Food and drink are as essential for life as the air we breathe. So we ought to be able to assume that the inhabitants of this planet organise their access to food and drink in a fair way, especially since we are keen to call ourselves civilised. However, we don’t need to step far out of our front door before we discover our assumption is false: there are hardly any people on this planet who are truly free to decide what they eat, drink or breathe.

One of the main reasons for this is that our cultures treat food as a commodity to trade. Everybody needs it, which means that anybody who isn’t able to produce it for themselves has to get it from somewhere else, and in our society that usually means they have to buy it.

There have always been people trying to control the trade in food – this is nothing new. But the last 50 years have seen both a dramatic reduction in the size of this group and an increase in their influence within the field of food production. This has happened despite an overall increase in the quantities produced. Looking at these developments positively, we can say that an ever-decreasing number of people have to do the back-breaking work necessary to make sure that an ever-increasing number of people are fed and watered. However, there is also a negative side: fewer and fewer people are included in the whole range of decisions that affect the nourishment of more and more people.

That wouldn’t be so bad if this small group, claiming to ‘feed the world’, weren’t mainly concerned with ‘feeding their pockets’ – their real priority lies not in nourishment but in achieving the best profit at the end of the year. With this kind of motivation, the stage is not set for the best quality or for a fair distribution system meeting people’s real needs.

The food production revolution that has taken place in recent decades is unique in human history. It is now possible almost anywhere on the planet to eat whatever we feel like eating (or what we are led to believe we want to eat), regardless of place and season. The only thing that matters is whether we have enough money: those with money have almost unlimited choice, whereas those without have only one – to go hungry. In spite of food production surpluses, somewhere on the planet one person dies of malnourishment every four seconds. But even in the well-supplied areas of the world people are not happy with their situation. More and more people find it unsettling that their food supply is dictated by others. And it’s no longer just ‘alternative’ people who are concerned about their own nourishment: if it wasn’t obvious before, the advent of the “Slow Food” movement shows that even the mainstream has become more conscious of how and what they eat, and where it comes from. People want to decide for themselves how much blood is spilled for their food and they are no longer prepared to eat whatever rubbish some company decides to stuff into its pre-packaged meals.

If we want to know what we’re eating, one of the main things we need to do is find out where our food comes from and how it was produced. None of us can claim that we are really forced to go into a supermarket and buy so-called convenience food, whose ingredients can’t be checked for either quality or production conditions. Luckily, the responsibility for what we decide to buy is (still) our own – if the number of people buying convenience food decreases sufficiently, it will quickly disappear from the shelves.

There are many reasons why the carrots from our own gardens are the best: no blood has been spilled, nor fertiliser or pesticides – at the most, a few drops of our own sweat were lost in the production. However, not everyone is able to grow their own vegetables, especially in the city. (Although it has to be said that in Berlin after the Second World War and in Sarajevo during the siege, both cities saw every free square metre of their soil being used as a garden!) Many of us only have the option of buying; we have to think carefully as we purchase, even in organic shops, and remember that salad doesn’t grow outdoors in Northern Europe in winter. The quantity of CO2 pumped into the atmosphere for the greenhouse production, storage and transport of out-of-season vegetables is many times the quantity used by the plants if they grow naturally. Unless we want to plant a small woodland every time we eat to offset our carbon dioxide emissions, we really need to adapt our meal planning to the seasons. If you don’t know what food grows at what time of year, ask the sales assistants, and if they don’t know, get out of the shop quickly and find one where they do!

The easiest way we can show our disagreement with the way things currently work is to avoid buying anything we believe to be contaminated or blood-stained. However, you may ask whether this change of behaviour means you’ll have the added effort of learning a new, more complicated way of cooking? Maybe. But for me this is exactly what makes cooking adventurous: it is a creative way of dealing with what I have available. And I have to come up with some good results: it might be great if my food is ‘politically correct’, but it’s much more important for it to be tasty!

There is also a big difference between cooking and enjoying it, or cooking when we’re feeling terrible. The food ‘notices’ if we are cooking with love or if we are constantly swearing out loud! I performed a little experiment, which you can try at home if you want to. Boil a cup of rice and divide the rice into two clean jars that can be sealed tightly. Label one of the jars with a symbol you consider to be positive, such as a smiley, a flower, or the sun – whatever. The other jar then gets a negative label: the radioactivity symbol, a skull, a sad face, or something like that. Then you treat the ‘positive rice’ well – smile at it, whisper encouragement or praise, put it in a beautiful place – whereas you swear at the ‘negative rice’ and blame it for anything that goes wrong and all the world’s problems. Watch carefully what happens to the rice in the coming days. My results were always somewhat different due to variations in temperature and other surrounding conditions, but there was one thing that always came out the same: the ‘sunny’ rice always looked better than the ‘nuclear’ rice. OK, I admit, my experiments prove nothing really, but they are fun and you just have to try them yourselves.

I’ve written down 24 recipes for this book and each one is accompanied by a story from my life. The book is therefore also a whistle-stop tour through the past 50 years. As a child, I ate fish from the Rhine; when I was twelve, I was told not to swallow the water when I swam in the same river; as a twenty-year-old, I saw dead fish floating there; when I was thirty, I developed photos in it; ten years after that, the river began to become cleaner again and now, at the age of fifty, I hear that the first wild salmon have returned to the Upper Rhine. In those five decades, over fifty million people have lost their lives in wars and many millions more have starved to death. Nothing much seems to have changed, even though new conferences are constantly organised and ‘solutions’ for the problems claim to be found. But this shouldn’t surprise us too much: the change can’t come from above. Only you and I can change things – nobody else.

The government of the Netherlands has been planning 16 new nuclear power plants for thirty years now – but not one has been built.

Looked at this way, the stories in this book are also recipes – recipes for cooking up a new world. Don’t be scared, just try them out – as a Native American storyteller once told me, “Fake it till you make it.” I hope you have a lot of fun with your discoveries. So, with that in mind, I’ll leave you with a cordial wish from the Netherlands: Eet lekker!

Wam Kat, Weitzgrund, Germany, May 2008