AS THE nights grow colder, one of the pleasures of autumn is a warm evening meal. Cooking is unique to humans.

Unlike language, where other animals undeniably exhibit aspects of meaningful communication — chimpanzees, dolphins, and so on — cooking has no equivalent outside our species.
 
A series of experiments over the last few years led by researcher Dr Rachel Carmody at Harvard have investigated the effect of cooking on nutrition. The basic concept is to feed the same food to mice in both raw and cooked forms and look for any resulting differences in genetics.
 
Last month, Carmody and a team of other researchers published their most recent paper. They looked at the genomes of the bacteria in the mice guts, known as the “gut microbiome.” They showed that the abundances of some bacteria varied depending on the mouse’s diet of cooked or uncooked food.
 
They also experimented in humans. A professional chef designed a vegan, organic, gluten-free plant diet where the same ingredients could be eaten either raw or cooked (it included things such as chia pudding, sweet potato salad, and berry smoothies).
 
Eight volunteers ate what they would normally, then switched to either the raw or cooked diet for three days. The researchers saw consistent changes in the gut microbiome with the raw diet across volunteers, suggesting that the microbiome also evolved over time with the adoption of cooking.

Research into the evolutionary history of nutrition is valuable, yet it is also being carried out in a modern world where people still go hungry. A recent Unicef report found that worldwide, one-third of children under five “aren’t growing well because they aren’t eating well.”
 
This happens in Britain too. As winter approaches, fuel poverty and lack of money combine to make getting enough healthy food to eat a huge problem. For example, there has been a 73 per cent increase in Trussell Trust foodbank use in the last five years. On Teesside, a third of emergency food parcels provided in 2018 and 2019 were for children. Universal credit has been blamed for the recent increase.
 
A common tactic of the Conservatives is to sow doubt about the seriousness of the problem. The lack of a single national definition of “hunger” makes interpreting official statistics difficult. This problem is common in social science. Disingenuous pedants sometimes appeal to this lack of consistency as a way of undermining the facts.
 
But it should be obvious that there is no single objective “hunger number” that summarises all the subjective experience of hunger in its many forms — and those studying hunger in Britain are not attempting to approximate this ideal number. There are different ways of defining hunger quantitatively which capture different aspects of a multifaceted problem, each reasonable.
 
One can accept this without rejecting the abundant evidence of a worsening problem. The risk is that technical discussion of these distinctions can give the impression that there is disagreement over whether hunger exists, when the existence of foodbanks should make it clear that it does. A similar tactic is used by climate change deniers — by talking about the assumptions that go into defining it quantitatively, they aim to create a false impression that the existence of climate change itself is up for debate.
 
Dry language doesn’t help. For example, an important concept in reports on hunger in Britain is “food insecurity.” This technical phrase tries to emphasise the multifaceted nature of the problem of not getting enough nutritious food. Unfortunately, it also lacks any emotional heft; it’s jargon.
 
A common way of measuring food insecurity is the Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES), which rather than using a single question about hunger uses eight yes/no questions about the past year. People are asked whether a lack of money or other resources has led to certain things happening to them, from worrying about having enough food to literally going a whole day without eating. Higher scores on this are used to measure greater “food insecurity.”

Understanding the basic questions this term is built on show that it is anything but abstract.  
 
Analysis by the Food Foundation in 2017 used FIES data to find that 10 per cent of children under 15 in the UK live in a household experiencing severe food insecurity. Britain is the worst-performing EU country by this score.

Such a statistic provokes different reactions. One is outright denial. Several politicians are on record as rejecting outright this conclusion because it doesn’t “feel right.” Yet in doing so, they are rejecting the actual answers of real people to the FIES questionnaire, and only highlighting how out of touch they are.
 
Another is what we might call the Philip Larkin defence (“No-one actually starves,” from his classic misanthropic and self-hating poem Toads). Aside from the fact that some would without the emergency assistance provided by foodbanks — a terrible example of the government’s failure — it is obvious that we should hope for a lot more from our society.

In contrast, last month the Labour Party officially adopted an impressive raft of policies on radical changes to welfare provision. Rather than emergency stop-gaps for those going hungry, the focus was on serious solutions.

One group of campaigners are taking inspiration from National Kitchens (in WWI) and British Restaurants (in WWII), which successfully provided communities with facilities and access to cheap healthy food. This socialist idea could be expanded from a grassroots network to a national programme. Much like the early establishment of the NHS, it would form a National Food Service.

If this sounds ridiculous to some, perhaps it’s because our society is now so divided that many privileged people can live their lives without ever personally seeing poverty that demands radical action. One interpretation is that this ignorance at the top is all that is needed to explain the lack of action.
 
As public health expert Professor Michael Marmot of UCL has commented, “People at the upper end of the income scale have no idea of what’s going on down at the bottom of the scale. They don’t realise how much people are really hurting.”

No doubt this is true for some people. But for others — this government among them — denying the existence of the problem is a callous political decision.

If treating food as a basic right which should be free at the point of use seems radical, it should do. Sadly, it is not unwarranted.