Fast food, slow food and food changing gear
The place of food in the moral, political and monetary economy has changed radically in the last fifty years – and the result has been a vast and potentially catastrophic loss of equilibrium. The global food producer, who can move from country to country, acquiring land, importing agricultural machinery and fertiliser, and selling his product in the global market, poses a threat to the environment of a kind that has never been seen before.
And the global food distributor, who can descend like Wal-Mart on the periphery of any town anywhere in the world, with a tempting array of cheap food wrapped in plastic, poses a threat to local economies and lifestyles comparable to that posed by a tribe of belligerent invaders.
Those vast disequilibriating forces did not come about because someone planned them. They arose by %26lsquo;an invisible hand`, from the developments in international trade, agricultural technology and food processing that have occurred since the end of the Second World War. Nevertheless, there has been little or no effort from our political elites to come to terms with, still less to moderate, their adverse effects, and the perceived indifference of our governments to forces which are not merely changing every aspect of our lives but also impacting on the lives and environments of people all over the globe, is one reason for the growing movements of protest against the global food economy.
Much that people lament in the decline of traditional farming results, however, not from the global food economy as such, but from the local imposition of regulations that only global producers and distributors can comply with. The strange illusion that food is unsafe until wrapped in plastic has promoted an explosion of absurd regulations designed to quell the anxieties of our increasingly risk-averse populations.
But, by avoiding the small-scale risks associated with local food, people expose themselves to the large-scale risks associated with obesity, environmental degradation and the weakening of the human immune system. It is not enough to protect people from this or that infectious disease that is transmitted through the food chain. For diseases transmitted through the food-chain are for the most part diseases against which people acquire immunity, as all who have suffered from traveller`s tummy will know. Present policies towards diseases of the digestive tract may actually be making children more vulnerable to those diseases in the long-run and also requiring ever greater efforts to ensure that we are presented from birth to death with the kind of sterilised food that our weakened immune systems can deal with. This is fine in the short term; but one major hiccup, in the form of war, epidemic or economic disruption, and the result could be a large-scale disaster.
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