Christmas dinner
A couple of years ago, on Christmas Eve, anyone who watches British television with basic video recording equipment had the opportunity to do a truly surreal evening show. On the same day at nine in the evening, two programs were broadcast on different channels about how the products for our Christmas table are made. To watch both of them, the topic would have to interest you, perhaps a little too much. But if you, like me, wished to devote the whole evening to her, you would surely remain in deep perplexity. First, in the special issue of Table Heroes, Rick Stein, Britain's most popular advocate of quality local food, set off in his Land Rover (paired with a faithful terrier named Melok) in search of the country's finest smoked salmon, turkey, sausages, Christmas pudding, Stilton cheese and sparkling wine. After admiring the magnificent landscapes for an hour, listening to uplifting music, swallowing saliva from the beauty of the shown dishes, I caught myself thinking: how can I endure six more days before having the same feast up to myself? But then I turned on the VCR and received a generous dose of antidote from what I had seen earlier. While on the second channel Rick and Melok created a Christmas mood for us, on the fourth the journalist of The Sun, Jane Moore, did everything possible so that several million viewers would never again sit down at the festive table for anything in the world.
In What Is Your Christmas Dinner Really Made Of, Moore talked about the same traditional dishes, only the ingredients for them she chose from completely different suppliers. Penetrating unnamed factories with a hidden camera, she showed how, in most cases, the products for our Christmas table are made - and it was not a pleasant sight. Pigs at the Polish agricultural plant were kept in such cramped stalls that it was impossible even to turn around. The turkeys were stuffed into dimly lit cages so tightly that many of them gave up their legs. The normally unflappable chef, Raymond Blanc, was asked to perform an autopsy on one of these turkeys, and he stated with almost unnatural enthusiasm that the bones of a bird crippled by accelerated growth were extremely fragile, and the liver was overflowing with blood. But if the life of these birds was sad, then death was much worse. Taking them by the legs, they threw them into trucks, then hung them upside down on the hooks of a conveyor belt, then dipped their heads into a bath of soporific solution (however, not all of them fell asleep) and finally cut their throats.
Rick Stein also touched, in his words, "that side of the turkey that is not customary to talk about - how they are slaughtered." The topic came up when visiting Andrew Dennis, an organic farm owner who raises turkeys in flocks of 200 and keeps them in the forest, where they feed like their wild ancestors. Dennis sees this as a model of turkey farming and hopes others will follow. “Of all the farm animals,” he explains, “turkeys are the worst treated. Therefore, it is important for us to prove that they can be bred in humane conditions. " When the time comes for slaughter, the birds are placed in an old barn well known to them and killed one at a time, but so that others do not see it. In 2002, when the man he hires for the job did not show up at the appointed hour, Dennis confirmed his principles with deed, personally slaughtering all of his turkeys using this method."The quality of death is just as important as the quality of life," he says, "and if we can provide both, I have no qualms about what I do." In general, here. If you want to have a turkey on your Christmas table, and at the same time do not agree to suffer from conscience, you will have to shell out fifty pounds for such a "lucky" bird. Another option is to pay less than a quarter of that amount and try not to wonder what the life and death of your turkey was like. I don't think you have to be seven inches in the forehead to guess what most of us will do.
You can hardly blame those modern Britons who do not know what to think about their food. The media is filled with materials on this topic, but they are increasingly sliding towards one of two poles: on the one hand, the gourmet sketches for which Rick Stein is deservedly famous, on the other, shocking revelations like the one suggested by Jane Moore. There are more farmers' markets, gourmet shops and gourmet restaurants in the country - you might think Britain is undergoing a true gastronomic revolution, but our everyday food culture suggests otherwise. Today we spend less money on food than ever before: in 2007 only 10% of our income was spent on this (in 1980 - 23%). Four fifths of all food we buy in supermarkets is most influenced by price - far more than taste, quality and health benefits4. Worse, we are losing our culinary skills: half of our compatriots under 24 admit that they cannot cook without convenience foods, and every third dinner in Britain consists of preheated ready-made meals. So much for the revolution …
In truth, British food culture is in a state of near schizophrenia. When you read Sunday newspapers, you get the impression that we are a nation of passionate gourmets, but in reality most of us do not understand cooking and do not want to spend time and energy on it. Despite the recently acquired habits of gourmets, we more than any other people in Europe, perceive food as fuel - mindlessly "refuel" than necessary, just not to be distracted from business. We are accustomed to the fact that food is cheap, and few people wonder why, for example, we pay half as much for a chicken as for a pack of cigarettes. While a moment's thought or a simple click of a button to switch to "What Your Christmas Dinner Really Is" will give you the answer right away, most of us try to avoid this sobering analysis. You might think that the meat we chew has nothing to do with living birds. We just don't want to see this connection.
How did it happen that the country of dog breeders and rabbit lovers with such callous indifference refers to the living creatures that are raised for our own food? It's all about the urban lifestyle. The British were the first to survive the industrial revolution, and for several centuries, step by step, they have lost touch with the peasant way of life. Today, more than 80% of the country's inhabitants live in cities and the "real" countryside - the one where they are engaged in agriculture - is seen mainly on TV. Never before have we been so disconnected from food production, and while most of us, deep down, probably suspect that our food system is turning into terrible problems somewhere on the planet, these problems are not so annoying to us that we have to turn to them attention.
However, it is practically impossible to provide us with meat in the amount that we now consume at the expense of animals raised in natural conditions. The British have always been lovers of meat - it's not for nothing that the French nicknamed us les rosbifs, “roast beefs”. But a hundred years ago, we ate an average of 25 kilograms of meat per year, and now this figure has grown to 806. Meat was once considered a delicacy, and the leftovers from Sunday roast - for families that could afford the luxury - were savored for the next week. Now everything is different. Meat has become a common food; we do not even notice that we are eating it. We eat 35 million turkeys a year, of which more than ten million at Christmas. That's 50,000 times the number of birds that Andrew Dennis is raising at a time. And even if there are 50,000 farmers who are willing to treat turkeys as humanely as he is, they would need 34.5 million hectares to grow them - twice the area of all agricultural land in Britain today. But turkeys are just the tip of the iceberg. About 820 million chickens and chickens are eaten in our country per year. Try to grow such a crowd without using industrial methods!
The modern food industry is doing strange things to us. Providing us with an abundance of cheap food at the lowest apparent cost, it satisfies our basic needs, but at the same time, it makes these needs seem insignificant. And this applies not only to meat, but also to any foodstuff. Potatoes and cabbage, oranges and lemons, sardines and smoked salmon - everything we eat ends up on our table as a result of a large-scale and complex process. By the time food reaches us, it has often traveled thousands of miles by sea or air, visited warehouses and kitchen factories; dozens of invisible hands touched her. However, most people have no idea what efforts are being made to feed them.
In the pre-industrial era, any city dweller knew much more about this. Before the advent of railways, food supply was the most difficult task of cities, and the evidence of this was impossible to miss. The roads were clogged with carts and wagons with grain and vegetables, river and seaports - with cargo ships and fishing boats, cows, pigs and chickens roamed the streets and yards. A resident of such a city could not help but know where the food comes from: it was around - grunting, smelled, getting underfoot. In the past, the townspeople simply could not help but realize the importance of food in their lives. She was present in everything they did.
We have lived in cities for thousands of years, but despite this we remain animals, and our existence is determined by animal needs. This is the main paradox of urban life. We live in cities, considering it the most common thing, but in a deeper sense, we still live "on earth." Whatever the urban civilization, in the past, the vast majority of people were hunters and gatherers, farmers and serfs, yeomen and peasants, whose lives took place in the countryside. Their existence is largely forgotten by subsequent generations, but without them the rest of human history would not exist. The relationship between food and the city is infinitely complex, but there is a level where things are very simple. Without peasants and agriculture, there would be no cities at all.
Since the city is central to our civilization, it should not be surprising that we have inherited a one-sided view of its relationship with the countryside. In images of cities, you usually do not see their rural surroundings, so it seems that the city exists as if in a vacuum. In the eventful history of the countryside, the role of a green "second plan" was given, where it is convenient to arrange a battle, but about which hardly anything else can be said. This is a blatant deception, but if you think about what a huge impact the village could have on the city if it realized its potential, it looks quite understandable. For ten thousand years the city was fed by the village, and it, subjected to coercion of various strengths, satisfied its requirements. Town and country were intertwined in an awkward symbiotic embrace for both sides, and the city authorities did everything possible to remain the masters of the situation. They set taxes, carried out reforms, made treaties, imposed embargoes, invented propaganda constructs, and unleashed wars. It has always been this way and, contrary to the external impression, it continues today. The fact that the overwhelming majority of us are not even aware of this only testifies to the political significance of the issue. No government, including our own, is willing to admit that its very existence depends on others. This can be called the besieged fortress syndrome: fear of hunger has haunted cities since time immemorial.
Although today we do not live behind fortress walls, we depend on those who feed us, no less than the townspeople of antiquity. Rather, even more, because our current cities are often overgrown agglomerations of a size that would have seemed unthinkable a hundred years ago. The ability to store food and transport it over great distances has freed cities from the shackles of geography, creating for the first time the possibility of building them in the most incredible places - in the middle of the Arabian Desert or in the Arctic Circle. Regardless of whether or not such examples are considered extreme manifestations of the insane pride of urban civilization, these cities are by no means the only ones that rely on food imports. This applies to most modern cities, because they have long outgrown the capabilities of their own rural area. London has been importing a significant portion of its food for centuries, and now it is fed by “rural neighborhoods” scattered around the world, whose territory is more than a hundred times larger than its own, approximately equal to the total area of all agricultural land in Great Britain.
At the same time, our perception of the surroundings of our cities is a collection of carefully maintained fantasies. For centuries, the townspeople have looked at nature as if through an inverted telescope, squeezing the created image into the framework of their own preferences. The pastoral tradition, with its hedges and green meadows where fluffy sheep graze, and romanticism, which extols nature in the form of rocky mountains, age-old fir trees and gaping abysses, fit into the mainstream of this trend. Neither one nor the other correlates in any way with the real landscape necessary for the food supply of a modern metropolis. Vast fields planted with wheat and soybeans, greenhouses so huge that they can be seen from space, industrial buildings and pens full of intensively farmed animals - this is how agricultural surroundings look like in our era. The idealized and industrialized versions of the "countryside" are exactly the opposite, but both are generated by urban civilization. This is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde of nature transformed by man.
Cities have always changed nature in their likeness, but in the past this influence was limited to their relatively small size. In 1800, only 3% of the world's population lived in cities with more than 5,000 inhabitants; in 1950 this figure was still not much higher than 30% 9. The situation has changed much faster over the past 50 years. In 2006, the number of city dwellers for the first time exceeded half of the world's population, and in 2050, according to the UN forecast, there will be 80% of them. This means that in 40 years the urban population will increase by 3 billion people. Considering that cities already consume up to 75% of the planet's food and energy resources, you don't need to be a mathematical genius to understand - pretty soon this problem will simply have no solutions.
Part of the catch is what the townspeople like to eat. Although meat has always been the staple food of hunter-gatherers and nomadic pastoralists, in most societies it has remained the privilege of the wealthy. When the masses ate grains and vegetables, the very presence of meat in the diet was a sign of abundance. For several centuries, Western countries have occupied the first places in the ranking of global meat consumption - recently, the Americans have taken the lead with an incredible figure of 124 kilograms per capita per year (and volvulus can be earned!). But other regions of the world appear to be closing the gap. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the world is undergoing a “meat revolution”: consumption of this product is growing rapidly, especially in developing countries, whose inhabitants have traditionally followed a vegetarian diet. According to the UN forecast, by 2030, two thirds of the world's meat and milk will be consumed in developing countries, and by 2050, global meat consumption will double.
What is the reason for our growing predilection for carnivorousness? There are many reasons for this, and they are complex, but in the end it all comes down to the nature of man as a large mammal. While some of us consciously choose vegetarianism, humans are omnivorous by nature: meat, simply put, is the most valuable component of our natural diet. Although some religions, such as Hinduism and Jainism, require meat to be abandoned, most people have not consumed it in the past simply because they did not have the opportunity to do so. Now, however, urbanization, industrialization and rising prosperity mean that the meat-based diet, which has long been rooted in the West, is increasingly spreading around the world. The most stunning changes are taking place in China, where the urban population is expected to increase by 400 million over the next 25 years. For centuries, the typical Chinese diet consisted of rice and vegetables, only occasionally adding a piece of meat or fish. But as the Chinese move from village to city, they seem to be getting rid of rural eating habits as well. In 1962, the average per capita consumption of meat in China was only 4 kilograms per year, but by 2005 it reached 60 kilograms and continues to grow rapidly. In short, the more burgers there are in the world, the more burgers they eat.
You may ask: so what's wrong with that? If we in the West have been eating meat to our fill for so many years, why can't the Chinese and in general everyone who wants to do this? The problem is that meat production comes with the highest environmental costs. Most of the animals whose meat we eat are fed not with grass, but with grain: they get a third of the world's harvest. Considering that the production of meat for one person consumes 11 times more grain than that person would eat himself, this use of resources can hardly be called efficient. In addition, the production of a kilogram of beef consumes a thousand times more water than growing a kilogram of wheat, which also does not bode well for us in a world where there is an increasing shortage of fresh water. Finally, according to the UN, a fifth of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere are associated with livestock farming, in particular, with deforestation for pastures and methane emitted by livestock. Given that climate change is one of the main causes of water scarcity, our growing addiction to meat looks doubly dangerous.
The effects of urbanization in China are already being felt globally. With much of its territory occupied by mountains and deserts, China has always found it difficult to provide itself with food, and as a result of the growth of its urban population, it increasingly becomes dependent on countries with rich land resources such as Brazil and Zimbabwe. China has already become the world's largest importer of grains and soybeans, and its demand for these products continues to grow uncontrollably. From 1995 to 2005, the volume of soybean exports from Brazil to China increased more than a hundredfold, and in 2006 the Brazilian government agreed to increase the area under this crop by 90 million hectares, in addition to the 63 million already used. Of course, the lands put under the plow are not abandoned, unnecessary wastelands. The Amazon jungle, one of the most ancient and richest ecosystems on the planet, will be cut down.
If the future of humanity is connected with cities - and all the facts speak about this - we need to immediately assess the consequences of such a development of events. Until now, cities generally felt at ease, attracting and consuming resources without any particular restrictions. This cannot go on any longer. Providing cities with food can be seen as the most powerful driving force that has determined and still determines the nature of our civilization. To properly understand what a city is, it is necessary to highlight its relationship with food. This, in fact, is what my book is about. It offers a new perception of cities - not as independent, isolated units, but as organic formations dependent on the natural world because of their appetite. It's time to look away from the upside-down telescope and see the whole panorama: thanks to food, to understand in a new way how we build and supply cities and how we live in them. But to do this, you first need to understand how we ended up in the current situation. Let's go back to the days when there were no cities yet, and the focus of everyone's attention was not meat, but grain.
