Issue 126 book review sustainable diets

BOOK REVIEW

SUSTAINABLE DIETS: How ecological nutrition can transform consumption and the food system Review by Ursula Arens Writer; Nutrition & Dietetics Ursula has a degree in dietetics, and currently works as a freelance nutrition writer. She has been a columnist on nutrition for more than 30 years.

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AUTHORS: PAMELA MASON AND TIM LANG PUBLISHER: ROUTLEDGE, JANUARY 2017 ISBN: 978-0-415-74472-0 (PAPERBACK) PRICE: Paperback £28.94

This is a mighty beast of a book, dedicated to the elephant in the room of nutrition science. Meaning the big and grey and trumpeting elephant of environmental threat . . .

Actually, a herd of elephants that can trample over any societal plans for improvements of human health and equality and well-being. Elephants with the tags greenhouse gas emissions, water shortage, acidification, eutrophication, species collapse, marine Armageddon, genetic diversity shrinkage and control systems concentration. All the things that we know for sure will affect food supply and distribution and, ultimately, all human diets.

Dr Pamela Mason is a nutritionist with expertise in food policy and public health. Co-author Dr Tim Lang is professor at the Centre for Food Policy at the City University of London. Both authors are dedicated to widening the discussions of ‘what is a good diet?’ to matters beyond the nutrient content of the foods we eat.

With predictions of a global population increase of three billion people in the next 30 years, everything that is currently challenging in terms of food production and distribution will get more so. Ultimately needed, although not directly discussed in this book, are population-control measures.

But what are the possible policies to address concerns of environmental crisis affecting food supply in the future? Mason and Lang identify eight possible policy responses to dietary (un)sustainability. These range from

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denial, to technical-fix solutions, to information-and-duty on consumer choices, to focus on human health aspects of diet, to just cutting the peak environmental challengers of beef and dairy production. All of these measures are discussed in detail, and all-of-theabove are the correct responses.

The book is jam-packed with facts and figures describing eco-stress. As a taster: ‘Globally, the blue water footprint of food wastage - the consumption of surface and groundwater resources - is about 250km3 which is the equivalent to the annual water discharge of the Volga river, or three times the volume of Lake Geneva.’ The critique by Emperor Joseph II to Mozart about his Marriage of Figaro opera, “too many notes”, seems relevant. But perhaps too many notes are needed to convince all of us to consider and act on all the evidence that business-as-usual is not an option.

And some national governments have issued guidelines. Mason and Lang praise Sweden for support of less meat consumption and local and organic food choices, but note subsequent reprimand from the EU on this. They praise Brazil for advice to eat freshly prepared foods, together with others whenever possible, and avoid packaged or advertised products. They especially commend the ambitious and sustainably principled national dietary

Sustainable Diets . . . is a highly detailed book full of brick-solid data on the most important food subject of today (and tomorrow).

guidelines from the tiny, but very rich kingdom of Qatar! They welcome brave but failed attempts by the US 2015 Dietary Guidelines committee, to introduce sustainable considerations into public health advice: they claim the US meat lobby successfully thwarted these developments. They note that even the Chinese government set a remarkable public consumption target of a 50% meat reduction in June 2016, although this is very painfully counterbalanced by the statistic that China subsidised pig production by $22 billion in 2012 ($47 per pig!).

My favourite chapter is the one on real food economics. Mason and Lang call for moves from value-for-money to values-for-money. They use several measures to support the view that food is cheap and is very unlikely to be getting cheaper. EU figures on consumer spending of foods shows lowest amounts in the UK at less than 10%, rising to about 20% in most Eastern European countries. Agricultural prices using the wonderfully named Grilli-Yang index, shows an annual 1% decline from 1900; today the index is 40 percentage points down from levels of 1977-9. The chapter then considers issues of externalised costs, and polluter-pays costs, and Mason and Lang call on national and agricultural economists to develop wider pricing mechanisms to support the sustainable diet.

The book critiques the limited success of education and labelling in changing consumer intakes of meat and dairy, but the huge volumes of data fizzle out fast in the discussions of population-wide effects on nutrient intake and health from sustainable diets. If UK diets were modified with a 90% increase in beans and pulses and a 78% reduction in red meat (calculated by Scarborough et al, 2016 to achieve

Eatwell Guide targets), what, for example, are predicted increases in iron-deficiency anaemia in pre-menopausal women? What fortification and/or supplementation policies could be used to address these?

There is a huge dietitian-shaped hole in discussions of dietary consequences from sustainable diet policies, and predictions that in the future dietitians will be much needed to add sense and detail to these considerations is not rocket-science. In fact, Mason and Lang observe that dietitians may have become professionally distracted by the excitement of the mapping of the genome and less focused less on the social and behavioural traditions of nutrition science. They caution that dietitians and other food professions cannot bury their heads in the sand over these themes: “Their influence as ‘actors’ for the sustainable diet transition is considerable.”

For all the infinite detail of food production issues threatened by environmental destruction, the main conclusions in the book observe the most extreme pinch-points from the consumption of fish, and the consumption of meat (especially ruminants) and dairy. For the UK diet, this means less animal-sourced proteins and more plant-sourced proteins. To what degree the mix of future UK diets will contain more beans and nuts, or more insects, or more synthetic laboratory-produced ‘meats’ is unknown: but future dietitians will be the expert advisors.

Sustainable Diets by Mason and Lang is a highly detailed book full of brick-solid data on the most important food subject of today (and tomorrow). It is a really essential reference for all dietitians who want to participate in discussions and debates on food choices for the future. www.NHDmag.com July 2017 - Issue 126

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