Rethinking the throwaway economics of takeaway food

Food is never out of the news. At the moment Jamie Oliver is (rightly) indignant because Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, has been slagging off Jamie’s  successful campaign to revitalise school food (presumably to justify the coalition government’s plan to restrict access to free school lunches). The other day NICE, the agency that advises the health service on best practice, announced that 40,000 deaths from heart disease and stroke could be prevented each year by reducing salt and saturated fat in our food, and suggested that local authorities restrict the number of takeaways near schools, on the grounds that takeaway meals have often been found to be high in salt and unhealthy fats. And a recent edition of the Guardian carried a striking photograph of an outsize billboard in China that featured a huge photograph of a hamburger, stuffed with beef and dripping with cheese, designed to whet a billion new appetites for a diet laden with (energy-intensive, carbon intensive) meat and dairy.

These stories are all different and all the same. Fundamentally, they are all about the homogenisation and debasement of our diet, which increasingly depends on intensively farmed, mass produced and therefore relatively cheap commodities – the starches, sugars, fats and protein that go into the globalised fast food menu of meat patties, poultry nuggets, rolls, wraps, pastries, shakes and soft drinks, likely to be available at outlets near you, wherever you are.

A lot of this food comes via chain outlets – not just the big Mac, but KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell and many others. In fact these three, respectively global leaders in quick-service fried chicken, pizza and Mexican-style food, are all owned by the world’s largest fast food company, Yum! brands. Yum (headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky), has more than 37,000 outlets in 100 countries, including China, where it is developing a new chain of fast food outlets selling – Chinese food! According to its website, Yum’s mission is to be ‘the defining global company that feeds the world’.

In the face of this competition, many of the small, independent cafes that form such a distinctive part of our diet and our streetscape here in Britain are struggling to survive. And even they are not as local and individual as they seem. Most buy at least some of their food from national wholesalers who provide the same globally sourced, highly processed, deep-frozen and ready-to-microwave items – fries, burgers, pies, kievs, hoagie rolls, muffins, banoffee, crumble – to outlets everywhere, hence the startling similarity of their menus.

As our new report, An Inconvenient Sandwich – the throwaway economics of takeaway food shows, this massive shift in our eating habits is anything but sustainable. Cheap food has huge hidden costs – to the environment; to the poorly paid, low status and badly safeguarded workers who produce the food here and abroad; to the health of the people who eat it; and to future generations, who will depend for their food on the soil, water, fuel  and biodiversity that we are plundering. Cheap, convenient takeaway food is one of the things that our hurried, peripatetic lifestyles depend on: we want food that we can eat on the run, any time, anywhere. But the economics underpinning it are as throwaway as the processed, packaged food itself.

The food has to change, no question, as does the system that delivers it. But we all need to change, too. We have to slow down and rethink the value of ‘convenience’. Small, independent cafes, in particular, will need support – from the state and from all their customers – if they are to survive and provide the sustainable food we need to eat – at prices everyone can afford to pay. 

Photo by Paul Goyette via Flickr