Fair-trade, organic, local - which is best?

A surprise consequence of writing a book about food was that we lost our appetite. A month in, we realised we had underestimated just how devastating the effects of our industrial food systems are on our health, animal welfare, climate change and the earth’s resources.

Thankfully, a few trips to some farmers markets with their good news story of artisan baking, handmade cheeses and fresh-from-the-ground veg offered the escapism we needed and helped provide a sense of perspective.

Food, lies and red tape

Overwhelmingly we found that most of us simply don’t know much about food, having grown up knowing only supermarkets. In our confusion we are at the mercy of food manufacturers’ aggressive marketing campaigns, especially for highly profitable "healthy" foods.

The Food Standards Agency and the EU are now challenging manufacturers’ health claims. Yakult, we discovered, is essentially overpriced sweetened water with added bacteria marketed as a probiotic health drink (check the label: we naively assumed it was diluted live yoghurt!). Why spend your money on foods that are not all they’re cracked up to be? Become a label checker and edit your shopping list: a good rule of thumb is the fewer and simpler the ingredients the better.

Ducks

We knew animals had a pretty bad time in order to provide us with ever cheaper meat; but we were shocked that their lives were literally not worth living. Despite our national attachment to Jemima Puddleduck, 98 per cent of the duck we eat comes from mass-produced, often mutilated animals which are packed into vast sheds and only see the light of day on their way to the slaughterhouse. Ducks have nowhere to swim.

Beware of misleading labels implying "freedom"; only the Soil Association accreditation offers any real guarantee of a decent standard of animal care. Top supermarkets for animal welfare are Waitrose and M&S - see Compassion in World Farming’s annual welfare league tables.

Food giants

We set out believing supermarkets were where power was concentrated in the food system, so it was a surprise to learn about the handful of mega-powerful transnational corporations which control most of the links in the food chain. Giant among giants is Cargill, whose $120bn turnover in 2008 was bigger than the GDP of two-thirds of the world’s nations. Cargill controls almost half of all the world’s grain trade and has, in the words of one commentator, "its tentacles in every aspect of the global food system" from meat and sugar to animal feed and fertiliser. This is worrying because it gives them incredible power over what we eat and our future food supplies.

Bitter chocolate