Martin Henry

Last Thursday was a good day for food. Not only were gourmet diners well into the Gleaner-sponsored Kingston Restaurant Week; it was the day for the paper's weekly Food feature. And at the University of Technology a lunch hour forum presented exciting product development work on the plant half of the national dish - ackee. In the evening, just about when Restaurant Week diners were ready to hit the road, the UTech and the Scientific Research Council jointly staged a public lecture at the Hilton, 'Food for Life: A Balancing Act.'

One of the stark, troubling points of the lecture is that lack of sufficient food for millions remains such a chronic global reality that the Food and Agriculture Organisation [FAO] has invented a new measure of the problem. It is called 'the depth of hunger'.

Janeen McNish and her colleagues in the School of Hospitality and Tourism at UTech have taken the ackee, traditionally just boiled as part of the ackee and saltfish national dish, and developed a range of interesting formulations out of it. Some of these could well become commercial products, packaged by food processors for consumers' delight.

Jamaica has such a rich food culture, and one of the important things we have been doing over the last few years in our little food industry has been to develop formulations for the market - domestic and export. Many of these products have simply improved and packaged traditional foods.

The Scientific Research Council has over its 47 years done most of its work in agro-processing and its current Executive Director, Dr. Audia Barnett, is one of the country's leading food scientists and is now an adjunct associate professor of Applied Science at UTech. So the SRC and UTech teaming up for a public lecture on Food is pretty natural.

Poverty and hunger

The lecture took us from the history of food to modern controversies in food biotechnology through poverty and hunger issues, food security and food sovereignty, food trade, and Jamaica's own food situation.

By international measures, the country's food security and nutritional situation have shown significant improvement in a world with nearly a billion under-fed people. The percentage of people living on and below the poverty line has been in fairly steady decline throughout the last administration blamed for so many bad things, halved from 30 per cent in 1989 to about 15 per cent today. Among the fairly small pockets of the under-nourished it is the non-carbohydrate components of a balanced diet which are mostly lacking. Surprisingly the agency's data have Trinidad and Tobago - and Cuba - with deeper depth of hunger figures than Jamaica.

Non-communicable, chronic diseases have replaced infectious diseases as the leading causes of death in Jamaica. The top four causes: heart disease, stroke, cancer, and diabetes are all food-related to varying degrees. And obesity, another generic cause of ill-health is ballooning.

Heart disease

The lecturer tackled the role of trans-fats, artificially made by hydrogenating plant oils, in killing us. Tropical oils, like coconut oil, have taken a bad rap from developed temperate world research for their saturated fats. But trans-fats are believed to pose a higher risk of heart disease than saturated fats, which were once believed to be the worst kind of fats.

Having worked her way through thorny food trade issues and enough international agreements and protocols to glaze the eyes, especially with cocktails waiting, Dr. Barnett declared, "Agriculture is not dead!" She then outlined how the country could revamp its agro-food system backed by new technology and research.

In many ways the lecture is a public policy call for the new Government to consider. It spans a whole range of portfolios and agencies. "Agriculture is deeply woven into the fabric of Jamaican culture and the observation that GDP originating from agriculture is four times more effective in reducing poverty than [contributions] coming from other sectors should be motivation for consolidated and coordinated activities within and between public and private sectors," the lecture concluded.

"Jamaica with its rich biodiversity, some capability and infrastructure for research and development, together with its enviable 'brand' and innovative human capital has much to look forward to - if agro-industry is prioritised," the lecture continued. Shouldn't we be talking over SRC-developed sorrel drinks and UTech-developed ackee eats?