by Jurgen Brauer, September 2007
Copyright: J. Brauer. No reproduction without permission.

While on a recent lecture through India, I marveled at Indian food. As one frequently finds in so-called developing nations, much more variety of foodstuffs is available for consumption there than in developed countries. There are varieties of legumes, varieties of grains, varieties of greens, varieties of fruits, varieties of spices. And varieties of recipes and preparations, in part because formal labor market participation, especially of women, is less pronounced there - rendering women bound to the home - so that creative, individual food preparation practices are more likely retained instead of becoming atrophied into standardized and bland servings for the mass market when women move into paid labor and reduce cooking time at home.

By “variety” I mean variety of nature’s products, not varieties of processed items. Indeed, back home, the variety of processed food available in the local supermarkets is astounding: tens of thousands of items are on sale. But a peek at the list of ingredients reveals that processed supermarket food consists of little more than infinite variations of fats, salts, artificial colors and sweeteners, and preservatives - and I wish I were back in India or Africa, where I spent some of my earlier years and food was similarly varied. I don’t advocate putting women back in the kitchen - to the contrary - but clearly our labor market riches have impoverished our culinary menu. Highly processed food, with its incredibly high energy density - more energy per unit of food than nature’s own - easily makes us overeat, bloated, and sick. We may live longer, but many of our compatriots do so literally at ill ease for want of proper diet. While much of the developing world still is undernourished, many in the developed world are malnourished. In India, I happily moved about all day long on a skimpy but nutritious breakfast, while in Australia - next stop on my lecture tour - much larger helpings of high-caloric but nutritionally “empty” foods left me feeling bloated and hungry.

In both India and Australia it struck me just how absurdly removed modern urban populations are from food production.

But in both India and Australia - I visited Kolkata, Delhi, Mumbai, Canberra, and Sydney - it struck me just how absurdly removed modern urban populations are from food production. This year, for the first time in human history, the majority of us live in urban spaces. To eat, we go to markets and purchase ingredients. This implies the need for proper storage and transportation of perishables and, with it, the need for long-term preservation, that is, the industrial processing and marketing of food. Truth be told, very few of us have any idea at all how to grow a sufficient amount of food for our own survival. Even if our lives depended on it, we couldn’t do it! Advances in soil, plant, and seed technology, agricultural mechanization, irrigation, and production, food processing and preservation, and long-distance refrigerated transport (and in financial and insurance markets!) have done a remarkable job to effectively liberate us from the vagaries of weather, so that a harvest failure in any given spot on earth does not need to lead to food shortages or starvation. But in exchange, it seems, we have traded in a healthy diet of natural, varied foods and made ourselves utterly dependent on the proper functioning of a human-made food web few understand or ever even think about.

This trend is likely to continue. India, for example, is “only” 30 percent urbanized. In years to come, hundreds of millions more will stream to urban areas, increasing the need for further advances in agricultural production, preservation, transport, and storage to feed ever growing non-agricultural urban populations. The recent popularity of organically grown foodstuffs in the United States and other western countries won’t save us. For one thing, organically grown food by itself does not recover variety of food. Even if organic, my local supermarkets offer up only 2 or 3 varieties of apples. As a young boy growing up, I had twice as many organic varieties available to me just from my grandmother’s plot of land in very much urban Berlin! For another, it is well-known that natural nitrogen-fixation, necessary for plants to grow, limits food production to feed a mere 2 billion people. Artificial fertilizers supplying nitrogen to plants - the Haber-Bosch process - helps feed the other 4.6 billion of us.

As a consequence, even as the vast majority of people become further and further removed from the land, world agriculture will become more important, not less. In fact, constraints on land-based food production already have led us to dip into the world’s oceans to an unprecedented extent and with devastating consequences for the health of the generally ill-regulated and ill-supervised fishing grounds.

The point of this column is that even as people get exercised about climate change, transnational terrorism, or global pathogen transmission in times of ever less effective antibiotic medications, I wonder if we may face a world food crisis before we may face any of the other potential crises. And when I see modern college students carry their voluminous tomes of English literature to class, I also wonder whether the hallowed paradigm of a liberal arts education meets the requirements and challenges of our times.

All in all, much food for thought to ponder as - upon return from my lecture tour - my wife and I cooked ourselves a tasty and immensely satisfying pot of lentil stew.