FINANCIAL TIMES SEPTEMBER 9/SEPTEMBER 10 2006 ★ WEEKEND W7

B O O K S

Something to chew overAlthough often priced cheaply, mass-produced food costs us far more dearly than we think, says Sarah Murray

F ood, glorious food! What isthere more handsome? Gulped,swallowed or chewed – stillworth a king’s ransom!” singthe hungry workhouse boys in

the musical Oliver!. Sadly, such anunreservedly joyous approach to eat-ing is becoming harder to counte-nance. As the environmental impact ofagribusiness emerges and an obesityepidemic sweeps across the globe, foodis at the heart of fierce debates.

These debates have spawned plentyof books. Marion Nestle, Eric Schlosserand Morgan Spurlock are among thoseto have highlighted the more unsa-voury aspects of our industrialised foodsupply. Joining them are MichaelPollan with The Omnivore’s Dilemmaand Princeton bio-ethicist Peter Singerand his co-author Jim Mason with TheWay We Eat.

Both books explore the social andenvironmental impact of what we eat,using small lenses through which toscrutinise big issues: Pollan analyses aseries of meals, while Singer andMason take the food purchases of fourfamilies and examine how they wereproduced.

Singer and Mason’s prose is straight-forward and clear although, at times,

unexciting. The authors evidently feel –and with some justification – that thefacts speak for themselves. Certainly,the descriptions of factory farming needno embellishment. Tales of chickensbeing debeaked and pigs castrated makefor extremely unpleasant reading.

Such material is not new. In 1980,Singer and Mason themselves pub-lished horrific accounts of the cruelty

inflicted on animals in their controver-sial Animal Factories and others havesince written extensively on the prac-tices of the meat industry. But if theauthors – both animal rights advocates– appear to be embarking on a familiarattack on factory farming, there aresurprises in store. For a start, theyconstantly challenge conventional wis-dom. One might, for example, thinkbuying organic is the answer, but at anorganic egg producer the authors arealarmed to find hens still crowded intoa large shed.

Organic farming might foster bio-diversity, but organically fed cows eata higher proportion of grass and haythan conventionally fed cows. As aresult, the burps of organically fedcows contain larger quantities of meth-ane, a greenhouse gas that is at least 20times more toxic than carbon dioxide(interestingly, cattle are thought to beresponsible for almost half the world’smethane emissions).

Buying locally produced food wouldseem an obvious ethical choice, reduc-ing “food miles” and supporting localfarms. But a better option might be tobuy snow peas from Zimbabwe, whereif even a small percentage of the retailprice goes to growers, it can signifi-

cantly boost their annual income. Weare constantly assailed with such con-flicting choices in The Way We Eat. Attimes, the task of making ethical pur-chasing decisions seems impossible.What on earth can we eat when evenvegetarianism claims its victims in thethousands of small creatures that per-

ish beneath harvesting machines?Fortunately, a neat summary of the

issues covered appears at the end ofthe book, along with a section underthe heading “Food is an ethical issue –but you don’t have to be fanaticalabout it.” This suggests we simplymake more thoughtful choices aboutwhat we eat (which generally meansbuying more expensive food), even if

we err occasionally. This, say theauthors, is better than forgetting thewhole thing simply because one day wecould not resist the smell of fryingbacon. There is also a section on whereto find “ethical food”.

In an altogether more personal jour-ney in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollanexamines many of the problems thatworry Singer and Mason. Pollan alsogets his hands dirty, making hay, killingchickens and hunting pigs. In between,the story of US farming unfolds as welearn how the industrialised food chainsthat shape what we eat emerged.

As is so often the case with techno-logical advances, bad follows good. Thedevelopment of synthetic fertiliser, forexample, augmented natural sources ofnitrogen, thereby creating a more sta-ble food supply. But fertilisers requireenergy to manufacture, so this break-through also marked a dramaticchange: instead of “eating exclusivelyfrom the sun”, says Pollan, “humanitynow began to sip petroleum.”

As well as engaging with history,Pollan also explores market economics(why cheap staples have penetratedevery corner of the food chain), sociol-ogy (how organic labelling seduces con-sumers longing to connect with a pas-

toral idyll) and farming philosophy (is“industrial organic” a contradiction interms?). He throws in a healthy dose ofself-deprecation along the way.

It is easy to predict which of Pollan’smeals will be found more nutritionallyand philosophically satisfying: aMcDonald’s, an “industrial organic”dinner, a meal of local, sustainablyfarmed ingredients or one he hashunted and gathered himself. But thismisses the point. The most compellingpart of the book is what comes betweenmeals – a fascinating exploration ofeverything from industrial feedlots tohow plants produce poisons to fend offpotential predators.

Although written in different stylesand crossing swords on animal rights,both books have a recurring theme: thehidden cost of cheap food. The 99¢ ham-burger comes at a high price if youcount the carbon emissions, agriculturalpollution, human healthcare and animalsuffering that are its by-products. In tot-ting these up, cheap mass-produced foodstarts to look, as the workhouse boysput it, “worth a king’s ransom”.

Sarah Murray is writing a book aboutfood, ‘Moveable Feasts: The IncredibleJourneys of the Things We Eat’

Eat natural: a farmer and his son on their organic pig farm in New Hampton, Iowa Corbis

One might think buyingorganic is the answer, but atan organic egg producer theauthors are alarmed to findhens crowded into a shed

THE OMNIVORE’S DILEMMA:The Search for a PerfectMeal in a Fast-food World(UK title)A Natural History of FourMeals (US title)by Michael PollanPenguin Press/Bloomsbury $26.95/£12.99,464 pages

THE WAY WE EAT:Why Our Food Choices Matterby Peter Singer and Jim MasonRodale $25.95, 328 pages

Prints not so charmingJenny Uglow on an exuberant guide to the caricatures that tarnished many an 18th-century reputation

City of Laughter is an over-flowing cornucopia of abook, stuffed with illustra-tions, rippling with stories,packed with characters, ripewith quotations, rich withinsights and argument. Thetone is fast and full-blooded,including a brilliant, bra-vura chapter on the wholediscourse of laughter.

The social historian VicGatrell explores the popularprints of the time, cheer-fully taking issue with pastscholars and laying claim tothe subject as fresh terri-tory. Although many recentauthors have used print sat-ire to illustrate their work,the prints themselves andthe laughter they inducedhave been woefully under-studied. For that lapse thisbook makes magnificentamends.

There is far more herethan sex – everything frompugilism to poverty laws.The scope extends beyondthe 18th century to thedemise of such ribald, gener-ous bums-and-farts jokes inthe 1830s. But sex and thecity are at the heart of hisstudy and so is the complexrelationship between highand low art, polite and popu-lar humour.

We know where we arefrom the first pages, whereReynolds’ portrait of Lady

Worsley in her fashionableriding habit is underminedby Gillray’s print, “Sir Rich-ard Worsley Worse-than-sly,Exposing his Wife’s Bottom –o fye!” This was publishedduring Worsley’s law suitagainst Captain Bisset for“criminal conversation” withhis wife, during which it tran-spired that he had himselfhoisted Bisset up to peep atLady W through a hole in amilitary camp bathhouse.The comedy of such doubleexposure is, as Gatrell says,“bawdy, knowing and ironic”.

Foreigners consideredsuch prints an indicationof British “liberty”. Morethan 20,000 were issued inthis period, “selling expen-sively in scores, hundredsor thousands of copies”,and nearly all were pro-duced in London. Gatrell isinterested in where peoplelaughed, as well as howand what at, and his earlychapters offer a vivid topo-graphical and cultural tourof the “booming, consum-ing, commercial capital”.

Prints drew on the ancient

rough humour of the street,the fair and the tavern andon the upside-down world ofthe carnival and masqueradeand while the costly copper-plates sold to the elite, theiraudience was far wider.When they hung in the print-shop windows, as Goldsmithsaid: “The brick-dust mantook up as much room as thetruncheoned hero and thejudge was elbowed by thethief-taker; quacks, pimpsand buffoons increased thegroup and noted stallionsonly made room for morenoted strumpets.”

Gatrell’s account of print-sellers such as W.S. Foresand Thomas Tegg brings lostfigures vividly to light.But his real heroes arethe printmakers and heprovides superb chapterson Gillray’s “dreamscapes”,Cruikshank’s radicalism andRowlandson’s life-affirmingcelebration of chaos. Farfrom being motivated by rad-ical ideals, these artists weresimply trying to make aliving. They supported what-ever political side wouldpay and – as with Gillray’scruel satires of Lady Strath-more – sometimes undertookunpleasant commissions.

But if the humour seemsflagrantly male, with itsbumptious repetition of piss-ing and groping, breasts andopen legs, on inspection itturns out that men are cari-catured far more harshlythan women. Rowlandson’sseductresses are clearly hav-ing a jollier time than thedodderers who ogle them.And women were keenpurchasers, too, avidly snap-ping up fashion satires andprints of their neighbours’sexual downfall.

Prints were hot gossip

with edge. The diffidence ofHogarth’s day had long gone– it was almost impossible tosue for libel – and targetssuch as the politician CharlesFox tried to shrug off satires.But Gatrell shows that theprints, shadowing the old“image magic” of stickingpins into intended victims,did affect reputations.

As Prince Regent, GeorgeIV had been the butt ofhundreds of satires, from thesplendidly literal “His High-ness in Fitz”, after his secretmarriage in 1785 to Mrs Fitz-herbert, to Gillray’s iconic

“A Voluptuary” of 1792 andGeorge Cruikshank’s “RoyalEmbarkation” in 1819.

Once on the throne,George IV silenced the pub-lishers with massive bribes.At the same time “the Age ofCant” arrived, fending offthe dazzling comic thrustwith its sentiment, earnest-ness and reforming zeal.Remembering his grandfa-ther’s huge albums of prints,Thackeray lamented theirpassing. We should be grate-ful to Gatrell for bringingthem to exuberant life again.

Jenny Uglow is author of‘Nature’s Engraver: A Life ofThomas Bewick’

CITY OF LAUGHTER:Sex and Satire inEighteenth-CenturyLondonby Vic GatrellAtlantic Books/Walker &Company £30/$39.95, 696 pages

The judge elbowed by the thief-taker: from ‘Caricature Shop’, 1801

A writer’s exploration of auniverse without parallelWill we ever grasp the secrets of the cosmos, asks Alan Cane

Admirers of Michael Frayn’swork, such as his sublimesatire on journalism,Towards the End of theMorning, his theatricalstudy of moral ambiguityamong physicists, Copenha-gen, or the glorious farceNoises Off, may find TheHuman Touch a surprising,perhaps even unsettling,addition to his oeuvre.

It is a philosophical dis-course, an extended solilo-quy – penetrating, oftenwhimsical and sometimesdownright irritating – on therelationship between humanconsciousness and thenature of the universe.

The universe will still bethere whether the humanrace exists or not, Frayncontends, before going on toquestion whether – withouthuman minds to measureand wonder at its size andscale – the universe existsat all. The world only hasform and substance, he sug-gests, because of our contri-bution: “We are activeagents in the traffic, co-originators in it, autono-mous members of the greatco-operative.”

Put another way, Frayn’sessential question is: “Is theworld in one way or anotherout there or is it in here?”

(his italics). This is a para-dox that has puzzled think-ers for centuries, so it’s nosurprise that even as clevera writer as Frayn comes upwith no definitive answer.

The centrepiece of Frayn’selaborate piece of intellec-tual architecture is thathuman awareness is basedon analogy: we can compre-hend the new only in termsof what we already know.Now take a deep breath: “Ifin the end,” he argues, “wecome to understand some-thing about the quarks thatcompose the protons and

neutrons that compose thenuclei at the heart of theatoms that compose the mol-ecules that compose the cellsthat compose the bacteriathat keep us alive or aboutthe quasars that blaze inconditions entirely removedfrom any we have ever comeacross, even in the depth ofour own galaxy and uponprinciples which seem tosubvert the physics of theworld we know, at the veryedge of the perceptible uni-verse and the very beginningof reconstructible time, thenthat understanding comes atthe end of a long chain ofanalogy which has its begin-

nings in our most humbledealings with the everydayworld around us.” Phew!That ’s a sentence thateven the late British col-umnist Bernard Levin, mas-ter of the multiple-depend-ent clause, would havestrained to emulate.

Fortunately, there are nottoo many sentences likethat in The Human Touch,although Frayn is fond oframming his points homewith a kind of circum-locutory wilfulness that attimes had me reaching formy metaphorical shotgun.

It’s reasonable to ask whysuch an accomplished writershould have chosen to writethis provocative but diffi-cult book. Perhaps there is aclue towards the end whereFrayn, 73, writes: “Soon Ishall close my eyes not tem-porarily and experimentallybut permanently and in ear-nest. I shall cease to keepmy eye on things – ceaseeven to dream them. So itwill be up to you to keep thewhole performance going.”

Perhaps The HumanTouch is Frayn’s testament,an expansion of thoughtsabout life, the universe andeverything that cannot livewithin his books or plays.And a marker of that inevi-table sadness that comeswith the knowledge that nomatter how much one readsor writes, no matter howfar back in time the tele-scopes peer, no matter howwe learn about the mecha-nism of the mind, the funda-mental secrets of the uni-verse will remain just outof reach. Frayn is passingthe baton.

THE HUMAN TOUCH:Our Part inthe Creation ofthe Universeby Michael FraynMetropolitan Books/Faber &Faber $32.50/£20, 704 pages

The world onlyhas form andsubstance, Fraynsuggests, because ofour contribution

Women were keenpurchasers, avidlysnapping up fashionsatires and prints oftheir neighbours’sexual downfall