A chilly late autumn day in 2013 and I am sitting in a central London

branch ofPizza Hut trying not to be noticed. I wanted a table towards the
back but they directed me instead to one here, in the window. I turn my
body away from the glass, but it makes no difference. I am well over six
foot, have a chest so big there are plans to build a high-speed rail link
between my nipples, and have hair like an unlit bonfire. Plus I whore about
on television. Sitting in a public place inconspicuously is not part of my skill
set.
Quickly someone tweets that they have spotted me. Oh God. I fear my
carefully honed reputation as a paragon of good taste is about to be
destroyed. I feel like some Bible-bashing Republican senator who's been
caught strapping himself to the wall bars in a secret torture garden, my
appalling morals revealed. And so I am forced to explain. Pizza Hut UK has
just launched a new product; an item so terrifying, so nightmarish, so
clearly the product of a warped and twisted mind in matters edible, that I
feel I have no choice but to try it.
I am doing this so others do not have to.
Most of the diners here today are going for the 6.99 all-you-can-eat buffet
deal. Not me. I am ordering a large double pepperoni pizza with
cheeseburger crust. I am consigning myself to my very own grease-stained,
cheese-slicked gastronomic hell. I am doing this to shine a light on the way
a deformed model of nutrition has come, in the past year, to play a key part
in the debate around global food security.
Quickly it arrives. It's certainly not misnamed. The middle is standard Pizza
Hut: a soft doughy base as sodden and limp as a baby's nappy after it's been
worn for 10 hours. There is a scab of waxy cheese and flaps of pink salami
the colour, worryingly, of a three-year-old girl's party dress. What matters
is the crust. Each of the 10 slices has a loop of crisped dough and in the

circular fold made by that loop there is a tiny puck of burger, four or so
centimetres across and smeared with more cheese. It looks like a fairground
carousel realised in food.
When I prise out one of the mini burgers, the greasy, insipid dough beneath
looks like the white flesh of an open wound that's been hidden under a
plaster. Do I need to tell you that the burger is a sweaty, grey orb of deathly
protein? It is advertised as 100% British beef, but origin is irrelevant after
this has been done to it. Those poor, poor animals. Surely they could have
reached a more dignified end, perhaps by cutting out the trip to Pizza Hut
altogether and going straight to landfill?
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As I bite down on the meat, hot salty water leaks into my mouth. There is
the fat-soaked dough, the wretched insult of the cheese sputum, and a
general air of desperation and regret.
Pizza Hut UK admits that the cheeseburger crust pizza is 288 calories a
slice, or 2,880 for the whole thing, well above an adult male's
recommended daily calorie intake and above the previous Pizza Hut big
dog. That was the BBQ meat feast stuffed crust, its doughy edges
suppurating with cheap cheese, at 2,872 calories. Extrapolating from
figures for that BBQ meat feast stuffed crust monstrosity, the cheeseburger
crust has north of 120 grams of fat; the recommended daily limit for men is
95 grams. That could be mitigated only if the person who desperately
wanted the cheeseburger crust pizza could find a friend with whom to share
it. Or quite a few friends. That might prove a challenge.
What's most peculiar about all this is that in March 2011, Pizza Hut, along
with many other big players in food retail, signed up to the British
government'sResponsibility Deal, an attempt to co-ordinate efforts by the
food and drink industry to encourage healthier lifestyle choices by the

public. One of the core pledges to which Pizza Hut signed up was: "We will
encourage and enable people to adopt a healthier diet." And yet here they
are, two years later, introducing to their menu an item that looks like it
could clog an artery at 20 paces.
The head of the food industry division of the Responsibility Deal is the
nutrition expert, Dr Susan Jebb. She declined to comment on Pizza Hut's
gastronomic delights, having not had them inflicted upon her. However,
between deep, weary sighs, she did say that "if we are going to support
people in making changes to their diets then the food choices they are
offered are a crucial and critical element". Indeed.
It's easy to dismiss the wretched cheeseburger crust pizza as a mere food
curio, a tragic example of the terrible things done to perfectly innocent
ingredients by those operating at the bottom end of the market. And it's
certainly that. But it's also something much bigger: a rallying point for
those talking seriously about the challenges of food security in the 21st
century.
For years the debate has been solely around improvements to agriculture;
about ways to increase yield and productivity while reducing impact on the
environment. It has been about what sustainability actually means, and the
need to revolutionise the way we make food or, as it's known, the supply
side. Nothing has changed. That agenda remains firmly in place. The
impact of climate change on our ability to feed ourselves really is going to
be huge, and we need to be serious about taking measures to mitigate that.

Waste food adds 3.3bn tonnes of greenhouse

gases to the planet's atmosphere and uses 1.4bn
hectares of land 28% of the globe's agriculture
area
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In the past year, however, a second debate has come to the fore, and this
one is all about the demand side. It's not just about how we produce the
food we eat; it's about how much of that food we're consuming or not
actually consuming, as the case may be. In the past year, for example, the
volume of the debate around food waste has been turned up and up. In
September 2013 the United Nations Food and Agriculture
Organizationreleased a report, Food Wastage Footprint: Impacts on
Natural Resources [PDF], which revealed that the 1.3bn tonnes of food
wasted globally each year caused $750bn worth of damage to the
environment. The water wasted is equivalent to the entirety of the flow of
Russia's Volga river. The waste food adds 3.3bn tonnes of greenhouse gases
to the planet's atmosphere and uses 1.4bn hectares of land, or a full 28% of
the globe's agriculture area. All to grow food that will never be eaten.
In November 2013 a report by the British government's waste advisory
body, theWaste Resources Action Programme stated that Britons were still
throwing away the equivalent of 24 meals a month, or 4.2m tonnes of food
a year. Every day UK homes were chucking away 24m slices of bread, 5.8m
potatoes and 1.1m eggs.
But there is another kind of waste, summed up by the Pizza Hut
cheeseburger crust pizza, and that's overconsumption.
Eat food you really don't need to eat and that too has been wasted. Joining
the middle classes, as millions across China, India, Brazil and Indonesia
have done, provides access to loads of cool things like education, flat-screen
TVs and karaoke machines. It also provides access to eating opportunities
which might not be for the best. Like cheeseburger crust pizzas.
A full 18 months before it was launched in the UK, the cheeseburger crust
pizza made an appearance in the Middle East. It's no surprise Pizza Hut
chose to trial it there. Of the top 10 countries in the world for prevalence of

type 2 diabetes, six the likes of Kuwait, Lebanon, Qatar and Saudi Arabia
are in the Middle East, where it affects a whopping 11% of the population
(compared with around 5% of the population in the UK). How better to
decide where to launch the worst kind of junk food than by identifying the
part of the world with the highest prevalence of an obesity-related disease?
All these people who are developing type 2 diabetes the kind related to
lifestyle rather than the non-lifestyle related type 1 will surely be total
suckers for a pizza freighted with cheeseburgers.
Clearly, Pizza Hut now needs to focus its efforts on the boom lands of
China. In September 2013, just as the cheeseburger crust pizza was arriving
in Britain, a new study into the disease in China was published by the China
Noncommunicable Disease Surveillance Group, based on a survey of nearly
100,000 people. As a measure of economic advancement, of an exploding
middle class shamelessly demanding to eat as their equivalents in the west
do, you couldn't hope to find much better. In 1980 less than 1% of the
Chinese population was diabetic. By 1994 the figure was 2.5%. By 2001 it
was 5.5% and six years later 9.7%. The report revealed that 11.6% of the
Chinese population is now diabetic, with a staggering 50% showing signs of
being pre-diabetic. Even the USA, that stadium for all things lardy and
obese, the outright winner of the biggest-arses-in the-world contest, can
only manage a diabetes rate of 8.3%. China has well and truly won the
global competitive over-eating contest. As treating each diabetic costs
around 900 annually in the UK, the financial implications of the disease
are huge. If just a third of the pre-diabetics in China went on to develop the
full-blown disease, in just a few years China could be facing a bill of around
300bn a year.
But there is also the simple issue of resources. As I was told by Professor
Tim Benton, the co-ordinator of government and academic work on food
security in the UK, if we all ate like the Americans we would need four

planet Earths. We are all moving towards eating like the Americans. We are
suckers for cheeseburger crust pizzas. And the last time I looked we didn't
have four planet Earths.

Obesity is a huge problem in China.

In 1980 less than 1% of the Chinese population was diabetic. 11.6% of the
Chinese population is now diabetic (more than in the USA), with 50%
showing signs of being pre-diabetic. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images Peter
Parks/AFP/Getty Images
How do we solve this problem? If we study the numbers it all looks very
simple. Along with the cheeseburger crust pizza, and the Chinese diabetes
statistics, September 2013 also saw the publication of a study that weighed
the benefits of techno fixes to agriculture to reduce greenhouse gas
emissions, against simply fixing the world's diet. The report, written by Pete
Smith of the Institute of Biological and Environmental Sciences at the
University of Aberdeen, along with many other academics worldwide,
concluded that if every single techno fix was introduced renewable power
generation, lower carbon methods of tilling, waste recycling and so on it
would reduce CO2 emissions by between 1.5 and 4.3 gigatonnes (a
gigatonne being a billion tonnes). However, if the world changed its diet
and went completely vegan, emissions would drop by 7.8 gigatonnes
(though that ignores the positive impact that well managed ruminants have
on the landscape and their ability to eat waste from agriculture).
There are many people who advocate just that. They say that if we all went
vegan everything would be fine. And I'm sure they feel a warm glow of self-

righteousness as they deliver these claims. There is nothing more

empowering than making airy proclamations about the way forward, when
you have no power whatsoever to make it happen. It's worth repeating:
certain social groups in Europe and the US may wish to make these
changes, but who fancies telling the newly emerged middle classes in China
that they can't now eat like us? It's also true, of course, that if we stopped
living in the 21st century everything would be fine. If we hadn't had an
industrial revolution everything would be fine. Best of all, if, as a species,
we hadn't been so damn successful, and we didn't keep being born and
living longer, everything would be completely fine. There'd be fewer of us
and, as a result, enough resources to go round. The fact is that, as the Smith
report acknowledges, the world is not going vegan any time soon. That said,
anoptimal diet, as defined by the Harvard Medical School, which reduces
the intake of animal proteins in rich countries and raises it in poor
countries, would lead to a reduction in emissions of 4.3 gigatonnes. If that
could be combined with advances in agricultural sustainability and
improvements in yield, we might be getting somewhere.
According to Tim Wheeler, professor of crop science at the University of
Reading, who is both deputy director of the Centre for Food Security and
deputy chief scientific adviser for the British government's Department for
International Development, it's only very recently that the debate's opposite
parties have finally started talking. "Longstanding concerns with supply of
sufficient and nutritious food to a growing population have spurred new
ways of thinking about the links between agriculture and nutrition," he
says. "What have traditionally been two separate schools of thought on food
production and on nutrition have started to come together to tackle global
food security challenges."
As he says, the dialogue can't come too soon; the over-nutrition issue is not
something that can simply be dismissed as a "first world" problem. "Even in

countries where stunting among children persists due to under-nutrition,"

he says, "there are fairly high and growing levels of adult overweight rates
in urban and rural areas, with child overweight rates also rising rapidly in
Latin America."
There are, it seems, an increasing number of places around the world where
Pizza Hut could make a serious splash with that 17.25 cheeseburger crust
pizza.
In the early summer of 2013 I was approached by a senior press officer
at Tescoplc. Would I like to have coffee with Philip Clarke, the chief
executive? Apparently he wanted to hear more about my views "as a food
expert, on our commitment and our ideas on how to achieve it". How very
flattering.
And how very, very odd. Historically, Britain's biggest retailer had also been
Britain's most bolshy. Generally press inquiries about their business were
met with a curt "no comment". They sold stuff, lots of stuff, and they didn't
see why they should have to explain to filthy journalists how they sold that
stuff.
Then a cheap, own-brand Tesco burger was found to be 29% horse, and
everything changed. The discovery of horsemeat in four Tesco products,
announced by the Food Safety Authority of Ireland on 14 January 2013,
cast a long shadow over the year which has not yet receded. Their ups and
downs have, in many ways, mirrored the debate around global food security
and the role of large corporations in it.
Other food retailers in Britain including Iceland, Aldi and Lidl were
implicated in the horsemeat scandal, but Tesco was the biggest player by
far. The scandal was described as a wake-up call for mass retail. The
question is will they all doze off again, given half a chance?

Within a few weeks of the discovery Tesco was taking out full-page adverts
in newspapers to declare that they understood they had screwed up. They
insisted that they had "changed". Shortly after that, the initiatives began. In
early May they announced they were going to help their customers to waste
less food. Which was nice. A week later, they announced they were going to
help their customers to eat more healthily. Each time they made these
announcements in radio or television studios they came up against a big
man with a goatee beard, sideburns and a book to sell: me.

More than 3 million children die globally each

year as a result of malnutrition Photograph: Ismail Taxta/Reuters
On waste food I asked why they didn't just stop doing the buy-one-get-onefree deals, the famed "bogofs" that encourage shoppers to buy more than
they need?
Why didn't they stop selling bagged fruit and veg, with their unnecessary
use-by dates, which infantilise customers and make them throw away food
that is perfectly edible?
Tesco insisted that most of the waste was either in the field or in the home
and not in store. This seems more than a little disingenuous. A lot of waste
in agriculture is a direct result of supermarkets cancelling orders, or

refusing produce on spurious quality grounds. Sure, it never reaches the

supermarket shelves to be wasted there, but that doesn't mean the
supermarkets aren't responsible for it.
Their initiatives on healthy eating were even less robust.
They admitted that the plan, which involved looking at their customers'
eating habits via Clubcard information, required those customers to opt in
to the programme. Anybody who opts in for healthy eating advice is
probably not the person most in need of it. Demolishing Tesco's publicityseeking initiatives, their attempts to recast themselves as the good guys
post the horsemeat scandal, really didn't take much effort.
Hence the email requesting I sit down with the chief executive to explain
what I thought they should be doing. I declined, and not very politely,
because I really do have appalling manners. I told them I wasn't really up
for acting as a free consultant to a multi-billion-pound company. Far better,
I suggested, that I stick with being a journalist and they stick with being a
supermarket.
I suggested we do a face-to-face interview with the boss of the company, all
on the record. To my surprise, they agreed.
Philip Clarke's predecessor as chief executive, Terry Leahy, had been
businessman as rock star, the buccaneer who wielded a well-cut suit like it
was a lethal weapon. Clarke presents as the comfortably upholstered grocer.
And it was the sweet-natured, local grocer who was there to meet me in his
sleek boardroom in the heart of London's St James's. Tesco, Clarke said,
was not just a retailer. It was a custodian of the food chain. "When you have
30% of the retail trade it comes with responsibilities. And I bitterly regret
that four of our products were laced with horsemeat." He accepted that the
deals they had done with producers had been too tough, that they needed to
be in partnership with them. He acknowledged that the global marketplace

had changed, that they couldn't just assume they could buy in food from all
over the world because the emerging middle classes of China, India and
Brazil may have got to them first. In what was a remarkable admission for
the man who runs one of the UK's biggest food retailers, which competes
furiously on price, he acknowledged that food was simply sold too cheaply
for farmers to get the sort of return they needed to invest in the agricultural
base.
"Because of growing global demand, it is going to change," he said. "There's
going to be more demand and more pressure. Over the long term I think
food prices and people's proportion of income may well be going up but
we'll be doing our bit. Unless more food is produced prices must go up. It's
the basic law of supply and demand." Philip Clarke had said the unsayable.
In the days that followed, Clarke's admission on the need for food prices to
rise would make headlines.
He finished by admitting to me that Tesco had a big part to play in cutting
down on waste, by not reneging on contracts and forcing farmers to dump
crops. "There will have to be an end to that," Clarke said. Tesco would have
to become better at forecasting their needs. And where they had ordered
too much they would have to take responsibility "for selling them on the
open market for a lower price than we contracted to pay". Unsurprisingly a
lot of this openness and commitment to change was met with scepticism by
both industry and consumers. After all, this was big, bad Tesco we were
talking about. Surely they didn't actually mean it?

In October 2013, Tesco's report on waste within

its own food supply chain showed that in six
months it had wasted almost 30,000 tonnes:
21% was fruit and veg; 41% was bakery items

But still the initiatives came. In October 2013 they issued a report on waste
within their own food supply chain. In the first six months of the year they
had wasted almost 30,000 tonnes of what could have been lunch; 21% was
fruit and vegetables, but a vast 41% was bakery items. They were filling
their shelves with bread that nobody ever bought, let alone ate. Tesco
estimated that across the UK food industry as a whole, 68% of all bagged
salads were never eaten.
And so they started making commitments: where possible, food that had
not been bought would be distributed to charities like FareShare, for
redistribution to community projects and food banks. Bogofs on large bags
of salad would come to an end, in-store bakeries would put less bread on
display and they would remove display-until dates on bags of fruit and
vegetables, which consumers said they found confusing. It's not the same as
removing bagging altogether, but it is a start.
How seriously should all this be taken? Can a company like Tesco really be
part of the solution? The honest answer is that we can't afford for them not
to be. Mass retailers are a part of the landscape whether we like it or not. A
privileged few may have lifestyles that enable them to avoid multiples
altogether, but the majority will continue to shop there. We need Tesco to
take seriously the challenges of food security. The real question is whether
they can continue to do so in the face of pressure from shareholders. As
2013 came to an end, Tesco plc was faced with some truly horrible trading
results. UK sales were down 1.5% in the third quarter. In Ireland they had
plummeted 8.1%. The rest of Europe was down 4%. A year that had started
with the company discovering there was some horse in its burgers ended
with Tesco looking like a bit of an old nag.
It wasn't just the big food retailers who spent 2013 struggling with their
responsibilities. In June, David Cameron, convened a "hunger summit" of
world powers to thrash out a new international plan to combat

malnutrition. He would have been forgiven for being a little disappointed

by the turnout. He was the only actual leader to attend; the rest were mere
ministers.
Around 2.7bn was pledged that day to tackle the problem, though it was
pointed out by critics that in 2009, at another intergovernmental meeting
in L'Aquila, Italy, nearly 15bn had been pledged, and very little of that
money had ever been released. In any case, much of that turned out to be
cash already pledged as part of other international aid initiatives.
During the hunger summit a 45,000-strong crowd gathered in Hyde Park,
London, at a rally staged by the Enough Food for Everyone IF campaign,
which argues that the issue isn't one of lack of food, but of lack of equal
distribution and unfair taxation and aid regimes. It was proof, if proof were
needed, that the issue had moved far beyond the tight world of policy
wonks and academics. Food security was now officially part of the political
agenda. That same week a report [PDF] in the medical journal
the Lancet revealed that there had been a miscount. Previously it had been
thought that somewhere north of 2 million children under five die globally
each year of conditions they might otherwise survive if they weren't
malnourished. The statisticians had redone their sums and discovered that
the number was actually north of 3 million.
In November, a leaked draft of a new report from the United Nations
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, due for publication this
spring, revealed that fluctuations in weather are already having an impact
on global agricultural yields. It predicted that worldwide food production
could drop by as much as 2%, while both population and demand continue
to rise.
In short, the food security forecast during 2013 was gloomy and troubling,
with possible outbreaks of calamity. But not everything was misery and

disaster. Because in London that fine company Pizza Hut (UK) Ltd had
decided that precisely the right moment had arrived for the launch of a
17.25 pizza boasting a crust containing 10 mini cheeseburgers, with an
overall calorie count of 2,880. Many will tell you it's hardly the end of the
world. It's just a pizza. And they would be right.
By itself, it isn't the end of the world. But it has the potential to make a
bloody good contribution.
This is an edited extract of a new chapter from A Greedy Man in a
Hungry World by Jay Rayner