Eat more – not less – to improve your health and that of the planet

I’ve always thought I eat a varied diet. I kick off the day with a coffee, then a few hours later have an apple or banana (an orange if I’m feeling adventurous). At lunch there’s usually bread, eggs or meat, and dinner might be pasta with tomato sauce, a stew, or a curry packed with vegetables. So far so diverse, right? 

Wrong. An estimated two billion cups of coffee are consumed per day across the globe, but only two species of coffee bean are used (arabica and robusta), despite the existence of at least a hundred others. The Cavendish banana accounts for 95 per cent of all exported bananas in the world. Ancient orange-growing traditions in Sicily are dying out due to cheaper monocultures being produced elsewhere. Victorian Britons could have eaten a different variety of apple each day of the year; now we barely crunch a handful. 

The eight billion humans on this planet increasingly eat the same diet. Of the 6,000 plant species eaten throughout history, only nine now make up the vast majority of our collective caloric intake. Just three (rice, wheat and maize), provide a whopping half of all our calories. Diversity within these crops is also diminishing; there are thousands of types of wheat, but just a handful are used on a large scale. My morning coffee and bananas are both under threat, less resilient now because of a lack of genetic diversity. 

“We’re living through an experiment of farming and food production that are so novel that we don’t really know what the impact will be,” says Dan Saladino, a presenter of the BBC’s The Food Programme and author of Eating to Extinction: The World’s Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them. 

Dwindling crop diversity has consequences for our health, the planet, biodiversity, local economies and traditions – yet we barely take notice. When an animal becomes endangered or extinct, it makes front-page news, but the plight of edible crops is less well known. It’s why Saladino is launching Food Diversity Day on Friday January 13, to raise awareness of the damaging effect of dwindling diversity. 

A series of free online talks from scientists, chefs (among them Michael Caines and Mitch Tonks), historians, and farmers including Riverford founder Guy Singh-Watson will highlight the need to broaden the food chain. The campaign’s citizen food project hopes to encourage the public to eat a wider range of foods and engage with the debate. 

To understand how our diets have become so narrow, we must look back to the Second World War. Ramping up food production after it ended was essential. Scientific and technological advances enabled food to be grown more quickly and with higher yields, and vast monocultures spread across the globe. Economies were globalised and liberalised, allowing a relatively small number of crops from a few breadbasket regions to dominate. Staple crops such as wheat became cheaper and more plentiful than ever but, nutritionally and environmentally, they are increasingly being seen as far from ideal. 

Scientists including Tim Spector, who is involved in Food Diversity Day, argue that eating a wider range of foods, especially plants, is the key to good health. But there’s an environmental benefit: vast swathes of rainforest are being chopped down to grow soy and palm, while monocultures are more susceptible to disease and pests. Animal and insect biodiversity is taking a battering, too. 

Higher yields of a narrower range of crops has helped feed the world, and can continue to do so, but according to Prof Tim Benton, head of the Environment and Society Programme at Chatham House, there is already a huge surplus of food. “Such a large amount of food is misused in the sense that it doesn’t feed people in a healthy and sustainable way,” says Benton. “Growing more food is not going to solve the problem of starving people in the world. We’re flooded with food. Over 60 per cent of all the grains grown in Europe get fed to cattle.” 

Benton argues that a more sustainable and healthier food system would see higher consumption (and a greater variety) of fruit and vegetables. “It would be better from a farming perspective, because you’ll have more diversity, which is better for resilience, because if one crop gets hit you’ve got a multitude of other crops,” says Benton. 

“It makes sense from a sustainability and health perspective, but from a driving the economy perspective it’s frightening for many of the constituencies of decision makers. We’ve got layers upon layers of incentives to not grow a different range of goods in a way that is more sustainable for people and the planet.” 

At last year’s Cop 15 and 27 conferences, Benton says he witnessed political pushback against the idea of making food systems “fit for purpose”. Though Cop 15 pledged to “maintain and restore the genetic diversity within and between populations of native, wild and domesticated species,” the Crop Trust has since argued that crop diversity should not be forgotten. 

In many ways, the current food system works well much of the time: food is abundant and cheap. Yet when Russia invaded Ukraine, wheat and vegetable oil prices shot up, as both are key global producers of those staples. “Every time a big crisis arrives, the potential fragility of the (in some ways) highly efficient food system we created is revealed to us,” says Saladino. “Going forward, we need the options that food diversity can provide.” 

There are signs things are changing. Saladino takes inspiration from southeastern Turkey, where ancient emmer wheat is still grown. The grain fed those who built the pyramids and erected Stonehenge, and is still widely used in the region. Chefs in Istanbul are increasingly cooking with it, while crop-breeding programmes are using it to introduce disease resistance into modern wheat varieties – proof, Saladino argues, of “why an obscure, almost-extinct food actually does matter to all of our futures”. 

Take the case of the humble Swabian lentil. The southern German pulse became extinct in the 1960s but was revived by a German farmer who acquired seeds from a Russian seed bank. Now hundreds of farmers in the region are growing it and the story has inspired the likes of Hodmedod’s, which works with British farmers to produce “lost” local pulses. “There are local economies that are thriving because of this return to diversity,” says Saladino. 

At the Millennium Seed Bank at Kew Gardens, scientists hold over 2.4 billion seeds from around the world, preserving them for the future. Meanwhile, at the National Institute of Agricultural Botany in Cambridge, a wheat-breeding project is aimed at boosting the genetic diversity of the grain. 

There is progress at an institutional level, too, though Benton says the British Government is dragging its feet, for example by ignoring Henry Dimbleby’s National Food Strategy which among other things highlighted that food production is a predominant cause of biodiversity loss. The United Nations declared 2022-2023 the International Year of Millets, a response to record breaking temperatures in India that led to crop failures and drought. Bringing back neglected but drought-tolerant grains, as opposed to relying on single modern varieties wheat and rice, is hoped to lead to greater food security in India. 

“We’re seeing efforts by a new generation of scientists, crop scientists and animal breeders to bring diversity back into the system,” says Saladino. “Because of climate change, less predictable seasons, the spread of certain types of crop diseases and pests, scientists are finding resilience and genetic traits in the crop diversity that can be found in different parts of the world.” 

There have even been murmurs from global food corporations: Emmanuel Faber, the former CEO of Danone, one of the world’s largest dairy companies, admitted that restoring biodiversity is fundamental. 

The answer, both Benton and Saladino claim, isn’t simply a return to regenerative agriculture that aims to restore biodiversity. That has a significant role to play, but so do modern, technology-driven forms of farming.

“Whether you envisage a more regenerative agriculture, or one focused on biotech, one thing is definitely true,” says Saladino. “Both systems depend on diversity.” 

The public must also be willing to change its habits. Eating a wider range of fruit, vegetables and animal products doesn’t have to be costly, but it often is. Diets will have to incorporate more pulses, and we’ll need to seek out different varieties: a Cox’s Orange Pippin apple instead of a Pink Lady, say, or a Crown Prince squash over a bland Hallowe’en carving pumpkin. 

Apples, bananas and oranges may still be a virtuous start to the day, but seeking out different varieties may just help save the planet.

For more information, visit dansaladino.com/food-diversity-day