For most of my forty-two years, I have been eating bananas in Britain. I was born in 1974, the year after we joined the European Economic Community. Since then, I have consumed bananas in many shapes and sizes. Some were as rounded as a crescent moon, and others as straight as a policeman’s truncheon. I’ve nibbled on tiny yellow finger bananas—thin-skinned and sweet—and bananas so giant they could be sliced up and shared across three platefuls of pancakes.
In theory, my varied experiences with bananas should have been impossible. The classic anti-European Union joke was that faceless Eurocrats banned "wonky" bananas and imposed a single, standardized fruit on the British people. Bureaucracy gone crazy! This Euromyth—one of many—was based on a 1994 E.U. ruling that bananas should be "free from abnormal curvature." In fact, this rule applied only to bananas of the very highest grade. The normal British Class I and Class II bananas sold in most shops have always been allowed "defects of shape."
Now that the Leave campaign has won the referendum on Europe, it is clear that far more was at stake for British food in the E.U. than our right to misshapen fruit. Already, the president of the National Farmers’ Union, Meurig Raymond, has warned of food prices rising from the combination of a falling pound and the U.K.’s reliance on imported food. As a country that produces only around fifty-four per cent of what it eats, Britain starts to look vulnerable to fluctuating markets. For the first time since the Second World War, Britain’s ability to feed itself is in question. On June 24th, Tim Lang, a professor at City University and the leading U.K. food-policy expert, tweeted, despairingly, “EU shock. Very sad.” And then, “Food Plan B now needed. Will the people who voted Brexit be prepared to dig for Britain, work in picking fields and factories for low pay?”
One of the main reasons for establishing the E.U. in the first place—aside from peace—was to insure a plentiful food supply for entire populations. Sicco Mansholt was a Dutch farmer who became the E.U.’s first commissioner for agriculture, in 1958. Mansholt saw the union’s role as preventing any recurrence of famine, such as the terrible “Hunger Winter” suffered by the Netherlands in 1944 and 1945. Mansholt’s dream was for Europe to become as self-sufficient as possible in food.
As Lang sees it, Europe not only nourished the British but changed British palates. With Britain’s membership in the union, sunny new produce flooded in from southern Europe: apricots, peaches, tomatoes, garlic. During the decades of our membership, the food on British dinner tables changed beyond all recognition. We developed a penchant for wine and soft French cheeses. In 1973, the U.K. was a country where olive oil could be bought—if at all—in tiny bottles from the chemist shop, as a cure for earwax. Now you could get lost in the olive-oil section of a British supermarket, from the kalamata varieties of Greece to the Arbequina of Spain.
The E.U. can’t take sole credit for the fact that the British now know pesto from salsa verde. Probably some kind of food revolution would have happened here anyway, just as it did in the States and Australia over the same period. But to contemplate Brexit is to see the extent to which Britain is not a food island. We eat food cooked by French and Italian chefs using European ingredients. More than a quarter of those working in food manufacturing in Britain are immigrants from within the E.U. We could not eat as we do without them. British food has also benefitted from the E.U.’s protected-designated-origin (P.D.O.) system, which gives protected status to special regional foods, from Périgord walnuts to the Brocciu cheese of Corsica. It took Europe—through P.D.O.—to remind Britons of the specialness of native delicacies like Cornish clotted cream, Whitstable oysters, and Yorkshire rhubarb. Over all, the impact of the E.U. on the British diet has entailed, as Lang puts it, “cultural exchange on a massive scale.”
In April, Lang co-authored—with Victoria Schoen—a “briefing paper” on the far-reaching impact of Brexit on British food. It is a sobering read. Lang and Schoen point out that, as of 2015, twenty-seven per cent of all food eaten in the U.K. (by value) was imported from the E.U. (compared with just four per cent from North America and four per cent from Africa). When it comes to fruits and vegetables, Britain is dependent on the E.U. for forty per cent of fresh produce. Lang sees this as a question of health as much as economics. Only thirty per cent of British adults currently eat the recommended five daily portions of fruits and vegetables, and only a tiny fraction of U.K. farmland is given over to horticulture—a hundred and sixty-four thousand hectares, out of 4.7 million hectares of crop-growing land. When the E.U. subsidies and tariff exemptions are gone, the odds are that plant foods will become more expensive, and that even fewer Brits will consume enough of them.
The thorniest question, though, is how Britain will actually go about extricating its food supply from that of Europe. As Lang and Schoen write, “A vast array of agreements, policies and standards now underpin UK food.” Brexit could entail the renegotiation of thousands of exceedingly complex E.U. regulations, many of which concern the food system. E.U. law extends from environmental law and farm subsidies to food safety and nutrition. Brexiteers would say that it is precisely this complexity that Britain could do without. Indeed, some E.U. food policy has been Kafkaesque, such as the Common Fishing Policy, which until recently required fishers to discard perfectly usable fish to meet quotas. But Lang suggests that leaving the union will involve even greater bureaucratic complexity—a revisiting of “43 years of what has already been decided in a kind of food policy groundhog day,” he writes.
What we forget when we grumble about E.U. food policy is that many of these laws were set up to make Europeans healthier, safer, and better fed. And, within reason, they work. Food is one of the unequivocal successes of the European Union. Two generations have grown up without an inkling of famine or even shortages, thinking that the worst we had to fear was a bureaucrat messing with the curve of our bananas. Now Britain finds itself in an alarming new landscape, where our very ways of feeding ourselves, like so much else, look uncertain.
