Channel 4′s food season ‘Big Food Fight’ is about to start its second week. I’ve deliberately avoided most of the programs so far, because I know a lot of this stuff already and frankly I just get upset by yet more gory details about factory farming. Great bloke though Hugh Fearlessly-Eatsitall seems to be, I don’t need to sit through his faithful reconstruction of an intensive chicken farm. Although anyone who has cooked and eaten both roadkill and human placenta paté deserves our respect.

Be that as it may, last Thursday I found myself watching ‘The Truth About Your Food’, a Dispatches documentary about the £5 billion UK market in premium foods and ready meals that claim to be healthy and nutritious. Three families were given different collections of ‘foods’ from which to assemble their regular diet: premium ‘healthy’ products, e.g. Sainsbury’s ‘Be Good To Yourself’ range; bargain basement equivalents; and I can’t honestly remember what the third, quite health-conscious, family had, it may have been business as usual. That must have made them the ‘control’, although that would imply a level of scientific rigour for the program that it didn’t really deserve.

Between domestic reaction shots (“Mmmm, this is…. quite nice”) and nutritionist talking heads, we learnt a few things.

• Foods that claim to be good for you very often aren’t.
• Premium-price healthy products are often no better for you than their cheaper cousins, and sometimes worse.
• The various competing food labelling schemes are confusing and pretty much useless, since people who don’t have time to cook their own food tend not to have hours to spare to decypher the figures on the packet.
• Breakfast cereals are full of salt and sugar.
• Concentrated fruit juices are full of citric acid which is as bad for your teeth as fizzy drinks.

And so on. I know that by the end I was past caring what the ‘results’ of the ‘experiment’ were. Each family was shown piles of salt, sugar and fat equivalent to what they’d consumed while on their ‘diet’. The relative sizes don’t matter, they were all scarily large. The one thing I took away from the program was recurring nausea at the thought of yet another Tesco chicken tikka massala or Waitrose chicken filo parcel. Chicken seemed to crop up quite often as an ingredient. I wonder where it comes from. My mate Hugh could probably tell you.

A feeling gradually emerged from all this that what these people were being fed wasn’t really food at all, but what Michael Pollan would call “foodlike substances”. In his book ‘In Defence of Food: The Myth of Nutrition and the Pleasures of Eating’, he describes how our eating habits have been formed, manipulated and controlled by a “nutritional industrial complex”. We have moved away from traditional food cultures where what we eat and how we eat it was determined by family influence and local ingredients, to a complacent acceptance of interference in our diet by scientists, marketing and governments. While nutritional recommendations change regularly, the end result is still that “much of the nutritional advice we’ve received over the past fifty years has made us less healthy and much fatter”.

So, what to do? Pollan’s core message is that we should return to eating “real food”, and offers some recommendations on how to find it and get the most out of it. It’s a long list, here’s a few to give you a flavour:

• Don’t eat anything that your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognise as food. Going back several generations enables us to avoid the confusion of lengthy ingredient lists, most of which have dubious nutritional value and are included more for the food industry’s benefit than for ours.
• Avoid food products that make health claims on the package. Anything with a package is more likely to be a processed than a whole food. And the whole issue of packaging and its environmental impact is another kettle of worms altogether.
• Cook – and, if you can, plant a garden. Creating your own food chain, “from fork to fork” as Monty Don used to say, enables us to reclaim control from industry and science.

Pollan goes so far as to say that “cooking from scratch and growing our own food qualify as subversive acts”. This puts him firmly in the same camp as relocalisation groups such as Path To Freedom. It doesn’t matter how much or how little food you can grow yourself. If you can just grow some salad on a window-sill, that’s one less nitrogen-filled plastic bag of imported salad bought. After all, as Lao-Tzu said, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Extracts from Michael Pollan’s book ‘In Defence of Food’, including his full set of rules-of-thumb, are published on the Guardian’s web site.

‘Consuming passion’

‘How to get back to real food’

It’s taken a while, but today the UK government has given formal backing to the construction of a new generation of nuclear power stations. To paraphrase Sir Humphrey Appleby, that most civil of civil servants: as far as we can see, looking at it by and large, taking one thing with another, then in the final analysis it is probably true to say, that at the end of the day, in general terms, you would probably find that, not to put too fine a point on it, this is probably the right decision… As far as one can see, at this stage. In the absence of any indication (apart from wishful thinking) that the UK will be able to (a) reduce its power consumption or (b) bridge the energy gap with renewables, it seems completely sensible to retain the nuclear option as part of a balanced energy portfolio, especially if you buy into the crusade to reduce carbon emissions.

Nothing’s set in stone, naturally. The government hopes the first plant could be open by 2020, but I wouldn’t put money on it. With a shortage of skilled nuclear engineering workers, long lead times on crucial components, and no guarantee that any private company will jump in to build anything while the government insists on zero subsidies, it may be a while before we all start to lose our hair and glow in the dark. Meanwhile, all the usual suspects are queuing up to condemn the announcement. Of course, it’s the Opposition’s job to oppose the government, and it’s the environmental NGO’s job to oppose anything to do with the word ‘nuclear’. Except families (so far).

It’s good to know there are still some things we can rely on.

The Observer reports that Britain is running out of renewable energy, as a surge in demand from businesses has outstripped the supply of electricity generated from ‘green’ sources. Firms’ interest in reducing their carbon footprint has far exceeded new capacity coming on-stream. This leaves companies which have pledged to become ‘carbon neutral’ with a sizeable headache. EDF is ‘prioritising’ existing customers, Npower says the amount it can supply depends on how much customers can pay, and Good Energy, a renewable-only electricity supplier, is turning away very big orders.

What some might consider a surprising popularity of renewables in the business fraternity is being led by large companies, who are obliged to pay the climate change levy on electricity from fossil fuels. The situation isn’t helped by the snail’s pace of the UK planning system, with wind energy projects which could supply one in six British homes mired in bureaucracy.

So much for the power of the market.

‘Business runs out of green energy supply’

It’s official, we’re in trouble again. Or still. You’d be forgiven for thinking the latest report from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is more of the same old same old. It is. The Synthesis Report of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report is effectively a summary of three papers published earlier this year, and is intended to lay the foundations for worldwide agreement on emissions. You’ll have heard much of this before:

Snow and ice melting, sea levels rising by up to 0.59m by 2100, Arctic sea ice shrinking by 2.7% a decade, heatwaves and hurricanes increasing, human greenhouse emissions up by 70% between 1970 and 2004 and set to double by 2030, atmospheric CO2 at its highest level for 650,000 years, up to 30% of species at risk of extinction.

Despite all the doom and gloom, there’s still a surprising degree of confidence that if decisive action is taken now we can mitigate the worst of the projected impacts. In particular, not only do we have current or imminent technologies that will enable us to do this, but prompt action will be cost-effective and will have a minimal economic downside. In other words, it’s possible and it’s affordable.

It seems the UK government is having trouble balancing the books to make this happen. On Saturday the Guardian reported that DEFRA, the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, is planning reductions in key environmental services to generate savings of at least £300 million. The cuts are driven by the huge costs of a series of recent disasters such as foot and mouth disease, severe flooding, and mismanagement of agricultural subsidy reforms. All fifty DEFRA agencies are expected to be affected, hitting areas such as National Parks, sustainable development, forestry, fisheries, energy saving, waste management, environmental protection and, last but not least, the fight against climate change.

Coinciding with the publication of the Climate Change Bill and constant re-affirmation of emissions commitments, the conclusion must be that the government is struggling to meet its targets. Concentrating efforts on climate change and neglecting wider environmental obligations is bad news for nature conservation, with Natural England facing budget cuts of 30% for new conservation projects. Spending cuts are under consideration for some of the country’s most valuable wildlife sites.

It’s time that someone realised that it’s not just about carbon, stupid. Making environmental policy around a single issue is short-sighted and short-term thinking. We must continue to support our natural resources, our habitats and wildlife, to keep them robust and resilient against the effects of climate change. Without a holistic view of the environment , we may win the battle to reduce carbon emissions, but we will lose our natural heritage. A landscape consisting of nothing but windmills set in fields of biofuel source crops is not somewhere I would want to call home.

Summary for Policymakers of the AR4 Synthesis Report

“Climate change department faces £300 million cuts” (Guardian)