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These days, the sweetness of grapes is a sure bet, because in common with other modern fruits such as red grapefruit and Pink Lady apples, our grapes have been carefully bred and ripened to appeal to consumers reared on sugary foods. Fruit bred for sweetness does not necessarily have to be less nutritious, but modern de-bittered fruits tend to contain fewer of the phytonutrients which give fruits and vegetables many of their protective health benefits. Most of the phytonutrients in green grapes were in the seeds. A modern red or purple seedless grape will still be rich in phenolics – nutrients that reduce the risk of certain cancers – from the pigments in its skin. But green seedless grapes contain few of these phytonutrients at all. Such fruit still gives us energy, but not necessarily the health benefits we would expect.1
The very fact that you are nibbling seedless grapes so casually is also new. I am old enough to remember a time when grapes – unless you were living in a grape-producing country – were a special and expensive treat. But now, millions of people on average incomes can afford to behave like the reclining Roman emperor of TV cliché, popping grapes into our mouths one by one. Globally, we both produce and consume twice as many grapes as we did in the year 2000. Grapes are an edible sign of rising prosperity, because fruit is one of the first little extras that people spend money on when they start to have disposable income. The year-round availability of grapes also speaks to huge changes in global agriculture. Fifty years ago, table grapes were a seasonal fruit, grown in just a few countries and only eaten at certain times of year. Today, they are cultivated globally and never out of season.2
Almost everything about grapes has changed, and fast. And yet grapes are the least of our worries when it comes to food: just one tiny element in a much larger series of kaleidoscopic transformations in how and what we eat that have happened in recent years. These changes are written on the land, on our bodies and on our plates (insofar as we even eat off plates any more).
For most people across the world, life is getting better but diets are getting worse. This is the bittersweet dilemma of eating in our times. Unhealthy food, eaten in a hurry, seems to be the price we pay for living in liberated modern societies. Even grapes – so sweet, so convenient, so ubiquitous – are symptoms of a food supply that is out of control. Millions of us enjoy lives that are freer and more comfortable than those our grandparents lived, a freedom underpinned by the amazing decline in global hunger. You can measure this life improvement in many ways, whether by the growth of literacy and smartphone ownership, the spread of labour-saving devices such as dishwashers, or the rising number of countries where gay couples have the right to marry. Yet our free and comfortable lifestyles are undermined by the fact that our food is killing us, not through its lack but through its abundance – a hollow kind of abundance.fn1
What we eat now is a greater cause of disease and death in the world than either tobacco or alcohol. In 2015 around 7 million people died from tobacco smoke and 3.3 million from causes related to alcohol, but 12 million deaths could be attributed to ‘dietary risks’ such as diets low in vegetables, nuts and seafood or diets high in processed meats and sugary drinks. This is paradoxical and sad, because good food – good in every sense, from flavour to nutrition – used to be the test by which we judged the quality of life. A good life without good food should be a logical impossibility. 3
Where humans used to live in fear of plague or tuberculosis, now the leading cause of mortality worldwide is diet.4 Most of our problems with eating come down to the fact that we have not yet adapted to the new realities of plenty, either biologically or psychologically. Many of the old ways of thinking about diet no longer apply, but it isn’t clear yet what it would mean to adapt our appetites and routines to the new rhythms of life. We take our cues about what to eat from the world around us, which becomes a problem when our food supply starts to send us crazy signals about what is normal. ‘Everything in moderation’ doesn’t quite cut it in a world where the ‘everything’ for sale in the average supermarket has become so sugary and so immoderate. In today’s world, it can be hard to know how to eat for the best. Some binge; some restrict. Some put their faith in expensive ‘superfoods’ which promise to do things for the human body that mere food cannot. Others – this is how far things have gone – have lost faith in solid food altogether, choosing instead to consume one of the new meal replacement drinks: curious beige liquids which have become an aspirational form of nutrition.
To our grandparents, it would not have seemed credible for any hungry human to think that not eating was a better option than eating. But our grandparents never had to live and eat in such a bewildering food culture as ours.
At no point in history have edible items been so easy to obtain, and in many ways this is a glorious thing. Humans have always gone out and gathered food, but never before has it been so simple for us to gather anything we want, whenever we want it, from sachets of black squid ink to strawberries in winter. We can get sushi in Buenos Aires, sandwiches in Tokyo and Italian food everywhere. Not so long ago, to eat genuine Neapolitan pizza, a swollen-edged disk of dough cooked in a blistering oven, you had to go to Naples. Now, you can find Neapolitan pizza – made using the right dough blasted in an authentic pizza oven – as far afield as Seoul and Dubai. Thanks to the new home delivery apps such as Deliveroo and Seamless, we can have food from almost any cuisine on our doorstep in minutes.
The gatherers of the world never had it so good. In our hunter-gatherer past, if you wanted a taste of something sweeter than fruit, you called a group of brave comrades together and went on a long, perilous expedition, scrambling up rocks, hunting in crevices for wild sticky honey. Often, the honey hunters came back empty handed. Now, if you fancy a taste of something sweet, you head to the nearest shop with a little loose change. You do not come back empty handed.
The flipside of food being so easy to get is that it is also hard to escape.
We are the first generation to be hunted by what we eat. Since the birth of farming ten thousand years ago, most humans haven’t been hunters, but never before have we been so insistently pursued by our own food supply. The calories hunt us down even when we are not looking for them. They tempt us at the supermarket checkout and on the coffee shop counter. They sing to us in adverts when we switch on the TV. They track us down on social media with amusing videos that make us want even more. They sneak into our mouths as free samples. They console us for our pains, only to become the cause of fresh sorrows. They trick us by hiding in ‘healthy snacks’ for our children that are just as high in sugar as the ‘unhealthy’ alternatives.
Talking about what has gone wrong with modern eating is delicate, because food is a touchy subject. No one likes to feel judged about their food choices, which is one of the reasons why so many healthy eating initiatives fail. The foods that are destroying our health are often the ones to which we feel the deepest emotional connection because they are the stuff of childhood memories. Some say we should never speak of ‘junk food’ because it is a pejorative term to use about someone else’s pleasures. But when poor diets become the single greatest cause of death in the world, I think we are allowed to be pejorative – not about our fellow eaters but about the products that are making people so unwell.5
The rise of obesity and diet-related disease around the world has happened hand in hand with the marketing of fast food and sugary sodas, of processed meats and branded snack foods. As things stand, our culture is far too critical of the individuals who eat junk foods and not critical enough about the corporations who profit from selling them. We spend a lot of time discussing unhealthy foods in terms of individual guilt and willpower and not enough looking at the morality of big food companies who have targeted some of the poorest consumers in the world with products that will make them sick, or the governments that allowed them to do so. A survey of more than three hundred international policymakers found that 90 per cent of them still believed that personal motivation – aka willpower – was a very strong cause of obesity.6 This is absurd.
It makes no sense to presume that there has been a sudden collapse in willpower across all ages and ethnic groups and each sex since the 1960s. What has changed most since the sixties is not our collective willpower but the marketing and availability of energy-dense,