We All Eat The Same Stuff

boast how the chef uses only local seasonal ingredients. But the fact is, in our daily lives, most of us are eating an ever narrower selection of the thousands of edible plants the planet has to offer, and many of them are from big industrial producers like the US, that grow vast amounts of grain and export it the world over. Diets in Beijing in Boston were once pretty different. Now the Western diet, carb heavy, pizza, bread and fat ask

food has spread across the globe. Here's a non scientific survey we gathered a somewhat arbitrary group of people from all over the place are leaving Canada, England, India. I live in Rhonda, I live in France, the US. I'm from Scotland, but I do live in Turkey. I'm an Australian living in the United Kingdom. I live in the Netherlands. I live in Norway, and we asked them, what's your favorite take out the food you crave? My favorite takeaway

is Indian food, certainly something Southeast Asian pet ti. It's either usually like a breed or some kind of wrap which is like a Turkish version of pizza. So bread of course, my goats, who is usually any Mexican sushi can already be Pizza McDonald and fiza. I really do enjoy a good fast food chicken sandwich. My favorite takeaway

is pizza. My your favorite takeaway east tacos. My favorite takeaway as probably tai So why does it matter if tacos and pizza are taking over the planet and our diets include more foods made from grains, fruits, and vegetables that are shipped in from far away. My colleagues Jasmine Ung and Gin Wou join me now from Singapore to explain they're out with a deeply reported story about some of the unexpected risks posed by this increasing global dependency

on a handful of crops. Jasmine Young and Jin Woo, thanks so much for being here, Thank you for having us, Glad to be here with us. In your story, you write about this enormous global trend which is that diets around the world are becoming more and more alike. Where before around the world people would eat differently, would eat local foods, Now people are eating the same sorts of foods.

Can you describe what's happened? So our story is based on this idea that you know, it doesn't matter where you are in the world, our diets are looking more and more similar. And in the past sixty years or so, the biggest changes that we have seen are in Asian Africa towards a more universal diet. And what that looks like is something that resembles a typical Western diet. You know, things like hamburgers, sandwiches, steaks, potato, chips, and even cakes.

And while it's true there on a country by country basis chances that that we have access to a wider variety of food than our parents are grandparents did, but as a whole, you know that shift is causing the whole world to become overly dependent on a handful of staple crops. And there are mainly rice, weed and mace and which is you know, the same as corn. And in fact, today over sixty of the world's daily calorie intake is made up of just those three staple crops

around the world. You're saying sixty of our calories are coming from just those three crops. That's right, and we're seeing those crops become a bigger and bigger part of meal time. And then those are the placing you know, native crops like cassava and saga, which were once very important to local diets, but today some people might not

even have heard about them. We asked the same group of people you heard earlier professing their love for pizza and fast food, among other things, how important bread, the quintessential wheat product is to them. Bread is very important, is one of our staples, and we buy it every week. Brand is really important for me. I like it a lot and I eat it every day. For me, bread is a sense of for lunch and dinner, very important. Bred is obviously very important to me as well as

to the country, very important. Growing up, there was a loaf of Italian bread on the table at dinner every night. I don't think bread is very important to me. I feel like it's one of my staples that I could most easily go without. Bread is a pretty important part of a Turkish diet. How important is bread to me, it's very portant. Actually, I really love bread. I think I mean, I mean, in all my life, for breakfast, sometimes long sometimes for dinner, I bread every single day.

I guess about two or three slices every day. So I'd say it's pretty important. Bread is pretty important to me. It's really important. Bread is really important to me. It's a part of my daily life. Jin How did our diets all converge? There are a lot of factors behind

those increasing similarities. Economic growth and rising incomes are definitely a big reason why we're seeing these massive changes, mainly in Asia and Africa, you know, with people moving away from basic staples and adding more meat, dairy and processed foods. And the other thing is industrial mass production, and it's also a key driver. It has happened in every industry,

including agriculture and food. There's a lot that goes into industrializing our food system, from the companies that sell seeds and fertilize us to farm us, to the producers who buy the raw ingredients and process them, and eventually to the consumers. So this simulate efficient system has contributed to our prosperity. It helps businesses reap economies of scale and produce really large quantities of food for our massive population across the globe for a relatively small price. Gen, can

you give some examples of what you're talking about. How would a diet, say in China or Singapore where you are right now, in Japan, or in countries in Africa, how would they have been sixty years ago and what do they look like now? Yeah, it's great you mentioned China because China is actually one of the biggest changes we observed from our analysis, and I think that was highly related to its booming economy in the past several decades.

So you know, Chinese consumers now have access to more choices of food, especially with all the restaurants selling foreign cuisines, and they can afford more expensive ingredients such as you know, meat and seafood. So take my personal experience as an example. Actually, I grew up in China and my parents still lived there. For them, a typical breakfast nowadays often includes bread, milk, eggs, and sometimes cereal, and almost every day after dinner they

would also have some yogurts. These were not something we usually ate when I was little back in my childhood, like twenty plus thirty years ago. A typical breakfast included above clanji or something we called power fan. You know, you just put water into a bow, leftover rice, some soy milk or fine toi and like rice rolls. So

basically a lot of rice. And if we look back and further to the nineteen sixties and seventies, a typical Chinese diet MI include a lot of sweet potatoes and bonds or pancakes made from SGA and flour, millets or maize. Of course, China is very big, so the diets look different in various provinces, but in general very little protein is the disposable income of an honorary Chinese consumer was much lower back then, and many things were not even

available even if you had money. But if we fast forward to now, port has become China's most widely eating meat. It's actually providing about ten percent of our daily calorie intake. So every weekend morning the cafes across the nation are also packed with people grabbing French toasts and coffee. And we hardly eat food made with millets and sgam anymore.

You know, the main things I mentioned in the nineties sixties diets and too many people sweet potato is something healthy that actually they eat once in a while just to gain more fibers. Imagine if you go to a restaurant with a friend and she orders a plate of food that represents the Chinese diet, and you get one that represents the Chinese diet, as they will look very different.

So we've talked about how the industrialization and mass production of certain foods spreading around the world is contributing to our diets kind of converging and becoming more alike. You're writing your story about how imports have become a big part of this. That countries used to grow a lot of their own foods and more and more now they're getting their foods from a smaller number of countries. Yeah,

that's right. So what these dietary changes mean is that there is now a greater competition for a limited number of crops. And the war Uklein and the impact it's had on foot prices and supply around the world, it's a very clear example why having similar diets as a problem. Earlier this year we saw, you know, Russia's invasion of Ukraine cutoff exports from a region that is known as the bread basket of the world. Because it accounts for

a quarter of global weak trade. And on top of that, we had bad weather like droughts, flooding, heat waves that damage production of wheat. From the US to France to India and just about every major producing region was facing one threat on another and the result was rampant foot inflation. You know, food prices were staring everywhere, and for import

dependent countries, the shop was huge. The country's most affected tend to be those in the global South, and many of them are lower middle to lower income countries, mainly in Africa and the Middle East. And you know, Egypt is the world's top importer of wheat and buys most

of its supply from Russian Ukraine. And after the war, you know, there were reports of breadlines, concerns that such countries would be at risk of bread shortages, and there were fears that this would lead to political unrest similar to Arab spring. And it's not just that emerging countries to experienced problems. You know, there are also issues for

rich countries. The war in Ukraine has called exports of grains and vegetable oils, which push global prices to record highs, and that added the pressures from the pandemic from high energy costs and also labor shortages in developed countries. And in the UK we saw grocery inflation hit the highest

in decades. You know, British shoppers are having to switch to discount supermarkets and buying more store brand items, and they're cutting back on non in central spending and buying you know, monkey vegetables or imperfect produced just to try to save money. And in the US at the recent Thanksgiving, price increases for flour and cookies hit a record high for October, and all of these products that made from wheat, and there are reports of bread costing as much as

ten dollars to loaf in some places. And it's very ironic because US is one of the largest wheat exporters in the world. And you know, this just goes to show that no country, whether you're a producer or consumer, developed or developing nation, can be insulated from price spikes and supply shocks when the world it's all going after the same few staple crops. My conversation with Jasmine on

and jin Wi continues after the break. Jin can you tell us what are the countries mainly responsible for exporting these goods? Around the world, and what are the countries that are mainly dependent on importing all of these grains and other global products. So what we find from our reporting and analyzing data from the United Nations is that majority, or if not all, all of these major staple crops, the supplots of exports were controlled by a very small

number of countries. And for many of these major crops, these kind of exports were controlled by higher incombinations, which making the most vulnerable countries even more vulnerable. We can take rice as an example, and rice is actually one of the few staple crops that's not heavily controlled by higher income countries because we know like India is actually a very big producer and exporter of rice, and we also have Asian countries like Thailand, Vietnam, Pakistan and then

followed by US. And that's what the rice explore control looks like. But if you go to crops like wheat, wheat is a crop that has huge problems over the years due to the war in Ukraine and one of the major exporter of wheat was we all know that Russian and Ukraine's but most of the other major exporters of wheat, our countries like u US, Canada, France, Australia.

So if we look at the country categorization by income groups, all of the low income countries are net importers of wheat, and majority of the lower income countries like lower middle income countries are also net important of wait except countries like India and in Ukraine. Gen How has this consolidation of diets affected health? I mean, the Western diet people want it, but it's not known as exactly the world's healthiest diet. It's high end carbs, it's high in fat.

Has that affected the health of people who are now moving toward a Western diet as opposed to traditional diets? In actually many countries there is this quite interesting but also troublesome situation going on. It's like we have under nutrition and obesity happening at the same time, and these two issues are actually increasingly connected due to rapid changes in countries food systems. One big reason why it happened was our higher reliance on processed or sometimes like ultra

processed food. You know, it's food that's made by industrial processing and often contains addictives such as flavors, colors. So a bag of sliced bread is an ultra processed food. A piece of cake is a pizza, could be a fruit. Yogurt could be ultra processed food. A scoop of ice creams that eat often there's also part of that, and of course instant noodles. I think this increasing popularity of Western diets like you mentioned, in many cases are could

be fast food. You know, instant food definitely brings a lot of health concerns to the global populations. You know, their health reads associated with a global diet that depends on just a few staple crops. People around the world are consuming more calories, more protein, more fat as to rely on a short list of food crops like wheat,

mas and soybean, along with meat and dairy products. So this westernized diet that souping the world has contributed to a rising global obesity, which has you know, nearly tripled since the nineteen seventies, has also led to the spread of metabolic diseases like diabetes, and in both war and

rich countries. You know, people are just seeking out the lowest cost glories and that might exclude things that make up a balanced diet, like you know, fruits and vegetables because they tend to cost more, and the result is malnutrition, which is defined by number one, you know, not just having enough to eat and to not eating enough of the right things. So eating a light isn't just unhealthy and boring. It's like owning a portfolio with very few stocks,

and it's very vulnerable to any kind of disaster. One of the things that you write about is how this reliance and fewer and fewer crops has led to neglected crops. What are neglected crops and what is the effect of that. We have like five thousand fruit crops globally, but we are actually now only eating a very small array of them. So there was this idea of neglected crops, sometimes also

being called underutilized crops. They're usually domesticated species used in previous centuries for food, but in recent times have been reduced in importance. So many experts actually believe these neglected crops might provide an answer to our food system problems, as many of them are more climate resilient and actually richer in nutrients. I want to bring in Stefan Schmidt's here. He's executive director of Crop Trust and he spends his days thinking about what foods people eat and where it

comes from. We'll hear more from him in a minute, but he has an interesting point to make about what Jasmine just said. We had more than five hundred apple varieties in Europe a hundred years ago. When you look at genetics of apples these days, they derive from just six varieties we all know, and that is a very dangerous narrowing of the corridor. We need to build on the diversity we have. The diversity of food is the raw material for breeding new varieties. What we see as

the current and potential feature disruptions in trade. We start to see more and more governments actually thinking about bringing back these marginalized crops as alternate staples. But in order for many of these neglected crops to be common stable, a robust supply chain actually it will be essential. That might include things such as improving farmers fields and maybe modernizing how these crops are actually processed. Gin Wu and Jasmine Ill, thanks so much for joining me today. Thank

you with but the pleasure. Thank you for having us west. When we come back. What are developing countries doing in the face of all this, and what does it mean for the developed world. Stefan Schmidt joins me now he's the executive director of Crop Trust based in Bond, Germany. Stefan, thanks so much for being here. Hi. Can you tell

us what Crop Trust does? The Global Crop Diversity Trust, or crop Trust for short, was established eighteen years ago to provide support to provide funding for seed banks for gene banks around the globe. Those gene banks posts the collections of the most important crops that will secure food security for mankind in the future. And so this is really in an enormous vault filled with all varieties of

species to protect them from extinction. Yes, all crops, all plans that are suitable for consumption for agriculture is collected in various gene banks around the globe and we provide funding. We provide support in particular to those gene banks in the Global South that do not have the capacities to

provide funding themselves. And this plays very well into the conversation that we're having here today, which is all about diversity in the food that people eat around the world, and how what used to be a great variety of crops has now narrowed to relatively few that people consume. Yes, absolutely It is amazing what mankind, what farmers around the world over the last twelve thousand years, created amazing diversity. There are twenty thousand edible plants on Earth. Six thousands

of them have historically been used as food. Just nine account for two thirds of food production. These are the usual suspect. We all know it's weed, its rice, its maze, potato, and ends on. But we must not forget that there is an incredible diversity of edible plants, old land races, also the crop wild relatives that are so important for food security. When we are facing climate change in particular,

can you describe how this would affect the global supply. Yes, those the ieties of wheat, for example, we use today will in many cases no longer be suitable for planting and harvesting in twenty thirty years from now, when it's warmer, when plants need to be better adapted, too longer, droughts,

too higher rainfall. So breeders start to look now for those old varieties and crop wied relatives that are in nature that holds the genetic traits that are able to cope better with heat and drought, and they have to use these old varieties for breeding purposes to bring these old traits back into the crops for the future. How are those old versions of these crops being brought back? Is this something that is being taken from the seed

banks to try growing them? Exactly? That is exactly where the seed banks, where the gene banks come into play. They house thousands of old varieties of wheat and maize and rice, but also those thousands of varieties of lesser known species like a sorgum or millet a. Scientists and

breeders today know where those old varieties are housed. We have established a huge information system, so everybody knows around the world which old varieties are collected in gene banks, and those science is those breeders can ask for duplicates of those varieties. They will receive it and then they use it for their breeding purposes. That is not an easy job. It sometimes takes years. It's try and error.

You need many growing cycles until you get to that point where a new variety is ready to be planted and harvest. When you look down the road, do you see that we are going to have a different future that includes many different kinds of grains. I am convinced that ten twenty years from now, we will have a complete different landscape of what we see as crops growing in the fields. There will other crops and there will be a greater variety. Again, we do not have any

other choice. We have to start today being prepared for that future and make use of the diversity we have and create a newer a diversity. So Stefan, give us a preview when we go into a grocery store, when we go into a restaurant a decade from now, what are some of the foods we're going to be eating that we would not even think of today. Perhaps millet. Let's take millet compared to wheat. It requires less water input,

can withstand higher temperatures. So in future, I see a great opportunity for millet to be grown ten twenty thirty years from now, and I'm sure that it will appear on the menu of restaurants in many parts of the world. We have to change our diets anyway, and that is again where seed banks come into play. There are speed banks that house hundreds and thousands of different kinds of fruits and legumes that are ready to be used for

more healthy diets in the future. Today, many people around the world simply cannot afford food and vegetables, so we have to put more effort into research into breeding of new varieties of fruits and vegetables to make it affordable for people all around the world. Steven Schmidtz, thanks so much for speaking with me today. You can read more from Jasmine on and gin wo and Bloomberg dot com. Thanks for listening to us here at The Big Take,

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