Every Thursday night, in that strange lockdown spring of 2020, people leaned out of windows and huddled on doorsteps to rattle pans, cheer and clap. The Clap for Our Carers started as a way of thanking doctors and nurses. A few weeks in, the tribute was extended to all of the country’s ‘key workers’. Among them, it’s easy to forget, were supermarket staff, abattoir operatives, delivery drivers, and farmers.

It's been a year of conversations about how much our society values the work of growing, making and serving food. The campaign against the cut to agricultural property relief segued into a bigger debate, about whether the government even has a view on farming’s future. Trailing her profitability review, Baroness Minette Batters urged politicians to look beyond the small dent farming makes to GDP. 96% of the UK’s farming and food businesses are small or medium-sized. Those firms have felt under the cosh, from changes to national insurance, minimum wages and business rates, on top of stubbornly high running costs.

Food work remains poorly paid. The latest data shows that almost half of the UK’s food sector workers receive less than the Real Living Wage. That’s more than double the rate across the rest of the economy. Then there’s all the insecure, shadow work that’s harder to count, including delivering takeaways and meal kits. The Home Office recently press-released an immigration crackdown on delivery drivers. Of the 171 riders arrested over seven days in November, 60 face deportation.

I was reminded of Clap for Our Carers while finishing The Care Economy, the new book from economist and FFCC commissioner, Tim Jackson. The book’s premise is twofold: that real prosperity is about health, rather than wealth; and that the economy should be geared around care, rather than growth. To care is to ‘maintain, continue and repair our “world”’, according to a definition to which Jackson is drawn. The story of his book is about how often we – and our economy – fall short.

Food workers should be in the care business too. Farming clearly demand responsibility and paying attention, particularly when it comes to animals. It’s nearly Christmas. I think of bringing cattle coming into straw-filled barns, taking out hay to overwintering sheep, and cracking the ice on water troughs. We talk about pastoral farming. Animal welfare. Farms get paid for stewardship of the environment.

But farming provides care in more expansive ways. Most obviously, the care farming movement is all about helping people directly. Beyond this, the job of farming itself can be fulfilling, creative and varied. Looking after the land entails maintaining homes for wild creatures, keeping rivers clean, and sustaining soils bursting with bugs, bacteria and fungi and rich with organic matter. Farming also produces the nutritious food the rest of us use to build up our bodies and live long, healthy lives.

In this, the people slogging away in packhouses, mills, and factories and behind the wheel of vans and lorries all play a part. As do bar staff, waiters, chefs and pot-washers, who keep us full and happy away from home. Hospitality, in its old, pre-commercial sense, is about caring for guests and entertaining strangers. They might be angels in disguise. And don’t bin men show care too? They clean up, recycle and compost scraps, so we can use these materials and nutrients again.

Yes, food work can be care. But it frequently adds up to the opposite. There is farming that takes from nature without giving back, that’s so squeezed that its workers risk accidents and struggle with mental health, that produces raw materials for heavily processed junk linked to a crisis in chronic disease. A food industry that competes fiercely on a single measure, price, and is expected to grow at any cost has little capacity to care. It cannot look after all its workers and provide them with good wages and protections. It allows working conditions and the treatment of animals that would be unbearable on British soil to carry on out of sight, overseas.

What if we took Jackson’s prescription? What if the health of ourselves and the planet was the aim?

Those with some power to shape what they do might take pause. Business owners, managers and farmers might ask themselves if their work, in its small way, maintains and repairs our world. Shareholders and banks might ask the same of their assets.

Prioritising care might reorient policy. It might cultivate the sorts of food, business practices, and farming that aim to better people’s lives. It might encourage food work to become more qualified and prestigious, up there with other high-skilled trades. It might incentivise eating together, in canteens, schools, community kitchens, affordable restaurants and pubs, because we feel fuller when we’re not alone. It might even start a conversation about making sure every household has access to abundant, healthy food. Because if a society doesn’t do that, can it claim to care?

Putting food work on a par with nursing wouldn’t magically improve the lot of farmers and factory workers. During Covid, the enthusiasm of Clap for Our Carers waned. Healthcare professionals saw an empty gesture, one embraced by politicians when NHS budgets were as tight as ever and conditions for care workers were extreme. Since then, we’ve had doctors striking most years. This summer, the Royal College of Nursing rejected the government’s pay award. In real terms, nurses’ starting salaries have fallen £8,000 since 2010.

It shouldn’t take a crisis to remember what matters. But in the past few months, I’ve heard many propose that it will take a severe shock – even worse weather, a breakdown in trade, a war on our doorstep – to jolt food up the list of political priorities. We need to know we’ve got the skilled, attentive people who can care for us – and that the work they do amounts to care.