Editorial: Your Five a Day

The ubiquitous injunction to consume ‘Your 5 a Day’ quota of fruit and vegetables seems to stand in for a whole governmental ideology of population management in contemporary Britain and beyond. As Madame Tlank explains in her article ‘The Battle of All Mothers’, (p.72), which explores the UK’s neoliberalised welfare system and its corralling of working class women:

In the [NHS], illness-risk and its management are personalised, even though accounting norms for staying healthy are rigid – ‘your 5 a day’, pedometer quotas, etc. – and conflicting ideas about who is at risk of what keep proliferating. Likewise, in social services, responsibility is devolved downward from the institution to the individual, and the point of intervention has moved as far ‘into’ the subject as possible.

Where once welfare was handed out in a relatively standardised form, it is now highly individualised, with far more intrusive assessments, data gathering and heavy conditions imposed on the recipient than ever before. ‘Your 5 a Day’ stands for the third-way New Labour ethics of personal responsibility, whose background is the relentless consumption of social wealth and destruction of public resources. Keep eating ‘Your 5 a Day’ because we’ve just shut your local A&E ward; keep those bananas coming because we’re cutting your Incapacity Benefit; go on, gobble up those grapes, they really help when your pension has just been wiped out. It’s not just the case that, as per Foucault’s formulation of biopolitics, life itself has become the object of power, but also that the body is being reconfigured as an asset – one that offsets the high personal risks of life in capitalism. Invest in your body today and it will pay dividends tomorrow (and if you don’t, we’ll write you down!)

It is ironic, but not accidental, that this health-obsessed, risk averse ideology forms the background to a global food crisis – which now looks like the razor-sharp tip of a general stagflationary crisis. Isn’t it the case that our ability, if not willingness, to consume ‘5 a Day’ is premised on the globalisation and commercialisation of food production which makes fresh fruit and vegetables available to rich nations around the year? And yet, this same process of converting food into an export commodity is responsible for the unaffordability of basic foods in some of the world’s top food producing nations. As investors, post sub-prime crash, pile into basic commodities like food and oil these commodity markets are spiralling. The ‘5 a day’ injunction would read even more clearly as the insult it is in countries like Bangladesh and Haiti where food inflation has been so great that many can only afford one meal a day – often a staple like rice unembellished by meat or vegetables.

The precariousness of the UK’s citizen-‘stakeholders’, whose forms of social life are relentlessly subjected to marketisation, rests upon the still greater vulnerability of the world’s ‘surplus population’ to this same logic. But with tanker drivers protesting the cost of fuel with go-slows and road blockades across Europe, food riots breaking out in Haiti, Cameroon and Bangladesh, and an emergency UN summit on ‘food security’ in Rome this June, these global lines of connection are daily becoming more starkly apparent. Of course bullish free marketeers see the interconnectedness produced by the free market as the only way out of the crisis: the Rome summit ended in a commitment to ‘minimise the use of restrictive measures that could increase the volatility of international prices’ and backed the rapid conclusion of the Doha round of WTO orchestrated negotiations over trade liberalisation. If you’re in a hole, as they say, keep digging. Clearly some more G8 orchestrated aid packages are never going to offset the underlying causes of the food crisis, and neither is their twin, the ‘free market’. It is important to remember that one of the motivations behind the ‘green revolution’ (the improbable term for the industrialisation of global food production devised in the 1960s), was the fear of a Maoist-type revolution across the developing world sparked by famine. Could this be on the cards again, but this time without the possibility of producing more food as a counter-revolutionary deflection? The homeopathic effects of the market itself is successfully blocking any such ‘cure’.

A parallel can be drawn between the treatment of developing countries and the subjection of welfare recipients in the UK to a sandwich of standardised advice and personalised control/responsibility. For is not the same logic at work when countries forced to open up their internal markets in return for aid are then held responsible for the repercussions? In both cases, help is adulterated by the imposition of rules and the beneficiary is left to deal with the consequences. The hope is that somehow these universal injunctions and ‘cures’ can be turned on their heads, transforming the insistence on Your 5 a Day into the radical demand to be freely fed, and the globalisation of supply chains into co-ordinated networks of resistant logistics.

Josephine Berry Slater <josie@metamute.org> is Editor of Mute