Spoilt for choice

The UK’s supermarkets deliver a wide choice. But full shelves today do not tell us anything about the resilience of the system to cope with food shocks tomorrow.  

Last week, senior executives from some of Britain’s biggest food companies wrote to their investors with a warning. Writing anonymously through the non-profit Inside Track, they say that after a sodden winter and the hottest summer on record, climate change is eating into what farms can reliably grow. Yet boards are reaching for quick fixes like switching ingredients or sourcing supplies from different regions, while the farmers at the bottom of the chain carry the cost. The industry, they write, “cannot sacrifice actual resilience for the illusion of resilience”. 

A recent report from the National Audit Office sounded a similar alarm. Its review of resilience in the food supply chain asked whether the country could feed itself through a real crisis. The NAO found that the market worked well through crises such as COVID, but that we need to prepare for the day the market can no longer respond. Defra may not even hold the legal powers it would need in a catastrophe, such as the power to direct a company to take emergency action.  

Food resilience goes beyond Defra through other departments and to all levels of government. On paper, food is critical national infrastructure, one of 13 sectors the state calls essential to keeping the country running, alongside energy, water and transport. The National Risk Register lists food among the essential services vulnerable to a flood, a cyber attack or a pandemic. The risk register goes into fine detail elsewhere - a ship sunk across a major port, a city cut off from drinking water - and yet it carries no entry for the food economy giving way. 

Perhaps that risk feels too distant or overwhelming. Supermarkets are the embodiment of a full cupboard, where we are sold choice and efficiency as the wonders of modern food. Aisles that promise everything: hundreds of fizzy drinks, breakfast cereals, ready meals, crisps, biscuits, sweets, every fruit and vegetable in every season, and we're told to choose, choose, choose. Trainspotting turned that litany into a biting critique of consumerism 30 years ago. It's now the mantra that drives the status quo. Has choice and abundance bred complacency? 

Full shelves and cupboards might look like resilience but they only show that the system is coping. For half a century we have run the food economy for one thing, the most food at the lowest price through consolidation. The cheapness is paid for elsewhere - on worn-out soil and dirty water, on the nation's health, on farmers paid less than it costs them to grow food. Last month FFCC released an update on just one part of that bill, calculating that food-related ill health now costs the UK £298bn a year. This is £30bn more than two years ago and almost six times what it would take to put a healthy diet within every household’s reach.  

Resilience instead grows from diversity. Late last year on behalf of Defra we went with the Citizen Advisory Council to Cornwall, York and North Yorkshire, Liverpool and Merseyside, and the North East, to find out what works to get good food within reach of more people in a region.  

The citizens found the same barriers came up in every region, from public procurement that shuts out nearby farmers to the loss of the local abattoirs, mills and cold stores that allow food to be processed and sold through more diverse routes. We also found what works – a cooperative in Cornwall where farmers set their own prices, a not-for-profit caterer in Liverpool cooking 26,000 nutritious meals a day for more than 80 schools, city markets in Liverpool giving local farmers and growers somewhere reliable to sell their food. If more places had the means to grow these types of initiatives, what we eat as a nation could change, more surely than any guidance about what to put on our plates.  

Defra has taken a welcome first step towards backing that kind of work. Its new £10m Good Food Neighbourhoods programme, developed following the Citizen Advisory Council’s work, gives funding to 45 councils in the most deprived parts of England, to spend on what their communities need, whether that is a community food shop, a mobile greengrocer or a lunch club. It puts money in the hands of places to build alternatives that their communities need.  

But big business also needs to get behind more resilient regional food economies. In today’s consolidated food economy money and control are held by a small number of big corporate players. The spread-out, varied one that would carry us through a crisis needs those players to loosen their hold, just a bit. Yet the executives writing through Inside Track concede that their industry tends either to stay silent, or actively lobby against policies that might help.  

Instead, we need large food corporations to align with citizens and government in pursuit of long-term resilience rather than propping up the status quo or resisting change. Then we will finally get the choice really worth having - to eat well now, to eat well in the face of coming disruption to food supplies, and to still be eating well for generations to come.