Are we eating too much processed meat?

Meat consumption is dominating the news agenda these days and the latest headlines concern the risk of cancer from eating processed meat. New data comes from the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC) study (covering 10 countries and around half a million people) indicating that high consumption of processed meat is associated with an 18% increased risk for all-cause mortality.

However, the risk was much lower with red meat than with processed meats – indeed no statistically significant link between fresh meat consumption and mortality was found. This distinction was hard to find in the tabloid headlines and the storyline was, “sausages and bacon are bad for you”.

Past peak meat consumption

Regardless of the tabloid’s reporting of these new  findings, if we stop and look at the statistics more widely it may be that consumers in developed economies are already reducing consumption of meat even without the latest news from EPIC.  In the USA per capita consumption of meat has fallen by about 10% in the last 5-6 years and in Europe per capita consumption has levelled off. In the USA some commentators believe that the country is now past “peak” meat consumption.  That news may come as a shock to Texas cowboys but the numbers  are there to back this claim up.

There are also reasons to believe (horsemeat scandals, recession, etc) that meat consumption is also falling in some European countries.  The latest Which?  survey supports this in the UK and notes that consumer trust in the food industry has dropped by 24% since the horsemeat scandal broke. 30% of shoppers are now buying less processed meat and 24% are buying fewer ready meals with meat in, or choosing vegetarian options. The retailers have suffered in all of this: before the scandal broke, nine in 10 felt confident when buying products in the supermarket. This has dropped to seven in 10.

Food security policy

It would appear that consumers’ perceptions about health and food safety procedures in meat production and consumption are leading them to reduce consumption  and change their shopping habits -  almost regardless of the scientific evidence.  This has implications for food security policy.

Meat consumption in Asia and China has grown rapidly recently and the impact of meat production on climate change is acknowledged to be significant. Our Global Security Forum in Shanghai last year had several papers that demonstrated these aspects of meat production and consumption.  And from these papers and the Forum’s discussion some solutions and ideas for research were generated. Amongst these were low carbon productions systems and less resource intensive diets (less meat consumption).

However, one lesson that we might draw from meat consumption statistics and consumer behaviour in the West (if we agree that less meat consumption is needed)  is that consumers in Asia may slow their growth in meat consumption because of health and food safety issues if their meat providers and media allow the creation of negative perceptions. Even without the scientific evidence global peak meat consumption may arrive sooner than we might have thought.

The horsemeat scandal in the UK food industry chain isn’t the first example of contamination in the UK’s beef supply chain.  The BSE/mad cow scare in the mid-1990s began a train of actions that resulted in “traceability” systems being introduced for the UK and European beef industry. At the time this was world class and the UK farm and food industry showed real innovation in creating the Red Tractor scheme  – albeit farmers and processors have often complained about the costs of applying the new “assurance systems”. But the latest scare demonstrates a big weakness of the current traceability system for meat – the reliance on form filling and regular audits.

Clearly, checking meat and food products in the UK (and the rest of the world) will always be necessary and the application of monitoring and testing procedures is part of this. Traceability through the chain  is part of this but as such systems have become more comprehensive  the record keeping and auditing procedures have become more costly and time consuming – and they are heavily dependent on form filling and labelling by humans. Worse, as the present scandal seems to show, they are open to criminal manipulation.

Before we despair about the next hike in costs that more audits or form filling imply it’s worth recalling an earlier blog that demonstrated how this sort of fraud can be prevented – and that can reduce costs. That blog illustrated how Chinese researchers in Chengdu, Sichuan have designed and implemented a traceability system for pork and for vegetable products that guarantees an electronic, paper-free trail from the farmers’ fields to the consumers’ tables. In other words, a system exists (and is being rolled out to other cities in China) that would have prevented the horsemeat scandal that is now being played out on our TV screens.

The traceability system in Chengdu does not rely on form filling – it uses the three technologies of RFID (radio frequency identification), wi-fi, and Cloud systems of data collection and analysis. Simply put, the Chengdu system records each stage in a product’s journey through the food chain electronically. Audits can occur at virtually zero cost (even by smartphone) and any fraud would require tampering  with electronic records (not impossible but rather more difficult than re-labelling boxes of horsemeat and creating a false delivery note).

What does this example of innovation in China teach us about the way we deal with food traceability systems in the UK?  Well, firstly it shows that it’s possible to have traceability without big increases in costs and, secondly, that these new “electronic” systems will be less open to criminal manipulation than current ones. The costs of the current horsemeat scandal and the associated product recalls are significant and may yet run into millions.

The damage to brand reputations will be even greater.  As an academic who has researched the costs of food scares and who ran a meat and fine foods company for four year I can testify to the size of the “hassle factor” in the current meat traceability system and it would appear that at least one part of the criminal fraternity has demonstrated its weaknesses. The time has come to learn a lesson from the Chinese on how to avoid more horse trading in the UK.

The Institute of Mechanical Engineers (IME) has hit the headlines this week with its report on waste in the global food system. The report makes some bold assertions and estimates that, because of  poor practices in  harvesting, storage and transportation, as well as market and consumer wastage, 30–50% (or 1.2–2 billion tonnes) of all food is wasted. That’s  a bold claim and I am not going to question the mathematics here. (But I do note that the supermarkets in the UK have refuted the IME’s claim that supermarket promotions and a reluctance to stock produce that is not visually attractive, are part of this waste problem).

Whatever the level of waste it seems commonsense to believe that reducing “waste” is part of the set of solutions for achieving global food security.  Indeed, at the University’s recent food security forum in Shanghai recently, two of the speakers highlighted the waste issue.  Dr Yuelai Lu from the UK-China Sustainable Agriculture Innovation Network (SAIN) noted that one of the key actions needed for food security was to “reduce waste” and Professor Lin Erda from the Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change detailed a key recommendation of the Commission to, “reduce loss and waste in food systems, targeting infrastructure, farming practices, processing, distribution and household habits”.

But what is “waste”?

In my experience of the agri-food chain, and with my professional economics hat on, I can only say that “waste” is what we do not value and it is a concept that requires some care in our discussions. And, mostly, the marketplace ensures that valuations give us good guidance on what is, or is not, wasteful.

A few examples  will help us understand how the definition of waste changes according to market conditions. If you are ever lucky enough to visit the Caribbean or any sub-tropical climate you cannot fail to notice the amount of tropical fruit that lies rotting by the roadside. This fruit is waste because the cost of storing it or transforming it into a nutritious food product is very high, and by the fact that there are plentiful supplies of fresh fruit to replace any fruit that is not eaten in prime condition.

We can always reduce waste by a technical process but if the cost of doing so means that we cannot use financial resources to, say, improve sewage provision, supplies of clean water or access to medicines we have not helped anyone by reducing food  waste. On the other hand, a fresh produce producer in East Anglia in the UK will know that the costs of removing the waste green matter or rejected vegetables from his production site to a landfill destination will be very high and so will attempt to reduce his “waste” or transform it into another use e.g. compost or biomass for energy production. In the East Anglian situation the comparison of costs and alternative uses of finance is quite different than for the sub-tropical region.

The marketplace

But in both cases the marketplace guides our view of what is waste and what the appropriate amount of effort should be to reduce waste. It is not as simple as saying, all food waste is bad. Crucially, “food waste” is not an absolute concept – it must be considered relative to all the actions and resources available in the food system.

The IME report recommended that more technical know-how should be transferred to developing countries to help reduce waste and that Government policy should be proactive and try to change consumer expectations and retailers’ “wasteful practices”. Unfortunately, the IME missed out on one important recommendation that would have driven these know-how transfers and consumer preferences more efficiently than any government policy or technical aid programme. We need the market to operate in the agri-food system and only then can we be sure that “food waste” will be at an optimal level – where resources are allocated to production (and waste reduction) in the correct manner.

Food for thought

A day out in York in cold, snowy December probably isn’t that appealing but I was tempted when I heard that the Women’s Institute was launching its report Food for thought: global and national challenges of food security.

This was part of its Great Food Debate  - a debate which it wants to see gathering steam next year. I wasn’t the only one prepared to endure the weather as the Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Owen Patterson, was in York too and he shared the platform with an alumnus of the University, Peter Kendall, the President of the National Farmers’ Union. Whatever the WI’s report might say these policy-makers and opinion-formers knew that the +200,000 members of the WI would be very engaged in the debate on food security in the near future.  I had high hopes of learning something from this event so the trek seemed worthwhile.

And did I learn anything from this venture north? 

Well, I didn’t get answers to a lot of questions but I did get confirmation that the Global Food Security research group at the University is asking the right questions – and that there are a lot of them. Again and again the speakers, the WI’s report, and the audience came back to the same (long) list of challenges and queries in the food security agenda and, generally, they put the emphasis on science and rational debate to answer those inquiries.  This was one learning point – that the University is right to have a multi-disciplinary evidence-based approach to global food security research and that we have identified many of the challenges that will determine the correct outcome to the research efforts in this area. Even if the destination is not clear it’s good to know that we are travelling in the right direction.

Perhaps it wasn’t surprising that the Secretary of State approached the problems in a reasoned and rational way as he is the brother in law of Matt Ridley the author of The Rational Optimist. But it was pleasing, nevertheless, to hear a key politician underlining the need to have science-based answers to food security questions. This was another learning point and one that I was pleased to identify in the attitude of a key policy-maker as I reflected on the evening’s discussions on my return south.

The time is now

The NFU President, Peter Kendall, made an important observation as well – that the Foresight Report on food security  may have made a mistake in talking about what we needed to do by 2050. In Kendall’s view we need to be talking about what we need to do by 2025 – or a lot of people will be going hungry, and the planet will be warming uncontrollably, long before 2050 appears in the smartphone calendar or the PC’s desktop diary. I hope that I am not overly influenced by Mr Kendall’s links with Nottingham University (he is one of our graduates) but I think this is a crucial point. There is no time to waste and we should not let the policy-makers think that the answers to food security challenges can wait until after the next election – or, worse, after the next but one.

The WI’s great food debate could not come at a better time and it’s a debate that the University’s research priority group can play a part in – indeed, our recent Shanghai food security forum is a launching pad for entry into the “great food debate”. I would expect that, as part of that debate, the University’s research into global food security can offer some solutions to the long list of challenges that the WI’s meeting identified.

Recently I had three days in London listening to an array of speakers from far and wide about the future of farming and where the best investment prospects are in the world for agriculture. Three days might seem a lot (it is when the rest of your week’s work remains undone!) but these subjects eat up time, PowerPoint presentations, and informed debate and argument.

I learnt a lot and met a lot of business leaders and technical experts (an interesting mix) who had much to say. And almost all of what I learnt was relevant to global food security. The subjects covered in those three days included: soils, water, productivity, yields, consumption and population growth, innovation, and much more. And I confirmed a view that I had formed early on in my food security research – and exemplified by many of the contributions to this website – namely, that there is no silver bullet when it comes to working out the solution(s) to global food security. No single discipline or expert has the answer.

OK – so where does that take us? It seems to me that it takes us to an important conclusion about how global food security questions will be successfully addressed.

If it isn’t one branch of expertise or a single research discipline that can be relied upon to deliver progress then, obviously, we need a multi-disciplinary approach. Less obviously, this requires another type of expertise – communication skills. The latter are necessary if we are to move forward at the speed we need to muster.

Different experts cannot, per se, be expected to organize and communicate key ideas across research (and cultural) boundaries. We hear or see it every day in the news media when representatives of, for example, sport, politics or finance struggle to communicate their narrow fields of knowledge. Similar barriers occur within science disciplines, and between science and the social sciences, and between the Americas, Asia and Europe.  Yet global food security solutions need the mix of people I saw at the London conference last week if this communication challenge is to be addressed.

In a small way The University of Nottingham is doing its bit to take on this issue through its upcoming meeting in Shanghai on November 5 and 6. We have a programme that covers, we hope, all the key issues with speakers and participants drawn from across the globe. In one (very full) day we expect to identify road blocks and solutions, and to be able to articulate a consensus view from an audience that will contain many senior executives from the global food industry and the world’s research community.

There will be no silver bullets fired but I expect that we will generate the right sort of ammunition that can hit the food security target.

Taking food safety to another level

Food safety isn’t an issue that suggests compromise but in certain aspects it can be difficult to deliver. In the UK we found this when Mad Cow disease (BSE) was discovered in the beef industry in 1995. My research at that time made a contribution to understanding the costs and benefits of implementing new farm assurance schemes and actions to restore consumer confidence after new technical standards were introduced post-BSE.

Those new standards included ways of ensuring that beef products could be traced back to the abattoir and farmer that produced them. In China last week I was introduced to a traceability system for pork and vegetables using software and hardware that takes food safety to another level.

Traceability systems

My trip to China was part of collaborative research with Sichuan Agricultural University on various aspects of the pig industry in China, including pork traceability systems.  Food security is obviously directly affected by waste, contamination and consumer perceptions of the integrity of the food supply chain and so an efficient method of providing traceability is a necessary condition for food security to occur.

But it’s not an easy thing to accomplish with millions of animals and meat products needing to be monitored in the economy (and you can multiply this many times when you include fish, vegetables, dairy products, etc). Indeed, it seems a huge and expensive  task.

Costly move

In the UK the introduction of a radically improved beef traceability system was very costly but the crisis conditions at that time made it inevitable. In the city of Chengdu, in Sichuan province, the stimulus to change their system came from reports of adulteration of pork products by the addition of water back in 2008. This led to various new systems being promoted for pork traceability and what I was shown by the software engineers at BoYun in the Chengdu hi tech zone last week is a system that is probably class leading.

The Chengdu system marries radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology (which identifies a carcase or product) with Cloud computing (which collects and analyses the data) and with wifi enabled weigh scales at wholesale, retail and foodservice establishments (which measure, monitor and tag pork products) so that, at any one point or time, the meat derived from 5 million pigs per annum can be traced back through the supply chain.

Where iPhones come in…

The ubiquitous iPhone (or smartphone), with an extra piece of RFID equipment attached to it, can be used to deliver data and to receive and analyse it. From the point at which the first RFID tag is applied by human hand in the abattoir the rest of the work is done without anyone hardly doing anything differently. But when a retail customer buys a pork joint the sticky label attached to it has its weight and price and the RFID-derived information so that the customer can go on-line and see which  farmer produced it: the ultimate in traceability.

It’s concepts like the Chengdu system that will deliver improved efficiencies and benefits in all parts of the food chain in the future. It’s not jujst about one city in China or one supply chain for pork, traceability systems that truly work will be able to deliver sustainable vegetables, meat, fish and food products across global supply chains. And being part of this innovative research into traceability now makes me feel more optimistic about achieving our goals in global food security.

A meeting on our Jubilee Campus last week gave me the chance to catch up on some new developments in science and, with about 100 others, to share ideas on what vertical farming can contribute to global food security.

We were gathered together at a vertical farming workshop organised by Dr Chungui Lu and colleagues from the School of Biosciences, the Faculty of Engineering, and the Department of Architecture and the Built Environment. Over a full day the workshop’s agenda saw contributions from the University’s researchers and from external scientists and practitioners.

Vertical farming

Some of the discussions were at the very edge of the research frontier and, when I returned home that evening and was asked , what is vertical farming, I fell back on popular science fiction and replied, “It’s farming, Jim, but not as we know it”. You can see what I mean by visiting the International Vertical Farming Workshop’s website.

The discussions at the workshop convinced me that this is a subject that will undoubtedly occupy a significant amount of researchers’ time and resources in the years ahead. Vertical farming is, essentially, about how we allocate resources in a way that gets more from less – and that must be a prerequisite for actions that improve food security.

In our workshop we were given insights into: how building design might be able to accommodate crops, how plants can improve yields and the utilization of nutrients, and how vermionics and fish farming can link with vertical farming systems to increase productivity dramatically.

Chinese involvement

We were also given a presentation by visitors from the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Beijng  on the work they are doing, and from researchers working with new forms of lighting and other technologies that improve yields for crops and animals, and an update on the engineering challenges posed by the Sahara forest project in Qatar.

From this brief summary you can imagine that there was a lot to talk about on the day and many new ideas and concepts were explored. And while these were mainly scientific issues, the discussions in the workshop also touched on the socioeconomic aspects of urban and office developments that were designed to have a role in food production.

Cutting edge research

The workshop also illustrated a wider truth about food security. Namely, that the solutions that will feed the world and ensure that resources are used most effectively in food production will be based upon the application of cutting edge research in science, engineering, architecture, and the social sciences.

In finding these solutions we will need to work collaboratively and in multidisciplinary teams, and we will test our views about the future of food production to the limit.  Most of all, we will have to be bold in our research and where it leads us – even if the resulting farming system isn’t quite as we have known in the past.

Dr John Strak, Honorary Professor in Food Economics at The University of Nottingham, explores China’s growing demand for food.

The latest piece of research from The Institute of Grocery Distribution (IGD) in the UK confirms something that we all knew was coming – China has overtaken the United States as the world’s biggest food and grocery retail market.

The numbers

According to the IGD researchers, the Chinese grocery sector was worth £607 billion at the end of 2011, while the Americans spent £572 billion over the same period. This isn’t just a one off statistical event – by 2015 the IGD forecasts that the Chinese market will be worth £918 billion compared to a US spend of around £675 billion. Indeed, Chinese food sales will grow at a rate of almost 11% per annum between 2011 and 2015 – more than twice the rate of the US market.

These numbers put China’s place in the debate about global food security (GFS) in context. Clearly, a debate on food security without the involvement of the Chinese is like staging Hamlet without the Prince. It makes no sense. That’s one of the reasons why the GFS Priority Research Group at Nottingham is actively pursuing research links and meetings with Chinese colleagues at our campus in China and with new colleagues from research institutions situated all around China.

What should be done and when

I am personally making progress with new research collaborations on the Chinese meat industry with academics at Sichuan Agricultural University. And the major global food security event in Shanghai that Nottingham is hosting later this year will bring world class researchers and major global food businesses into one room in order to identify solutions to food security issues.

Stakeholders from industry and the academic community from west and east will be encouraged to focus on what can be done and by when, rather than what should be done, if ever.

 Science-led solutions

The other angle on this subject that should not be neglected is the need to construct a multidisciplinary dialogue and research effort. Science-led solutions for GFS questions will have social and cultural impacts – and will need to be framed within the existing market and economic systems. There is only so much change that the world’s institutions and trading networks can bear in a set period of time.

This last point is one that the Chinese system, with its checks and balances and its habit of considering history and tradition as an important part of dealing with change is something that I, for one, will welcome. China’s dominance of the world’s food market is a timely reminder of how important Chinese ideas will be in achieving global food security in the future.

诺丁汉大学的粮食经济学荣誉教授John Strak博士探索了中国对粮食不断增长的需求。

英国的食品分配研究所(IGD)最新的一份研究报告称，中国已经超过美国成为世界最大的粮食和副食零售市场。

统计数字

根据英国的食品分配研究所(IGD)的专家们的研究，截止2011年底中国在食品方面的销售总价值已经达到6兆70亿英镑，而美国在此方面的销售额为5兆7百20亿英镑。IGD还预计在2015年之前中国市场将突破9兆1百80亿英镑，而美国为6兆7百50亿英镑。换句话说，中国的粮食销售在2011至2015年间将达到几乎11%的年增长率，这几乎是美国市场的两倍。

这些统计数字使中国成为全球粮食安全领域讨论的中心。如果这场辩论没有中国的参与，就如同莎士比亚戏剧《哈姆雷特》中没有王子一样，完全失去了它的意义。这也是为什么诺丁汉大学全球粮食安全研究小组积极地与中国校区和其他研究机构的同行见面，讨论，切磋。

什么应该做，什么时候做

我与四川农业大学的专家们一起在就中国肉食品工业的研究上取得了进展。诺丁汉大学将在年底举办全球粮食安全会议。全世界的顶尖科学家和主要的食品企业都将前来参与这一盛会并探讨粮食安全问题。东西方企业和学术界的利益相关者将就“什么可以做以及什么时候做“而非“什么应该做”进行讨论。

以科学为主导的解决方案

从另外一个角度来看待中国与全球粮食安全问题是在跨学科的对话和研究上努力。以科学为主导的解决方法将需要在现有的市场和经济体制内形成框架，以产生社会和文化的影响。当今世界的机构和贸易网络在一定时间内还只能承受有限的改变。

中国的传统体制一贯将历史和传统作为改革的首要考量，在这一点上我个人非常赞同。中国在世界粮食市场的主导地位对于中国式思维对未来实现粮食安全的影响将是一个及时的提醒。

Small is beautiful and big is ugly – or so goes the rhetoric. And this sentiment typically triggers an avalanche of criticism for any big corporate (or public sector organisation) that suggests it may have some answers to food security questions. But it may be that the world is changing and that some of the biggest food firms are now in the forefront of best environmental and sustainable food production practices.

McDonald’s is big – 33,000 sites, 68 million customers each day in 119 countries and it has recently announced the winners in its Best of Sustainable Supply Chain competition.

Best Sustainable Supplier

Amongst the winners were Smithfield Foods for its efforts to protect the health and safety of its employees;  GenOSI Inc. for its contribution to improved animal welfare through training animal welfare officers and meat inspectors in the Philippines; Grupo Melo, a Central American supplier, which built and optimized hydro power turbines that produce excess power for the surrounding community during the rainy season;  and Fresh Start Bakeries in Europe worked with suppliers to reduce the carbon footprint resulting from the agricultural practices used to produce its main raw material, wheat.

Truly, this was a global competition for a global supply chain. In total, McDonald’s received more than 400 submissions to be recognized as “Best Sustainable Supplier” from 172 different suppliers across the world.

Big is the new small

The key point in this story is that these suppliers wanted to please their customer and their customer is big enough for this process to have a global impact. Long before the relevant government official has visited the factory site in the Philippines or South America for example, McDonald’s has induced the factory owner to institute higher standards which improve food security.

It’s difficult to see how a small supplier – or hamburger seller – could have this sort of impact. Hence my thought that big is the new small – and a belief that we cannot accept criticism of large firms just because they are large.

‘Forum for solutions’

Later this year this aspect of modern supply chains – what works best, small or large in the search for global food security – is one of the themes that the University intends to explore in a new initiative. In Shanghai in September we intend to have over 100 senior executives from the global food chain in a closed meeting with experts and academics.

This will be the first of a series of three meetings at or close to the University’s campuses in China, Malaysia and the UK and these will be a “forum for solutions” – a way to identify how the food industry’s supply chain can work with the best of the academic community to identify and deliver answers to the key questions in global food security. I hope that McDonald’s, and many of its key suppliers will be there.

tackle post-harvest losses

Producing enough food to feed the world’s growing population is becoming a major concern. But making sure the food we grow is safe, nutritious and good enough to eat is also fraught with difficulty.

With funding from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) UK, the Ministry of Agriculture (MOA), the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, Malaysia (MOSTI) and private sector organisations in Malaysia, the CEPB is working with other universities across the world to find solutions to the problem of post-harvest waste. It is also running an accompanying MSc and PhD programme.

See video ‘Making sure the food we grow is good enough to eat’

Read more about this research on The University of Nottingham website.