Feast and famine: The holiness of food policy
Feast and famine: The holiness of food policy
How we manage our food consumption reflects the quality of our politics, writes George Pitcher. And the signs aren't promising
I invoked here at the end of March the Book of Revelation’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, to note that we’d emerged from the covid plague immediately to face war in Ukraine. Famine and death couldn’t be far behind, I noted dolefully.
Now the Governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, has predicted – some might say prophesied – “apocalyptic” price rises in food staples as a consequence of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which will threaten the world’s poorest peoples. Developing countries such as Egypt and Tunisia depend heavily on Ukrainian food staples and they are simply not being shipped out. Famine? Tick.
Pharaoh’s dreams
Interesting to note that Egypt is particularly under threat. In the Hebrew Bible, the slave-traded exile Joseph interprets the Pharaoh’s dreams to predict - some might say prophesy - that seven years of abundance will be followed by seven of famine, meaning that the Pharaoh wisely stores grain in the years of plenty to account for the forthcoming famine. Egypt becomes the bread basket of the holy lands.
The story counterpoints starkly with the Parable of the Rich Fool in Luke’s gospel. Here, a wealthy farmer enjoys an abundant harvest and stores his grain so that he might “eat, drink and be merry”, only to be told by his God that he’s a fool, for that night he will die and his opportunity for generosity, to feed the poor, is squandered.
The two stories contrast the economic prudence of Egypt, managing its food resources to sell to its neighbours, with the personal selfishness of individuals who enrich and feed only themselves. The two come together in our contemporary politics – how we manage our food policies in relation to our neighbours is ordered by the quality of the individuals who lead our politics.
Food-policy U-turn
Two food-policy stories this week in the UK’s political sphere neatly illustrate this dynamic. The first is the Government’s policy U-turn on tackling a national obesity crisis with interventions to ban buy-one-get-one-free (bogof) deals on rubbish, fattening “foods” and imposing a 9pm watershed on junk-food advertising.
The Government caved in to pressure from its backbenchers, who object to the “nanny state” image of anti-obesity issues. Two points to make here: First, “nanny-state” is all too often a convenient fig-leaf for free-marketeers looking after their profiteering friends in the food industries.
Second, one of the policies concurrently abandoned was a ban on foie gras, a food delicacy which involves the most grotesque farming of geese. Intervention was described as “fundamentally unConservative”. The only logical conclusion of which is that animal cruelty is fundamentally Conservative, which I suppose might explain support for the hunting of (inedible) foxes.
Junk-food cycle
The declared issue here is freedom – the freedom to eat what you want. But those trapped economically in the junk-food cycle, addicted to cheap, processed foods, know no such freedom. The 99p burger is as exploitative as the drug dealer. Obesity levels in Surrey are a fraction of what they are on sink-states in the north-east of England. Fat is a political issue.
William Hague, not himself an unqualified success as a Conservative leader of the past, nevertheless this week condemned his political tribe’s food rebels for “acquiescing in a future of higher dependence, greater costs, reduced lifestyle choice and endless pain.”
He doesn’t mince his words in conclusion: “For the Government to give in to them is intellectually shallow, politically weak and morally reprehensible.” If only a bishop had said that.
Part of the problem is that Hague is from a generation of political giants from the nineties to the twenty-teens, compared with the current occupants of office. Which brings me to the second food issue of the week.
Food banks
Lee Anderson MP followed in the finest traditions of his political tribe’s victim-blaming by claiming that food banks are unnecessary, because nutritious meals can be cooked for 30p, but poor people don’t know how to cook them.
Not only does this channel Marie Antoinette’s (almost certainly apocryphal) “let them eat cake” in its almost self-satirical ignorance, it doesn’t bear the vaguest arithmetical scrutiny; as journalist Frances Ryan counters, food-bank clients often eschew potatoes because of the spiralling energy cost of cooking them. It also seeks to blame the poor for their own poverty.
That mindset chimes with the established order of two millennia ago that the gospel disrupted forever. The “elect”, God’s chosen people, prospered because of their virtue – the poor were so because they were sinners. Luke, the author not only of his gospel but the Acts of the Apostles, holds that the poor were not just the economically deprived who must be fed, but the alienated, the vulnerable, the dispossessed and the despised.
The Christian faith is born in the scandalous news that these erstwhile low-lifes are not just the social equals of the elite, but made in the image and blessed in the eyes of God.
That’s why we feed the hungry, not because we’re nannies of the state. Food policy and Christian ministry are indistinguishable. And that’s why addressing the fat of the land isn’t just a political issue. It’s a holy one too.
George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest.