The coming crisis in food
“Food insecurity,” a development academic said recently, “is the new Aids.” It’s a hideous formulation, but we will hear an awful lot about hunger and the prospect of there being less food to go round as this century progresses. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (UNFAO), in 2009 the number of undernourished people on the planet topped 1bn for the first time.
After the disappointments of Copenhagen, climate change campaigners can rally around the issue of food. September’s summit on the UN millennium development goals will be one arena. A documentary on the food industry’s failures, Food Inc, comes out in February; its co-producer, Eric Schlosser, proved with his book Fast Food Nation that you can get poverty campaigners to shout about food. And with reason: we will probably run out of things to eat long before we are overcome by rising sea levels.
This is, of course, partly because of population growth, partly because of the effects of warming on agriculture in the hotter regions and—most importantly—because of people’s habit of eating more protein as they get wealthier. Meat, famously, uses far more resources per person fed: producing one kilo of beef requires between 6-10kg of vegetable matter and up to 16,000 litres of water. In China, meat consumption has roughly doubled every decade since 1985. The UNFAO says that we need to double food production in the next 40 years to keep pace with demand—and that’s without accounting for the effects of climate change.What’s the answer? Controls on economic development? Compulsory vegetarianism? No one has a clue. A much vaunted UN summit on food security in November produced only vague promises. The poverty lobby wants small farmers and sustainable irrigation supported; environmentalists would like to see food waste addressed; neophiles (and the Economist) pin their hopes on biotechnology, looking back to the green revolution that transformed Indian agriculture half a century ago. Action has come mainly from private donors—in 2009, Bill Gates put more than £24m into research on drought-tolerant maize.
The debate is heating up. In November I watched Robert Watson—the Gandalf figure who is Defra chief scientific adviser—give his celebrated PowerPoint presentation on food security and climate change. This has now been watched in most places where they think about policy and it is certainly the gloomiest document about food ever seen in Westminster, after the menus of Whitehall pubs. His warnings, backed by those of the government’s chief scientific advisor, John Beddington, are having an effect. Part of Watson’s message is that we need to start worrying about places much closer than the drying wheat plains of India, or the fast-shifting rice paddies of east Asia. The Mediterranean countries, he says, are going to get much drier, and even southern Britain, under a medium emissions scenario, is likely to be 5oC degrees warmer and 70 per cent drier by the 2080s.
I saw Watson delivering this talk at the Soil Association’s annual conference, and the crowd—well used to doom-mongers—were pretty depressed by it. They raised their usual anti-GM cry, claiming that part of the answer lies in turning all agriculture organic. Watson bravely rejected this, insisting that biotechnology, including genetic modification, must play a part in addressing hunger. He also raised an idea I hadn’t heard before, involving mass dietary change in the tropics. Crops like rice that use water and nitrogen comparatively inefficiently may be replaced with more efficient ones like maize. There are lean times ahead.
My recipe for warming
To cheer myself up as things get darker, I’ve been testing an ancient warming device, invented some 300 years ago on the ships of the West Indian sugar trade, and very useful for a graveyard watch in December. This is hot rum, spiced and buttered. I can’t discover who first put butter in rum and why, but you can imagine how those two ingredients and the necessary nutmeg, salt and clove could have mingled in a ship’s galley. Perhaps buttered rum was born in one of those happy kitchen confusions, as in the first mixing of oil and vinegar, or Marmite and peanut butter. Here’s my recipe for six large shots of hot buttered rum.
You will need 300ml of dark or golden rum, 20g (4 teaspoons) of dark sugar like muscovado, 20g of lightly salted butter, a pinch each of nutmeg, powdered clove, powdered cinnamon and salt.
Heat the rum, spices and sugar gently until the sugar has melted. Do not allow the mix to boil or you’ll lose the alcohol. Add the butter and stir until melted. Serve well-mixed or with a stirrer. If you take it outside in a Thermos, give it a shake before pouring. Rum is under appreciated, I think, in Britain. Its modern use in jolly cocktails like pina colada or rum’n’coke shows no respect for the drink’s dark history, its role in stories of piracy, slavery and the making of guilty fortunes. Rum, and other distilled sugars, are more geographically widespread than any other spirit—every seafaring nation has its version, as do some nations that hardly ever got their feet wet. I’m trying to perfect, in time for the new year, Austrian jagertee: the hunter’s drink of rum, black tea and spices, perhaps best drunk after chasing wolves in the Carpathians, but useful on a wintry Edinburgh evening too.
“Food insecurity,” a development academic said recently, “is the new Aids.” It’s a hideous formulation, but we will hear an awful lot about hunger and the prospect of there being less food to go round as this century progresses. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (UNFAO), in 2009 the number of undernourished people on the planet topped 1bn for the first time.
After the disappointments of Copenhagen, climate change campaigners can rally around the issue of food. September’s summit on the UN millennium development goals will be one arena. A documentary on the food industry’s failures, Food Inc, comes out in February; its co-producer, Eric Schlosser, proved with his book Fast Food Nation that you can get poverty campaigners to shout about food. And with reason: we will probably run out of things to eat long before we are overcome by rising sea levels.
This is, of course, partly because of population growth, partly because of the effects of warming on agriculture in the hotter regions and—most importantly—because of people’s habit of eating more protein as they get wealthier. Meat, famously, uses far more resources per person fed: producing one kilo of beef requires between 6-10kg of vegetable matter and up to 16,000 litres of water. In China, meat consumption has roughly doubled every decade since 1985. The UNFAO says that we need to double food production in the next 40 years to keep pace with demand—and that’s without accounting for the effects of climate change.What’s the answer? Controls on economic development? Compulsory vegetarianism? No one has a clue. A much vaunted UN summit on food security in November produced only vague promises. The poverty lobby wants small farmers and sustainable irrigation supported; environmentalists would like to see food waste addressed; neophiles (and the Economist) pin their hopes on biotechnology, looking back to the green revolution that transformed Indian agriculture half a century ago. Action has come mainly from private donors—in 2009, Bill Gates put more than £24m into research on drought-tolerant maize.
The debate is heating up. In November I watched Robert Watson—the Gandalf figure who is Defra chief scientific adviser—give his celebrated PowerPoint presentation on food security and climate change. This has now been watched in most places where they think about policy and it is certainly the gloomiest document about food ever seen in Westminster, after the menus of Whitehall pubs. His warnings, backed by those of the government’s chief scientific advisor, John Beddington, are having an effect. Part of Watson’s message is that we need to start worrying about places much closer than the drying wheat plains of India, or the fast-shifting rice paddies of east Asia. The Mediterranean countries, he says, are going to get much drier, and even southern Britain, under a medium emissions scenario, is likely to be 5oC degrees warmer and 70 per cent drier by the 2080s.
I saw Watson delivering this talk at the Soil Association’s annual conference, and the crowd—well used to doom-mongers—were pretty depressed by it. They raised their usual anti-GM cry, claiming that part of the answer lies in turning all agriculture organic. Watson bravely rejected this, insisting that biotechnology, including genetic modification, must play a part in addressing hunger. He also raised an idea I hadn’t heard before, involving mass dietary change in the tropics. Crops like rice that use water and nitrogen comparatively inefficiently may be replaced with more efficient ones like maize. There are lean times ahead.
My recipe for warming
To cheer myself up as things get darker, I’ve been testing an ancient warming device, invented some 300 years ago on the ships of the West Indian sugar trade, and very useful for a graveyard watch in December. This is hot rum, spiced and buttered. I can’t discover who first put butter in rum and why, but you can imagine how those two ingredients and the necessary nutmeg, salt and clove could have mingled in a ship’s galley. Perhaps buttered rum was born in one of those happy kitchen confusions, as in the first mixing of oil and vinegar, or Marmite and peanut butter. Here’s my recipe for six large shots of hot buttered rum.
You will need 300ml of dark or golden rum, 20g (4 teaspoons) of dark sugar like muscovado, 20g of lightly salted butter, a pinch each of nutmeg, powdered clove, powdered cinnamon and salt.
Heat the rum, spices and sugar gently until the sugar has melted. Do not allow the mix to boil or you’ll lose the alcohol. Add the butter and stir until melted. Serve well-mixed or with a stirrer. If you take it outside in a Thermos, give it a shake before pouring. Rum is under appreciated, I think, in Britain. Its modern use in jolly cocktails like pina colada or rum’n’coke shows no respect for the drink’s dark history, its role in stories of piracy, slavery and the making of guilty fortunes. Rum, and other distilled sugars, are more geographically widespread than any other spirit—every seafaring nation has its version, as do some nations that hardly ever got their feet wet. I’m trying to perfect, in time for the new year, Austrian jagertee: the hunter’s drink of rum, black tea and spices, perhaps best drunk after chasing wolves in the Carpathians, but useful on a wintry Edinburgh evening too.
