Is healthy eating good for the countryside...?

We're on slightly virgin territory here. I like the countryside...and I love my food. Technically on the Body Mass Index...the all powerful BMI, I fall into the `Fat Bastard' category.

Some of this can be laid at the door of the brewing industry, some of it is down to eating too much food... not necessarily the wrong sort of food, just a lot of it. Much of the blame must lie in the fact that technically I'm a lazy `Fat Bastard'.

However I am trying to make an effort. I eat a stick of celery every week, and I have given up aubergines... arguably the world's most pointless vegetable... but every bit helps. I'm trying to eat healthily, but these things take time and effort.

We live in the age of virtuous eating. The Food Standards Agency's `five portions a day' slogan encouraging people to eat at least five portions of fruit or vegetables every day has to be the most recognised public information campaign since Tufty saved millions of the nation's children from an early death at the hands of the automobile industry.

Healthy food is big business, with entire chiller cabinets devoted to guilt free calories. Things like diary produce, and red meat have become the love that dare not speak its name. The nation is on the path to a long and healthy life, but can the same be said for the countryside?

An academic paper which has just been published by the Rural Economy and Land Use programme (RELU) based at Newcastle University has been looking at the relationship between farming, the food chain and the countryside.

In the first of a series of chapters colleagues from Reading University asked what would happen to our landscape if the population followed the kinds of advice being issued by the Department of Health and the FSA. Their conclusions make interesting reading.

If we eat fewer dairy products' the report says' this could lead to more farmers abandoning the milk parlour, in favour of crops or possibly livestock. If we eat less meat this could lead to the precarious hill-farming sector becoming unviable. The Reading scenario took as its benchmark the World Health Organisation guidelines for healthy eating. The researchers say that this, if followed by everybody, would mean a 75% drop in the consumption of cheese whilst the amount of fresh fruit and vegetables would increase by 50%.

In the case of the drop in consumption of red meat, which falls under this model by 15%, this would be made worse by competition from former dairy farmers who have switched to meat production in the lowlands, where the cost base is lower than in the hills. The end result could be the abandonment of hill farms, and a switch to massive `ranches'. There would also be an increase in demand for fruit and vegetables, and this might mean an increase in the Bete Noire of the `blight on the landscape' brigade, the polytunnel.

Of course healthy eating doesn't mean cutting out meat and dairy. Infact there is an argument out forward by the researchers that some of the methods used to produce healthier meat and dairy products, are infact very good for the countryside. For instance `grass-fed' meat has been found to be higher in beneficial fatty acids than meat from animals which have been fattened indoors on cereals.

Grass fed animals are good for the environment, and in some cases, in particular in the uplands they are also a vital tool for conservationists. For instance in the Yorkshire Dales traditional breeds of cattle are used because they can live, and thrive on the harsh limestone hills, whilst eating the invasive, tough, scrubby plants that the the sheep are `too posh to nosh'. Under the Limestone Country project which has just come to an end, farmers were encouraged to use breeds such as Dexter, and Highland and Luing. The beef was specially marketed, meaning the farmers got a better price for what they produced.

So the conclusion is that not only do you change the attitudes of people towards eating healthy food, but you change the composition of that food so that it is both healthy to eat and good for the landscape. Strawberries which are produced under plastic which allows ultra-violet light to come through, rather than in polytunnels have, according to the researchers, a better nutrition value, although the yields are lower.

Grass-fed beef is also more expensive to produce than its intensive counterpart. The message is that people must be prepared to pay more for their food if it is to be healthy for them, and healthy for the landscape in which it is produced. Something which may cause problems for people on low incomes.

Of course this vision of the future is based on a model which accepts that people will change their eating habits to consume only healthy food. That is highly unlikely, especially if that food is more expensive at a time of recession.