Moveable Feasts | Sarah Murray | Talks at Google

Welcome again to the New York Authors at Google series. We're really excited to have Sarah Murray in today. She is. She works for the Financial Times. She's been there since 1990, first in London and then now in New York. She's lived and worked in Asia, Hong Kong and in South China for the Morning Post. That's the region's leading global daily newspaper. Anna Vietnam. Based in Hanoi, she helped launch the Vietnam Economic Times, an English language magazine aimed at foreign investors. She's got a great book out, Movable Feasts, which you guys should all be holding. Yeah, wonderful book. And it talks about the incredible journeys of the things that we eat. Sarah has traveled extensively. She's been to. Here we go, let me see. South Africa, Togo, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Mozambique, Tanzania, Kenya, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Spain, Denmark, Russia, Czech Republic. Goes on and on and on and on and all to search out where our food comes from and the journeys that it makes. So, without further ado, I'd love to welcome Sarah Murray to AuthorsGoogle.

Thanks very much. Well, it's actually, it's great to be talking to a technology company that's so used to working in the virtual world because I'm going to be talking about things that are incredibly real and solid. And I'm also quite embarrassed to be in a technology company. And I've come with absolutely no sort of presentations on computers or anything like that. I've come with this tin, which I don't know if anybody knows what it is, but I will explain all afterwards. One of the things that inspired me about this book was I've always had this very sort of unusual fascination for shipping containers and for cargo shipping. A lot of people think I'm actually this is a disguise for a sort of more glamorous career as a spy. But in fact, I used to go around the world photographing docks and shipping containers around the world. And the reason is I got completely fascinated with basically how everything in the world gets to us. You know, we can all order it online, but somehow it's got to get into a box and it's got to be shipped around. And probably everything we're touching in this room has been in a shipping container. So I got very fascinated by this. And then there was one quote that stuck with me. I heard somebody say to me once, if you ever want to find out what's going on in the world, speak to a shipper, because they basically know what's happening. They know about the weather in far off parts of the world, the globe, and they know also about the trends of goods and services and where those are moving. So I became very fascinated in that and I really wanted to write a book about that. But the reason I chose food was A, I think everybody can kind of relate to food and I think we're all starting to think a lot more about where our food comes from and where it's been sourced. And B, food is actually a lot more sort of difficult to mitzer ship around than a lot of things. So. So it's perishable for a start. So you've got to have some fairly complex technologies around that. It's very messy and sloppy and often liquid. So I decided to start looking at food. And I looked at it really from way back. I started very early on my first chapters on the Roman Empire, which I'll explain a little bit about later. But because I decided to do this book about looking at how food has been transported around the globe, I thought, well, I have to have the story of the tiffin men of Bombay. And this is where this lovely tin here comes in, because this is actually a tiffin tin, it's a lunchbox, and you have your curry, your chapati, your rice, or indeed whatever. And there's the most extraordinary system in Mumbai where there's about 5,000 guys who work in this service. I think there's actually four or five women now, so they're kind of increasing the diversity a little bit in the workplace, but. But they come to your house at about 10 o' clock in the morning when either the husband or the kids have already left for work very early on a commuter train. And these guys will come and they'll pick up the food that you've cooked ready for your husband or your kids. And through this extraordinary system of sort of hub and spoke relay type system, they go down to the local stations with all of this. They'll have great, great big trays on their heads with about 20 of these things in them. They get to the local stations, they put them all in a big pile. It sort of seems like absolute chaos, but it's incredibly organized chaos because each tin has on it a very basic set of markings. So to me it looked like absolute nonsense. I couldn't make head or tail of it. But each little marking, whether it's a letter or a number or a digit of some sort, relates to the area, the street, the office building, the floor in that office building that the person works in, and the room number. And what happens is these tins may change hands about, I don't know, four or five times throughout the morning. So different people will take them on, they'll change trains, they go, by the way, in the luggage compartment just of the regular commuter trains. So they'll all pile into these, these, the carriages. And then by this amazing system, every single lunch gets to the right person at lunchtime. And in fact they're so accurate, Forbes magazine gave them something like a 9.999% Six Sigma management excellence rating a few years ago because they make so few delivery mistakes. And then in the most amazing thing as well is that there's a really kind of rare form of radio reverse logistics where at the end of lunchtime at around sort of three or four in the afternoon, another guy will come back and take this tin and return it to the very right household that it came from. Now there are all kinds of reasons behind this because I was very curious and I actually went out to India, to Mumbai, and I followed them around for a day, these guys, I went to somebody's house with the guy who picked it up and then I changed the trains and I sat in the luggage compartments, rattled around on these trains with the guys and I was thinking, well, yeah, this is, I mean this is an amazing system, but you know, why can't you just carry it to work, you know, you know, surely that would be much easier. Then I happened to be at, I think it was Victoria or one of the huge great old Victorian stations, the commuter hubs of Mumbai at. I think it was something like 8:30 or 9:00 clock in the morning. And I went, ah, okay, I see. Because literally people are hanging out the sides of the trains to stay on them. They can barely hang onto their briefcases. And of course, what's more, they leave very, very early before the food is actually cooked. So you know, you need to be able to pick it up at mid morning for them to get a hot lunch at dinner time, at lunchtime. And the other thing that's sort of really interesting cultural reasons behind a lot of this. Mumbai is one of the most, I mean, sort of like the New York of India. It's really the most ethnically diverse. There's Muslims, Hindus, Parsis, expats, a huge range of people living there. And there's a very, a lot of people have very, very strong beliefs as to what they should or should not eat. So if you're vegetarian, you, you don't even want to eat in a restaurant that cooks meat in the same area. So of course you want to make sure that you can trust what you're having. For lunch. And that's sort of partly why this system evolved. So that's the Tiffin Men story. But it served as a handy way for me to tell you about what's in this book because I've put some food in each of these little tins, which relates to some of the chapters that I looked at. So I'm going to open up my tin. Okay, so what we have here, I was very proud. I actually managed to find a bottle of olive oil that fitted into this very small tin. Took me a long time, but I got there. This relates to. I mentioned that I started this whole journey off with the Roman Empire and I was looking at how food has moved around and I found that, I mean, we think we eat very global diets today. But you know, the Romans were eating food from absolutely all over the place. And one of the great ways that they transported things around was the Roman amphora, which is a great big sort of like a barrel sized pot with a pointed bottom, so you can't stand it up. But it fitted very, very cleverly into the, into the curved side of the ships. And of course, you know, you've got two like that and the third one, the point fits right down in between the other two. So it was a very good way of packing these things in. And they transported all sorts of things around in this. But they mainly transported olive oil in just vast amounts. I mean, they used far much more olive oil than we do today because they used it for other things. Like athletes would rub it on themselves before going into races. They used sort of essential oils for perfumes, for fuel as well, actually. And so there was a huge need to transport olive oil around. And most of it at that time came from southern Spain. Interestingly enough, that's still the biggest producer of olive oil. We think of olive oil quite often as being Italian, but in fact a lot of it comes from Italy, comes from Spain, goes to Italy, gets repackaged and then sent out as Italian olive oil or exported as Italian olive oil. So it's interesting that that kind of link with Spain dates right back to the Roman Empire. Now what I did to sort of explore this whole area was somebody told me about a hill in Rome. It's called Monte Testaccio. And I don't know if anybody knows Rome. It's fairly near the center of Rome. It's a pretty unassuming sort of hill. There's a whole lot of bars and restaurants around the bottom. And it's sort of, yeah, about sort of 10 minutes out of the main center of town. And you don't really notice it until somebody told me that this entire hill was made out of broken amphora and that during the first and second centuries of the Roman Empire, there was so much olive oil being transported from Spain to Rome that they had to get rid of these pots somehow. They used. I mean, they actually did recycle a lot of them. They used them in, you know, they would pack them in the foundations of buildings, or they would actually use them for some. Some were used for storage jars. But of course, because of the point, you couldn't stand them up, so that wasn't so easy. And so basically, they had this very organized system of, you know, packing the pots together in this huge pile. They'd break them up first. And I went to the top of the hill to look at this, and there's a Spanish professor that goes every year and excavates. And it's the reverse to any other sort of excavation where you're normally, you know, you're scrabbling around in the dirt and you hope you're going to find one wonderful ancient piece of something. And in fact, here, once you get below the surface of topsol, there's nothing else. There's no earth, there's no dirt, there's nothing. It's just pots. And you look down and it's kind of. It's fun because it's like the rings of a tree. It sort of relates to the age. So, you know, I remember I got there and he said, oh, yeah, we've got down as far as Marcus Aurelius this so far, you know, so as you go down further, you get to different empires and emperors, and when they start bringing this stuff out, and again, totally unlike any other archaeological dig, they're heaving the stuff up in buckets, and they put it on tables, spread it out, and they start looking at it. And what these pieces have, because they've been so well preserved, they have these marvelous markings. There's kind of scratches, there's stamps that were stamped into the clay when it was wet. And then because they've been kept dry for so long, there are these wonderful ink hieroglyphs which you don't see anywhere else. And all of these relate to things like the weight of the pot when empty. The weight of the pot, pot went full, the date it left Spain, the date it arrived on the docks in Rome, you know, the custom stamps, that kind of thing. And the exporter. So the guy who owned the olive grove in Spain, who produced the olive oil and what's fascinating is when they find stamps on a lot of pots in one particular area with, you know, one Roman senators appearing in a huge sort of mass of shards, you know, they can actually say, well, hey, this guy was having a really good year with his olive grove. So it's kind of like this giant, economical sort of. Yeah, it's like a giant accounts book. It's a sort of economic history of the Roman Empire through rubbish. So, but what was interesting about this, and this sort of goes back to my strange obsession with container shipping, is that all that information is actually really similar to what you get on the back of a modern shipping container. On the back doors of a great big box shipping container, there's a panel and it has a lot of similar information. So my sense was, well, you know, nothing's actually changed that much. So I did. So of course I had to have a chapter on the shipping container. And what I was really looking at with the shipping container was how it's transformed. I mean, globalization really would not have been possible without the shipping container. The whole idea that you could slot these very efficient boxes together and they could go on a train, on a ship, on a canal boat, and you didn't need to redesign. You know, you'd have the same infrastructure that would, they would fit into everything. And so, and that really, I think more than any, I mean, obviously there are economic and financial developments as well, but you know, without that physical box to efficiently bring us all this stuff, it would, you know, globalization wouldn't have happened as fast as it has now. There has been with food. There's been some interesting stories that emerge from that. And I've got here, this is a pot of salmon paste. Now I actually followed the journey of salmon fish, but I thought you'd probably appreciate it if I didn't bring a live salmon into the presentation. So I brought my pot of salmon paste instead. The shipping container has been so efficient and has lowered the costs of transporting goods so much that a lot of fish is now sent salmon, which is particularly difficult to feed fillet and has to be done by hand, often sent to China, where it gets defrosted, they pick the bones out, they refreeze it, and it gets sent right back to Western markets again. So it's had this unbelievable sort of round trip journey. And of course, you know, the reason I looked at the salmon was that of course the salmon during its lifetime has traveled tens of thousands of miles in its migratory patterns. But, you know, it's nothing compared to its sort of Return journey to China and back after its. So that was kind of an interesting impact it had on food. So I'm going to go to my next tin. One of the things that I wanted to do was not just look at the technology of how we've transported this stuff around, but also the sort of knock on impact it's had. You know, it's changed culture, we know that, it's certainly changed our diets, we know that as well. But you know, how did it change the world we live in in other ways. So I started to look at some of the political history behind this and I've got a couple of things here. I started, this is banana chips here. I didn't again, I couldn't get a banana to fit in here, so I bought some chips and I've got a tea bag from Taylors of Harrogate, which is a little English company, and a brochure from a company called Tregothnan Tea, which is another English company. And these two are kind of interesting. Now tea, of course was absolutely a vast trade from the 17th through the 19th centuries. It really became, it was this incredibly valuable commodity. If you've ever seen those antique tea caddies, they're little sort of like miniature pieces of furniture often shaped like this and they've usually got a lock on them. And there was a reason for that. I mean tea was incredibly expensive and valuable and you kept it under lock and key. If you, if you were living in the 18th or 19th century and it all came from China at that point there was a massive trade coming from China and in order to get. They believed that tea was perishable. They believed that the fresher the tips of the leaves the better and the faster you could get it home, the better. So this tea trade actually sparked the generation of the fastest sailing ships, cargo sailing ships, this is that the world has ever known. This was the television T Clippers actually was an American idea, but the British took it and ran with it and I mean there were competitions to hone the design of these things ever finer so that they could go even faster. I mean this was a three month journey, but they would race back. And in the 1860s, in fact, I think it was 1866, there was one race quite astonishing, they all set off from Shanghai on the same day and these, I think it was five ships actually, but three of them arrived back in London within 20 minutes of each other after a 90 day journey. So it really was incredible. And captains, the captains of the winning ship got extra money for their Tea, you could sell it at a higher price if you were the winner. And there was this huge prestige of having the winning ship in your little tea caddy. Now I came across another round trip because actually today I was in Shanghai. There's lots of trendy cafes now and young trendy Chinese tea drinkers. They're moving away from the traditional type of tea, which is drinking it without milk. The idea of milk in tea is ghastly, or was ghastly for most Chinese a while ago. But now it's becoming fashionable to drink English style tea, which means putting it in milk and having a nice little teapot. And they like to buy these teas in the nice English sort of tea caddy boxes And Tailors of Harrogate is this little English company that does this and they've just started exporting, exporting their teas to China. But of course, funnily enough, this tea actually grew in China. So it went all the way back to Yorkshire where it got blended, checked for quality and put into a nice English package and then sent right back to China. The other fun thing that I discovered while I was looking into this though was that there's a company, well, actually not. It's a grand old aristocratic estate in Cornwall which is sort of, you know, the tip of England. And they have a strange sort of microclimate down there and they've grown camellias, camellia flowers for I think a couple of hundred years. And Sun Bright Spark had the idea of. Well, actually, you know, the camellia is. It's the same plant as the tea plant and they've just started growing tea in, in this place in Cornwall. And so I just thought it was a sort of lovely way to end this whole story and that this huge trade which, you know, by the way, sparked the opium and ended up with China having to cede Hong Kong to the British and huge political shifts around this transport of tea. It's finally been growing at home. English tea has finally come home. So it's quite sweet. Now the other, there was a lot of other interesting political things I came across. But I'm going to talk about this in sort of twofold way. This is a packet of chewing gum. This was something that became a kind of sort of symbol of, or a very big part of the Berlin Airlift. Now, I mean, for those of you who don't know the story, this was just after the war. Stalin controlled East Germany and Berlin was right in the middle of East Germany. But Berlin itself was divided up between the Allies. So there was the Russians, the French, the German, the Russians, the French, and the British. And Stalin knew that Berlin was absolutely critically important to his strategy of moving across Europe and basically his domino theory of getting the whole of Europe under his control. So the Allies realized they had to keep Berlin under their control, but Stalin, he basically cut off all the transport links to Berlin that were on the ground. So I think the idea was that once you start seeing starving Berlin citizens, the Allies are going to give up and start say, okay, here you go, you can have our part of Berlin. They were absolutely determined to stop for that not to happen. The only way they could get food in or the way that they could get anything in were these three air corridors that had been secured as part of an agreement after the war. And I think they were calculating that Stalin was not ready to breach this agreement because he really wasn't ready to be attacked by America at that stage. But it was a bit of a gamble. So. So they decided that they would actually fly all the supplies needed in to keep people alive. And it was the most incredible logistical feat. They kept a city of. I mean, I think the population of West Berlin was something like two and a half million people. Not quite as much as that, but nearly. And they kept them going for more than a year with these planes. Now, in order to do that, it had to be the most astonishingly efficient logistical system. What happened to start with was rather like, you sort of see it, LaGuardia and Newark, and planes are sort of queuing up and circling around and waiting till they can get a slot. There was one particular day when this happened, and it coincided with a storm, and there were people queuing up in, piling up in the airspace, and a couple of them crashed because the visibility became so bad. And the guy who was in charge, the general that was in charge, General Tunner, who was in charge of this whole operation, saw this and was absolutely dismayed and said, okay, right, everybody. He radioed everybody back to base now, because others are going to be a huge pile up. And after that day, what he did was he instigated this system where if you failed to make your landing into Berlin, and it was a very tricky landing because the airport was right in the middle of the. The city. So if you missed your approach, you couldn't hang around. You had to go all the way back to base in Frankfurt or where, you know, there were a couple of bases that they used. You had to go all the way back and start again. Now, people hated doing this because they really wanted to deliver their Food and, by the way, coal and medical supplies, other things like that. But it created this amazingly efficient system because basically you had a sort of, you know, sky conveyor belt of planes going like this, and they got planes arriving and landing every three minutes. I mean, it was really astonishing. And this guy, General Tanner, I mean, he didn't miss a trick. I mean, he absolutely. He would pace around the airport looking for inefficiencies, seeing where he could actually, you know, shave some time off to the extent that, I mean, he noticed that some of the pilots were. That, you know, they were getting out of the. When they landed, they'd get out of the. They'd run over to the cafe, grab a donut, grab a coffee, run back again. But even that, he said that we're wasting, you know, we're wasting valuable time here. So he devised this system of mobile snack bars where basically, you know, you wouldn't even have to get out of your plane. A snack bar would roll up with the coffee and the doughnuts, and you could just grab them from there and then off you go again. And he, you know, he did a lot. There was a lot of team building. He sort of set teams against each other competitively, and they kept this whole thing going for more than a year. And in the end, Stalin backed down. So it was a sort of fascinating story. And I just thought. So that was a sort of political story, but at the same time, it sort of sparked an idea for another of my chapters. And this is cornmeal polenta, I think, which is the closest thing I could get to food aid, because essentially this was the first humanitarian sort of food operation. And by the way, actually, I forgot to mention the chewing gum link, which is that there was a pilot called Gail Halverson who one day he'd been wandering around at the. He'd had a few vital, precious free minutes to wander around, and he'd gone to the edge of the airfield and he'd met a bunch of kids, and they were standing there talking to him. And when he left, he thought, oh, poor kids. These kids have got absolutely nothing. You know, the food that was being flown in was incredibly basic. And he reached into his pocket and he found a stick of chewing gum, and he handed it to one of the kids, and he immediately just thought, oh, you know, I've completely done the wrong thing. There's going to be a huge fight. They're going to be beating each other up over this one piece of chewing gum. But they didn't. They opened it up. They the guy peeled the wrapper off, tore it up into tiny little pieces and handed it out to all the kids. And he was so moved by this that he thought, well, how can I kind of, you know, bring more of this in? And he said, well, look, kids, when I fly in, I'm gonna, I've got my rations, my chocolate and my chewing gum. I'm gonna put it in a. Make a little parachute out of a handkerchief and I'll drop it. And they said, well, you know, but how do we know it's you? This like, plane's coming in every three minutes. And he said, well, what I used to do when I was in back in the States was that I used to, when I'd fly over my parents house, I would wiggle the wings of the plane like that and they would know it was me. So that's what he did. And he became known as Uncle Wiggily Wings. But what happened was. And he kept this going without anybody knowing for a while, until one day a packet of chewing gum or a bar of chocolate or something landed on a German newspaper reporter's head. And so the story got out into the papers that this guy was dropping candy for the kids. And his superior officer said, look, Howlison, what are you doing? This is totally unauthorized. But he very quickly realized that this was a great kind of wonderful relationship building exercise with the Germans. And so he said, well, let's carry on. And in the end, they had whole factories of Hershey's were being sort of delivering huge piles of chocolate over, and kids in America were sort of sewing little parachutes out of their handkerchiefs and sending them over. And it was this whole mini operation as part of the Berlin Airlift, but talking about dropping food because most of the food in the. He dropped his candy, but most of the food, they were landing and unloading it. The most extraordinary thing that I think I saw in the entire process of researching this book was a food drop. Because I thought, well, if I'm looking at how food is transported, I've got to go and see this. And they were still doing food traps at the time up in South Sudan, where the fighting had stopped in that part of the country. But there were still rebels on the ground, there were still land mines everywhere. And once the rainy season sets in, the roads become completely impossible. So they still deliver some food by food drops. So I rang up the World Food Program and I said, look, I'd love to come back and see one of these things because I'm going to look into the whole area of food aid delivery. And they said, sure, if you can get yourself up to northwest Kenya, we'll put you on one of these planes. And actually they said to me, don't worry, it'll all be incredibly, you'll be strapped in, there'll be no problem at all. If you've ever seen. And there was this scene in the Constant Gardener at the end, they do a food drop in that and you'll be in the C130 Buffalo planes, which are the American planes, planes with South African pilots. And I said, oh, marvelous. So I went up and we got there and it was a quiet week. And they also, as well as running these old buffalo planes, they run the Antonovs, which are old Russian planes with Russian and Ukrainian crews. And so they said, oh, you'll have to take one of these because we're not running the buffaloes this week. And when I got into the Antonov, I mean, this is a cold war era plane. They were, you know, because they were so well designed for cargo. But I mean, there was no, there was no security, there was no straps, there were nothing. I was basically kind of hanging onto the side of the walls as I went. But fortunately, I'm a very foolhardy traveler and so actually it made it more. I found it more fun, but it was quite dramatic because what happens is you, you know, so we flew up from this place in northwest Kenya, Loki, Chokyo, and you fly for about an hour and a half to the village where they were destined to get the food. And what they do is they map out a great big sort of football pitch sized drop zone with old sacks because they have to actually keep people away from this because as you can imagine, it's pretty dangerous and they don't want to kill anybody. What's more, they also don't want to kill people's animals because. And this is more, I think, an economic thing, as somebody was telling me, they actually have to compensate villagers for any animal, livestock that happened to fall underneath one of these sacks. And of course, so what a lot of the villagers do is that they push their livestock in because they think, oh, I can get the compensation and I can eat my goat. So they're very, very careful at keeping absolutely everybody away from this drop zone. And so you fly there and you can see it quite clearly from up in the plain. And. And so then as you get over it, they open the back doors. Basically, this cargo plane has huge great back doors like this and they open up and I mean, it's quite a Strange thing to stand in the back of a plane and just be looking out at the sky. And then what happens is when they're ready to drop, they undo the chains so that there's literally just a couple of little ropes keeping the big sacks in place. And this is 10 tons of grain in sacks. And the pilot basically does this with the plane. So. And thankfully, I was hanging onto my coat hook because it really is the most extraordinary sensation to be on a plane that's just suddenly doing that. And of course, then they just snip the last rope. All the food just FL you just see this stuff flinging out the back and onto the ground. So that was. That was probably the most dramatic experience I had. In researching all of this, I'll mention very briefly, there were sort of artistic impacts of transporting food. I've got a cork here to remind me of the fact that I did have a chapter on the barrel, which is an amazing, very, very efficient object of transportation during the 19th century. It basically kind of. It was the shipping container of the British Empire's huge globalization drive in that era. But of course, you know, what we forget is we don't really use barrels much for transporting anymore. Barrels are actually part of the creative process. And so I just thought it was a nice example of actually how transport object has now. It's become the artistic tool in the winemaker's palette. The other way that art came into this, this is some grain, actually. I originally had some flour in here, and then I realized I had to take this tin on a plane with me, and it looked suspiciously like narcotics. So I changed it for some grain instead. This is some wheat grain. And I looked at the buffalo grain elevators. Now, these are those huge great silos that they basically invented this machine in the 19th century for. It was sort of trans shipping grain. Buffalo was a huge grain hub. All the Midwest grain was going to Buffalo being transshipped. It was coming in on the lake boats, and then it was having to be transshipped into the canal boats. Once they built the Erie Canal, which would take the grain out to the east coast and then onto markets in Europe. And so this really speeded up the whole process. And Buffalo became one of the wealthiest towns in America. But what was fun about researching this part of the whole food transportation theme was that I found that later on in the 20s, a lot of the. I think it was Walter Gropius, one of the Bauhaus designers. Designers came out and took photographs of these huge things. And they took these photographs back to Europe and they were one of the big inspirations behind Bauhaus architecture. This huge industrial American new architecture. Never mind that it was actually for transporting food, but it became a big part of the sort of visual vocabulary of the Bauhaus and the whole modernist architecture. So when you want to blame somebody for some of the rather grimmer modern buildings that we got left with in the 60s, you know, you can actually blame transporting food for part of it. Now, of course, the thing that I did also look at as I was researching this book, I noticed, in fact, very early on, particularly in the uk, which, where this started earlier, was there was a whole lot of discussion and debate going on about, well, you know, listen, we should not. Why are we transporting food so far? This is crazy. It's just, you know, creating a massive carbon footprint. You know, we're shipping things in from New Zealand and Africa and all over the place. And of course here too, it's now a big thing, you know, going back the idea of going back to the Hundred mile diet. And, you know, and there are a lot. I mean, there are lots of fantastic reasons for going for local food. I mean, for a start, it tastes lot better. But what I was interested in was that a lot of people were focusing on the carbon footprint of this. And I really. So when I started out, I was thinking I really fully expected to be writing a book about how I would sort of kind of conclude that, you know, well, we've had all this food transportation, but really now we need to start kind of, you know, thinking in different ways and pulling in the reins and, you know, sourcing everything locally because that's going to contribute to, you know, reducing the impact of the carbon emissions. And I found some really interesting stuff. I found when I started talking to academics and researchers that actually this wasn't quite the case. And what I have here, which is a sort of good example of this is. This is a packet of I call crisps and you call them chips. This is Walker's. It's. They do. These are actually smoky bacon. And for anybody who hasn't had them, they're just delicious. It's my one junk food failure is crisps. And I eat these all the time anyway. But on this packet there are some, you know, there's a lot of information. A lot of it is about, you know, the nutritional value, the weight, that sort of thing. But there's an interesting. You probably can't see it from here, but there's a very small, small little mark in this corner. This is how much carbon dioxide was emitted in the production of this packet of crisps. This Walker's, I think, is the only company that's done this so far, and they're working with an organization called the Carbon Trust in the uk, and they're now beginning to look at all kinds of different products and measure the life cycle carbon footprint of different products. Interestingly enough, it's 74 grams. And I just thought, well, that doesn't really mean a lot to me. And then actually, very luckily, I found out that my tin of salmon paste is actually 75 grams. So if you want to know roughly what it feels like, the weight of the carbon dioxide produced by this packet of chips, you can pick this up later. But what was interesting was that when they started looking at this, they found that transportation and distribution was only 9% of the carbon footprint of this packet of crisps. And what the majority of it was was the frying of the potatoes to turn them into crisps or chips. And the reason that they had to fry the chips for so long was that farmers keep their potatoes in humidified warehouses and they had to be artificially humidified, moreover, so that mechanism is using energy and generating carbo dioxide. Plus, it means that when the walkers buy the potatoes, they're humidified and potatoes are sold by weight. So there is no incentive to drive off the water before they're sold. And the reason that they have to fry them for so long is they've got to fry all the water out before they can actually start turning them into crisps. So they concluded with this study that, you know, in a way, a lot of this is about more. More like sort of systems. So if we perhaps change the way that potatoes were traded to make it by bulk, or if we produced some kind of incentives for farmers to drive the water off their potatoes or find different ways of storing them, we could reduce the carbon footprint of these crisps. So it was kind of interesting. And then I found all sorts of counterintuitive studies, like the fact that really, if you start to look at the whole life cycle of food, transportation, obviously is a big part of it, but it's a very small part, relatively small part of it, and a lot of things offset that. So there was another study, again done in the uk, that showed that if you imported tomatoes from Spain, even if you included the shipping, it was still less energy intensive than or produced, generated fewer carbon emissions than if you grew them in England in its miserable winter climate, in hot houses, which you had to use energy to heat. So it was a very interesting it was a very interesting journey and, you know, it just made me realize that things are always a lot more complex than you think they are and that simply, you know, cutting out transportation is not necessarily going to be the, the answer to things. But I suppose to sort of go back to how I entered this whole thing, you know, again, it just made me realize that we live in a very physical world. It doesn't matter if we can do absolutely everything on the Internet. We still have to get stuff around in, you know, whether it's boxes, barrels, packets, you know, bottles. It's, you know, it's a very important part of life. So it was a really fascinating journey and, well, I hope you've enjoyed hearing about it. So does anybody have any questions?

This is a very interesting talk. It covers so many very diverse topics. Really fun. So, I mean, I want to ask about the tiffin boxes. So how long is the average rate for from the home to where the guy's working? And does the food stay hot until through the whole ride?

It's about, I mean, it takes about, let's see, they leave sort of 10. It's a sort of two or three hour, depending on where they're going. Mumbai or Bombay as people call it there. Actually, funnily enough, people there seem to call it Bombay more than Mumbai. The geography is that people are very separated from their places, work. And that's partly what started the whole thing off. Because in a lot of places it's still very traditional to eat the food that's been cooked at home. But in a lot of cities what happens is people just go home for lunch. But in Bombay, that's just impossible for most people. So that's what they have to do. But they don't just take it like this. They actually have an insulation cover on top of it as well. So it's sort of a bit more like a thermos kind of effect. So yes, it is warm. It does stay warm.

You mentioned that the food was being sent out to the guys that were off to work, also kids as well. So are people using this to send food to kids at school?

Yeah, they are. And actually the interesting thing is that as, you know, as the sort of demographics change and the women are starting to enter the workforce, you know, they can no longer stay at home to cook their husband their dinner. And actually there's some company now instead of people just going out for lunch. They've, they've actually there are a lot of companies starting out where they're creating tiffin food. And you would Go to your trusted company. So it might not be your wife, but now you can get it from a trusted source. And it's created a sort of new little business.

If you're getting food from a trusted source, where wouldn't you find a local restaurant rather than getting something closer. Sorry, a restaurant closer to your place of work.

Because people don't trust. I mean, it's funny because I asked people and they said, oh, you know, you just can't trust. And then they. And also they say, oh, it's too greasy, they use too much oil. And they're always complaining about restaurants. And I think there is that thing is that you are so absolutely particular about what goes into your food. It's interesting.

Ok, thank you.

Hi, thanks for coming. I've got a real interest in the topic and it's awesome that you're here. I thought it was interesting. I'm sure you saw in the New Yorker they just covered the same thing. The Walker Crisp, they just wrote that up and that it's like the first thing with a carbon label. Anyway, my questions about water have got a real interest in bottled water and. Or hate for it. And what do you think about that trend in like a historical way, thinking about foods that have been transported over time, like olive oil and all this. And what do you think about the trend in that kind of a scope of like water being transported from Fiji or from France? And what do you think about that?

To me, it seems a little crazy, actually. I mean, don't we have one of the best water supplies in New York of many places in the States, Am I right? So, I mean, you know, maybe it doesn't taste quite as good. I think it tastes fine, actually. So it does. To me, that does seem completely crazy. And then there's the generation of the bottles and there's all sorts of things. But of course, you do kind of have to remember that it's a bit more complicated than that because, I mean. And I haven't, to be honest, followed this that closely and I didn't look at water that much, but I think there's a Fiji. Is it Fiji water now? You know, that seemed to me completely mad. And interestingly, they actually advertise it. You know, they put a little map on the back of the bottles I noticed is showing how far it's come. And so I just thought that was interesting. But what is. And I don't know the answer to this question, but with a lot of this as well, the other consideration. And one of the things that became when this became a huge debate in the uk. What happened was, and actually one of the things I didn't talk about is I've got a little label here of green beans. Now these come from Kenya and they go to the uk and this is from Tesco, which is like the Walmart of England or the uk, and they have started now. They're really responding to the sort of ethical consumer in the uk. So there's this little blue dot here which is actually a picture of an airplane and it says buy air. Now, in the 60s, if you saw that, you'd say, hey, marvelous, that's a plus point because it's going to be fresh. Now the idea is if you're worried about your carbon footprint, you might not want to buy something with a little flown by air because obviously airplanes are much more damaging than shipping. Now what happened when they announced this was that the Kenyan Trade Commission got very alarmed and I think even sent some delegates over to the UK and pointed out, look, hang on a minute. The horticultural industry, which supplies Europe flowers as well, by the way, has created tens of thousands of jobs for Africans who, excuse me, by the way, have a fraction of the carbon footprint that we do in the UK or the us. So could we not find perhaps a more appropriate target for cutting our carbon footprint than the, than the Kenyan bean growers? And actually, interestingly, Tesca, this label is incredible. It's so tiny and it's got so much information on it, including, by the way, all the nutritional information you could ever want. But up here you can't see it, but there's a photograph and a little panel and it says, you know, this is Elizabeth, she is one of our growers in Kenya. You know, she works to the highest standard, whatever. They've said something like that, but it's interesting. So now you've got to go, well, okay, hang on a minute. I don't want to buy the flown thing, but, you know, I also want to support this Kenyan farmer. So, you know, it becomes kind of tricky.

The one thing I stood up that I wanted to say is like, so Fiji made this big allowance, they say, oh, now we're not going to fly all the way from Fiji to the East Coast. We'll just land in LA and we'll truck it across the country. Because it's like, not as bad as flying it. So it's funny, like the constellation they're making is so minor.

Yes, yes, yeah, that's interesting stuff. Yes. Yeah. And of course, it does depend a lot the mode of transport that you Use. I mean, because actually if you, I mean, the sheer volume. This was the other thing that struck me was the sheer volume of food that can be carried on a shipping container. I mean, a shipping. I asked somebody in the banana industry, you can, you can get 48,000 bananas in a shipping container. And the biggest ships now carry 11,000 shipping containers. So do the maths. It's a lot of bananas now and then compared to the person who sort of. I'm feeling very good. So I'm going to go to my local farmer's market and I'm going to drive there in my SUV and I'm going to pick up two packets of potatoes and a box of onions and per pound of food carried, which is the more damaging journey, you know. And so in that sense, you know, we sometimes get the maths a bit wrong. Shipping containers being standardized over many years now.

I was actually watching something on National Geographic on that very same subject. Get the bananas in. Did you do an assessment anywhere in your book or some sort of comparison on the different modes of transportation of said shipping containers? Ocean shipping versus truck, shipping versus rail, etc.

In terms of the carbon footprint? Yes, yes. And their local efficiencies and what they cost. Right. Well, there's a lot of debate around this and people are still doing new studies and in fact, recently there is some. There was a big study that came out that showed that shipping is actually more damaging than we thought it is. But still, in terms of the volumes compared to jet planes, it's a lot more efficient per, you know, per amount, the amount of fuel you're using to transport the volume of goods. But, and I didn't look at this in huge detail, but there's some very interesting work going on with this because one of the things, the guy who invented the shipping container was called Malcolm McLean, he was a North Carolina truck driver, actually, and he, I mean, he didn't really. I mean, the box. Who can invent a box? But I mean, he invented the whole idea of. Into what's called intermodalism, this whole idea that your box could go from a train to a ship to a canal boat. And the whole idea was that you used these multiple modes of transport. Now what happened since then was that just in time, philosophies of managing supply chains came in. So, you know, particularly with very high quality, high value goods, the idea is to get them there as fast as possible. And apparently this has eroded a lot of the original principles that maclean envisaged because, you know, instead of, you don't you know, it's inconvenient. You've got to go all the way up to a railhead, stick it on a train, then it's got to come back down. That reduces the time you can get your stuff to market. And so instead maybe what you do is when it arrives in La Long beach, you've just got a couple of truck drivers waiting and you're going to get them driving through the night. Whereas in fact, there would be a more carbon efficient way of doing it if you were to sort of plot it out. So there are some academics who are now looking into this and they're actually mapping out transport nodes across the US And I think the idea is that you could roll it out globally so that you rather like having, you know, Google Maps or whatever. You know, the way of mapping out your journey is now what's the most efficient, the quickest route? These guys are going to do it according to carbon footprint. So, and so you might say, well, okay, maybe my high fashion goods have got to get there absolute or my perishable food has got to get there absolutely on time. But you know, if it's just the socks that we sell every month in the same quantity, we could put them on a longer route and by the way, save a lot of money on fuel while oil prices are still high. So it's kind of an interesting, it'll be interesting to see what they come up with in those routes.

So we all know that tomatoes, most of the ones you buy in the store no longer have any flavor. And I've heard the same is true of bananas, that you can get them local bananas overseas that taste much better than the ones we have because they.

Don'T last as long.

Can you talk about the ways that we've changed our food in order to satisfy our sugar?

I mean, that's definitely true. I mean, I think lots of things are sadly now grown from transportation rather than for flavor. And that's definitely true of tomatoes. And that's definitely true of, I think it's the El Santa strawberry is the brand, is that kind of rather tasteless or some people say tasteless, I'm not a great strawberry eater, but so rather hard and crunchy. And so you do sadly lose a lot of the flavor with certain, with certain things, interestingly, because I was very curious about the whole salmon thing and you know, I just thought, well, how can that possibly be produce a sort of decent taste fish by the time you get to the end of it. But of course, if you think about it Actually, most fish has been frozen. And actually you would not want to be eating fresh fish unless you're pretty close to a harbor, because fish really starts to deteriorate pretty soon after being caught. And I heard a couple of chefs talking about this on the radio once, about how. And they did a little experiment where they got a piece of frozen fish and a piece of fresh fish and both these top class chefs cooked it and they couldn't tell the difference. So with some things I think you definitely can and others you can't.

Have you done much research in packaging or, you know, because it's like a.

Smaller form of shipping containers? I haven't. But I mean, one of the things I do in my work, I write the Financial Times. And one of the things I'm looking at there is sort of the impact of business on the environment. And there's some interesting work going on with companies coming up with packaging that takes up less space because obviously the smaller the space you can take up. I mean, I think the original version of this, I could be wrong, but it could be one of those urban myths. But I think it's. Is it Grant's whiskey that comes in a triangular bottle? One of the Scotch whiskies comes in a triangular bottle. I think originally that was because they packed together pretty well, rather like the Roman amphora fitting into the ships. So I think there's a lot of work being done on that. There's a lot of work being done on new forms of packaging. And again, one of the things I didn't get to is my hua bar, or hua, as you say, if you're in the military, apparently, because this was developed by the US Military. And one of my chapters is on. Is on military rations. Because I thought, well, again, who's good at being efficient on all of this stuff? And the US Military spends huge amounts of money on getting packaging that can be chucked out of planes. You can run with it and it can heat itself. So interesting. A lot of the types of packaging that the military has been developing are now coming into supermarkets. So you'll see that the technical word is retort package. But it's those sort of things that might have gone in a tin can before and now going in these much more flexible sealed packages. But that was the sort of area with packaging that I looked at.

Thank you for coming. I was interested in the way that transportation has positively affected foods. Like what new things have come out because food has had to be transported. Tinning and that kind of preservation technology is one of Them.

One of the kinds of things, I mean, of course, as well, we can eat things that we could never dream of eating before. But I suppose. Yeah, I'm trying to think what the. I mean, the best example is, actually, is wine, I suppose, because, you know, the whole oaking of wine became. Has become such a sort of sophisticated part of that. And there was one. There was one really fun story around the barrel and Madeira, which is that sort of sweet, heavier wine, and that actually came from the Isle of Madeira. And what they would do is they would transport it in barrels and they would add a bit of. It was either cognac or brandy or a spirit of some sort. And they found that when it got to the other side, they were transporting it across the tropics all over the world. And they found when it got there, it actually tasted an awful lot better. And they couldn't work out what this was for a long time. And there was a theory. This was sort of in the 18th and 19th centuries. There was a theory that it was the rocking of the ship. So I think for a while they had experiments going where they had a machine which would kind of, you know, rock the barrel. And then eventually they worked out there was. It was the heat. And now actually, of course, they replicate that with Madeira by. They literally cook it with these heating coils to give it that flavor. The hopping of beer is a similar story. That's. Yes. East India Pale Ale. That's right. Yes. Yes. That's a good one. Yeah. Yeah.

Anything else?

Thank you very much, sir.

We really appreciate you coming in.