I was reading this knowing that she would be preaching somewhat to the converted as I am already wise to a few of the horrors of modern food production and already veggie etc. It's a little dated now but still has much interesting info, mostly on the politics of food which is just too depressing for words. Well researched book and well written. ( )

Should be compulsory reading for anyone who eats food from a supermarket. ( )

http://pixxiefishbooks.blogspot.com/2...

I stumbled across this book in my library's catalogue whilst searching for something else food-related for a client. Intrigued, I requested it be sent to me, and it was quite a fascinating read.

Felicity Lawrence is an investigative reporter for The Guardian in London, England, and she has been writing on food-related topics (and other things, too, undoubtedly) for over 20 years. This book focuses on the food industry in Britain*, but I have no reason to believe that things are substantially different or better in Canada and the U.S. I'm willing to bet that while things may differ in the details, the larger brushstrokes of our food distribution chains are similar.

From the back cover (because sometimes they just say it better):

In a series of undercover investigations tracking some of the most popular foods we eat at home, Felicity Lawrence travels from farms and factories to packhouses and lorry depots around the world. She discovers why beef waste ends up in chicken, why a third of apples are thrown away, why bread is full of water and air. And she shows how obesity, the plight of migrant workers, motorways clogged with juggernauts, ravaged fields in Europe and starving farmers in Africa are all connected to a handful of retailers and food manufacturers who exert unprecedented control over what we eat and where we buy it.

This book is well-written and fascinating. Lawrence isn't preachy. She isn't trying to get us to switch to all-vegetarianism or all-organics or all-local. Rather, in a series of exposés (Chicken / Salad / Beans / Bread / Apples and Bananas / Coffee and Prawns / The Ready Meal), she is simply trying to make us more aware. She eats meat, and doesn't shun (all) processed food. She even sometimes buys bananas. However, she wants to make us more aware of where our food comes from, and what is done in the system to make food as cheap and abundant as it is today (at least in the Western world). Her general philosophy is: As much as possible, buy local, seasonal, and direct. Sounds like fine advice to me.

The book is an eye-opener. Sure, I've been hearing for years about the appalling conditions in which many animals destined for slaughter are raised (chickens in tiny cages where they can't even turn around, etc.). Lawrence mentions these things, but doesn't dwell on them. Rather, she walks us through the steps in production of some of the most basic things. Like salad: there are an unbelievable number of steps involved in getting today's ready-cut, pre-washed bags of salad to the grocery store. And if you want a mini-lesson on the effects of globalization, read her chapter on Coffee and Prawns. You'll suddenly have a much better understanding of why so many countries can't afford to feed their own people.

A rather timely read, as the headlines these days are full of dire predictions for the food supply in the not-so-far-off future, and we keep hearing about the rise of food prices despite any direct evidence of that here. This book helps me understand this rising debate, and I am looking forward to reading more on the subject.

* Perhaps in some ways it would be more accurate to say 'the food industry not in Britain'.

The author confines herself to the title message of the book: You don't know what goes into much of the food you consume (if you're a rich country resident, that is). This is, of course, because those supplying it would prefer not to deal with the likely outrage and rejection that would follow if you did.

Well, this reviewer did know some of it already--though she is grateful for the education to find out more. She's a bit doubtful that a mass taking up of arms will result from wider discovery though. Not least, this is because she is aware of a growing number of titles exposing the shock-worthy "hidden truths" of food production flying off the popular shelves, accompanied by little evidence of much change in collective consumption behaviour.

Make no mistake, books like "Not on the Label" fill a valuable knowledge gap, and Felicity Lawrence's extensive effort to gather evidence of practices contrary to consumer interests (and those of just about everybody bar shareholders) is impressive. Food manufacturers have little incentive to do more than they are required to do in disclosing their methods to maximise profits (which include adulteration, nutritional compromise, full exercise of superior bargaining power to drive down wages). Nor do they have an incentive to stay within legal standards if they can get away with transgressing them. Worse, perhaps, what looks like an effort to improve food standards (perhaps in response to popular activism) is quite likely to be a ruse to pacify the activists while changing little underneath the surface (beware of the organic, fair trade and farmers market crazes in this regard).

Yet the same is true for all corporate behaviour, which is a truth well publicised but not nearly so well understood. It is hard to go too far with accusations of lack of transparency, since even though the food production industry is hardly a paragon of perfect information disclosure itself, we nonetheless have Lawrence and her ilk (she is a journalist with The Guardian) filling in the blanks, and we have done for a long time. Jamie Oliver enjoys even higher profile ways and means of doing it too. And while informed public opinion can notch up several gains in respect of extracting a better deal than otherwise, the outers of the food business would probably all agree that changes are scarce relative to the siren alarms that they have been loudly sounding.

So why's that? This reviewer's conclusion tends towards acceptance that Jill Public's desires as an economic agent (a consumer and an investor) still win out over her wishes as a concerned citizen, even as she avails herself of more complete information. She might like it if workers employed in harvesting salad crops, baking bread and processing meat products were well compensated and motivated to produce wholesome output, and if Sainsbury's didn't screw over its clementine suppliers in Africa. But she apparently appreciates the permanent-summer choices and low prices even more, and she may be as ruthless as a stock market investor in fleeing from a retailer that tried to pass on the cost of these ethically higher alternatives to her, just as long as someone across the street was still going about it the old way. And she can compensate for the guilt trip with another book on food outrage, and an occasional trip to the local farmers' market (which, in London, can still earn this designation if the sellers have arrived in articulated lorries through the channel tunnel, apparently).

In summary, the scare simply does not seem to be scary enough for the general public, notwithstanding a diligent effort to make it so. So while 'eye opening' will probably continue to be a repeated commentary on texts like this, this reviewer is not really convinced that many people have their blinkers on. Or at least, she suspects that under the bright lights of full illumination is not a place where a whole lot of readers wish to stand.

Francesca ( )

This is the expanded and published version as what started life as a series of investigative reports for the Guardian newspaper between 2001 and 2003. Hence it's already beginning to show its age, as practises and regulations chage. Covering a range of basic foodstuffs - chicken, salad, bread, apples, coffee and prawns and finally the ubiquitous ready meal - in each case it quickly descends into a digression about the power and influence supermarkets have, and why this is not a good idea.

The inital section of each chapter is really informative, providing a lot of details on some of practises that routinally go on in processing the food prior to it arriving glossy and shiney looking in the supermarket aisles. Some of the later digressions are less interesting, and can be lightly skimmed.

Perhaps the key points of the book is that there are many many ways of processing all foods, saving money for the big corporations that do so. The author sees all of these as uniformly bad, and is probably correct - but there are many sides to the complex story of food, and the book only tells one of them.

Ultimately like many of the other books discussing how our food on the table has changed relatively recently, it fails to answer to the big question it raises - what would you do instead? and how do feed a world population of 6bil using those methods, including the densely populated cities where there are no gardens, and people whose lives don't allow time for 3 hr shopping trip followed by 2hr of food preparation. Many or even most people shop at supermarkets because that's most convenient trade-off of availablity and quality they prefer - and no solutions are offered about how to change these prefereances even if such a change was desirable.

But. The case is strongly made, that supermarkets are adversely effecting customer choice, purchasing decisions made by very few people have dramatic widespread impact on what is available to buy, and the harsh conditions imposed on the vast numbers of poor producers to get that cheap food.

A thought provoking read, not as dramatic as Fast Food Nation, but of wider scope. ( )