Food is an enormous part of our lives; it affects our moods, changes our bodies, is
a key part of our culture and celebrations and, for many of us, is a large part of what
we think about during the day. In fact, you could go as far as to say, the whole idea
of civilisation is completely down to food since it was the collaboration we learnt through
hunting and then the communities we built through agriculture that created villages
and towns, as well as technology. But if you take that sandwich out your mouth
for a second, do you ever wonder how it ended up on your plate? Where did they grow the
wheat to make the bread? What pig did the ham come from? Why did they put pickles in
it? They know you hate pickles. All very important questions.
So today, we are going to have a quick look at the major problems facing food, glorious
food. Most of the world is omnivorous; we eat meat
and plants. Although vegetarianism and veganism are on the rise, the numbers are still relatively
low. India is way ahead with 40% of the country being vegetarian but in almost every other
nation, it’s well under 10%. Animal farming, or husbandry, as it’s called,
began in the Neolithic era, some 12,000 years ago. We began to selectively breed the traits
we wanted into cattle and other livestock, making them fatter and more docile, because
let’s be honest; you’d rather deal with this than every morning.
As society grew, meat was more commonly the food of the upper classes, since you needed
to invest in the care of the animal first, in order to eat it, especially if you lived
in a city so far from any hunting grounds. You can even see this reflected in the English
language. The words for meats generally come from French;
beef – boeuf, mutton – mouton
The English royalty normally spoke in French and they were the ones eating the animals.
But the lower classes, those of Germanic origin, farmed the animals so the actual creature
names normally come from German and Dutch: Cow – Kuh
Sheep – Schaap And this leads us to our current problem.
As countries grow richer, you can see their meat consumption increasing, since it is seen
as a part of a wealthier lifestyle. China is a good example of this. According to the
OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), by 2024, China will be eating
over 10% more beef, almost 25% more poultry and 5% more pork.
But they have a long way to go to catch up with the carnivorous competition. The USA
is the world’s biggest meat lover, chowing down on over 120kg per person every year – that’s
the weight of 2 average adults. Just to be clear, I’m not saying that Americans eat
people, with or without fava beans. Australia and New Zealand are the only other
countries who manage over 100kg annually. Australia because of their barbeque culture
and New Zealand because what else were they supposed to do with all those Orcs after the
battle of Mordor? Producing all this meat uses up an enormous
amount of resources and is one of the biggest contributors to climate change. The main problem
is that it leads to our never-ending deforestation, especially in South and Central America. Since
the start of this video, another 2 square kilometres of trees have been felled down.
They use the land as space for the animals, but also to grow feed for them, such as corn
and soya. And less trees, means less CO2 being absorbed from the atmosphere. It also ruins
a good game of hide and seek. The second issue is that these animals produce
a lot of gas, especially cows. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas and our bovine friends
produce 120kg of it a year, that’s a thousand times more than a human. So cows are terrible
roommates, especially with their appalling taste in mooosic.
The way we keep huge herds of animals together also means the risk of diseases spreading
is far higher than it used to be, and much faster. Outbreaks of things like avian flu
resulted in the mass culling of millions of poultry, in an effort to limit it. Many animals
are given antibiotics but regulations are changing now, since they become less effective
over time and can lead to the evolution of a Superbug.
What do you think was the first animal we started breeding?
Of course, it was the dog, and we began doing it over 30,000 years ago. So, that is how
long we have been genetically modifying life around us. The huge varieties of breeds of
dog are all descended from wolves but we have been using artificial selection, as opposed
to natural selection, for tens of thousands of years.
A scientist called Dmitry Belyaev tried to look at how the process works by doing the
same with foxes in Siberia. From 1959 they started selecting the friendliest foxes and
killing the rest so that their tameness quality would become a part of the breed. The experiment
went on for some 40 years, they didn’t have anything better to do in Siberia, but the
results were pretty impressive. The foxes could be walked and act as pets. The most
interesting part was that they displayed similar changes to domestic dogs, with their floppy
ears and differently patterned fur. Look at a wolf’s ears and then at a Dachshund, they
are so different, but we weren’t breeding dogs to have floppy ears, what would be the
point? It turns out that a friendlier, tamer animal is one that has a lower epinephrine
level, also called adrenaline. So different hormone levels led to different physical development.
It also affected melanin production, which is what gives the fur its colour, so that’s
why they saw changes there as well. Our artificial selection was not limited to
animals of course. Almost every crop, fruit and vegetable in the supermarket today has
been altered from its original form by farmers selecting the traits they want and mixing
plants where they can. The lemon is a good example of this, being a hybrid of the citron
and the bitter orange. Without mankind’s input, it’s unlikely that the lemon would
have existed, and no gin and tonic would ever have been good enough.
Then the big jump came with the discovery of DNA. Friedrich Miescher first isolated
it in 1869 and then Watson and Crick gave us the famous double helix structure that
we know today, in 1953. By 1982 we had the first patented GM organism; an oil eating
microorganism owned by the Exxon Oil Company, designed to eat up oil spills.
So how do you genetically engineer an organism? How do you splice a tomato with a fish for
example? This was a real thing, by the way. They were using the anti-freeze gene of the
White Flounder fish to help tomatoes survive better in the frost. Apparently, hats and
scarves were not an option. Here’s a very basic overview of how genetic
engineering works. DNA is a group of molecules in the form of a double helix and they combine
in pairs to make strands, called chromosomes. For humans, there are 46 chromosomes and together,
these make up our genome, so it’s this collection of information that makes a human a human,
a dog a dog, and a cat a mean, ungrateful psychopath with a cute face.
You search though genomes for the traits you want; bigger leaves, less water usage, fishy
freeze proofing, whatever you’re after. Then you isolate the bit of the genome that
manages that trait and you cut it out, using enzymes – it’s just easier than scissors
apparently. You then stick that bit of genetic material into a thing called a plasmid – which
is sort of like an extra storage space you find in some bacteria. Now you need to put
it into the cells you want to modify. You can literally fire it in, with a thing called
a gene gun, using tiny metal particles as bullets. You can also use bacteria that will
infect the cells you want to change, and your genetic code can just hop out, like a Trojan
jumping out of one of those wooden horses they love so much.
Our main use for GMOs is as crops and we use the process to make plants more resistant
to the problems of their environment, potentially giving farmers a far bigger harvest. In the
US alone, it’s reported to have increased agricultural production by almost $100 billion.
The ability to alter crops quickly if the environment changes will also be a big help,
especially if we want to move away from meat consumption. So what is the big controversy
around GMOs? Well, so far, there is no scientific evidence that they are in any way unsafe or
detrimental to human health. But many people wonder if it is a good idea to be poking around
with life in this way. It’s not just the GMOs that have changed, since they affect
the environment around them too, such as the animals that need the GMO crops to survive.
As we learnt in the documentary Jurassic Park, when you mess about with life, things can
go wrong pretty quickly. Oh, that wasn’t a documentary.
It’s probably GMOs association with our next problem that is part of their negative
public image. From mildew on our lettuce, to flies in our
soup and ants in our pants, it sometimes feels like we’re in an endless war to keep pests
off our stuff. They are the annoying little brothers of the animal world. And this is
why we turn to our weapon of bug destruction; the pesticide.
For farmers, there are a number of ways you can lose yield; animals, insects, disease
and weeds, as well as extreme weather events such as drought and flooding.
The yield is the amount of usable product you end up with, so that would be the edible
grain for corn, the white fibre for cotton. If we let everything grow completely unassisted,
it’s estimated we could lose 80% of all cotton, 50% of wheat and over 30% of most
other key crops. There are a number of ways we try to combat this, such as mechanically
tilling the ground, using software to plant in the best places at the best times, and
lots of others. But it is still weeds and insects that are the biggest issue, so we
turn to herbicides and pesticides. The Sumerians are the earliest users of pesticides,
using a sulphur compound to control insects and mites, about 4500 years ago. But as technology
developed, and our understanding of plants grew, we were able to create better targeted
protections. Today, one of the most widely used is the notorious herbicide Roundup, made
by Monsanto. Roundup is mainly glyphosate, and it works
by inhibiting an enzyme, called EPSP synthase, that plants need to survive. But if it kills
all plants then isn’t that farming genocide? This is where the GMOs come in. Companies
have designed crops that have an enzyme that does what EPSP does, but isn’t affected
by Roundup. Okay, so if we’re spraying this on our food; is it safe? Um, yes and no. You
certainly wouldn’t want to do shots of it and it will irritate your skin if you touch
it. But, given the huge quantities that are used globally, it’s safe to say that it’s
not dangerously toxic since most of us are ingesting traces of it pretty regularly. The
World Health Organisation have said that glyphosate is probably a carcinogen, it causes cancer,
but the amounts required would be much much higher than would ever be in the food people
are eating. The big issues are that, since glyphosate
kills most plants, it can easily get into the water and damage the surrounding environment,
including aquatic flora. There have also been new weeds appearing that are now resistant
to the herbicide and it’s been suggested that the over use of glyphosate has accelerated
this process, because evolution is all about repetition.
So if you want to avoid pesticides, you just go organic, right?
I’m afraid not. This is one of the biggest misunderstandings in the supermarket, up there
with; why haven’t they opened a third lane, why is that woman buying just cat food and
ice-cream, and were self-service machines invented by Satan?
Organic farming uses pesticides all the time, they are just not allowed to use any that
are made synthetically and they don’t use any GMOs. There is no specific limit on the
volume of chemical used either so you can end up spraying a crop 7-8 times, whereas
a GMO crop might only need two sprays. The organic food market is now huge business and
one of the world’s leading organic supermarkets, Whole Foods, now has a similar revenue to
Monsanto, $12.9 billion to Monsanto’s $15.9. So don’t expect this fight to end anytime
soon. The battleground of the food industry is in
the supermarket. Companies scrap for prize positions on the shelves and fight it out
over prices. It’s a shame that no one has accidentally killed off Brussels sprouts yet.
No one likes you, sprouts. Almost nothing in a supermarket is random,
the entire layout and position of each product and promotion has been carefully calculated
by some very clever algorithms. The main purpose of loyalty cards is not to make you keep coming
back to the supermarket, it’s so they can get some basic demographical information about
you and then everything you buy is connected to this data. Now, they can build profiles
of what people of different ages, backgrounds, incomes etc. are buying. This then determines
which products they promote and how they layout the aisles. It’s game over as soon as you
walk in the door. Do you ever look down at the mountain you’ve just built on the checkout
and think “All I wanted was some milk.” But this need for supermarkets to force consumers
to buy endless crap they don’t need leads to one major problem; waste.
The oranges need to be completely round, the bananas need just the right curve, and the
sprouts need that perfect flavour of disgusting. And then everything must be labelled with
various expiry dates and best before dates and display until dates, some of which are
pretty meaningless, it’s just there to act as legal protection for the supermarket so
they are always selling an optimum product. Thanks to these factors, the world wastes
one third of all the food we produce. In fact, rich countries waste about 222 million tonnes
every year, which is almost as much as is produced in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa.
In the UK, households throw out about 6.7 million tonnes a year, despite the fact that
over 60% of it could have been eaten if we had managed it better. To give you an example,
the British chuck out over a million pots of yogurt every day, unopened. But that date
on the yogurt doesn’t mean it’s bad, it’s just the only date the company will guarantee
the quality up to. If you’re worried about it being full of bacteria, you don’t really
understand what yogurt is. Some countries are taking steps to limit this
now though and this year France passed a law that prevents supermarkets over 400 square
metres in size from throwing away unsold food. Now charities and food banks get the food
for free to distribute to poor and homeless citizens. This puts an end to the unpleasant
practice of deliberately spoiling food, with bleach or other chemicals, to prevent people
from taking it out of the dumpsters. Another crazy thing about the supermarkets
is that when you walk in and you look at those never ending lines of cereals and ice creams
and shower gel and soda, it feels like you have an almost infinite choice.
But it’s all an illusion, especially in the US. For Americans, almost everything in
the supermarket comes from just 20 companies, and that includes organic.
If it’s cereal, it’s probably Kellogg’s or Nestle. If it’s ice cream it’s probably
Unilever. If it cleans your house or your head it’s probably Proctor & Gamble, try
not to get those mixed up though because no one want Pantene on their carpets. Even meat
production is basically 4 companies, like JBS who control a quarter of US cattle. In
almost every area of food production, there are just a handful of companies with a monopoly
over the market. The Supermarkets themselves are also enormous.
Walmart for example is the world’s largest corporation, employing over 2 million people
and taking almost $500 billion in revenue every year, that’s more than all of South
Africa. Next up you have the British Tesco, the membership only Costco and the French
Carrefour. Each of these is about a quarter the size of Walmart.
It’s not all doom and gloom though. The rise of globalisation has given many of us
access to an amazing array of produce and dishes that would have been unimaginable just
a couple of generations ago. Your grandparents would have been shocked to just find strawberries
in December, and here you are dipping sushi into mango chutney, because you ran out of
gluten-free pumpkin spiced bagels. That is not a good dinner by the way, what would your
mother say?