Dangers of a standardised diet

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