, and I discovered that by pulling a thread on a farm, I was quickly taken to foundational philosophical questions about the way we live and how we want to organise our communities and society as a whole. Farming remains as central to the questions of humanity and our future as it ever was. We just don’t think about it that much because we think we solved the food problem a long time ago and there are far more urgent questions to get on with.

I wanted to know one simple thing: why you should care about farming. Or, indeed, whether you should.

At its most basic, farmers use soil and water to grow crops and raise animals. In the act of growing, farmers must look after landscapes. Australian farmers manage up to 60 per cent of the country’s land mass and account for up to 70 per cent of its diverted freshwater extractions. So we all have a stake in farmers doing their job well.

The acts of choosing a farming system for a place, growing food and selling it are like trying to weave a large tapestry. They require care, dexterity and a range of skills. If one thread comes loose, things can start to unravel. Farmers feed us, look after the landscape (or not), punch above their weight for exports and contribute to, or ameliorate, climate change. They play a crucial role in the social infrastructure of many rural communities.

Farming both contributes to and is endangered by the biggest existential threats of our time: climate change, water shortages, soil loss, energy production, natural disasters, zoonotic diseases, population displacement and geopolitical trade wars. That means we need governments to get the policy settings right.

Yet no Australian political party is doing serious thinking about how to knit together food, farming and environmental policies to continue feeding the population while mitigating climate change and biodiversity loss. We remain caught in ways of thinking about farming that hark back to 1788. But the growing market pressure on environmental, health and animal welfare issues means farming cannot be business as usual.

For a brief moment, at the height of panic over the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, we got a glimpse of what it’s like to live without basic ingredients on the shelves. Bread, pasta, rice, meat and canned goods disappeared from supermarkets. Small local food producers were overwhelmed as people wanted to source food from elsewhere. Food prices rose and global supply chains could not cope with demand.

After years of market-centric structural change, national production capacity was left wanting, and not just in food chains. Face masks, medical equipment and hand sanitiser were the first priorities, but there was also a flicker of discussion about food security.

The Australian government and national farming advocates reacted with campaigns to snuff out any conversation about holes in our food system. Nothing to see here, they said. Yet this was a live opportunity to look around the world and realise why so many countries consider farming and natural resources to be in their national strategic interest.

As I write, Australia has no national food policy, no national drought policy, a Hunger Games–style water policy, a cursory climate policy, and no vision for how land management and environmental assets should fit with farming and food security in a warming climate.

Nor are there any state or national strategies or guiding principles to govern the competition between our limited high-quality food-production land and residential development, mining and energy interests. Conservation, agriculture and land management are dominated by two loud clubs. One says, lock it all up. The other says, it’s my domain and I can do what I like. I’m interested in a more nuanced approach.

I wanted to think about key questions. What do we want to farm? If we concentrate on a few big exports — say beef and wheat — what diversity do we lose along the way? Do we want shorter supply chains for some critical assets in case of future epidemics? Who do we want to do the farming? Do we want to maintain a balance of big corporations at scale, smaller and mid-sized family farmers, including Indigenous landowners, as well as micro-growers? Do we want our land and water owned and managed by 800 companies or 80,000 companies and families? Do we want to put all our environmental and food eggs in those 800 baskets? How do we want to look after the land and water that we rely on for farming in a changing climate? We all need to care about those questions.

As someone who lives and draws an income from food production, I wanted to think about the whole bloody thing, to consider the chain that leads from the soil all the way to the eaters, because as a country we need to understand how farming fits as one piece in one big landscape puzzle. And I wanted to examine themes that resonate around the globe to know where the trends are and what we can expect in the future.

I was also struck by the contradictory demands made of farmers by governments and eaters. We want clean, green food to feed the world. We want scale because we want cheap food. We want family farmers. We want big global capital. We want lots to export to help our balance of payments. We want farmers to stand on their own two feet. We want farming to be like any other business. We want farmers to use the latest technology. We want them to look after the environment. We want them to look after native habitat for declining species. And now we want them to sequester carbon to turn around both their own emissions and some of the rest of the population’s emissions. I think that just about covers it.

My discovery process has not been linear. Like a beagle on the scent of a bunny, it has zigzagged — through time and disciplines; from science to philosophy to politics to culture and back again. It’s been maddening, confusing and confronting. Many times I’ve thought I have bitten off more than I could chew because the act of farming and its ramifications seem so simple but are so complex.

My view is different from others because a view depends on where you are standing. But I hope it sheds a light on important changes going on in our food system, and where the cracks are appearing. I believe it is an urgent conversation. Australian farming is changing rapidly. If you look across this landscape in coming years and you don’t like some of what you see, you can’t say you weren’t warned.

Essentially, we must find a way to knit together the need to grow and supply food with how we manage the landscape. Australia needs a national master plan for its land and food; we need to know how we are to protect our sacred places and unique species for their longevity, and that of the environment and our rural communities.

Responsibility for food, farming and landscape is shared by a number of local, state and federal government ministers and departments, particularly agriculture, environment, health and home affairs. These ministers and departments, and concerned citizens, need to imagine a food, land and water system that walks the path between wild utopia and human reality. We need to devise a plan that looks at the country as a whole and determines how much food is necessary to sustain ourselves into the future and how diverse our food system should be — in what it produces, who produces it and where they live.

This plan would identify and protect the best food production land and intertwine with the national reserve system that maps conservation areas across the country. It would identify high-value conservation areas and prime agricultural land as no-go zones for developments like housing and mining. It might point to partial development areas and open slather sites. It might map out areas designed for clever future housing that would not impinge on limited high-quality food-production land.

A food plan would be both local and global, with short, stout supply chains into our local communities and regions, and then longer freight lines that share our substantial production capacity with the world but particularly with our near neighbours. The priority is a realistic food price that covers the requirements of a healthy ecosystem and the humans who provide their labour to bring the food to your plate.

The plan would acknowledge our reliance for food security on many different imported components, including fuel, machinery and other inputs. It would identify our weaknesses. It would be robust and transparent enough to link to a natural capital account so we could measure the impacts of food production on our natural world and keep building smarter choices. It would measure the nutrition of the food so eaters could reward healthy food systems and encourage wholefood eating in a world that suffers from both obesity and undernourishment.

And while we are at it, why curb our ambition? We rely on land for so many different things and, as the climate changes, those uses are going to change. Our national plan might also include suitable sites for carbon sequestration projects and renewable energy. It would consider a transparent water policy and a visionary soil policy, with its capacity to balance our carbon budget. Finally, this national backyard plan would be afforded the status of the defence portfolio. That would make it of primary importance for the cabinet, the budget and the nation.

Such a food, land and water plan is, surely, a no-brainer. •

This is an edited extract from Why You Should Give a F*ck about Farming, published this month by Penguin.

The post What do we really want from farmers? appeared first on Inside Story.

Most Australian and NZ coverage of the crisis has highlighted the role of defence forces in supplying aid to the Pacific islands, and the competition for influence with China. There’s been little news of how local organisations are ensuring food security for the urban unemployed and people previously reliant on overseas supply chains.

Non-government, church and community organisations are supporting the poor in urban centres, networking with rural communities and promoting healthy, local foodstuffs. They are not only drawing on Pacific traditions of reciprocity, family and sharing, but also tapping into new technologies, organic farming and social media.

Development consultant Feiloakitau Kaho Tevi, a former general secretary of the Pacific Conference of Churches, highlighted the importance of family and community in a recent interview for the Global Research Programme on Inequality. “Families in Tonga have distributed their root crops freely in trying to help those in need,” he said. “A barter trade market on the internet is exploding in Fiji where individuals are exchanging goods and services, trying to help each other fare through these difficult times.”

Stories like these are coming in from many Pacific islands, Tevi said. “In some sense, it is not surprising that Pacific islanders react as such, given our communal living and our sense of caring for the other.”

Many people have responded with resilience and creativity — setting up barter networks for those without cash, shifting from export crops to local markets, returning to the village to work on family gardens and, above all, planting, planting and planting. “Our reactions to the pandemic, by far, have been more localised; falling back on our strengths as Pacific islanders: our sense of reciprocity and community living; living off our land,” said Tevi. “It was a consolation of some sort that the solutions to our ‘hardship’ are to be found in our own plantations and villages.”

This sentiment is echoed by the secretary-general of the Pacific Islands Forum, Dame Meg Taylor. When I spoke to her for Islands Business magazine, she welcomed international assistance, but highlighted the local mobilisation across the region: “After health, there’s going to be recovery around food security and environmental security. I think in the bigger islands, one of the good things is that everybody is planting and going back to our natural resources to feed ourselves. My own family and community in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea are getting their gardens going, so if there’s a long period of isolation, they will survive.”

Although the Solomon Islands has recorded no cases of Covid-19, the island nation had its own shock in April when Tropical Cyclone Harold hit, with devastating consequences. The government announced a state of emergency and the associated economic downturn has seen many people leaving the capital, Honiara, to ride out the crisis in their home villages on outlying islands. People in town are turning to family connections for support, and using social media to promote exchange and barter.

Alex Haro, principal of the Woodford International School in Honiara, joined with a group of friends to establish Trade Bilong Iumi, a Facebook page that allows people to barter and exchange necessities during the downturn.

“I started Trade Bilong Iumi because I had a lot of friends who had financial difficulties, so we came up with the initiative of this Facebook page,” Haro tells me. “Basically, there is no money involved, just the exchanging of goods and services. This is for Solomon Islanders if they have problems with their finance — this is their platform.”

Use of the page is gradually increasing. “For example, there were people from the [Weather] Coast, they actually needed some taro. So, they went fishing and then went on the Facebook page and said, ‘We’ve got some tuna and we need some bags of taro or cassava’ — and they actually exchanged the goods.”

For Haro, social media can build on existing cultural values among Melanesian communities. “This is what we have been practising back in the olden days — that’s how our ancestors have survived,” he says. “Our wantok system is very different to the Western world where you look after yourself, but here it’s about the community. If someone’s got a problem, then the brother or the sister or the aunty will step in. That’s how we survive.”

In other countries, activists are using social media to establish non-commercial barter networks, especially for people who have lost their jobs in the waged economy.

In Suva, the Barter for a Better Fiji group has 170,000 supporters and more than 4400 members on its public Facebook page. Administrator Marlene Dutta set up the site to encourage people who are doing it tough to connect with others. “Back in the before when money was sooo tomorrow,” say the organisers, “our ancestrals lived by exchanging what they had for what they needed. Easy eh? How about we do that again now? Some smart gang already doing it one-on-one style… but what if there was a space for everyone to trade? Well folks, this is it.”

In response, people have posted requests for food, clothes or other items, offering to barter an eclectic mix of goods: “My daughter’s tricycle for groceries (Rewa powder milk; 2kg sugar; 4kg rice, 2 tin tuna, eggs, oil, Maggi noodle etc)”; “One rooster to exchange with 2 x stereo speakers”; “A metal sink for fish and cassava”; “Seven kilos of waqa [kava] for a good smart phone.” One person has even offered tattoos in exchange for goods.

A different sort of pandemic-era scheme is running in Lautoka, Fiji’s second-largest town. Widely known as “Sugar City,” Lautoka is located in the sugar-cane belt on the west coast of the main island, Viti Levu. It was the site of Fiji’s first sugar mill, built by indentured labour from India and Solomon Islands and launched in 1903 by the Colonial Sugar Refining Company.

Lautoka also recorded Fiji’s first confirmed cases of Covid-19, after a flight attendant from Fiji Airways was diagnosed on 19 March. Within three days, two members of his family were also diagnosed with the disease.

Having already banned cruise ships and restricted international air travel, the Fiji government moved to quarantine Sugar City to limit the possibility of further community transfer. During the initial two-week lockdown, police roadblocks prevented people from leaving the city, except for essential travel.

“When the lockdown was announced, we thought we were just shutting the office and going home,” Sashi Kiran tells me. “But after a couple of days it was very obvious that people in Lautoka who were dependent on the city — hawkers, casual workers, wheelbarrow boys and other people with day jobs — were asked to stay at home at short notice. People who live week to week or even day to day were asking for food.”

Kiran is director of the Foundation for Rural Integrated Enterprises and Development, or FRIEND, a non-government organisation that has run programs on socioeconomic development, health and welfare in Lautoka for nearly two decades. Kiran says the overnight lockdown of the city created immediate problems for the poorest members of the community.

“Within days we partnered with organisations like the counselling body Empower Pacific,” she says. “Eighty per cent of the calls were people asking for food, and we also had the challenge of people not being able to access their medications. We asked for public assistance and people were very generous and we started doing food distribution. Unfortunately, it was raining very heavily because of Tropical Cyclone Harold and people couldn’t come outside. Our people were going out to impacted areas and to homes to deliver food, so we’ve been on the ground since March.”

Even before Fiji was hit by the double whammy of the coronavirus pandemic and the category-five cyclone, food security and good nutrition had been an issue for some rural communities and people living in peri-urban squatter settlements. The country has significant rates of non-communicable diseases, and studies around the world are showing that the risk of severe illness from Covid-19 is compounded by obesity and diabetes.

During the pandemic, lack of access to food or cash has created new pressures. In response, FRIEND has expanded existing programs to help people grow nutritionally diverse food, to ensure that children don’t face malnutrition.

“For people in town without land, we’ve been doing training on how to grow food in sacks or containers,” says Kiran. “Access to land in the squatter settlements, including the poorest communities, is a major challenge. They don’t have resources where they can plant. Sometimes when we reach people, they say, ‘My children haven’t eaten for the last three days.’ At that time, because of the cyclone, the rain and the Covid lockdown, they couldn’t even go to the shore to fish.”

Lautoka City Council responded to NGO requests for land with two blocks, including almost a hectare near some of the squatter communities. “The youth are preparing that land and planting,” says Kiran. “With this communal garden, the youth will be able to harvest and give people the food they need.”

The Covid-19 crisis is creating opportunities for young people to develop businesses around sustainable agriculture and nutrition. Youth entrepreneur Rinesh Sharma founded Smart Farms Fiji in April, and has been marketing basic hydroponic systems for households without land to grow leafy foods and vegetables, to supplement their diet.

Non-government organisations are also reaching out to rural communities, to support urban workers who have lost jobs and income during the current crisis. “We’ve also spoken with i-Taukei landowners and Indian farmers, and some villages have allocated large pieces of land, five acres or ten acres, to grow food,” Kiran said. “This is getting ready for people from the tourism industry who have lost jobs and who are coming back to their home village.”

In one case, she says, people from Tailevu brought food to people from their villages who are living in Lautoka. “Through these communal gardens, the surplus can be shared with their own people.”

Before the crisis, Pacific governments were supporting farmers’ networks through training and agricultural extension programs. Regional intergovernmental organisations like the Pacific Community, or SPC, have made food and water security a central element of their work on disaster preparedness and climate adaptation. For many years, the SPC has been testing new crops that can withstand the extremes of drought, flooding and salinity brought on by climate change.

In Marshall Islands, for example, the SPC has been supporting the Readiness for El Niño project since 2017. Women from outlying drought-prone islands like Ailuk and Kwajalein have established community nurseries, introduced improved soil management and drought-resistant crop varieties, and expanded water storage. Since the Covid-19 lockdown, new initiatives such as the Seeds for Life project, implemented by the SPC and Manaaki Whenua Land Care Research, have improved access to planting materials in Kiribati, Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, Tuvalu and Vanuatu.

This government work is complemented by the grassroots farmers’ networks of the region-wide Pacific Farmers Association. These local groups have encouraged the development of seed banks, communal gardens and organic farming, while seeking to improve livelihoods and food security for smallholders and village-based farmers. The long-established networks are all the more important today, as unemployed people move back to the provinces to clear land and make gardens.

For twenty years, the Kastom Gaden Association, or KGA, has been supporting farmers in villages as well as urban settlements around Solomon Islands. KGA developed sup sup gardens (backyard plots) in Honiara’s settlements, and its Planting Material Network has nearly 3000 members across the country.

“Kastom Gaden has already created gene banks or germplasm centres in the provinces,” KGA coordinator Pita Tikai explains. “We had some partners that we worked with to establish germplasm collections, like a seed garden. Farmers can access some planting material, especially at this time where people are going crazy looking for seeds, looking for planting materials in order to grow things.”

Tikai says that KGA hasn’t so far seen food shortages, “but you can see people going round who have lost full time jobs, so they are resorting to making backyard gardens,” he says. “People are looking for seeds, people are looking for planting materials. Currently we haven’t got this full lockdown, but people are wondering what the future will be like. People are getting gardens so they will have food stocks if we have a real crisis and confirmed cases [of Covid-19] and the government suddenly gives us a total lockdown.”

The disruption of transport has halted some agricultural exports, along with imports of crucial farming resources like seeds and fertilisers: “Commercial seeds coming into the country are already affected. If you go to shops around town that normally sell seeds, they say, ‘Our orders are yet to come in.’ So here in town, people are flooding to KGA’s main office here in Honiara, asking for nursery seedlings. Our partners are also asking us to raise seedlings that they can supply to their communities.”

Tikai believes that donors and government departments should be working in collaboration with existing networks established by non-government organisations. “I really want the government to work with us, as NGOs, to strengthen these gene banks and seed collections. The government is now thinking about establishing seed gardens, but we at Kastom Gaden already had this network of farmers and seed gardens around the country that people can source planting materials.”

The government’s agriculture ministry has begun distributing some free seedlings, says Tikai, “but it’s time for collaboration between stakeholders, especially from the line ministry, to support us to strengthen this network for when the real disaster comes. If there’s full lockdown, then people can find the materials that they need to survive. That would sustain the food supply and also help avoid a food health crisis that might happen in future.”

Food production is also closely linked to tourism, which makes up more than 40 per cent of the GDP of Fiji, Vanuatu and Palau.

Tourists are also a major earner for the Polynesian atoll nation of Cook Islands. Despite talk of a “tourism bubble” involving Australia, New Zealand and some island nations, the downturn in tourist numbers has damaged Rarotonga’s burgeoning organic agriculture industry. Growers face collapsing sales to tourist hotels, and are looking to find new markets for local production.

According to organic farmer Missy Vakapora, secretary of Natura Kuki Airani, or NKA, the Cook Islands organic farming industry has taken a significant hit as overseas visitors stay away. “The growers that I know are finding it very hard because the majority of them supply the resorts and they are losing money,” she tells me. “For organic growers, it’s often the tourists — whether from New Zealand or America or Australia — who buy our organic produce. So, with the crisis, we’ve lost this market, all up about 60 per cent of our business.”

But there is a positive side. “The majority of us have had to drop our organic prices to normal prices, so now local people have a choice between conventional products and the organic products which are much more affordable than they were before the virus hit.”

Vakapora believes there will be significant shifts in agriculture as long as the pandemic lasts. “The majority of growers are planting short-term crops now, more for the quick turnover,” she says. “There’s a lot more leafy products out there than normal. They’re not growing all the fancy stuff like carrots and radishes that the local people don’t like — they’ve returned to traditional foods like taro, kumara, local snake beans and other local varieties.”

The hit to markets and transport has also disrupted initiatives to expand organic farming in the Cook Islands. In 2015, the UN’s International Fund for Agricultural Development and the SPC came to Rarotonga to encourage a shift to organic production among local farmers. Growers were trained to use certified bio-organic materials and develop the naturally grown teas or herbs that are popular among older Cook Islanders. Farmers soon recognised the need for an organic seedbank in Cook Islands — an initiative that was almost completed when the coronavirus pandemic hit.

“The seed bank that we’re trying to get up and running is at the prison,” Vakapora tells me. “They actually have a conventional garden, right in the middle of the prison where nobody goes and they decided to go organic. Before the current crisis, it was just starting to get going. Through IFAD and SPC, we got funding for the cooling system for seeds, and we were just about to start generating the seeds for the prison when the coronavirus hit.

“Fiji were just about to send us open-pollinated seeds that were already certified organic, which would have been easier for us to plant at the prison, then harvest and secure the storage for them. However, the virus hit and we couldn’t get the seeds. It’s on hold until the borders open.”

How long will it be until that happens? Until a Covid-19 vaccine is developed and distributed, the global economy faces a long, slow return to pre-pandemic levels of activity. In the meantime, people are looking to develop more sustainable modes of development — and it’s clear that Pacific farmers are even more essential than before to lives and livelihoods across the region. •

The post Smart harvest appeared first on Inside Story.

The situation is likely to worsen. As restaurants reopen, and with much of the population expecting a return to normal, food shortages and rationing could provoke civil unrest. Yet the Trump administration has no evident plan — indeed few ideas of any kind — for tackling food supply pressures that are hitting the president’s own red state constituencies hardest.

The problems began emerging in April among the unsanitary and often unsafe meat and poultry processing plants in rural towns, especially in the Midwest and Great Plains. Two of the ten US facilities with the highest rates of coronavirus infection are the meat processing works in Sioux Falls, South Dakota and Waterloo, Iowa (seven of the other eight are prisons).

With meat processing companies reluctant to release their data and not legally required to do so, up-to-date official statistics are hard to come by. The most recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, dated 8 May, covers outbreaks in processing plants during April, by which time Covid-19 cases had been reported in 115 plants in nineteen states. Many of these plants were shutting down.

Not surprisingly, meat and chicken supplies quickly ran short on supermarket shelves. The consequent panic buying was aggravated on 26 April when Tyson Foods, one of the country’s largest meat producers, placed a full-page advertisement in major Sunday newspapers warning that “the food supply chain is breaking” and “millions of pounds of meat will disappear from the supply chain.”

The Trump administration responded with uncharacteristic speed. Just two days later, the president invoked the Defense Production Act and signed an executive order declaring meat and poultry processing an essential industry and forcing plants to remain open “to ensure a continued supply of protein for Americans.” The companies were happy to comply — the executive order shields them from any health or safety liability — and most workers were unable to resist demands to return to what is often the only work available, despite a continuing lack of protective equipment and health safeguards.

Just three companies (Smithfield, Tyson and JBS) account for two-thirds of the US beef market. This degree of consolidation is also evident at plant level: most processing facilities employ thousands of workers, and closing just one of them can result in more than ten million fewer beef servings a day.

Working in a processing plant is one of the most dangerous of American jobs, and the plants have a history of exploiting and abusing workers in the rural areas where they are major employers. Facilitating the exploitation is the fact that many of the workers are immigrants, often undocumented.

The pandemic seems to have opened another chapter in this nasty history. The Guardian recently revealed how negligence, secrecy and mismanagement at poultry processing facilities in Georgia, Arkansas and Mississippi operated by some of the largest food manufacturers have allowed the coronavirus to spread.

Since Trump’s order to reopen, and despite improved infection control procedures in some but not all workplaces, the number of cases tied to the plants has increased dramatically. Local health authorities are often reluctant to push major employers by mandating testing and isolation procedures. The governor of Nebraska has said his state will not disclose the numbers of coronavirus infections in specific meat plants without the consent of the companies.

Data collection by the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting shows that 20,400 infections had been recorded across 216 plants in thirty-three states by 8 June, and at least seventy-four workers had died. In April, only five of Tyson Foods’ facilities had infections; now, twenty-four have reported outbreaks, with more than 7000 workers infected. The problem extends beyond meat and poultry to processed-food facilities and farms and ranches. According to data collected by the Food and Environment Reporting Network, by 8 June at least 282 meat packing and food processing plants, and thirty-nine farms and production facilities had confirmed cases of Covid-19.

It’s easy to see how a very infectious virus can spread under the conditions at these plants, and it’s easy to see how this affects the communities in which these plants are located. Counties with or near meat processing plants have almost twice the rate of known coronavirus infections as the national average. In some cases the figures are much worse: the Tyson Foods plant in Dakota City, Nebraska, has 786 positive cases (about 17.5 per cent of the 4500 workers and contractors it employs), and surrounding counties in Nebraska, Iowa and South Dakota together average 1000 cases per 100,000 population compared with the national average of 199 cases per 100,000.

These cases fit into a surge of coronavirus infections in rural areas since May. Now, the counties with the highest numbers of cases on a population basis are in Tennessee, Nebraska, Minnesota, Iowa, Kansas and Oklahoma, as well as in the rural areas of southern states like Georgia, Mississippi and Texas. All are areas that rank highly on the CDC’s social vulnerability index. Outbreaks have been further fuelled by the decision of many Republican jurisdictions not to close down public activities, and the failure of people in conservative farming communities to use preventive measures.

Around sixty million people live in rural America, including as many as 2.7 million hired farm workers. They are older and poorer than their urban counterparts and have higher rates of diabetes, obesity and other health problems. In many places the local healthcare system is already stretched thin, and even a minor surge in patients is enough to overwhelm small hospitals that often lack intensive care units and ventilators.

The coronavirus infection has arrived just as the summer harvest season is starting. Fruits and vegetables are still largely picked by hand, an undesirable job that is generally taken on by immigrant workers, roughly half of whom lack legal immigration status. These transient workers live in crowded and substandard housing and often speak little English. Time off for illness means lost pay. The Trump administration’s public charge rule means that even legal migrants are unable to access healthcare and other government benefits.

Bloomberg News reported on 30 May that all the 200 workers on one Tennessee farm tested positive for coronavirus and that Washington’s Yakima County (which produces apples, cherries, pears and hops) had the highest per capita infection rate of any county on the west coast. More than one hundred migrant workers at two large produce operations in New Jersey had contracted the virus.

No concerted government reporting or prevention effort is apparent, despite these workers being essential to America’s food supply. The Covid-19 outbreaks are creating labour shortages at the worst possible time, and many fruit and vegetable crops are being left to rot in the fields.

Those shortages compound the pandemic’s impact on the food supply chain. With cafes, restaurants, hotels and schools shut down, and many people reluctant to shop in supermarkets and farmers’ markets, many producers lost their markets. Dairy producers have been dumping large quantities of milk, and growers have been unable to get fresh produce delivered. Now, just as venues are reopening, further supply interruptions are likely to lead to shortages and increased prices.

All this means that the rate of food insecurity in the United States, especially among households with children, is unprecedented in modern times. A Brookings Institution study drawing on two national surveys in late April found that more than one in five households, and two in five of those with children under twelve years of age, were experiencing food insecurity. The incidence of hardship — as measured by respondents who reported children not eating enough because the household lacked the means to buy food — has increased more than fourfold since 2018.

In New York City an estimated two million people face food insecurity. City officials are planning to begin delivering more than a million free meals a day under the supervision of a “food czar” appointed by mayor Bill de Blasio.

The Trump administration and a number of Republican-governed states have made things worse by trying to limit access to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly the Food Stamps Program), depriving many children of free or inexpensive school meals. With cars and people queuing for miles, food banks are under extraordinary pressure. According to the hunger relief organisation Feeding America, the number of people served at food banks is up by more than half on a year ago and about two in every five people are seeking foodbank help for the first time.

There are no simple solutions to the waste and the need. Growers already reeling from huge losses in sales say they need help to meet the costs of harvesting, packing and transporting their crops to food banks. And the food banks aren’t set up to be warehouses for such vast quantities of perishable food.

The US$2 trillion coronavirus stimulus package provides for US$23.5 billion in assistance for farmers, to be allocated by agriculture secretary Sonny Perdue. Concerns that the administration will use this money to shore up Trump’s support among farmers in electorally pivotal Midwestern states seem justified by the skewed distribution of US$28 billion in aid to farmers to offset Trump’s trade war with China.

The stimulus package also provides the agriculture department with a further US$25.1 billion for food aid programs for poor families, including US$850 million for food banks. To date, despite the unprecedented demand, less than US$300 million has been sent out.

Together, these problems encapsulate all that the United States has become as a result of Donald Trump’s mismanagement of the pandemic: essential workers are infected and dying in unacceptable conditions; food is wasted while American children go hungry and city supermarkets ration purchasing; and some rural livelihoods and lives are wrecked while others benefit from pork-barrelling. •

The post How not to feed America appeared first on Inside Story.

Just over thirty years later, Fulton published her autobiography I Sang for My Supper in the same year that Germaine Greer published The Whole Woman, the belated successor to The Female Eunuch (1970). Fulton loved the juxtaposition:

At the time of writing this, the publicity machinery promoting Germaine Greer’s latest book, the sequel to The Female Eunuch she said she would never write, is in action in Sydney. A half-page photograph in the Sydney Morning Herald shows her in her kitchen in England, in front of her slow-combustion stove, her cupboards laid bare for me to see the row of jars and bottles of what looks to be commercial sauces. Later that day she appears on television slicing raw meat and showing a practised hand at bread making. She appears truly comfortable in her kitchen role. Ironic, isn’t it? She has discovered what millions of Australian women have always known — that cooking is one of the most rewarding and lasting activities in life. Sure, sex is great, but if it’s not around, you can always fly to the kitchen.

The Margaret Fulton Cookbook was republished by Hardie Grant in 2004 to inspire another generation of Australian cooks. Over a fifty-year period Fulton was a household name, and through her writing Australian food culture was transformed.

Margaret Fulton was born on 10 October 1924 in Nairn, near Inverness, Scotland. She was the youngest of six children, and arrived in Australia as a three-year-old when her family immigrated to Glen Innes, New South Wales. Her parents, Alexander and Isabella Fulton, had led middle-class lives in Glasgow; her father was a master tailor and her mother a housewife. The family was artistic, creative and bohemian — all traits that would influence Fulton’s later working life in Sydney. She learned to cook from a young age at her mother’s side. One of her jobs, she has recalled, was to stir the custard.

Fulton can properly be regarded as the “mother” of modern cookery in postwar Australia. Her experience giving cooking classes at the Australian Gas Light Company, and her time (1955–60) working as an account executive in the Sydney office of the world’s largest advertising agent, J. Walter Thompson, were pivotal in forming her as a cookery writer.

Her writing career began in 1954 with Fairfax’s Woman magazine, one of Australia’s three leading women’s magazines of the time. At the interview for the job, Fulton was asked not whether she could write but whether she could make “brown luncheon rolls.” After her years working for the Australian Gas Light Company, brown bread rolls came easily. “So,” she writes, “on the strength of making brown bread luncheon rolls (and, I suspect, a glimmer of some kind of promise) I started my career writing about food in newspapers and women’s magazines and ultimately writing cookery books.” She initially wrote under the by-line of Ann Maxwell.

In 1960, following the collapse of Woman, Fulton became the cookery editor at Woman’s Day, where she remained for nineteen years before moving to the Murdoch-owned rival, New Idea. Under the editorship of Dulcie Boling New Idea increased its circulation steadily over the next decade, and Fulton’s cookery columns eventually reached a million readers a week. It was while Fulton was at Woman’s Day that she was approached by British publisher Paul Hamlyn to write her first cookbook.

Fulton was in the vanguard not only of Australian cookbook writing but also of styles of cooking that would eventually change Australian kitchens. Importantly, she understood the importance of fresh ingredients, shopping locally and getting to know producers and shopkeepers. These were all lessons she had learned from her mother. So, in cooking terms Fulton had a good story to tell, but in literary terms she also found the right means of telling it. Crucial to the success of The Margaret Fulton Cookbook is a narrative tone that is both autobiographical and instructional.

In fact, Fulton’s cookbook is reminiscent of scrapbooks of recipes collected by women and annotated with hints, points to remember and intricate details so that even beginners would not be deterred. At the time no other Australian cookbook so explicitly integrated personal notes that bordered on a form of memoir.

Cookbooks had previously incorporated autobiographical details in an implicit form only; they might include a much-loved recipe from an elderly aunt along the lines of “Aunty May’s melting moments.” (See any edition of the Country Women’s Association Cookery Book.) The significance of Fulton’s narrative is the deliberate inclusion of stories from her own life; an example can be found at the opening of the “Soups” chapter: “What wonderful memories I have of soup and my Scottish mother’s kitchen. We had soup every day and each one had its own character and charm. When I grew older and studied French cooking, I knew why Mother’s soups were so good.” Fulton continues with further details about her mother’s cooking and how she imbibed the subtleties of soup making.

Fulton also took great care to explain the details of each recipe carefully, knowing that not all readers would be as expert as she was. The book had a three-star system (which is retained in the 2008 edition): “1 star — A simple and quick recipe that a beginner could accomplish with ease; 2 star — Dishes for the average cook with a knowledge of basic techniques, but requiring a little more time; 3 star — A special dish, requiring more skill and probably taking some time to prepare.” Beginners are encouraged to try the three-star recipes, allowing for extra time and concentration.

In creating The Margaret Fulton Cookbook Fulton believed she was writing not only for her own family but also for all families. She has said of that first cookbook, it was “a book for everybody in my family and I think that my family would be typical… in different degrees, of a lot of families. And I think it appealed… as I say, to the many faceted sides of being a woman, or a person.”

The valuing of women’s work, particularly cooking, was very important to Fulton. As her observations about Greer show, she believed that cooking was important to women’s self-esteem. She also fully understood the drudgery associated with cooking and wanted to simultaneously value women’s work and acknowledge the daily effort that went into producing nutritious, interesting food.

The immediate postwar period had been a time of recovery, but by the 1960s the pace of change had accelerated, particularly for women. Fulton knew this intimately — she had grown up through the Depression, had worked in a munitions factory during the war, had married and divorced in the early 1950s and was now a single parent. As she has explained, cooking was a way for women to expand their own world, and that of their families:

If you’re doing the same thing, day in, day out, it becomes a chore. What makes cooking so exciting for a woman — in those days, a woman at home — is to enter into someone else’s world. And actually do it. Sometimes not very well, but that’s irrelevant… everyone gets better the second time they make it and the third time they make it. But they became familiar, and it was an excitement that was brought into women at home, who otherwise could have been quite bored with a lot of the… cooking that had gone on. There was something very good about the food that had gone on before. But doing it day in, day out, and just getting better at it, wasn’t all that much of a buzz for women. What was a real buzz, and a real interest, was to be able to say to the family, “Oh, look, we’re going to have a Spanish paella tonight”… It was a lovely time for both me and also my readers.

The reference here to the “Spanish paella” is telling, as Margaret Fulton brought global cuisine into the Australian kitchen and made the exotic commonplace. Her experience of growing up in a small country town whose residents included Chinese, Greek and Italian migrants made her acutely aware of other food cultures. She had attended TAFE courses to further develop her knowledge of French cooking, and with Woman’s Day she had adventured to India, Chile, Argentina, Mexico, North America and Spain. All this inspired her to show Australians how to cook new, international recipes at home, ensuring that they worked and finding ways for Australian women to make them their own. The classic French quiche lorraine was a perfect example — the exotic becoming prosaic in a uniquely Australian way:

The real quiche lorraine didn’t have the bacon and bits in it. But then I said… this is the one we like and [so] we did variations… for the first time people… were able to make a quiche that had just the right amount of pastry because I said, [at] the bottom of the recipe, this mightn’t seem like much pastry, but… it’s quite enough to give the quantity that you need… And that was, in a way, a breakthrough because it was a cookery person understanding that if a woman was at home and had a big lump of pastry, she thought it all had to go in and then it would be too thick. So I began to know how it was and then [write] the recipes accordingly. From this sort of thing, I got the reputation. People said, “Oh Margaret Fulton’s recipes work. They work every time.”

In introducing her Australian readers to new cuisine, Fulton became a significant player in a global shift in food culture among anglophone societies. In international terms she wrote in the immediate footsteps of a group of remarkable women, Americans M.F.K. Fisher and Julia Child, and Englishwoman Elizabeth David, who brought global cuisine (in particular derived from the Mediterranean) into kitchens that had hitherto been dominated by English traditions. Fulton shared with these other writers an openness to new culinary experience that was reflected in unconventional personal lives; and a gift for writing about cooking, food and gastronomy that emphasised the way in which food expresses something profound about ourselves, our lands and their people.

The Margaret Fulton Cookbook not only changed the lives of many Australian women; it changed Fulton’s life too. Notably, it gave her a degree of financial freedom she had not previously experienced. The initial print run for the book was 10,000, then orders kept coming in and it was increased to 20,000, then 30,000, then 40,000 — all unprecedented for a cookbook. The publisher stopped printing at 80,000, worried that they had never sold so many copies — it was, after all, only a cookbook and Fulton was a first-time author! A second edition was issued in 1969 and over the years The Margaret Fulton Cookbook was reprinted nineteen times.

Fulton was also at the forefront of Australian food culture in her championing of the use of organic, non–genetically modified food. She eased (only marginally) her dislike of the new fad of television chefs and cooking shows, appearing in episodes of MasterChef Australia, and became a food ambassador for the supermarket Woolworths, with her own “Honest to Goodness family meals” recipes. This understanding and knowledge of food has also been championed by Stephanie Alexander in her remarkably successful, encyclopedic The Cook’s Companion (1996), published almost thirty years after Fulton’s first cookbook. It is Alexander that Fulton believed had progressed Australian cooking and food writing, and importantly, had encouraged young people into the kitchen.

Fulton is also one of the major exemplars of popular and accessible cookery writing. She has brought this long-established form of writing into the public sphere, combining her recipes with life writing as well as political and social commentary. The acceptance of other cultures and the openness to new ideas that characterised her approach to food was also apparent in her personal life. One of Fulton’s good friends was Aboriginal activist Faith Bandler. They knew each other as young women and their friendship spanned some sixty years, with Fulton providing the wedding breakfast when Faith Mussing married Austrian concentration camp survivor Hans Bandler in 1952.

As a result of that friendship Fulton became keenly aware of the vast differences in life chances for Indigenous Australians. In her autobiography she outlined the impact of the work that Bandler and others undertook in the late 1960s and 1970s — the 1967 referendum, the return of land to the Gurindji people in 1975, and the Fraser government’s Aboriginal Land Rights Act. She was a sponsor of the inaugural national Sorry Day on 26 May 1998, when hundreds of thousands of Australians showed their remorse for government policies that had removed many Aboriginal children from their families. These were brave steps towards reconciliation, although it would be another ten years before Fulton would witness prime minister Kevin Rudd’s apology in 2008. It was appropriate that in 1997 Fulton and Bandler were included together in the National Trust’s initial list of one hundred National Living Treasures.

Discussing Fulton’s autobiography I Sang for My Supper, Elspeth Probyn argues that her cookbooks (as well as her autobiography) are an avenue to bring political debates into popular discourse:

In her autobiography [she] decries John Howard’s stance on reconciliation… [and] there’s a good chance that some of the millions who buy her books are listening to her message. Where and how we live… what we have done to Aboriginal people, and an openness to the tastes of other people are important issues.

Fulton used her cookery writing to tell stories and change kitchens, if not lives. •

This is Sian Supski’s chapter from Telling Stories: Australian Life and Literature 1935–2012, edited by Tanya Dalziell and Paul Genoni (Monash University Publishing).

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Foodjects: Design and the New Cuisine in Spain is a small, cleverly put together exhibition currently showing at the Craft and Design Centre in Canberra. Curated by Martin Ruiz de Azúa (himself an established designer whose imaginative prototypes include an inflatable house for carrying around in your pocket) and supported by the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the exhibition assembles various examples from the range of cookware, tableware and related products created by Spanish designers to complement and support the new Spanish style of cooking – a style indelibly associated with the master of “molecular cuisine,” Ferran Adrià. When put to their intended use, the “smooth organic shapes” of “Bliss,” a dinner set designed in 2003 by Gemma Bernal for Adrià’s elBulli restaurant, seem not merely to complement but to blend into the cuisine itself; as we are told in the catalogue, the individual pieces – plates, bowls, receptacles of various kinds – mimic the “ductile qualities” of the delicacies they hold and “the plates become a prolongation of the food.” It marks another step in the contemporary process of turning food into art; what began in the 1970s and 1980s with nouvelle cuisine, when those vast plates-cum-bowls acted as a kind of frame for a rose-pink quail breast and a few peppercorns, has now reached a point where the plate is not merely a frame, but an integral part of the picture.

You could say that things have come full circle. In medieval times, the plates were likewise inseparable from the food. In fact, they literally were the food, in the form of trenchers made from bread that could, theoretically at least, be set upon by unsatisfied diners looking to fill up the corners after the main dish was despatched. The difference now is not so much that the plate imitates the food it holds as that the food – the new Spanish cuisine that first began to be noticed a decade and a half ago and relies heavily on technology to transform it into something that is and is not the food we know – imitates the plate, taking on a designed and manufactured aspect that makes us wonder whether we should be eating it or simply admiring it, as we would a painting or a sculpture or an Eames chair.

As if taking this idea to its logical conclusion, there are a couple of objects in the exhibition that are fabricated to look and smell like food but aren’t food at all. A scented ceramic sponge cake and a virtual bonbon – the latter infused with natural cacao and Bulgarian rose essence – are “designed to be smelt only.” These faux foods call to mind the pièces montées of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, visual extravaganzas assembled by the great Marie-Antoine Carême and others out of a flour-and-sugar paste and designed to sit in the middle of the table, to be looked at, admired, but not eaten. The main difference being that the pièce montée was food got up to mimic something else – a Grand Chinese Summer House, for instance, or a Turkish Pavilion, both of which featured in Carême’s repertoire – whereas the virtual bonbon is something else, got up to mimic food. You could, if you were so minded, snaffle a piece of a pièce to eat afterwards, but it would be unwise, as that cautionary note in the Foodjects catalogue reminds us, to try tucking into a ceramic sponge cake or a virtual bonbon.

As a counterpoint to the virtual bonbon, the exhibition catalogue provides a recipe for a real one, made from olive oil. The bonbon is savoury this time, rather than sweet, and is given as an example of the kind of (edible) food that these “foodjects” are designed to accompany. Making olive oil bonbons is not for the fainthearted, involving as it does dropping a small amount of olive oil down a tube while ensuring that a thin film of melted isomalt remains adhered to the end, ready to encase the oil as it luges its way down to the bottom, turning it magically into a bright golden bauble. Well, that’s the idea, anyway. “If the first one doesn’t work, don’t be discouraged… Just try to do it faster next time,” says the recipe, reminding us in effect that the new cuisine retains quite a lot in common with the old: all that fun in the kitchen is actually hard work. In Mastering the Art of French Cooking, the famously influential guide to the pre-nouvelle way of doing things first published in 1961, Simone Beck, Louisette Bertholle and Julia Child sound a strikingly similar chord: if the egg yolks need to be beaten into the sauce drop by drop, then that is what you must do. “You may be slow and clumsy and first,” they say in their stern but encouraging preface, “but with practice you will pick up speed and style.”

The style of the new Spanish cuisine derives from a paradoxical combination of the earnest and the cheeky. Two of the more intriguing objects in the exhibition, both of them designed by the Swiss-born, Spain-based Luki Huber in 2005, emphasise the cheeky by having fun with spoons. “Spoon with Pincer,” which looks pretty much like a peg with a teaspoon stuck on the top, “allows a diner to smell one thing and eat another,” by trapping something aromatic – a sprig of rosemary perhaps – in the pincer, leading the diner to smell it on the way to whatever is waiting in the bowl of the spoon, a game of sensory mix and match. In the case of the “Strainer Spoon,” the bowl is a miniature colander, ideal for those who, for example “like to eat the cereal first, then the milk,” or the vegetables then the broth. It is essentially an update of the slotted spoon, made for the eater rather than the cook. It facilitates an active deconstruction of the meal on the part of the person eating it, echoing the fashion for chefs to break down traditional dishes into their constituent parts and lay the workings bare. Huber, with his quirky spoons, hints at how the diner can be something more than a passive consumer of one spectacularly inventive and original dish after another. The chef may be the undisputed star, but the diner can be allowed a small supporting role.

The “foodjects” in this exhibition oscillate between naturalness and artifice, between the twin poles that characterise this cuisine for the technological age. They emphasise how the new cuisine, with its “deconstructed dishes, foams, spherications,” which may seem complex and fussy and just too damn clever, is in fact aiming for the essence of taste, for a direct connection with pure flavour. José Andrés, an early colleague of Ferran Adrià whose name is now closely associated with the international spread of “small plates” dining, is quoted in the catalogue enjoining us to listen to the ingredients we use. “Have you ever had a conversation with a carrot?” he asks. “Or a tomato? You should sometime. They have a lot to say.” This kind of new-age, I-talk-to-the-carrots-and-the-carrots-talk-to-me characterisation of cooking is intended to plug us straight into what we eat, but at the other end of the spectrum is the way in which the new high-tech cuisine intellectualises the business of eating, making the food in front of us and the plates the food sits on intriguing, amusing, fascinating, part of a game rather than something we must engage with in order to stay alive.

The contradiction is resolved, if it is resolved at all, by the idea that food is nourishment for both the body and the mind. Whatever makes us pause and think about food, about how it has been prepared, how beautiful or striking or odd it looks on the plate, about how the composition of the dish alludes to something else – a painting perhaps, or a scene from nature, as in some of the signature dishes of René Redzepi’s Noma restaurant in Copenhagen, where mock grass sprouts from mock soil that has been made out of breadcrumbs or hazelnut flour – contributes to our enjoyment of food and the benefits it confers on us. The new cuisine is not, as its critics would argue, about extravagance and self-indulgence, but is a genuine attempt to get us to think about one of the most important relationships we have, to the food we eat. It is here that the “asymmetric and somewhat unstable” cutlery, designed by Javier Mariscal in 2007, can help. The irregular borders of the soup spoon, for instance, complete with an attractive but otherwise unexplained bight cutting into the bowl, are intended to “make people think.”

ALL this inventiveness notwithstanding, there are signs in the wider world that the new cuisine is running out of puff, that the emphasis on the role of technology in preparing the food, and the role of the intellect in leading us to appreciate it, has gone too far. The dates attached to some of the designs in this exhibition – the earliest is from 1999 – are a reminder that the new Spanish cuisine is not so new anymore. A lot has happened since the nineties – to cooking, to Spain, and to our general confidence in experts practising arcane arts – and a new simplicity is, at least ostensibly, back in vogue. It can be seen, for example, in the rise of American cook and food writer Tamar Adler, who models herself consciously on the formidable M.F.K. Fisher and who is all for getting back to basics. An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace questions all this emphasis on technology and cleverness and on people trying to bamboozle us with complex formulae. Cooking, she says, “has in recent years become a complication to juggle against other complications,” whereas it is in fact “both simpler and more necessary than we imagine.”

By the reckoning of Adler and others like her, the intellectualising and the relentless inventiveness of recent years just gets in the way of enjoying good food cooked well. Do we really need all the new products like Lecite and Algin and Gellan and Kappa and Iota – sample tins of these and similar aids to the production of “hot gelatines, airs, melon caviar or spherical raviolis” are included in Foodjects – in order to eat well? “Most of us,” Adler points out, “already have water, a pot to put it in, and a way to light a fire.” Our batterie de cuisine need not run to a “plastic tube of 1.5 centimetres in diameter,” as advised in the recipe for making olive oil bonbons, when we can choose to skip these space age amuse-bouches altogether and instead serve, as Tamar Adler recommends for those occasions when friends drop in, “little halved radishes, chilled in the refrigerator, a dish of salt, and another filled with softened sweet butter.”

The problem is that freshly picked radishes in crisper drawers, lying ready to spring into action when the doorbell rings, belong as much to a world of culinary fantasy as do olive oil bonbons and pincer spoons. That is not to say that radishes aren’t at a given moment, somewhere in the world, being chopped in half and served with sweet butter and a pinch of salt to unexpected callers (a process made easier by the fact that unexpected callers, having texted ahead, are more generally expected these days). And equally there are people, not all of them commercial chefs and restaurateurs, who serve olive oil bonbons too, and who prepare them with speed and skill. But neither is a common or everyday practice, and it is unlikely that they ever will be. The real difference between what are, for most of us, two idealised and unattainable culinary worlds – the low-tech one of split radishes, and the high-tech one of golden globules – lies in the differences they represent between two profoundly different ways of looking at food and its place in our lives.

Sometimes, it is true, these worlds will happily combine. Adler is quite prepared, for instance, for her low-tech practice of instinctive cookery to include an electric blender, though she draws the line at microwaves. “Use yours as a bookshelf,” she counsels, “or to store gadgets you don’t use.” And it’s fine to keep tins of artichokes and tomatoes in the cupboard for those days when you can’t get out to the shops, just as M.F.K. Fisher was not above resorting to a packet of dried onion soup when supplies of fresh alternatives ran low. But these are occasional examples that don’t disprove the general rule, which is that the Adler and the Adrià approaches to cooking are based on radically opposed philosophical precepts and are unlikely ever to become, in the manner of tomato and basil, two complementary halves of the same flavoursome whole.

What these two approaches to cuisine really do have in common, though, is the idea of food – the making, the presenting, the eating – as performance, complete with the occasional allowance for audience participation. (“Let everyone spread the radishes with a smear of butter and sprinkle them with salt,” says Adler, or let them use a specially designed slotted spoon to start with the cereal and end with the milk. Either way, the diner can become, however tangentially, part of the creative process.) Cooking and eating also entail thinking and imagining and reflecting. And writing. “I like to read descriptions of food in books,” says Adler, but “I will only read a cookbook if it is one in which the poetry of food comes alive on the page.” By and large, she meets her own benchmark, demonstrating that characteristic of all successful food writers, an elusive and ineffable way with recipes that makes you want to try them, along with a nice line in useful tips, including a chapter on rescuing culinary missteps called “How to Snatch Victory from the Jaws of Defeat.” If anything, though, Adler can sometimes overdo the poetry bit; her characterisation, for example, of a “perfect solitary sybaritic breakfast of pasta eaten directly out of a cold bowl, in bewilderment and utter presence,” betrays rather a heavy hand with the lyrical seasoning.

Tamar Adler makes the case for writing and reading about food as being an integral part of the pleasure and satisfaction of cooking it and eating it. The Foodjects designers, as might be expected, take things a step further, from writing about food to writing with it and on it. Julia Mariscal’s 2006 design for a “Writing Spoon” specifically acknowledges that “eating is a creative act,” the point being that rather than depend on a trained and talented barista to draw a picture on your cappuccino, you can do it yourself, with your own writing spoon. It’s a joke, of course, but a clever and sophisticated one, touching on the contemporary need to participate in the creative process rather than simply to witness it, to take what we are given and mash it up (a curiously culinary term) so that it’s just the way we like it. The writing spoon, with its nib-like tip, can also be used to draw pictures with foodstuffs; there’s an oddly hypnotic clip on YouTube of a disembodied hand repeatedly dipping the Julia Mariscal writing spoon into a cup of black coffee and using it to build up a picture on a plain white table cover. Designing, looking; writing, reading; cooking, eating. They all go together. •

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Santich records many efforts since the mid-nineteenth century to define the National Dish, and how the candidates for that honour have changed with the times. Our real gastronomic distinctiveness, she concludes, lies not in pavlova, Vegemite, lamb chops, Anzac biscuits or any other dish or dishes but in our “enthusiasm for new foods, our readiness to adapt, improvise and reinvent.” She insists that we’ve never had a single cuisine, much less a monotonously British one as is so often assumed, and we certainly didn’t wait for the postwar immigrants to bring variety of food type, origin and flavour into our diet.

I know from my own experience that this is true, up to a point. I was the beneficiary of a cuisine my mother got from her mother and grandmother, extending well back into the nineteenth century. It was rich in offal (including liver, brains, tongue, tripe and kidneys), pungent sauces, pickles, relishes and chutneys, a cheddar so magnificently matured that it could compete on equal terms with heavily spiced pickled onions, jams and beautifully preserved fruits, and an array of sweets, cakes and biscuits that even Brunetti’s would struggle to match.

And then there was bush tucker, both native and introduced. My father and his brothers and cousins learned as boys to trap yabbies and crayfish, shoot rabbit, hare, scrub turkey and duck, and fish for river callop and Murray cod as well as whiting, bream, tommy ruff, snapper and many other fish of the ocean. Earlier generations ranged even more widely, Santich points out, because they could and because they had to. Pigeon, flying fox, bandicoot, echidna, wombat and many others fell in the cause of (often unsuccessful) culinary experiment.

Although Santich marshals some intriguing menus, advertisements, lists of imported goods and the like, these don’t suggest the degree of cosmopolitanism and feverish innovation now so widely enjoyed. I went to university at about the time this revolution was getting under way, and soon became conscious that in leaving home I was also leaving one gastronomic universe for another. My hunch is that if we have always had bold palates, they’re a lot bolder now than ever before.

It would have been interesting to have all this set in a context of the subsequent fast- and prepared-food revolution – or counter-revolution? – noted rather than integrated into Santich’s overall picture. I wonder, too, how far “enthusiasm for new foods, our readiness to adapt, improvise and reinvent” marks off Australia’s gastronomic heritage from that of other so-called settler societies, particularly the United States.

The story of Bold Palates is told as much through reproductions of photographs, paintings, letters, diaries, advertisements and the like as through the text itself. There is much enjoyment to be had in browsing though this wealth of material, even if it is displayed in a rather self-consciously retro layout. But the profusion of illustration also gets in the way of a good read, as does the organisation of the book around themes and topics – “bush tucker,” “land of picnics,” “chops rampant,” “land of cakes” and so on. Each of these contains a narrative, but they combine to form a collection more than an integrated history. Santich’s muse is food rather than history. •

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If only it were always that simple. Most of us buy olive oil in bottles bedecked in green and gold labels bearing antique script that tells us the contents are “cold-pressed” and “extra virgin.” The story of how often and how much these labels lie constitutes much of the tale that Tom Mueller, an American journalist now resident among the olive groves of Liguria, has to tell in his passionate and learned new book, Extra Virginity.

But this is more than just an exposé of oleaginous malfeasance. It’s also a celebration of oil, its culture and the tree from which we take the fruit: it was fitting, says Mueller, that Homer chose an olive tree, rather than the curve of the surrounding hills, to tell Odysseus that he was back home in Ithaca. His search takes him as far afield as New Norcia in Western Australia (though it’s a pity that he has little to say about the industry in South Australia, where the sexual reproduction of olives, as opposed to propagation by cuttings, has led to some interesting varieties). His focus, however, is the Mediterranean, where olive oil is, perhaps, more important than anywhere else in the world.

Mueller does what they used to do there. He uses olive oil as a skin lotion and feels soft and soothed. He buys replicas of Roman oil lamps and lights them throughout the house, “their flames floating above dark pools of oil and emanating a faint sweetness, bathing familiar scenes in the tremulous amber light of the past.”

And he knows about the economic significance of the oil since ancient times. The importance of olive oil to the Romans is revealed by a place in Rome called Monte Testaccio: a mound, the size of a small hill, composed entirely of broken bits of amphorae, the jars in which oil was carried. (As a child, I filched a few of these pieces – which might or might not have been legal – and I still possess them.) The mountain, a huge rubbish dump, represents 1.75 billion litres of olive oil, distributed free to the citizenry thanks to government subsidy. In medieval times, despite the spread of barbarian lipids like butter and lard, olive oil continued to be prescribed by pharmacists for maladies as varied as skin disease or digestive disorders, and sorcerers and witches used it in their spells and unguents.

And where are we now? Back to spells and unguents. European Union law defines Virgin Olive Oil as oil obtained from the fruit of the olive (olive oil is the only commercially significant oil extracted from a fruit rather than from seeds like sunflower or canola oil) by mechanical processes that don’t cause alterations in the oil, and which has not undergone any treatment apart from washing, decantation, centrifugation and filtration. This excludes oils obtained with solvents or with chemical or biochemical reagents. The highest level is extra virgin, which has to convince a panel that its taste is free of flaws and offers a detectable level of olive fruitiness.

Cuneiform tablets in the city of Ebla in what is now Syria reveal that there have long been olive oil inspectors on the lookout for fraudulent practices. Quite a few centuries on, olive oil is one of the food products most frequently adulterated in the European Union. It may be bottled in Italy, the label may look very Italian, but chances are that it will have been bottled there having arrived by the tanker loads from somewhere else. (“What’s this oil to do with virginity?” says one of Mueller’s experts. “This is a whore.”)

Many of these scams involve simply mixing low-grade vegetable oils, flavouring and colouring them with plant extracts and, as Mueller tells us, selling them in tins and bottles “emblazoned with Italian flags or paintings of Mount Vesuvius together with folksy names of imaginary producers.” The contents of tankers full of Greek oil, or even hazelnut oil and sunflower seed from Turkey and Argentina, have been passed off as Italian olive oil. Bertolli oil, a market leader in the United States, is made of Spanish oil, shipped to Italy for bottling. If you want to be a more sophisticated scamer, you can take pomace – an extract of olive pits, skin and flesh – and produce an odourless, tasteless fat which you can then blend with a little extra virgin olive oil. And then there’s deodorisation, the difficult-to-detect process of heating low-quality oil to remove unpleasant flavours and odours.

Bertolli insists that what matters is not the origin of the oil – which doesn’t have to be and usually isn’t Italy – but Italian skills in blending it. Yet its advertisements on Italian TV use Tuscan accents and settings. The results of this sort of thing can be grim. “So long as smelly, rancid oils and first-rate oils with the perfume of fresh olives bear the same name,” says one of Mueller’s informants, “quality producers in Italy and throughout the Mediterranean have no possibility of covering their costs.”

It is these quality producers who are the heroes of Mueller’s book. Extra Virginity is full of loving pen-portraits of them, from Flavio Zaramella, president of the Mastri Oleari and campaigner for good oil despite his cancer, to Gino Olivieri, eighty-five years old, who makes oil amid the terraced fields and limestone cliffs of Mueller’s Ligurian village. Every one of them knows that oil, just as much as wine, is the product of a particular place, a particular soil. It is never the sort of thing that you can ship in bulk.

So how do we get good olive oil, which is say, really, how do we get real olive oil? There is, perhaps, no easy answer. It would be nice if it were simply about the state of the can in which it is sold but, as Tom Mueller tells us, human greed and greedy ingenuity make it more difficult than that. •

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It is these obstacles and the disastrous nature of our current trajectory that are the focus of The Coming Famine. Science journalist Julian Cribb sets the scene early in the book when he outlines the various ways in which food insecurity can and will cause conflict – or how, in the twenty-first century, “we either eat − or we fight.” He then explores the major causes of current and future food insecurity on both the supply and demand sides of the equation: water shortages; the declining level of arable land per capita; loss of nutrients from soil, and limits to fertiliser production; over-fishing and ocean acidification; under-investment in agricultural research and development; high energy intensity of global food production, as well as over-reliance on fossil fuels; climate change; population growth and changing dietary habits (towards meat-based products) as incomes rise; and, finally, the inequities imposed on farmers in developing countries by the international trade regime.

Three factors deserve particular attention. The first is water. In many developing countries, agricultural use constitutes around three-quarters of total water demand. Hence, degradation of water sources from over-use or pollution undermines agricultural productivity. What’s more, illness caused by unsafe water diminishes labour productivity and incomes, another way in which water insecurity affects the ability of poor households to get access to food. The second factor, fisheries, is often overlooked in discussions about food security. Much of the world’s population, particularly in Asia, relies on fish as a main source of protein. Decades of poor management and rising human populations have dramatically reduced stock levels and, in some places, destroyed entire fisheries, and that damage is now being amplified by rising acidity in the oceans due to anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions. Third, Cribb raises the issue of under-investment in agricultural research and development. Over the past three decades, the supply of public funding and, consequently, the volume of research activity has not kept pace with the global need for improved crop varieties and better farming techniques. Given the food requirements of a growing global population and the proximate need to adapt farming to a changed climate, an upsurge in agricultural research and development is urgently needed.

At the end of The Coming Famine Cribb proposes five principal measures to prevent the global food disaster he envisages. The first is to rebalance diets away from meat in high-income countries, and in emerging economies as incomes rise. Second, we need to curb the enormous waste of food that occurs globally, both in households and en route to market. Third, Cribb recommends a four- to five-fold increase in agricultural research and development, including extra funding to deploy this knowledge. He suggests a targeted rise of between US$36 billion to US$145 billion annually, most of which should come out of defence budgets. Fourth, we need to address climate change, including through land-based carbon sequestration. Finally, Cribb floats the idea of a “world farm,” where governments, business and consumers cooperate harmoniously to ensure global resources are sustainably managed.

Although this last measure is seriously over-optimistic and the others aren’t accompanied by a detailed discussion of their implementation, Cribb’s recommendations are, by and large, reasonable. Each chapter also includes practical recommendations for individuals. These are mostly sensible and general common sense (“waste less food and compost organic material”), although sometimes slightly curious (“teach our children to prize water as much as freedom”), and, besides, you’d think that broader policy actions would have a larger impact.

Cribb is neither a scientist nor an economist; he is a science journalist whose target audience is, in his words, “the ordinary citizen of Planet Earth.” Rather than being a scholarly work, the book is written in a journalistic style with a succession of statistics and quotes used to establish ideas. This barrage of numbers and excerpts from other works is not easy reading, but their cumulative shock value is likely to create a sense of astonishment in a reader unfamiliar with the topic, though fatigue could set in at some point in the book’s 260-odd pages.

That is not to say that Cribb simple collates other sources without engaging in any analysis. The chapter on research and development, for example, includes a balanced discussion of genetically modified crops. Too often this topic attracts simplified, dogmatic proclamations from both sides of the debate, when the truth probably lies somewhere in between. Cribb is more in favour than against, because “the world will need all the tools at its disposal to raise crop yields,” but he also acknowledges potential problems with the deployment of genetically modified crops. Similarly, his discussion of biofuels is impartial and informative, outlining the many downsides, such as competition with food crops for land and water, and acknowledging the areas of potential benefit, such as algae farming.

Unfortunately, however, these analyses are offset by distorted, and at times bizarre, commentary found elsewhere in the book. For example, Cribb’s discussion of population growth includes a wholesale condemnation of birth subsidies. He derides the notion that “we need more citizens to support the ageing ones” and bemoans the fact that “many governments still attempt to bribe their citizens to have more babies.” Japan is singled out for particular criticism for resisting the simultaneous ageing and decline of its population. Demographic change and the dependency ratio of workers to non-workers is a major economic issue concerning not just Japan, but most Western countries and, in a few decades, China as well. Cribb could have examined the potential contribution of international migration to rebalancing demographic disparities between developed and developing countries, for example, or discussed how welfare reform could reduce the burden on the public purse of a skewed dependency ratio. Instead, he simply dismisses “the crude expedient of [governments] merely trying to multiply their people.”

Cribb’s discussion of the growing demand for food, or the “global feeding frenzy,” is also strange. He asserts that “most people now feel entitled to high levels of protein and fat consumption and, if they cannot obtain them in their birthplace, are willing to move across nations and continents.” I would think that forced migration within and away from developing countries has more to do with, say, violence, water scarcity or not having enough food of any sort, rather than proximity to a fast food outlet. Not so, according to Cribb, who specifically includes refugees in his description of the “ravenous consumer,” the “affluent twenty-first century nomads... spreading the toxic message that unrestrained, promiscuous consumption is OK.”

Such hyperbolic descriptions are symptomatic of the principal weakness of The Coming Famine: too much of the text is dedicated to generating a sense of moral outrage in the reader. Cribb seeks to shock with emotive language and grand generalisations. These devices are not present on every page, but they occur so frequently that they appear contrived, and wading through them becomes exhausting for even the most interested or persevering reader. More serious is the reaction of the sceptical or less dedicated readers. Is it likely that they will be more willing to accept the veracity of Cribb’s collection of facts, statistics and quotes if they are accompanied by activist language and calls to arms? I doubt it.

Perhaps the most glaring example of unnecessary sensationalism is the preface of the final chapter. Cribb tells a story of a school trip in 2085 to view a museum exhibit that “sends a chill of horror through the awed children. As they draw closer they begin to feel its power... this fount of all the ruin, the suffering, the hunger, the loss. It’s a cookbook.” Cookbooks are then compared to “the most dangerous of military weapons,” their text likened to “Nero’s lyrics to a burning Rome.” The seriousness of food security doesn’t require such literary embellishment.

Somewhere in the communication of serious and urgent global issues there has to be a balance between sensationalism and moderation. For the most part, communication of climate change science has occurred at the other end of the spectrum. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and climate scientists more broadly, have been criticised for over-moderating their message for fear of being alarmist. Great emphasis is placed by climate scientists on acknowledging uncertainty and average or median projections, when in fact there is great certainty of serious consequences and the high probability, on the current trajectory, of worst-case scenarios. It is arguable that the measured presentation of climate science has contributed to public apathy in countries like Australia and the United States, although it appears that the science community is now beginning to strengthen its message. But how far should communication of such important issues go towards the activist end of the spectrum? Are disengaged sections of society likely to respond favourably and actively to the type of approach adopted by Cribb?

The Coming Famine is written by a professional in science communication and it may be that my opinions can be attributed to a lack of expertise in that area. It may be that Cribb’s style of presentation appeals to readers who are less familiar with the issues, or who are discovering them for the first time. Perhaps this book is successful in raising awareness, or perhaps it is not reaching as wide an audience as it could have done. Successful or not, the book does raise the important subject of how science and economics, and academic research more generally, is communicated. Cribb’s approach tends to the more sensational. I believe that this is not the best way to present these issues. It treats its audience with an element of disrespect, assuming that it needs perpetual astonishment. Just as some environmental advocacy groups undercut their message with overt partisanship, a large portion of the language used in The Coming Famine sets the book up to dismissed as an overstatement of the issues. Yet it shouldn’t be dismissed, because the facts are plain from the research that Cribb synthesises. The author’s choice of sources is predominantly sound, and the issues he gives prominence to are, by and large, the significant ones. It is just a great shame that he overplays his hand in their presentation and thereby undermines his credibility.

The stated aim of The Coming Famine is to be a “wake-up call” for humanity. But it is one thing to get people’s attention, and another, much more important objective, to retain it. •

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The unglamorous yet strangely charismatic lobster is the subject of two recent books, both of them appearing under the Reaktion imprint. Richard J. King’s Lobster is the latest addition to Reaktion’s splendid Animal list, where it joins monographs on the crow, the ant, the tortoise, the cockroach, the rhinoceros and thirty-five others, with wolf, trout, sparrow and chicken coming soon. Elisabeth Townsend’s Lobster: A Global History forms part of its Edible series, where its companion volumes include Cake, Caviar, Cheese and Chocolate. Inevitably, there is some overlap between the two series: between Cow, for instance, and Cheese or Milk. But the lobster provides the only example of a direct match.

It’s as if it wasn’t quite clear where the lobster belonged, which seems somehow appropriate for a creature whose essential character – its lobsterness – is so difficult to pin down. Both King and Townsend do their best to simplify the unsimplifiable by offering a clear and concise definition, although given the confusion that exists in the English-speaking world over what exactly is meant by a lobster, as against say a crayfish, a prawn, a shrimp, a bug or a langoustine, one may as well ask, as King rhetorically does, “what is a biscuit?”

And yet of course the many species of lobster do share certain characteristics. According to Tin-Yam Chan in the Lobster Newsletter, an electronic journal currently hosted by the Western Australian Department of Fisheries, at last count there were 247 living marine lobster species, twenty-eight of which were first described only in the last decade. Among the most common and best known are table lobsters like the clawed American and European lobsters (sometimes referred to as “true” lobsters) and Western Australia’s rock or spiny lobster (also popularly known as the crayfish, even though, just to muddy the waters even further, the crayfish is a freshwater and not a marine crustacean).

The novelist David Foster Wallace, in a piece called “Consider the Lobster,” first published in Gourmet magazine in 2004, runs through the common features. “A lobster is a marine crustacean,” he tells us, “with five pairs of jointed legs… stalked eyes, gills on their legs, and antennae.” He continues, the language growing more self-consciously specialised and impressively scientific, before concluding with the bathetic acknowledgement that lobsters “are basically giant sea-insects.” Biological precision notwithstanding, Wallace recognises the lobster as one of nature’s boundary-crossers – an animal that lives with the fishes and looks like an insect.

In terms of public image, the lobster is a good few steps ahead of the cockroach, but in contrast to the cat, for example – which, like the cockroach, is also part of the Reaktion “Animal” (and, just to be clear, not the “Edible”) series – the lobster does not have the advantage of a huge, ready-made supply of potential readers, of cat-lovers for whom the volume Cat would make an excellent birthday present. In both the visual and gustatory senses, lobster is something of an acquired taste which, once acquired, inspires great loyalty. And not just from diners. It is the loyalty of the second look, the realisation that what appears at first to be an unprepossessing creature is in fact quite beautiful in the intricacy of its construction. King quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson to this effect; Emerson found the lobster “monstrous to the eye the first time it is seen,” but on closer examination “as perfect and suitable to his sea-house as a glove to a hand.”

Culinary history is full of foods that have, in terms of the esteem in which they are held, started low and finished high, beginning as a staple and assuming over time, thanks largely to decreasing availability, the status of special treat. Oysters are just one example. The trajectory can also go the other way, as industrial levels of production transform an occasional luxury like chicken to a familiar and predictable standby. Lobster, however, with its customary capacity to straddle the boundaries, has managed over a very long time to keep a foot or five in both camps. King and Townsend, assisted by Reaktion’s generous quota of illustrations, include (different) images of seventeenth-century Dutch still lifes in which the brilliant red of the boiled lobster draws the eye into a privileged world of sensuality and indulgence. Yet at roughly the same time, across the Atlantic, the Pilgrim Fathers were shuddering at the thought of yet another lobster dinner. Both authors quote the words of William Wood, author of New England’s Prospect (1634), who showed a fine appreciation of the laws of supply and demand when he observed of the abundance of lobsters in the new colony that “their plenty makes them little esteemed and seldom eaten.”

Lobster stocks – while no longer as plentiful as they were in seventeenth-century New England, or in the commercial heyday of the late nineteenth century or even as they have been within more recent times – remain relatively robust, at least when compared with the much more rapid decline in the numbers of some other marine species. Attempts to farm them on a large scale have so far proved disappointing, but the early adoption in many of the major fisheries of sustainable practices to ensure the preservation and protection of breeding stock has helped to support the numbers. The Marine Stewardship Council, King tells us, have “given their certification (of environmental sustainability) to the spiny lobster industry off Western Australia… the first of any fishery in the world,” and others have followed.

As major industries go, lobstering retains an artisanal quality. Even when it is practised under the auspices of large corporations, as it is in Canada, for example, it remains primarily reliant on natural cycles and the hard-won skills of the professional lobsterman. The lobster on the dinner table evokes for us a connection with its habitat and the natural world that has been all but lost in the case of other, more staple proteins like beef or chicken. By way of reinforcing the point, purists recommend that for the optimum culinary result, the lobster be boiled in seawater.

Lobster doesn’t take kindly to being relegated to the supporting cast. The authoritative and always authoritative-sounding Jean-François Revel, in his Culture and Cuisine (1982), rules that “lobster in a bouillabaisse marseillaise is merely a tourist ‘frill’: its flesh becomes flabby in the cooking and its flavour is lost, adding nothing to the dish.” Lobster is best when it has centre stage, whether grilled and served with butter and lemon or playing more elaborate costume parts, dressed up in classic recipes like Lobster Thermidor or Newburg. It fits easily into the leading role, which helps to explain why it is so strongly associated in our minds with special occasions. Those seventeenth-century Dutch still lifes, showing a lobster with a claw or two hanging nonchalantly over the edge of the serving plate, emphasise the creature’s enviably regal bearing (appropriately enough, a lobster’s blood is sometimes described as having a blue tinge).

As is perhaps inevitable with such a focused subject, King and Townsend cover much of the same territory, particularly when it comes to the literary and artistic life of the lobster. King ranges more widely and deeply in this department, which again is not surprising given that he has what many people would regard as one of the world’s ideal jobs, teaching the literature of the sea at the Williams-Mystic Maritime Studies Program in Mystic, Connecticut. King is particularly good at conveying something of the dedication and enthusiasm of those people who have over the years devoted themselves to studying the lobster, like Francis Hobart Herrick, author of Natural History of the American Lobster (1911) and described by King as “the Da Vinci, the Darwin, the William Shakespeare of lobster biology.” At a time now of heightened distrust of theories of everything, there is something heartening about the kinds of insights into specialised worlds that characterise this and other volumes in the “Animal” series, worlds of shared and mutually supportive expertise, communities of enthusiasts not only for the lobster, but for the cockroach or the cat as well.

Townsend’s focus is much more specifically culinary, and couched in a direct, even colloquial style. “If you’re thinking about eating a dead lobster, think again,” she advises. “Forget cooking any shellfish… that has died before you prepare it.” In this instance at least her directness leads her further than King ventures in confronting the vexed question – what might be called the lobster in the room – of how to ensure optimum freshness and flavour (not to mention food safety) while dispatching the lobster humanely. King entitles the relevant chapter, with a Townsend-like touch, “To Boil or Not to Boil,” while Townsend heads hers “Killing and Cooking (Humanely).”

It all hinges, as David Foster Wallace considered at length in his 2004 essay, on how we see the lobster. Is it to all intents and purposes an insect, a kind of giant mosquito that cannot be understood to feel pain? Or do those scrabbling claws, struggling to escape the boiling water as the live lobster is plunged into the pot (“head first,” announces Julia Child airily in a YouTube clip from one of her cooking programs, apparently on the grounds that this will ensure an almost instantaneous death), signal not only the experience of pain but other, human emotions like fear and anguish and even, perhaps, a sense of betrayal?

Both sides of the argument tend to favour anthropomorphic language, with the advocates of live boiling or last-minute dispatch emphasising the least attractive non-culinary qualities of the lobster. Trevor Corson, author of The Secret Life of Lobsters (2004), recommends either the “professional” method (“take the largest knife you can find and plunge it straight into the bottom of its head and then quickly slap the knife down so it cuts through the middle of the head, through the nose and between the eyes”) or, for the more squeamish, the so-called chill-and-kill method, which involves first putting the lobster in the freezer for fifteen minutes to render it near-unconscious. This unsentimental approach seems at least partly reinforced by Corson’s characterisation of lobsters – in a 2004 interview in which he responded to what he saw as Foster Wallace’s wishy-washy approach – as rude, anti-social, cannibalistic and “constantly pissing in each other’s faces.”

In his A Concise Encyclopaedia of Gastronomy, first published in full in 1952, André Simon acknowledged that plunging a live lobster into boiling water resulted in “violent attempts… to emerge.” On the other hand, “with the lobster placed in cold water and the boiler put on the fire, there was no evidence of discomfort.” It is difficult today, in our climate of confusion and concern over live transportation and the methods used to kill animals for the table, to maintain quite such a level of insouciance. The passive voice – “there was no evidence of discomfort” – just doesn’t strike the right note for a contemporary audience. Australia’s RSPCA is unequivocal on this issue, forthrightly advocating the chill-and-kill method for lobsters: “The RSPCA believes that all crustaceans that are used for food and other purposes must be killed humanely as soon as possible after capture. This is because crustaceans experience pain and suffering and should be given the same respect and consideration that other animals are given.”

For Townsend, the answer to producing lobster meat humanely may lie with a giant machine, described colloquially as The Big Mother Shucker, which, while the name doesn’t sound especially compassionate, “kills lobsters in about two seconds” by means of very high water pressure. But, as with so much to do with lobsters, this isn’t as straightforward as it sounds. In an essay in the Summer 2011 number of the Virginia Quarterly Review, an issue devoted to the state of the world’s fisheries, Jesse Dukes notes that the manufacturers of this new technology say that “it can take up to forty-five seconds for the tanks to reach full pressure,” from which he concludes that “it’s unclear how long it takes a lobster to die.”

These new, industrial methods may, says Dukes, “be no more humane than boiling.” Both King and Townsend are sensitive to the ethics surrounding the dispatch and consumption of lobster, but they both feel too that, as King puts it, “the live lobster in the kitchen… is a final vestige of what it is like to butcher or kill our own food,” a way of maintaining what Townsend calls a “connection between the food we ingest and its origin.” But that’s easier said than done. It is all very well to emphasise the connection between origin and ingestion when the subject is a potato, but a variety of more complex emotions intrudes when we are confronted with a flailing lobster. The debate is likely to continue. •

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It is tempting to see more in this quoted remark than just a passing comment on the closed and self-reinforcing nature of the professions, in this case the profession of cooking. It also seems to be saying something about Adrià’s relationship to culinary tradition. In certain dramatic and larger-than-life ways he embodies and epitomises the profound shift that has been taking place over the past forty years in attitudes to cooking and particularly to haute cuisine, away from processes of recovering and refining the old ways of doing things and more and more towards being adventurous and inventive and original.

In the food writing of the mid twentieth century, when M.F.K. Fisher and Elizabeth David and Julia Child and others like them were introducing vast numbers of readers to the long history and continuing vitality of the great cuisines, the language of approval centred on words like “authenticity.” The success of the dish hinged on its capacity to reproduce the way it should be done, as sanctified by tradition. This did not entirely rule out a role for creativity in the kitchen, for new ways of doing things or even for cutting the occasional corner, but these influential texts told their readers that there were clear historical parameters and that they were firmly set. For the serious cook, the message was, the past is always with us.

What is radical about Adrià is not so much that he rejects the culinary past – as Andrews makes clear, he is much more versed in and sympathetic to traditional ways of cooking than his critics typically allow – as that he is so fixed on the possibilities of the future. Adrià’s interest in doing new things in new ways drew him first to nouvelle cuisine, which appealed to his instincts for aestheticising food and for creating pictures on plates. (That early influence remains; Andrews describes a dessert he enjoyed recently at El Bulli as “sculpture on a plate, an evocative scene built from spice bread, liquorice, frozen chocolate powder and cherry sorbet.”) But nouvelle cuisine rapidly developed its own rules and conventions, against which Adrià began to strain.

Then came an epiphany, which Andrews pinpoints to 1987, when Adrià was included in a visit by Spanish chefs to the great restaurants of the Cote d’Azur. Following a demonstration in Cannes by the chef Jacques Maximin (described by the Guide Gault Millau, we are told, as the “Bonaparte of the ovens”), during which he had urged his audience to be creative in their cooking, somebody asked him what he meant by “creativity.” Maximin responded along the lines of “creativity means not copying,” and “this simple formulation, Ferran says, changed his life.” He threw himself single-mindedly into invention and culinary experiment. And by Ferran Adrià’s own admission, it’s been hard work to remain consistently inventive. “For a chef to make something new,” he says of himself, “after centuries of cuisine, that is incredible.”

For his admirers and detractors alike, Ferran Adrià’s reputation as the world’s most innovative cook rests on his unstoppable enthusiasm for science and technology and the roles they can play in helping him create new dishes and new techniques. Indeed some of those techniques are better known than he is: “cooking” with liquid nitrogen, for example, or producing “foams” out of unexpected, often unglamorous ingredients, or introducing “spherification” to the world, a method, as Andrews describes it, “for enclosing flavoured liquid in a skin of itself, as it were,” thereby creating a perfect, idealised version of the original. At one point in the narrative Andrews tries a “plump green pearl” made out of peas. “It was the very essence of peas,” he comments.

Andrews also credits Adrià with fundamentally changing the ideal of the fine dining experience from à la carte to dégustation, from one where the diner exercises a degree of influence by making choices from a menu, to one where the diner simply sits there, deferring to the artist and waiting for what comes next. Adrià discarded à la carte altogether in 2002. Fittingly for a technophile, he redefined the restaurant dinner as a series of culinary tweets, usually thirty or more of them in a sitting, each one a compact encapsulation of wit, inventiveness and flavour. Indeed, on many occasions Adrià has described his approach to cooking as inventing a new language. If so, it is a language of aphorism, in which a lot of meaning is packed into each very small dish.

The question is, what does all this meaning mean? That is where both cook and biographer do tend to hit a stumbling block. In more traditional cuisines, words like “authenticity” and “legitimacy” serve a purpose, linking the dish to history and presenting it as an embodiment of culture and values. But when the culinary imperative is to “make it new,” as it is for Adrià, this kind of terminology, which emphasises the past, doesn’t really apply. Instead, when his cooking is described, by himself and by others, the word that recurs is “purity” – as in “purity of flavour” and “purity of the ingredients.” “What we did was so pure,” recalls his long-time friend and colleague José Andrés of their early days at El Bulli. For Adrià and his followers, food takes on a metaphysical quality, in which the objective seems to be to create a dish that isn’t really food at all, but the idea of food. When Adrià moved on to the next iteration of his famous “foams,” his so-called “airs,” made by injecting the “maximum amount of air” into the ingredient, the result, says Andrews, was “just the ingredient, oxygenated almost to the point of abstraction – pure essence of flavour.”

In some ways Adrià’s career so far can be seen as a path to abstraction, towards some imagined point at which the dish he creates speaks only of itself. But in other ways he has been anything but abstract, precisely documenting his every move. Andrews himself seems almost overwhelmed by the quite extraordinary volume of documentation that Adrià has produced, or caused to be produced, about his own practice. He begins by noting that “no other chef has so precisely and exhaustively – obsessively is probably not too strong a word – chronicled his own professional life and the history of his restaurant.” The list of publications is indeed mind-boggling, including but by no means confined to the General Catalogue (five volumes and rising) which aims to record every dish ever created at El Bulli. The El Bulli (latterly styled elBulli) website is a vast compendium of documents and images that is regularly supplemented.

It currently includes a request – posted in the context of the recent announcement that the restaurant will close by 2012 and re-open in 2014 as an (as yet undefined) foundation – for anyone who has ever worked at El Bulli, beginning with its pre-Adrià incarnation in 1964, to send in their details, preferably with a photograph taken at the time. It is almost as if, retrospectively, Adrià is pulling together and celebrating the professional family that he lacked when he was starting out. For a man who looks so relentlessly to the future, he has an abiding sense of the past – specifically his own past – and of the history that he and his friends and colleagues have created. Today’s innovation could well be tomorrow’s standard, and thanks to Adrià’s compulsion to record, if that does happen then we’ll know just what to do when it comes to reproducing it.

For many readers of Colman Andrews’s account of the life so far of Ferran Adrià, the subtitle – “the man who changed the way we eat” – will strike a jarring note. While his influence on fine dining and high-end restaurant culture is clear, the impact he has had on the day-to-day preparation and consumption of food is less easy to define. For the sceptic, a recent press release announcing an alliance between Adrià and the telecommunications company Telefónica, aimed at turning El Bulli into “the most creative and innovative lab in the world,” will not be encouraging. “The idea,” Adrià is quoted as saying, “is to transform, once and for all, the relationship between creativity and society through the use of new technologies,” an idea that could be dismissed as just another kind of “air” – in this case served very hot.

And yet. While it’s too early to say for certain, Andrews’s subtitle could well turn out to be justified. Adrià has been influential in blurring the distinctions between categories of food – local and international, natural and artificial, raw and processed, delicate and robust, sweet and savoury, fast and slow. He has shown how domestic and restaurant cookery can learn from high-volume industrial processes, without necessarily seeing those processes as inherently evil. He has mixed ingredients and, perhaps more importantly, hierarchies of ingredients, as in the case of his famous or notorious (depending on your point of view) “Kellogg’s paella,” described by Andrews as “made out of puffed rice (think Rice Krispies) fried with saffron and mixed with tomato, prawn powder and raw prawns, and served with an ampoule of intense brown prawn extract to be squeezed directly into the mouth.” He has embraced and in some cases invented kitchen gadgetry and other products with what can seem like an undiscriminating fascination with novelty, but quite a number of these innovations are now in commercial production and may, in some cases, end up as part of the standard batterie de cuisine. Most of all perhaps, he has linked food and cooking to the spirit of the times, in which, with the help of the technology, anything is possible. •

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Famine: A Short History, by Cormac Ó Gráda – sample chapter

Thomas Malthus

Niger food crisis, 2005

Darfur

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