Review

Crises of overconsumption

FOOD FOR WEALTH OR HEALTH?
Robin Jenkins
Socialist Health Association, 1991, £3.50

.Everyone can spot a yuppie, but would you recognise a Merry Wife of Waitrose if you met one at the check-out? Probably not, which is why you should read Food for wealth or health, to enter the cynical world of food advertising and see how you, the consumer, get packaged for exploitation by the producers.

Said Merry Wives are young, upmarket housewives with sophisticated attitudes to healthy eating and high household incomes. They can be distinguished from The Price is Right faction, who lack the income to disguise their proletarian taste with continental style lean cuisine, but instead are shopping for bargains.

Ex-farmer, catering manager and Food Commission founder Robin Jenkins has more to impart than insights into the shallow world of advertising. His arguments are simple and clearly put.

Out diet is poor, and detrimental to our health, because a decentralised system of growing and marketing largely raw, unrefined food has been replaced by the centralised systems of a few highly integrated multinational companies which aim to increase the consumption of manufactured foods. This is the nutritional truth about the long post-war capitalist boom.

Food production is for farmers, not for people. The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the EC encourages the use of environmentally damaging production methods, produces enormous surpluses which are costly to store, undermines Third World economies and hikes up domestic taxes and food costs. Our Ministry of Agriculture is unwilling to do more than tinker with the problems created by the CAP, and evades the issue of conversion to organic farming.

The collective stomach of the nation is fixed in size, but the need for profit dislikes such a limit. Food manufacturers put processed food (filled with sugar, or fat, or even tap water) into competition with fresh food, and meat into competition with vegetables.

The consequences for the country are heart disease, obesity, high blood pressure and strokes. Overconsumption is encouraged and food is imported into a country that is, in all probability, self-sufficient.

Robin Jenkins’ proposed solutions are a Ministry of Food that promotes a sustainable food economy, and tighter regulation of the monopoly manufacturers — to which we might add a politically motivated consumer lobby that takes the campaign for healthy, affordable food right to the supermarket shelves. There’s a challenge for the left to chew on!