Murder, obesity and happy chickens
This panel had a shared goal of wanting to improve the quality of people’s diet, their knowledge about food and to raise awareness of consumer power. Unlike many book events, here we had facts, figures and statistics that provided an informed discussion on that everyday subject: food.
James Fergusson, author of The Vitamin Murders: Who Killed Healthy Eating in Britain?, begins by showing the audience an orange. He is here to argue why an orange is no longer exactly what it appears as apparently it has lost 50% of its Vitamin A since 1940s. He asks the problematic question of: what vintage are the government’s GDA of vitamins and minerals? This drastic depletion in a food’s nutritional content happened in line with increased industrialisation of the food process. As a result the average human body contains between 300-500 chemicals, including potential carcinogens.
His book isn’t simply horror stories but investigates the brutal tabloid murder of Jack Drummond – the scientist who coined the term 'vitamin,’ brought milk into schools and organised the ration system in WWII. These were all whilst he worked at the Ministry of Food, where he transformed people’s lives. Yet in 1945, he left to work for Boots, where he became one of the leading figures in the industrialisation of our food industry by creating pesticides. Fergusson tries to uncover why he changed from being a hero to a harbinger of evil.
Hattie Ellis, author of Planet Chicken, guides us on her development from wanting to write a book of chicken recipes from around the world to producing a critique of the chicken producing industry. After visiting a chicken abattoir, she realised that the price of cheap chicken was animal welfare. She stresses that consumers have the power to change this, as they have driven for there to be a European wide ban on battery cages in 2012. Basically she wants us to eat only happily reared chickens.
Jill Fullerton-Smith is the documentary maker behind the BBC series and affiliated book The Truth About Food. She startles the audience with the statistic that it took her 9 months to persuade her science team to do a programme on nutrition. She offers us a sequence of useful gems about foods: fibrous foods keep you full longer; spinach can help prevent deterioration of eyesight and tomatoes can increase UV protection 3-fold. Her main adage is that the higher the percentage of fruit and veg in your diet, the healthier you will be. Nothing new but certainly reassuring.
Nutrition is at the forefront of scientific research and it is the constant learning that lead to confusion. This panel offered some tips, advice and reasons about why our nation’s health has deteriorated. Their key advice is simple: eat more fruit and vegetables, cook your own food and learn to find pleasure in eating and cooking.