We Want Real Food (2006)

Book Review from the June 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘We Want Real Food’. By Graham Harvey, (Constable £9.99)

Criticisms of food production usually concentrate on the supermarkets: with their emphasis on selling homogeneous produce and driving down the prices they pay to the producers, they play a major role in depriving consumers of healthy and tasty food. The fast-food industry is also attacked for its bland tasteless pap. In this book, though, Graham Harvey points the finger of blame at the companies that produce artificial fertilisers.

It is true that life expectancy is far greater than it used to be and that diseases like TB and cholera are almost things of the past in Britain. But degenerative diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and arthritis are reaching epidemic proportions. Harvey ascribes this to a change in the make-up of the soil, owing to the increased use of nitrogen compounds in fertiliser, which itself has been pushed by the companies who make big profits from selling the stuff.

Traditional farming exploited the minerals in the soil that contributed to a healthy lifestyle, but modern methods have relied more and more on chemical fertilisers that destroy these nutrients. According to one study, for instance, carrots lost 75 percent of their magnesium and copper between 1941 and 1990.

Minerals have various roles in protecting and promoting human health: copper, for instance, is important for the functioning of the liver, brain and muscles, while selenium protects against the onset of a number of kinds of cancer.

Harvey’s solution is a programme to reintroduce these crucial minerals to the soil. But this will face a problem: “For the best part of half a century, the chemical industry has effectively vetoed every attempt to remineralize over-worked soils and restore the health benefits to everyday foods.” So “What’s needed is leadership – from farmers, retailers or politicians.” Effective government legislation could supposedly promote sensible agriculture and hence healthier and tastier food. But food production would still be at the mercy of the profit motive rather than be aimed at satisfying human need.

Assuming that Harvey’s science is on the right lines, he makes a convincing case for changing the way in which agriculture is organised, but the problem is that this cannot be divorced from how society as a whole is run. His website at http://www.wewantrealfood.co.uk/ is also of interest, though we wouldn’t recommend bothering to write to supermarkets asking them to change their ways.

Paul Bennett