Don’t eat avocado? Ever?

Or, how will we navigate what's coming?

It is Friday afternoon, two days ago, and I am unsure where I am heading.

On Friday morning, I had set out with a metaphorical backpack full of ideas, a compass and a map, my mind full of intention and good spirits. I was aiming headlong for a round-up, a list; of the top ten foods we should eat more of, and the top ten we should avoid. Useful content, I reassured myself; enlightened and surprising at best, I hoped; crammed full of utility and common sense at worst, I reasoned.

I got bored of that list before I reached the end of my metaphorical front garden.

I might finish the list one day. By way of precis, I suspect my advice would have been to stop eating avocadoes, bagged salad and supermarket beef; eat more mussels, oysters, grass-fed lamb and local fruit. The Guardian will have a list somewhere, so maybe I won’t bother after all.

I feel boxed in, that’s the truth of the matter. Everything out there (and by out there I mean on social media, on the internet, in the news, in my inbox,) is so high key. Foreign affairs and politics are frightening, no one can afford anything, no one is properly acknowledging that we are in the foothills of a terrifying economic collapse, not even at base camp, nor that a global shift of hegemony from a dying America (economically, socially, politically and culturally) will be a seismic and destructive process. Even in the frothy business of food a polarised landscape has taken hold. Be it your diet, your choice of restaurant, the way you speak about food, the restaurants you frequent, what you choose to cook, where you choose to shop, the books you buy, the spices you use, the people you follow on Instagram, the way you choose to travel, it is all a reflection, a personal tapestry to be judged upon. It has always been slightly thus, but it feels aggressivly thus now. The truth is that the scrutiny is needed, is largely welcome, is forcing positive change, constructive conversation. Even observing from the sidelines though, it has me breathless.

As a good friend often laments, Rome is burning. And given the fact, our challenge of the last few years has been to consider how can we unravel from my rant above what is akin to Nero, stood there playing his fiddle, and what is a genuine attempt to get the root cause of the fire, perhaps help put it out even?

Watching England play India at cricket this week I took the chance to listen to a missed episode of The Full English podcast on factory farming. I had resorted to listening to a podcast at a live cricket match in order to block out the incessant braying of the boorish caricature behind me whose mewling lament told of a chap who had peaked in Thatcher’s city of London and had been in freefall ever since; he still had the jangle of Rolex and stench of Brut cologne, but the good times had otherwise deserted him. I was not going to let him ruin my day out. I am going to let him stand in for so much that has gone wrong in the last few decades in the UK.

Anyway, the upside was a very good episode of a very good podcast, and some wonderful takeaways. The most salient of which is the arrogance of our preaching of ending factory farming.

On the poddy, a very sage scientist made a very sage point with regard to our sole focus in the west being a move away from our quite gluttonous consumption of meats and cheese and other equally delicious but destructive treats, when in reality, huge swathes of the world are made up of fast developing economies and a fast-growing middle class, all of whom have watched us drink from the milky teat of success and they want their turn. And quite right too. Surely it's nothing more than a stealth form of colonialism to turn around and preach a pious diet of environmentally sustainable abstinence to a world populace who we have been merrily exploiting for their comparative advantages and relatively cheap labour on the way up, only to be told they can’t have what they want upon arrival as we’ve all enjoyed too much of it.

So global consumption of things that aren’t the best for the environment will continue to rise despite a few of us switching to oat milk in our takeaway coffee and testing out being flexitarian for lent, shock horror.

The truth is, the honourable thing to do would be to cease all consumption of factory-farmed and processed food in developed economies and let others have a ride on the merry-go-round of unbridled consumption whilst we settle into a sustainable diet of vegan sausage rolls and plant burgers. What? They’re not sustainable either? Well, what the hell are we meant to do then? The scientist's prediction was that maintaining current levels of consumption will be almost impossible let alone trying to reverse the trend.

A few weeks ago Janan Ganesh was in fine form on a very similar topic in the FT Weekend. Whilst pinpointing 2017 as the moment at which we might look back and conclude - we never had it so good, not before, or since - he suggests, “…Eden has passed. It was built on abundant labour and easy funding rounds for unprofitable companies in a zero-interest rate world. It was built on a co-operative US and China and therefore a well-oiled globalisation. As all these conditions fall away, the arteries of modern life fur and clog.” It’s a bleak but accurate assessment, one we see playing out before our eyes. He goes on, “…beyond a certain point, there must be such a thing as unhealthy convenience. There must be such a thing as a corrupting comfort. Orwell's great insight into empire was that it was bad for the master, not just the subject…A decade ago, Nassim Nicholas Taleb argued that some exposure to stress is better, more conducive to long-run robustness, than prolonged ease.”

Back to the podcast, the final headline from this scientist, who by now I was really rather taken with, was that if we want to pluck a vaguely sustainable future of feeding the world from the jaws of something much bleaker, the most likely route to doing so is going to be lab-grown meat. In a world, as described above, a world where it seemed we had everything, and we had it all very cheap, things like lab-grown meat seemed a nice idea, a novel solution to a problem that never quite seemed real. As stresses come barrelling into view, as we feel the pinch of it all in the next 5 years, I suspect we’re going to be looking at clever solutions to a growing problem with brand new eyes.

The thing is, we’ve been genetically modifying foodstuff since the dawn of time. Bananas? They don’t germinate naturally, their existence as a cereal topping in the morning is a result of human intervention and inventiveness. Carrots? Genetically modified; we came for the leaves and decided to stay for an unnaturally engorged root, we changed the natural order of the carrot for a better crudites platter - or something like that. The most illuminating thing to be learned from this particular episode of the podcast is that Quorn, a foodstuff invented in the 1960s (because even then the geeks in lab coats were rightly warning that our consumption of animal proteins was trending unsustainably), derived from fungal biomass, itself discovered on a compost heap in Buckinghamshire (I am only slightly joking), is still one of the best meat substitutes we have, and should be taken much more seriously.

At any rate, heading into the podcast feeling boxed in, I came out enlightened, but thoroughly depressed.

I’m sorry today's missive isn't a little more chirpy. Next week might be a magnum opus on recipes using Quorn mince, or perhaps I’ll treat myself and draw up a list of nostalgic ice creams and recipes for homemade Vienetta and no-churn Malteser ice cream.

As a pick-me-up for now though, how about a list of things that are bringing me joy. I’m not going to worry about what they say about me, nor how virtuous they are, I am simply going to enjoy them whilst I sit in the sun like Ray Winstone in Sexy Beast. I suggest you take them the same way.