How The World Eats | Julian Baggini
Suzy Chase: When two podcasts collide, magic happens. Welcome to Dinner Party, the podcast where I bring together my two hit shows, Cookery by the Book and Decorating by the Book around here. We're all about cooking, sharing stories behind recipes, and creating a cozy home. I'm your host, Suzy Chase, a West Village wife, mom and home cook. Inspired by Martha Stewart trying to live in a Nora Ephron movie, surrounded by toile, plaid, cookbooks, decorating books and magazines, cooking in my galley kitchen and living my best life in my darling New York City apartment in the cutest neighborhood in the city, the West Village. So come hang out and let's get into the show.
Julian Baggini: I'm Julian Baggini. I'm a writing philosopher, and I'm here to talk about my new book, How The World Eats,
Suzy Chase: You call it philosophical journalism. As a philosopher, what got you fired up about writing this book
Julian Baggini: As a philosopher? Only to a certain extent really. It's really as a person, as a citizen, and as someone interested in food, I've had a long interest in food intellectual as well as gastronomical. I did actually write a book about 10 years ago, which was about food's role in the good life and what it really teaches us about having the right attitude to existence, to pleasure, to ephemera to the people who supply our food. That was more of a, how can you say, a kind of desk book in the sense that it was really just drawing on my philosophical reflections and what everyone kind of knows about food, really mainly not saying entirely, but mainly. But then that kind of drew me into the food world a bit more. I was invited to join something called the Food Ethics Council in the uk, which is a very small NGO, which tries to kind of facilitate more serious ethical debate around food.
And so I was meeting more people in the food world and learning about how complex the food system really was and how as a result of that complexity, a lot of the seemingly obvious solutions and ways forward that people think are good, aren't that straightforward. And it just struck me that I didn't understand this well enough, but certainly most people don't understand it well enough. There wasn't a single book which really I think explained it, and one reason for that is there's no one who's an expert on it. No one can be an expert on the whole thing. I say no. And actually there are a few people I met along the way who I think are very, very good on this, but they hadn't written books for the general reader. So the kind of project I love is one where I want to find out more about something.
I want to join the dots and understand it better. And if I go on that journey and come out the other end the right way, then hopefully I've got something which is interest for other people too. And the philosophical side of it I think is it's not my kind of role to prescribe very precise solutions. I'm not an economist, I'm not a food technologist, I'm not a nutritionist. But I think what a philosopher should be good at is trying to identify the principles that support a good or bad anything. And so that's what I thought I could perhaps bring to this particular party.
Suzy Chase: While I was reading your book, I was thinking about where this food naivete started. And personally, I think it was grown in my generation, in my fifties, fast food, packaged food, frozen food generation. My grandparents were born in the Midwest in 1900 and they knew exactly how food was grown. And my parents were born in 1929, and they were aware of the food system, if you will, but I feel like it fell off in the 1970s. I remember my mom was so excited about Burger King. When do you think this ignorance or naivete began?
Julian Baggini: Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, I think a lot of what you say is right. I think there's various different strands though certainly I think the greater urbanization is clearly one part of it. There was a time where most people lived in the countryside, or at least if they didn't live there, they knew people in the countryside. There was a time where a huge amount of population working in farming. So industrialization and urbanization means we become rather alienated from that, so we don't see it. But then you've also got the way in which food production has become more mechanized. And you talk about the seventies now. I'd be very interested to know if this was the same in the states as it was here. I was a child of the seventies. I was born late sixties, and in the early seventies in particular, it was like people thought this processed food was the best.
They thought it was the bee's knees. So there were all these products which were really highly processed, but people thought that was fantastic. I mean, I remember for example, there was this powdered drink. You made a orange juice out of which was meant to be fantastic for your breakfast. I'm sure it was like 80% sugar and coloring. So there was that kind of fascination with the technologically most advanced things being best, which I think was part of the spirit of the times. But I think the other sort of side of this is agriculture and food production of change and the changes there go back further. They have deeper roots. And what industrialization did was partly it took people away from food production, but it also made the reality of food production much less kind of idyllic. And in a way, I think a lot of people in food and farming, they were sucked into this gradually, but eventually they were in a situation whereby they didn't really have an interest in people knowing how they produced the food.
This is particularly true with animals. Intensive animal production I think is pretty horrific in lots of places. And I have to say, I think it is worse in the states than it is in Europe and Britain. So there's a little political aside here. When Donald Trump complains that Europe doesn't want American food, it's not because we don't like Americans and we don't want their food. It's because a lot of the standards, environmental and welfare standards around all that food are not up to standards. We don't want them, and European standards aren't fantastic, but they are better. So if you think about it, I mean if you are a chicken farmer these days on a typical chicken farm, you actually don't want people to come in and see what it's like because it looks pretty ghastly. So that's another factor, I think. So you put all these things together and yeah, people haven't got a clue anymore.
Suzy Chase: The idea of hunger boggles my mind. I just don't understand the paradox of overproduction and under supply of food. You wrote in the book in 2022, nearly 3 and every 10 people on earth were moderately or severely food insecure, 3 in 10. That's crazy.
Julian Baggini: It is crazy. As you say, the paradox is that we've never had more food. So I think the statistics, obviously they change slightly from time to time, but it's around 3000 calories for every person on earth, which is way more than enough, given that the typical man needs about 2,500 a woman, 2000 children less so 3000 colors for everyone is loads. And yet at the same time as you've got a lot of people who are struggling for food and are undernourished, you've also got people who are overn nourished. So what an interesting statistic there was that more people live in a country where being overweight is a cause of health problems than living countries where being undernourished is. So you've got kind of like a third of the world eating too much and eating bad things. You've got about a third of the world not eating enough.
It's only about a third of the world who are eating the right amount of roughly the right things. It is really quite extraordinary, and that's systemic. And I think that's one of the things that people again, don't really think about, about the food system. There's a lot of politics involved and there's a lot of policy leavers that have been pulled, and generally a lot of countries have pulled those levers for their own interests and for short-term interests. And that means that despite the fact we've got plenty of food, it's just not getting to the people who need it most.
Suzy Chase: I read something in your book about the Inuit people and how when they started eating store, store-bought food,
Julian Baggini: Processed
Suzy Chase: food, that they started gaining weight, they got high blood pressure immediately.
Julian Baggini: Yes. And that's something which people who study these things find in basically all traditional societies, they call that the nutrition transition. So when people move from eating their traditional diet towards one which is based more on processed bought foods, invariably the health outcomes go down. Now the good news is in the long run, they can improve. So it's not like it means that they can never be healthy doing that. But what tends to happen initially at least, is people are replacing foods which have various characteristics, mainly that they're whole foods and they're fresh foods. And also cultures manage to evolve without anyone planning it balanced diet because you have to, if your traditional diet isn't healthy, you are not going to survive. So there's a kind of natural selection that goes on with diet. So you can be pretty sure any traditional diet is probably pretty healthy, but part of what makes it healthy is the balance.
It's the way things work together. And I think this is something about nutrition that's not properly appreciated. People think a lot about healthy foods as though in isolation they're good. So this is why you get these silly crazies, I think silly crazies for super foods. So people find out that something like a east side berry or blueberry is very, very good for you, and they think, therefore, if you get a huge plate of blueberries, that's going to be twice as good for you. Well, no, it is good for you, but how much benefit you're going to get depends on the context in which you eat it. So the context changes, the balance changes, the type of foods change and the health outcomes go down invariably. And the other thing, you can set me off on any of these things and I'll just get going, but one of the interesting things about that is that if you look at the Inuit diet, it doesn't actually fit the standard dietary guidelines of countries like America or Britain, huge amounts of fat, huge amounts of protein, very few whole grains, very few fresh vegetables.
So how on earth can they be healthy? And I think this is a good example of why we should be very humble, I think about how much we understand about nutrition. When people dig away, they find it's not mysterious, it's not magic, it's partly genetic because as I say, people develop the genes that enable them to metabolize the food that is available to them. But it's things that because they eat all the seal, there are parts of the inners of that seal where you find the kind of vitamins and minerals that we typically find in fruit and vegetables. So they get that balance. Of course, they do eat small amounts of plants as well, but the plants that tend to be more nutritionally rich than say a lettuce, which is almost all water. So this is great grind of wisdom in these traditional diets.
Suzy Chase: So do you think we should be taking a page out of the hunter gatherers playbook? I was fascinated by the Hadza people in Tanzania and they have no food supplies in reserve.
Julian Baggini: Yeah, exactly. Well, this is the great thing about hunter gathering, or maybe it should be called gathering hunting. The men do the hunting and the women do the gathering and we call them hunter gatherer in that order. As a matter of fact, most days the hunts aren't successful, whereas every day the gathering is so gathering is in a sense, it should come first, not second. But yeah, so they don't keep anything in reserve at all. But the problem is we can't take that lesson from them because you need huge amounts of land to live that kind of lifestyle. You're basically just going around collecting what's already there, and you are taking only as much that allows it to regenerate so that when you come back next year, there's more of it. You need very, very, very low population densities. In fact, there was a small statistical error in my book.
I have to confess this. I said that in order for the UK, the United Kingdom, to go back to a hunter gatherer diet, we'd have to get rid of 96% of the population. In fact, it was more like 99. Wow. It might be corrected from the American edition edition already actually. But we can learn some lessons, and it's the lesson you see, what I find is I go from place to place time to time across the book. If you find that certain practices tend to have good outcomes in lots of different times and places, that's a pretty good indication and that's a good thing. And it goes back to similarly for Inuit as well. What is the basis of their diet? It's a wide variety of whole foods. And by whole foods we don't just mean whole grains, we mean all the different bits of the animal, all the different, a lot, most of all of what they eat.
And that is really the secret. We can learn a lot from that. For example, one interesting thing about the Hader is that the gut microbiome is very, very diverse, considered very, very healthy. Now, everyone's talking about the gut microbiome at the moment. I think most people are talking about it. If you look carefully, have a very great interest in you purchasing either their cookbook or more likely their products, which are meant to facilitate the good healthy microbiome by your kefi, by your gut shots, all these kinds of things, supplements, blah, blah, blah. Well, the fact that the hands don't eat any of that is cautionary because what it tells us is that the best thing you can do for your gut microbiome is to eat plenty of fresh, whole fibrous foods, fruits and vegetables. What does it, you put that mix of things into your gut, you get all the diversity you need.
You don't need all these super special products at all when it comes to diet. I think listeners I'm sure will know Michael Pollan and his food rules, and these are about 20 years old now, and you envy a right, manages to nail something so well, but all these years later, you still can't better it. Of course, if you have a particular health condition, you may need to do specific things that exclude certain foods, but generally speaking, eat foods meaning proper foods, whole foods not processed food like edible food, like substances. As he says, not too many, mainly plants.
Suzy Chase: I feel like the food pyramid was a big fat lie. I've actually heard it was a vehicle to sell more processed grains and breads and cereals. So that was a whole line in the food pyramid. What are your thoughts on the food pyramid?
Julian Baggini: I think the biggest piece of misinformation or perhaps disinformation about diet, which came from a visual advice over the last century really, was this idea that fats were to be avoided when actually it turns out that sugars and highly processed carbohydrates were much worse. For us, that was a big mistake. And again, it's very well evidence. It's not a wacky conspiracy theory. There was a lot of industry lobbying and special interest groups that were behind. That's not a secret at all in terms of the grains and everything. I think the thing about grains is there was, there's a huge element of truth in the fact grains are perfectly good basis for a diet, particularly as they're quite cheap. And we kind of forget because food has become so plentiful. We forget the fact that if you want to give dietary advice, then you've got to be able to advise people to eat plenty of things which are affordable.
But the problem with that message was if you think about how most grains are sold in a country like America or the United Kingdom, it's in the form of heavily processed industrial bread and things like breakfast cereals and breakfast cereals really, I mean actually. But breakfast cereals are complicated. Again, it's an example of how one shouldn't be too simplistic. Breakfast cereals tend to be very, very sugary. They tend to be not that good for us, not full of whole grains, but generations have been brought up thinking this is a great thing. You can give your kids for a healthy start to the day. But the reason I don't be too dogmatic about that is that in this whole debate about ultra processed foods, when people try and break it down a bit and go, well, are they all equally as bad as each other? Et cetera, et cetera, they find that industrially produced whole meal bread and whole grain cereals that are not massively over the sweet do seem to contribute to making people healthier.
And the reason to understand that is you've got to compare it to what they would be eating otherwise compared to a homemade bowl of oatmeal or just some sort of unsweetened gran or something, of course it's not as good. But in the society we live in, people eat those kinds of things for breakfast rather than some other processed products like Pop-Tarts or things like that. They are healthier. So I think we don't want to sort of demonize everything that's manufactured and everything that's a bit sweet because we want to improve people's diets from the base of where they are. We don't want to give them an unrealistic idea. They've got to go out and cook everything from scratch and everything's got to be fresh or else you're poisoning your children and yourself.
Suzy Chase: So as a private citizen, what should we be focusing on in terms of food? Should we be going to the farmer's market more? What do you suggest?
Julian Baggini: This is something I think I've changed my mind on a bit over the years because I think that as a citizen, you have a responsibility to do the best you can, make the right choices you can. And that will involve largely trying to buy from small suppliers often, but not just local. You want to buy internationally as well. You want to get those fairly traded fruits from the Caribbean, whatever it might be, Palestinian, olive oil, whatever it might be, which I can get in Britain. So it is not about purely being local, but I think to be honest, there's a bit of a myth that the way to solve the crisis, it's through the shopping basket. We'll shop our way to a better world that really won't do it. I mean, there've been people conscientiously trying to buy the right things for decades, and they still represent a very, very small proportion of the population.
So change has to occur at the systemic level. But here, I mean there's this, in the UK we've had this organization which has advocated what they call the citizen shift. So what they say is we think of ourselves too often as consumers. First we are the consumer, but let's remember, we are citizens as well, and as food citizens, there are things we can do and there are levers you can pull at institutional level. So I think I'd encourage people to say, what institutions do you have some influence over? Now sometimes these are quite big. Public procurement is a huge part of the food system. What schools and hospitals and government departments buy for their food, they have huge contracts. So if you are in one of those organizations, you can push so that those contracts that go out to tender have the kind of conditions in them which ensure that they supply healthy, sustainable, fairly priced food.
You can do this at all sorts of levels. I'm a member of a tennis club actually, and it is certain small, but as a tennis club, we formed an ethics and environment committee a few years ago, and it's quite remarkable what we managed to do already. I mean, a lot of it is around the environment, but we have a small bar and all that kind of thing. And gradually we're kind of shifting the kind of thing we get in. So there's less plastic, there's more sustainable produce, whatever it might be. I mean, that's small, but I think whatever the tennis club is affecting hundreds of people, my own shopping basket is affecting too. And I think it's the same for all of us. So find the levers that you can help to pull and collectively pull those.
Suzy Chase: Now for my segment called The Perfect Bite where I ask you to describe the perfect bite of a favorite dish.
Julian Baggini: There's one thing which I will never eat again, which I think would be the perfect bite. I grew up in England. My mother was English and we didn't have much proper Italian food at home, but we did use to go to visit the family in Italy. And we often went to Easter. And at Easter, I mean we always had the risotto, which was always delicious. I always had a, not just second, I had a third portion, I had a third portion of everything. But the thing that was the highlight was for Easter Sunday, Anana used to make the ravioli and she made it for the extended family. So the days before we'd have these sheets of pasta rolled out on every available flat surface on tea towels filled with whatever the meat must have been. I think it was probably a kind of pork. And then it was served in the day in a pretty simple ragu.
Now this is actually really simple cooking in a way. It's not as simple in the sense it takes a lot of preparation, but it's just good home cooking. It's not restaurant food. And that ravioli, it was delicious. And I think partly because at the time it was just a different level to anything else I'd ever had. I mean, now I can get very good Italian food in England and I can make things as well, but that and I will never taste it again because our grandmother died many, many years ago, and that's just not a tradition, the answer. So the other generation kept going, although they're all good home cooks making ravioli for them. Every time I've had ravioli since then, they've actually it from a shop, good stuff from a shop, not the supermarket, a nice pastor shop, but still not the same. I think one of the secrets of enjoying food well is to let things go.
Because the whole point about the pleasure of food is that it's ephemeral, and it's like the old Buddhist idea. If you start craving and sort of becoming too attached to your pleasure, it becomes unsatisfying. You eat it, but then you want it again, and you are disappointed. It's finished. So the kind of attitude to food you should cultivate is you enjoy it and you savor it. You can enjoy the memory, but once it's gone, it's gone. Once your favorite restaurant is closed, it's closed, and you're just pleased that you've had it and you don't crave that, you must have it again
Suzy Chase: Said like a philosopher. Where can we find you on the web in social media?
Julian Baggini: Well, my website is just julianbaggini.com. I am on Instagram, Julian Baggini and those posts are automatically put onto Facebook.
Suzy Chase: Well, this has been truly eye-opening. Thank you so much, Julian, for coming on the show.
Julian Baggini: Well, thank you so much, Suzy. Love speaking with you.
Suzy Chase: Okay, so where can you listen to the new Dinner Party podcast series? Well, it's on substack suzy chase.substack.com. You can also subscribe to Dinner Party for free on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Additionally, the episodes will be available on both Decorating by the Book and Cookery by the Book. Long story short, you'll be able to listen to it virtually everywhere. Thanks for listening. Bye.
