The choices we need to make to ensure a healthy food supply
From field to fork, our food system is mired in problems. It has harmed both the environment and human health. Land and waterways have been damaged by intensive farming as some of us suffer from diseases caused by what we eat and others are going hungry. No wonder a growing number of people believe change is urgently needed.
Among them is Henry Dimbleby, co-founder of restaurant chain Leon. When he was appointed the UK’s “food tsar” in 2019, it was heralded as a once-in-a-generation opportunity for change. He was to lead a year-long review that would culminate in a national food strategy to revamp the way the UK farms, and the way it feeds its population.
In March, Dimbleby quit his role at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs after politicians failed to act on most of his recommendations. “It’s not a strategy,” he said of the resulting policy. “It doesn’t set out a clear vision as to why we have the problems we have now and it doesn’t set out what needs to be done.”
Dimbleby hasn’t finished pushing for change, but is trying a different approach. Hoping to get his ideas across to a larger audience, he and his wife, journalist Jemima Lewis, have collaborated on a book, Ravenous: How to Get Ourselves and Our Planet Into Shape.
“Very few sane people are going to go online to download a government document, then read it,” says Dimbleby, now. “But the story is very important: why we’re becoming unhealthy, why we’re destroying nature.”
He refers to the modern food system as both a miracle and a disaster, and says that almost everything people understand about it is wrong. We don’t realise we are cogs in a vast and complex machine that influences everything we buy and eat. And crucially, many of us are not aware that globally, the food system is the second-biggest emitter of greenhouse gases (after the fuel industry) and the primary cause of deforestation, drought, freshwater pollution and the depletion of aquatic wildlife.
“The way we produce food is imperilling the way we produce food, and that is news to a lot of people,” says Dimbleby.
He and his colleagues travelled around the UK, visiting farms, foodbanks and alternative-protein laboratories, holding focus groups and digesting science and ideas from around the world. When they were halfway through their work, the pandemic arrived, giving Dimbleby the opportunity to see how the system coped as supermarket shelves were stripped bare, supply lines faltered and many food outlets were unable to operate. It left him with respect for its resilience and agility, but no less convinced it needed to be reshaped.
He drew up what seems an impossible to-do list: solve the health crisis created by our modern Western diet; repair the environmental damage caused by intensive agriculture; ensure that good food is affordable for everyone; and improve food security, protecting against events that might affect global supply chains.
Intensive production
The modern food system was created with the best of intentions. Seventy years ago, as the world’s population swelled, there were fears there wouldn’t be enough farmland to produce the amount of food needed and we were heading for mass starvation. Enter US agronomist Norman Borlaug, who developed high-yield strains of wheat, which meant three times the quantity of grain could be harvested from the same area of land. Disaster was averted and, in 1970, Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his lifetimeof working to feed a hungry world.