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number of people who prefer tinned peas and tinned fish to real peas and real fish must be increasing every year’, he wrote. He noted that in England at that time, a man over six feet was usually ‘skin and bone and not much else’, attributing this largely to ‘the modern industrial technique which provides you with cheap substitutes for everything’. He warned in no uncertain terms where the move away from home-cooked, real food might lead us: ‘We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine gun’.
    How prescient Orwell was. Nowadays, the expression of our ongoing embrace of factory food in its myriad processed forms is rather different than in the 1930s, with an irony that would not be lost on him. A growing number of us are simultaneously overfed and undernourished, a crazy consequence of our reliance on food manufactured in an industrial setting. Whereas Orwell linked processed food consumption with excessive skinniness, today’s six-foot-tall man, like most other citizens, will most likely be carrying a good few kilos of excess weight. These days, a disturbing 60 per cent of the UK population is overweight; a quarter of us are obese.
    Are we leaping to an unjustified conclusion when we lay a significant part of the blame for obesity, chronic disease and the dramatic rise in reported food allergies, at the door of processed food? There are several a priori grounds for seriously examining this possibility. Firstly, food manufacturers combine ingredients that do not occur in natural food, notably the trilogy of sugar, processed fat and salt, in their most quickly digested, highly refined, nutrient-depleted forms. Might these modern constructions be addictive? That proposition is gaining airtime. Secondly, manufactured foods often contain chemicals with known toxic properties – although we are reassured that at low levels, this is not a cause for concern. Thirdly, the processed food industry has an ignoble history of actively defending its use of controversial ingredients, such as partially hydrogenated oils, long after well-documented, subsequently validated, suspicions have been aired.
    The precautionary principle doesn’t seem to figure prominently in the convenience food industry’s calculations, and such is the lobbying power of this influential sector, it does not loom large in the deliberations of our would-be regulators either. If it did, then steering clear of manufactured products that are very likely to prejudice your health would be a lot easier. All through this book, you will read examples of potentially harmful ingredients and processes being used in food and drink manufacturing, yet statutory bodies fail to restrict them because they do not yet have full, incontestable certainty of damage.
    I would like to be able to report that the powers-that-be are working away in the best interests of the population to curb the processed food industry’s worst excesses. I would be delighted if the concerns I raise in this book could be swept away by strategic government action: better labelling, taxes on miscreant foods, and tighter industry surveillance. But I believe that hell will freeze over before the state takes radical action to protect us from the damage caused by processed food. Why? This industry is just so damn profitable.
    The bottom line here is that there are already reasonable grounds to infer that a diet heavy in processed food is bad for us. We can wait for that contention to be ‘proven’, and the activities of the companies that sell unhealthy food to be restricted, or we can start operating our own personal precautionary principle by eating less of it, and cooking more of our own food from scratch.
    This is not to say that there is no such thing as a healthy, wholesome manufactured food. I happily use many processed ingredients. Realistically, I am not likely to keep a house cow for milk, or make my own butter and cheese. Nor do I intend to grow my