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СКАЧАТЬ different answers to the question whether you were in Lagos or in Paris. In the past ‘food’ was not one thing but many, varying according to local crops, local ingredients and local ideas and prejudices.

      When I was a child in the 1980s, I remember grown-ups in Britain talking with horror about the fact that the Japanese liked to eat … raw fish! It seemed so improbable. From their tone of baffled revulsion, these Britons might as well have been contemplating swallowing live frogs. I never imagined that one day those same grown-ups, older and greyer, would stroll into a perfectly normal shop on the average British high street and casually pick up a tray of sushi for lunch. We now live in a clone-world where you can get pizza in Beijing and Chinese dumplings in Rome, and not even be startled by the incongruity.

      At a cultural level, some of this change has been wonderful to see (and to eat). So many of the old barriers and prejudices that kept people from experiencing each other’s food have been ripped apart. Many Westerners who used to look with suspicion on anything too garlicky or spicy or strong will now happily eat Korean-spiced barbecue or fiery Thai curries.

      But if our palates have widened in some ways, they have narrowed in others, particularly at the level of ingredients themselves. When ‘food’ becomes a common language across the whole planet it stops being food at all, as our ancestors would have understood it. No matter where on the planet we live, there’s a striking convergence going on in our eating habits.

      In the early 2010s, a team of researchers led by Colin Khoury, an American plant diversity expert, set out to quantify how the world’s diet had changed over the past roughly fifty years from 1961 to 2009, using food supply data from the FAO. For every country about which they could gather evidence (152 of them, representing 98 per cent of the world’s population), they measured which crops were eaten and how many per capita calories and other nutrients each of the foods delivered. Overall, the researchers looked at fifty-three different foods, from oranges to rice, from sesame seeds to corn.²³

      These researchers found that there had been massive changes in eating since the 1960s. Wherever in the world you happen to live, you will now have access to much the same menu of core ingredients as someone who lives a thousand miles away in any direction. Khoury’s team referred to this phenomenon as the Global Standard Diet.²⁴

      I started scrolling through the data on the FAO website trying to ascertain how the ‘average’ global eater in the 1960s differed from the average eater today. Then I realised the very question I was asking was wrong. The whole point is that in the 1960s, there was no such thing as an average eater across most countries, just lots of specific and wildly divergent patterns of eating. Back then, there were maize eaters in Brazil and sorghum eaters in Sudan. There were steak and kidney pie enthusiasts in Britain and goulash devotees in Hungary. But it made little sense to ponder how a globally average person might eat because no such person existed.

      It is only now that we can, following Khoury, speak of a Global Standard Eater, because it is only now that humans have come to eat in such startlingly similar ways. Perhaps the biggest change is in the quantities that we eat – around 500 calories on average more per day than our equivalents in the 1960s (from 2,237 calories in 1961 to 2,756 calories in 2009). The Global Standard Eater consumes a whole lot more of almost everything than most eaters of the past. From the 1960s, we started to eat more refined grains and more fat, we drank more alcohol and, quite simply, we ate much more food. The average eater consumes a lot of sugar and rice and very few pulses or beans. Our diets overall are becoming sweeter and oilier and meatier and we are highly dependent for our sustenance on foods that have been grown or produced far away from the place where we live, wherever that place might be. Khoury and his colleagues have calculated that more than two-thirds of national food supplies across the world are derived from crops that are foreign to the country where they are eaten.²⁵

      One grey rainy spring morning I am talking with Colin Khoury over the phone. He is at his home in Colorado, where he works at the US National Seedbank. His background, he explains, is not in nutrition but in plant science. ‘I’m a diversity person,’ he says – one of the many biologists who believe that the future of the planet depends on maintaining the maximum biodiversity for healthy ecosystems. As he and his colleagues began to draw together all the data on the world’s food supply, Khoury was startled to see just how homogenous the global diet had become, with eaters tending towards a common mean.

      In Denver, where Khoury lives, the breakfast burrito is a local favourite in diners and cafés, especially at weekends. This greasy and comforting wrap is made from flour tortillas stuffed with eggs, potatoes, green chillis, maybe cheese and some kind of meat – sometimes chorizo, sometimes bacon or steak. The sandwiches are an object of local pride, like the Philadelphia cheesesteak.

      To those who love it, the Denver breakfast burrito is a distinctive thing. But in another sense, this ‘local’ American speciality is not local at all. The bacon and the eggs come from giant production lines in Iowa. The eggs are fried in soybean oil from Brazil. As for the wheat that makes the tortilla that binds the whole meal together, it is the same dusty refined white flour made from the same flavourless modern strain of wheat that goes into most breads in America, from bagels to sliced Wonderbread to hotdog buns. The ingredients may be shuffled differently, but the Denver breakfast burrito is built from much the same deck of cards as a New York hamburger and fries or a pepperoni pizza in the Philippines.

      ‘People are eating much more of the same crops,’ Khoury tells me. ‘We have all these local twists on food but underneath it is not a huge list of species.’ In a way, the leap into stage four is like the emergence of agriculture in stage two: a narrowing of the diet which brings new diseases in its wake.

      When you strip away the packaging, the recipes and the brand names, most humans – from Rio to Cairo – are getting a sizeable majority of our energy from meat, sugar, refined wheat, rice and refined vegetable oil. The average global eater largely consumes certain staple items, most of which will have been internationally traded before they reach the shop or the plate. The average eater gets the bulk of his or her daily calories (1,576) from just six sources. These are:

      1 animal foods

      2 wheat

      3 rice

      4 sugar

      5 maize

      6 soybeans

      Of these, animal foods and wheat each contribute around 500 calories, with a further 300 calories apiece coming from rice and sugar, 200 calories from maize and 76 calories from soybeans. Compared to these big six items, all the other food commodities pale into insignificance.²⁶

      There has been a startling shift away from multiple traditional diets towards a single modern one, with the same sweet-salty flavours and the same triumvirate at its heart of rice, wheat and meat.

      You can trace the effects of these homogenous diets all the way to the gut. Compared to the average affluent Westerner, a hunter-gatherer from the Hadza tribe in north-central Tanzania – subsisting on an ever-changing diversity of roots and berries and wild meats – has 40 per cent more microbiome diversity (the microbiome being the host of micro-organisms in the human gut). Having a less diverse gut microbiome has been linked with both obesity and type 2 diabetes.²⁷

      It’s worth noting that in some countries the move towards a global average diet has been beneficial. ‘In some places,’ Khoury points out, ‘it actually means an increase in diversity,’ certainly compared to fifty years ago. Averaged out, the world’s diet is more balanced now than it was in 1960, if balance is defined as eating an even spread of different foods. Until recently, many countries in east Asia were dangerously dependent on the single staple of rice to feed themselves. СКАЧАТЬ