Vegging out

I'm not that keen on air-conditioning. When Maggie went to the UK for a few days a couple of weeks ago, I enjoyed turning off the aircon in the car and riding around with the windows down. I don't care for that "climate control" icy blast or the more insidious slow freezing of your knuckles. Then again rolling down the windows, with the resultant noise and the buffeting hot wind, isn't that comfy either. My main, anti aircon, gripe isn't temperature related - it's more about shutting the world out. One of the hallmarks of living in Southern Spain is that it’s hot in summer. It seems a bit perverse to come somewhere warm and then struggle to cool spaces to the point that they would be considered cold at other times of the year. Sometimes, it’s a blessed relief to settle back in an air-conditioned space, after getting super hot, but that’s not the same as maintaining a room at Stavanger in December levels with the Spanish summer just beyond the door.

If I were designing a cliché magazine cover for Mediterranean Homes & Gardens, I'd show Bougainvillea by a turquoise pool with views of the sparkling Med, framed by gauzy curtains fluttering in a light breeze from a room decorated with light, modern furniture. That’s my idea of a Spanish summer—not one with rooms in near darkness behind pulled down shutters to vainly attempt to preserve the cool air allowed in through opened doors and windows late at night or early morning. No, light and sun are our trademarks, not the subdued lighting of a tasteful funeral parlour.

We’ve been talking about this at home. I want to throw doors open and let the outdoors in even when it’s hot, but Maggie finds it unbearable. She closes blinds, and cranks up the aircon to igloo temperatures. It's fair enough, I can go and sit somewhere else, it's not a hard compromise.

The odd thing about this situation is that it made me think about some of the terrible food we eat nowadays. One of my bar-room topics of conversation is how the search for higher and higher profits by the food corporations and gigantic agricultural enterprises makes farming of animals more and more cruel and the crop harvest less and less tasty.

There’s an irony that food scarcity and rationing in the UK of the Second World war made for a healthier diet than today’s abundance. In the 1940s, Britons ate around 3,000 calories a day—more than current recommendations—with far less obesity. The diet was mostly whole foods: bread, potatoes, vegetables, dairy, some meat, fish, and minimal processed items. Quality gaps between rich and poor, in relation to food, were smaller. Now, the UK diet is overloaded with calories but poor in nutrients. Convenience and ultra-processed foods prevail, driving obesity, especially among poorer people, who are often given little option but to eat the cheapest, lowest-quality food.

Maybe it’s just nostalgia, but I'm sure that food used to taste better. It wasn’t only that tomatoes, strawberries, and ham tasted like something—instead of flavoured water. It wasn’t just that cooking bacon or chicken didn’t involve releasing puddles of liquid. It was that nearly everything simply tasted better.

One of the triggers for this line of thought was that I bought a 2kg bag of potatoes from a local shop, my supermarket of choice. I shopped badly, I didn’t check the produce. The next day, the kitchen stank of rotting veg. There were four spoiled spuds in the bag. How is it that my mum used to buy half hundredweight sacks of spuds that kept until she peeled the last one? Just how long had those supermarket potatoes been in cold store?

When we first came to Spain, tomatoes had blotches, carrots were different colours and fruit was seasonal. Now, most fruit and veg have been stored artificially to control price and supply. Varieties are chosen for their fashion show good looks, not for taste. Food quality here has clearly declined. Spaniards, like Britons before, are being wooed by fatty, sugary foods. The Mediterranean diet is shifting away from traditional staples of bread, potatoes, olive oil, fish, beans, and vegetables toward more meat, dairy, sugar, and processed foods. Ultra-processed food consumption is rising, though not to UK levels. Some food education efforts are helping, but supermarkets and food giants still make it tough to know what we’re eating. I laughed seeing ham labelled “92% meat” as if that were something to boast about only to learn that’s the top end for most brands.

I’d heard ten companies control 80% of the global food market—which turns out to be yet another of those untruths touted on social media. What is true is that six big firms do control about 70% of global agriculture. In processed foods, Nestlé, General Mills, Conagra, Mondelez, Tyson, and Kraft Heinz account for 30–40% of all sales, over 50% in confectionery. I always think it's quite amusing that Spaniards describe lots of the packaged cakes and buns as "bollería industrial" but it turns out that industrial confectionary is dead right.

So how, in my enfeebled mind, was I making this connection between a decrease in food quality and the maintenance of artificial environments with air conditioning? For thousands of years, planting and harvesting barely changed. Now we breed crops for superficial ideals—enormous strawberries, apples that grow on bushes to enable mechanical picking and lettuces that know not either sun or soil. In those same thousands of years Iberians coped with heat by cooling water in clay pots, wearing broad hats and baggy clothing and eating in shade. Nowadays that’s not good enough.

Real as climate change is, there have been high temperatures on Spanish soil for ages. It's scientifically true that summer is coming earlier each year and there are more hot days with incredibly high temperatures, but the differences—while huge environmentally—are not really important to individuals. In Albacete in August 1903, the temperature reached 45.5 °C, which is only a couple of degrees shy of the current record set in 2021 near Córdoba at 47.6 °C. A reflection of this change is that throughout the 20th century, the average summer temperature in hotspots like Seville was around 35–36 °C, while since 2000, those same places have been running at 38–40 °C. So, it has been hot here in summer for a long time now, and earlier generations coped well enough

And that's the link; that just as our food is being distanced from the natural world by genetic manipulation and abominable husbandry so are we as we try to maintain an overly unnatural environment.