You Are What You Eat

The chicken scald tank, described by Felicity Lawrence on the first page of her new book Not on the Label, will make you queasy. The contents of a chicken nugget (page 13) will leave you feeling nauseous. By page 19 - chicken injected with beef proteins to help it retain water - you should, by rights, be retching.

Not on the Label is a shocking analysis of the way we eat today. Yet despite its opening, stomach-churning chapter on chicken, it is not simply one big gross-out - instead, it's a serious study of the Western food-chain.

Lawrence's thesis is simple. The demand for cheap, exotic, cosmetically perfect food all the year round has terrible consequences, to which most of us are blind.

Our obsession with cheap meat leads to food scares, animal-welfare abuse and sickening processes of adulteration. Our love for bagged salad requires a highly flexible, usually migrant labour force of people who are underpaid, live in appalling conditions and are vulnerable to ruthless gang-masters. Our demand for cheap fruit and veg is ruining local farming, as produce is being driven and flown billions of miles each year to our shops. Every mouthful we take has serious ethical, environmental, social and political implications.

Lawrence is judicious in her finger-pointing. The food industry in general and supermarkets in particular are subtle, even mendacious. The Government - unlike fast-food burgers - is gutless and spineless. But the heart of the problem is that we, the great British food-buying public, do not care enough. If we were only prepared to spend a little more time, energy and money, then our food chain would be very different.

For Christians, whose image of the resurrection is one big feast, this could not be more poignant. Jesus is a little sketchy about where the food in the kingdom is grown and tended, but you can guarantee it will not be by penniless, homeless migrant workers or underpaid Ugandan coffee producers. If anything, it's these people who will be at the table, and those of us who never bothered to look for the lives behind our groceries who will be serving.

The strength of Not on the Label is that rather than being one long whinge, it has an appendix full of resources and a deceptively simple solution: buy local, seasonal, direct (from producers) and organic. Lawrence acknowledges that this will cost us (a little more) time, energy and money - but the alternative is much less palatable.

Nick Spencer

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