In a way, this is not surprising.
“We’ll save the world through mass consumer choice” never seemed like a sentence that was going to ring true, especially if it hinges on something so emotive and personal as the food we choose to eat.
For pretty much the whole of humanity, being able to choose what you want to eat, rather than having to treat food as scarce fuel and nutrition to keep you alive, is the first signifier that you have escaped pervasive and grinding poverty. And that aspiration to have a little bit of control over their own diet, to enjoy eating rather than to always do the right thing is why people react strongly at being told to change their diet. As Orwell put it in The Road to Wigan Pier:
Now compare this list with the unemployed miner’s budget that I gave
earlier. The miner’s family spend only tenpence a week on green vegetables
and tenpence half-penny on milk (remember that one of them is a child less
than three years old), and nothing on fruit; but they spend one and nine on
sugar (about eight pounds of sugar, that is) and a shilling on tea. The
half-crown spent on meat might represent a small joint and the materials
for a stew; probably as often as not it would represent four or five tins
of bully beef. The basis of their diet, therefore, is white bread and
margarine, corned beef, sugared tea, and potatoes–an appalling diet.
Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like
oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter
to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it
would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do
such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on
brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less
money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A
millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an
unemployed man doesn’t. Here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of
the last chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to say
when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don’t want to
eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit ‘tasty’. There is
always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. Let’s have three pennorth
of chips! Run out and buy us a twopenny ice-cream! Put the kettle on and
we’ll all have a nice cup of tea! That is how your mind works when you are
at the P.A.C. level. White bread-and-marg and sugared tea don’t nourish you
to any extent, but they are nicer (at least most people think so) than
brown bread-and-dripping and cold water. Unemployment is an endless misery
that has got to be constantly palliated, and especially with tea, the
English-man’s opium. A cup of tea or even an aspirin is much better as a
temporary stimulant than a crust of brown bread.
However, there is a hopeful, bright side to the article. The throwaway line about fumaric acid cutting the methane output of sheep by 70% points us towards the wins that are available while accepting that human food culture is not going to change fundamentally overnight. Because that is how real change happens.
