I think I only did it twice.
I think that only two images of what I was eating needed to appear on social media before the waiting world said ‘enough!’. And it said ‘Get a life!’. And so I tried to.
But I have a residual fascination with food which, over the years has led to, in no particular order, me becoming a better cook, me getting bigger, and me writing a book about cows. Be that as it may, I know a fair bit, and I have adopted (or stolen) a simple rule: ‘Eat food; mainly vegetables; not too much; plenty of variety’. It comes from a brilliantly simple book called Food Rules by Michael Pollan.
What I have found out is largely that our food systems are screwed. Saturated in sugar and salt, 40% having to come in from abroad and 90% of it in the hands of just eight boardrooms….you could go on, but I won’t. But onto my desk yesterday flopped an academic paper written by some scarily intelligent people that I feel I should share with you.
The cow, is its gist, is entering its final disruption. Cheap protein technologies will inevitably lead to a situation where the ‘current industrialised animal-agriculture model will be replaced by a food-as-software model, where food is engineered by scientists at molecular level and uploaded to databases that can be accessed by food designers.’ Demand for cow products will be down 70% by 2030 and 90% by 2035, as we welcome in what the authors call the ‘second domestication event’ for plants and animals. 10,000 years ago, we tamed them at a macro-organic level; now we are taming that at a micro-organic one. Get used to new terminology like ‘precision fermentation’, ‘computational biology’ and ‘high throughput screening’.
Most people who read this blog are of an age where they probably feel a bit uncomfortable at that thought. Yes, the authors paint lovely pastel images of vast tracts of land returned to nature, and bovine bottoms forever corked up against methane emissions. But my experience is that humans are much better at inventing things than they are at learning to live with them, and I don’t buy it. Not yet, at any rate.
Your neolithic ancestor, grubbing around in the hedgerows and plains that are now occupied by your local diabetic clinic, generally presented about 120 different food types a week down to his or her appreciative gut microbes, who duly processed it into doing more or less useful things to keep him or her alive. These days, they reckon it’s about 15 (hence so much gut illness), and you can easily see it descending to single figures in the brave new world.
But there are two rather more powerful reason for my disquiet. The first is that every single dietician I spoke to in researching the cow book, whether they were vegan, vegetarian, omnivore or Paleo, agree that the secret is to eat unprocessed food, and avoid processed food as much as you possibly can. Food from a lab bench is just as processed as the appalling cheese we used to get in our army ration packs.
The second is more simple. With the costs of all that science and research, who do you think is going to control, and make the ultimate decisions about, all that molecular food? You? Me? The growing band of artisan food producers and sellers? The man in the moon?
I don’t think so. I think that we will be handing over yet another chunk of our lives to those eight boardrooms and- call me Mr Marx, if you must- but that idea doesn’t totally appeal.
Eat that beef shin ragu while you can.
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