When you walk down a city supermarket isle
almost anywhere in the world, it will rarely feel like the shops are lacking in
variety. When strolling through the America's king of supermarkets, Walmart,
one can find 150 different ice cream flavours, hundreds of varieties of
chocolate and about 30 kinds of potato chips. On the surface, the ginormous
supermarkets of our time house a sea of choice but in reality the variety of base
ingredients and recipes is very limited. In fact, humankind has weeded out the
often most tasteful and pleasant varieties and kept the ones that are most
easily transportable and least vulnerable to disease. This has led us to be
highly dependable on a handful of base ingredient varieties- the Cavendish
banana, the Granny Smith apple and others. And all those 'basics' have evolved
to be the optimal breed of vegetable, fruit or even meat for commercial
cultivation and use.
Simran
Sethi, the author of 'Bread, Wine, Chocolate: The Slow Loss of Foods We Love’,
writes on food standardisation and how climate change threatens our current way
of eating. Sethi accurately points out that we are all moving towards a global ‘standard
diet’, often taking America as the role model. And as it turns out, the
standard diet is largely made up of the basic ingredients that have come to
dominate the food industry: corn, soybeans, rice, palm oil. Sethi writes: ‘globally,
foods have become more alike and less diverse. As the amount of food
around the world has shrunk to just a handful of crops, regional and local
crops have become scarce or disappeared altogether. Wheat, rice and corn, plus
palm oil and soybeans, are what we all eat now—the same type and the
same amount.’
The
statistics are astonishing: the FAO’s research suggests that 95 percent of the
calories consumed across the planet come from 30 species. Out of the 300 000
edible plant varieties, we only use and cultivate 150. In fact, 75 percent of
world’s food produce comes from 12 plant species and 5 animals. This standardisation
has an obvious negative effect on biodiversity, with local plant species disappearing
to make room for the megacrops. Additionally, by depending so heavily on just a
handful crops and animals, the global food industry is putting itself in a very
vulnerable position when it comes to climate change. If the world continues to
warm, bringing along more climate extremes and changing seasonal cycles, many
of these megacrops may be in danger.
Our
standardised diet is making us put all our eggs in the same basket, both
figuratively and literally. And unfortunately, it is not only climate change
that is affecting our basic megacrops. We also need to be on the lookout for
crop diseases. One of the current biggest worries in the agribusiness is wheat
rust, an airborne fungus that has quickly spread from Africa to East and
Central Asia, Middle East and Europe. Wheat rust is a powerful fungus dubbed as
the ‘polio of agriculture’ which threatens to wipe out the wheat crop on a
global scale, putting our current wheat intensive diet in danger.
In
conclusion, to protect the planet’s biodiversity and ensure that we do not lose
some of the most important ingredients in our food system, a more balanced and
locally sourced diet is sought. Locally sourced, seasonally balanced and
diversified diets will embrace the local biodiversity and benefit us in many
other ways (check out the previous posts on local/organic topics).
PS.
To all the food lovers, 'Bread, Wine, Chocolate: The Slow Loss of Foods We Love’
is a powerful and delicious read, a true eye opener.
Until
next time,
Laura
