Executive Director Adele Jones comments on her time at COP27, highlighting that positive commitments are being made, but the proof will be in what happens next.

Patrick and I had a good, but busy seven days in Sharm El-Sheikh last week. Whilst many will agree that on big climate policy, this COP is likely to be something of a placeholder, on food and farming, I genuinely think the progress is encouraging. For the first time, it was included as a theme on the COP programme as ‘Adaptation and Agriculture Day’. Although this allocation perhaps highlights that governments have not yet realised the full potential of farming to become a major part of the climate solution – not just a sector that must ‘adapt’ to a changing climate – thinking back to where we were after Glasgow 12 months ago, it’s moved quite a way up the agenda.

 

Meeting and greeting

This year, we spent much of the week at private sector and media-led events, including the Sustainable Markets Initiative’s ‘Terra Carta Action Forum’, Bloomberg Green, the New York Times ‘Climate Forward’ conference and Goals House agenda.

The Sustainable Markets Initiative (SMI) event, in particular, felt significant. Despite His Majesty the King not being able to be in Egypt in person, the level of attendance and the energy generated was quite extraordinary, with many CEOs of the world’s major companies. Over this last week, we have supported the launch of the SMI Agribusiness Taskforce report on scaling regenerative agriculture. The ‘Big 5’ recommendations were:

1. Agree on common metrics for environmental outcomes
2. Build farmers’ income for environmental outcomes
3. Create mechanisms to share the cost of farmers’ transitioning
4. Ensure government policy rewards farmers for transitioning
5. Source differently to share costs across the value chain

To quote Grant Reid, the CEO of Mars, “We must make regenerative agriculture a no brainer business case for all farmers.” Building this financial case will, as the recommendations suggest, need to include a mixture of new revenue streams for farms. Food companies must start sourcing from farmers using regenerative techniques and practices and pay a premium for these products; governments should pay for the delivery of public goods; banks should provide preferential lending rates to farmers delivering positive, measurable, impacts; and farmers should be able to access new markets by selling carbon, nature or even culture credits.

I have to admit to having been somewhat sceptical of the emerging voluntary carbon markets for farmers, and whilst I remain cautious, I feel a little more optimistic about the opportunity than I did a week ago.

The great work of SEKEM

During our time in Egypt, we were generously hosted by SEKEM – an inspiring organisation led by Helmy Abouleish that has pioneered the development of organic and biodynamic agriculture in Egypt. Since the 1970s, SEKEM have effectively ‘re-greened’ the desert using innovative farming methods and composting techniques. They now work with farmers across Egypt to produce high quality, nutritious food and clothing and they even run schools and a University of Sustainable Development to encourage young people to build a career around sustainablity.

This week SEKEM launched a pioneering soil carbon credit scheme under their ‘Economy of Love’ initiative. By measuring their emissions and soil carbon sequestration potential, they found that their farming systems were not just net zero, but actually net climate negative, and felt strongly that their producers should be rewarded for this societal good. As such, working with the Land Banking Group, they are now paying soil carbon credits to 2000 of the farmers they work with, with plans to increase this to 250,000 farmers by 2028. They estimate that if all famers across Egypt adopted these techniques, they could not only offset up to 25% of Egypt’s total GHG footprint, but also save a significant amount of water and create secure livelihoods for the population of Egypt working on the land.

Is this scheme absolutely perfect? Not yet. But is it an exciting step towards shifting the balance of financial advantage towards genuinely healthy and sustainable food production that is part of the climate solution? Yes. The positives and possible pitfalls of these carbon markets is the subject for a whole other blog, but the leadership shown by organisations like SEKEM should be applauded, as it’s clear that we can’t rely on business as usual if we’re going to speed up the agricultural transition at the scale and pace now needed.

The question then is, how do we responsibly scale these sorts of initiatives in a way that drives genuinely positive change? A reasonable criticism would be to assume that companies, such as those involved in the SMI Agribusiness Taskforce or those taking part in new carbon offset schemes, are just making empty commitments – using offsets as an excuse to keep polluting or using their support of regenerative agriculture as a form of greenwashing. That’s exactly why we feel our involvement in this group is so important. The proof will be in the action these companies take next, and we will be there to hold their feet to the fire. Of course, the inconvenient truth for them is that if everyone is measuring the impact of their supply chains – including the farms they source from, lend to or invest in – in a common way, greenwashing will actually become quite a difficult thing to do.

Think positive

I have had a number of really positive conversations about the journey ahead, over the last couple of days, particularly in regard to the team from the UAE taking forward the COP presidency into next year – apparently, they really mean business. There is also a lot of talk about food and farming being genuinely central to the agenda at COP28. Let’s pray this is true, as it feels like a huge, missed opportunity at the moment. As an organisation in an interesting position of influence right now, due largely to Patrick’s leadership, we will do our utmost over the next 12 months to move food and farming further up the agenda, as well as making sure big businesses really do mean business when it comes to all of this.

To end, a reflection on where we’ve been. Sharm El-Sheikh is a strange place. When we first arrived, I couldn’t understand why on earth it was chosen as the location for this conference. However, as the week went on, I realised it was actually quite perfect. Sharm is located on the coast, at the foothills of the serene Sinai mountains. The buildings are mostly sprawling and extremely ugly and the six lane highways (built just for COP) are completely over the top. And yet, after a long day of meetings and events, you only need to swim a few hundred yards off the beach to witness some of the most beautiful coral reef ecosystems on earth. Although there are early signs of bleaching, the fish and reef are breath-taking – it’s a stark reminder of what it is that we’re all fighting for.

Then, you walk back up the beach, into the metropolis of hotels and meeting halls to do it all over again. So, whether or not it was planned (probably not), Sharm fittingly represents the deep contrast between pristine nature and ill-considered human intervention. It’s now up to all of us to re-address this balance.

Recordings of all the sessions that Patrick and Adele were involved in at COP 27 will be posted as soon as they become available.

 

When was the last time you bought meat at a high street butcher’s shop? Chances are that it’s been a while, either because the butcher’s shop near you closed down years ago or because it’s simply easier to pick up meat and sausages when you do your weekly shopping at a supermarket.

For consumers, shopping at a supermarket has advantages: finding everything you need in one place makes it fast and convenient, usually there is plenty of parking space available and opening hours are longer than those of specialist shops such as high street bakers, butchers or fishmongers. A big enough branch of a supermarket will have a fresh meat counter, but mostly shoppers grab whatever they need from the coolers, portioned and neatly packed. In the last 12 months UK consumers bought 600 million kilos of beef, 84 million kilos of lamb and 1 billion kilos of pork, spending just over £11 billion – most of it in supermarkets.

Such convenience for consumers has consequences for farmers and processors: supermarkets need large volumes of product, fast and on demand. As a result, supply chains have become shorter and more centralised. Abattoirs have become much bigger and specialise in killing one or two species. Hundreds of head of cattle or pigs can be slaughtered and processed in a day. This efficiency reduces not just costs but also paperwork and the need for highly trained staff: the processing of an animal is broken down into many dozens of single movements performed by as many dozens of workers on an assembly line. Each movement has to be fast and precise, but it can be learnt on the job, you don’t have to be a trained butcher to repeat the same cut over and over. Small abattoirs with a team of trained butchers cannot compete on price and over the past 10 years many have had to close down. In 2021, just under 90% of beef cattle were killed in 31 medium and larger abattoirs, and 98% of sheep were killed in 57 medium and larger abattoirs. Only 5.4% of cattle and 0.7% of sheep were killed in smaller abattoirs.

Why is this a problem?

With fewer and fewer abattoirs, animals have to be transported further to slaughter – a journey that is often stressful and uncomfortable for the animals, in particular those who have spent all their lives within the same herd, grazing. But the problems reach much deeper: big abattoirs need a constant supply of ‘cookie cutter’ animals that are pretty much the same size and weight. Similar to the chassis of a car, the carcase moves along an assembly line, the main difference being that cars are assembled and carcases ‘disassembled’. For a worker to repeat one task often dozens of times per minute, the ‘parts’ must not vary much in shape and size.

We witnessed last autumn what happens when pigs don’t have their ideal slaughter weight. Because of severe worker shortages, the slaughter capacity at abattoirs was greatly reduced, and pork producers had to keep many animals on farm and continue feeding them. Very soon, the lack of space caused animal welfare concerns, but in addition, many pigs also grew too large for an abattoir to handle and had to be culled, their meat never entering the food chain. It’s not that the meat of a 300 kilo sow (the ‘normal’ slaughter weight is about 120 kilos) couldn’t be delicious – the fat of a grown pig is actually essential for making high value products such as salami. The problem is that only a fully trained butcher will have the very specific skills to slaughter and process such a large pig, which wouldn’t even fit onto the assembly line of a big slaughter facility.

The industry’s need for ‘same size’ animals has shaped the way they are raised: UK supermarket beef, for example, might be born and raised on a conventional beef farm in rural West Wales, where the fields are  sown with artificial fertiliser, and to increase growth rates, the cattle are fed supplementary concentrate feed, including genetically modified soya imported from Brazil. When it’s time for slaughter, a haulier collects these animals and transports them 170 miles to an abattoir in Lancashire. The meat products are then distributed across the UK to supermarket shelves, possibly even returning to a supermarket shelf in rural West Wales.

This system has huge environmental implications such as emissions from transport and the use of imported protein sources such as GM soya, which is having a devastating effect on rainforests in South America. Other feed grains are grown in the UK under intensive arable systems that have become biodiversity deserts.

It could be so different

And yet, the British Isles in large parts are predestined for growing grass and keeping livestock. If grazing on permanent pastures is well managed (the pasture is neither over nor undergrazed), little or no chemicals are needed and there is no need to import soy. Arable land then becomes available to grow food for humans.

From shaggy Highland Cattle to the tiny Dexters, from hardy Romney sheep to woolly Blue Face Leicesters, Britain is home to a wealth of cattle and sheep breeds, each of which does particularly well under specific topographic and climatic conditions but all very different in looks, size and weight. In a well managed system, these animals are not only effective ‘land-managers’ delivering environmental benefits, they could also be a source of healthy, nutritious and local food – if only the farmers had access to a local abattoir. Which, increasingly, they don’t.

Our food system is based on industrial food production, centralised supply chains, just in time delivery and supermarkets stocked with cheap food. What’s rarely talked about is how easy it is to cheaply produce highly processed foods with low nutritional value such as sugary cereal, not just because of the relatively low value of the ingredients, but also because the costs to the environment and to our health are not factored in. Food manufacturers do not pay for the emissions caused by transport, fertiliser and pesticide use, nor for the healthcare costs arising from diabetes and obesity. As Nicolette Hahn Niman explains in her book Defending Beef, consuming small amounts of sustainably produced meat from grass-fed animals has health benefits as well as benefits for the environment and local and rural economies.

From farm to fork via your local supermarket?

Given the way our food system works, it is unsurprising that consumers have lost the connection with where their meat is coming from. Very little produce can be traced from farm to fork. Education and information would help. But how do we get sustainably produced local food, meat in particular, to consumers? The pandemic has shown that at a local level, farmers and local food shops were able to adapt very quickly and react to the demands of customers providing local food to local families. But most of us shop in supermarkets. Supermarkets control British food retail and have the single biggest role to play in improving food supply chains and the national diet. As huge buyers from the farming sector, these corporations wield an overwhelming degree of power over their suppliers.

It’s not all bad news, some tentative steps have been taken: in Wales, Lidl has a range of Welsh beef products on the shelves as part of their ‘commitment to supporting local farmers’. According to the industry website Sterling Choice, Morrisons claims they are moving to sourcing only British meat: “In July, it was announced that Morrisons was to become the first UK supermarket to commit to only selling British meat, and would stop selling imported fresh meat, such as lamb from New Zealand, which it has previously done during the winter months.” How far this meat travels within the UK is a different matter.

Waitrose told me in an email: “All of our fresh lamb, pork (including bacon), beef and chicken are UK sourced and come from local farmers we know and trust.” In another email, Waitrose said the data on which farm delivers what meat were recorded internally:  “(We) have full traceability from farm to shelf and can trace each piece of meat back to farm…We also submit [this information] to Business Benchmark and Farm Animal Welfare (BBFAW).” BBFAW has given Waitrose Tier 1 status, but again, there is no way of knowing how far the animals had to travel to an abattoir.

Possibly, farmers could do – and are doing – more, too. Just last week, a group of farmers together with a butcher launched ‘The Good Beef Index’, a label that scores meat quality, its environmental footprint and the conditions under which it was raised. “We want to bring consumers and beef farmers together,” says Ian Warren who runs the family’s butcher’s shop in Launceston in Cornwall. He worries about the future supply of the highest quality beef from local farmers: if we want farmers to raise animals sustainably and produce excellent quality meat, we have to make sure the farms are financially viable, he says. For him, it is about educating consumers and he hopes the Good Beef Index will create demand, because only then will retailers stock it.  “This has to be consumer driven,” says Warren. How will he and his farmer colleagues get consumers interested in yet another label? For a start, endorsements by well known chefs may help – 70% of Warren’s business is meat supply to restaurants – but in the end this is a long-term project.

Networking is essential – whether it is through informal groups, co-ops or associations – farmers who are part of a group that aims to facilitate slaughter, transport and marketing will be in a better position to get their meat onto the shelves of retailers. They could work with distributers who would be able to deliver orders via EDI (electronic data interchange) which would open up the choice to consumers who would like to buy more locally produced products but can’t make the leap to changing their shopping habits to buying all meat in a butchers or at (online) farm shops. With this method, supermarkets could also allow shelf space for locally produced, unprocessed meat products. Another option would be to bring the local butcher into the supermarket, where they could sell locally sourced meat with the expertise only a trained butcher has. On the continent, the ‘shop in shop’ model works well at least for bakeries.

Even with a strong demand for local, sustainably produced meat, at present all efforts to increase the supply are hampered by regulatory burdens, unfavourable planning laws and staff shortages. For local, sustainable meat to reach supermarket shelves, we need a network of small abattoirs where well trained and well paid butchers are able to humanely slaughter and process not just different species, but animals of varying size, age and temperament.

COP27 is set to be a critical moment for global climate solutions, as thought leaders, CEOs and activists from across the world travel to Egypt for a fortnight of discussion, commitment and promise.

The SFT team will be joining the conversation in person, with updates shared on our social channels. Here’s some of our top picks for the event – many of which you can watch online.

Monday 7 November

3:45 – 5pm

Goals House fireside chat with Rt Hon Baroness Scotland

Goals House will be sharing all their coverage of COP27 on their YouTube channel.

Tuesday 8th November

9 – 9:45am

The Dairy Dilemma, hosted by Tortoise Media

People in the rich world eat far more meat and dairy than we need, more than is good for our waistlines or the planet. There is widespread awareness of the climate impact of beef, but less scrutiny of dairy.

How do we scale back the global north’s outsized meat and dairy industries? How can farmers be incentivised to care for nature rather than maximising food production? What technology and policy changes can help slash methane emissions from agriculture, a major driver of climate change? How can we make sustainable nutrition accessible and affordable for all?

Wednesday 9th November

10:20 – 11:05am

Cropped Out: Farming in an Age of Insecurity, hosted by the New York Times

Food production is expanding. But so is undernourishment. In 2021, 193 million people were food insecure, even as the production of potato, wheat and rice crops reached an unprecedented 9.3 billion metric tons. Conflict, Covid and climate change have been widening this gap considerably. In India, a brutal heat wave recently ruined the wheat crop and led to a ban on wheat and sugar exports. Many fear that rice and potatoes will be next. Under the increasing strain of droughts, flooding and supply chain issues, how can farmers protect their yields? How can new techniques and finance schemes ensure farmers’ self-sufficiency, crop variety and cash flow? How can farming communities in vulnerable regions sustain themselves in the future?

5:30 – 8pm

Rewiring the Global Economy to Deliver A Net-Zero Economy, hosted by HSBC and Financial Times

In order to solve the climate crisis and achieve net-zero ambitions, every major sector of the global economy will need to transform. It’s estimated that US$120trillion of global financing will be needed to deliver a net-zero economy by 2050. So, what can we do to unlock this capital and transform the real economy?

Saturday 12th November

5 – 10pm

Regenerative Agriculture Solutions

SFT CEO Patrick Holden will be speaking at this event in the Green Zone, with presentations beginning at 7pm.

I’ve been musing over the last day or so about the proposed use of gene editing to create a strain of poultry which are immune to avian flu. On the face of it, it sounds most beguiling, the idea that we could create genomes, whether, bird, human or otherwise which have in-built resistance to diseases, in this case the terrifying flu epidemic which is threatening to wipe out wild bird populations throughout the world.

Here are a few thoughts about why, in my view, this approach will never work and should be resisted at all costs.

Firstly, the description that gene editing is a precision technology is inaccurate. My colleague, Dr Michael Antoniou, who uses gene editing to treat human diseases and understands precisely the potential benefits, tells me that this technology is anything but precision and the claims made by its proponents are demonstrably wrong. If you want to learn more, I suggest you read the recent newsletter published by Genewatch or listen to my recent conversation with Dr Antoniou. My simplistic understanding of this critique is that even those who have a comprehensive knowledge of gene therapy and manipulation of the genome, can’t be sure of the unintended consequences of such a fundamental interference with the stuff of life.

The second critique is based on Sir Albert Howard’s philosophy of disease. His book, An Agricultural Testament, published in 1940, included a memorable statement along the lines that we should come to regard pests, parasites and diseases as nature’s professors of good husbandry, because they reveal to us the deficiencies in our management.

Underpinning this philosophy is the view that health is not merely the absence of disease, but a vital state where an organism can encounter exposure to a disease and make a full recovery.

Critics of this philosophy might quickly point out many examples, such as that of Saint Kilda, a particularly relevant case study on a remote island archipelago off the north-west coast of Scotland, where the seabirds are currently dying of bird flu. After a thousand years of continuous habitation, the human population suffered terribly when the Victorian tourists who visited those islands gave them a whole range of common diseases to which their immune systems had no defences. This eventually led to their voluntary evacuation in the 1930s. Vaccination might have been the best response in this situation.

Related to this is another interesting case study. In response to the foot and mouth disease epidemic in 2001, I strongly advocated vaccination as the least damaging short-term measure of dealing with the disease, which was then being countered with mediaeval slaughter and burn practices.

A deep-rooted societal fear of disease may well be the reason for our extreme responses to epidemics. This may be understandable, but I am convinced that Howard’s principle should still hold true today – and in the case of agriculture, this means the first responsibility of farmers and growers should be to promote the health of the animals and plants they produce, rather than relying on draconian measures, whether they be prophylactic medication, extreme biosecurity, slaughter or gene editing, to stop them getting sick.

I am not ideologically opposed to medication, vaccination or any other form of short-term disease treatments; however, if as a society we want to eat foods which build and promote our health, these foods should ideally not come from plants and animals which are dependent upon ‘insurance medication’ to remain well. Yet this is sadly the case with nearly all of the foods we consume today.

My third critique is of the industrial poultry production systems, which, aside from having a disastrous impact on the environment and animal welfare, act as ideal incubators for previously unknown poultry diseases and viruses. In all likelihood, the current Avian Influenza epidemic originated in an intensive poultry unit, where the closed and crowded conditions provide the perfect environment for a mutating virus, which will then spread to wild bird populations.

It is entirely possible that we might dampen down the disease through short term biosecurity measures, but meanwhile the wild bird and animal populations, such as the Gannets of Saint Kilda may be heading towards extinction. If this happens, we only have ourselves to blame for ignoring the wisdom of Sir Albert Howard’s insights.

Amid the cost-of-living crisis, families across the UK are struggling to afford daily essentials, like housing, heating and food. Last year, 2.5 million people were forced to make use of food banks, an increase of almost 600,000 people on the previous year. For many families, the severity of the current situation means cutting back and often skipping meals altogether. According to a recent study, more than half of those experiencing food insecurity are not only buying less food, but cutting out healthier produce they deemed unaffordable, including fruits and vegetables. For children, in particular, this reality can have serious implications for health and well-being, with hunger also impacting upon educational attainment and productivity.

International research has revealed the numerous benefits that free school meals can provide, with lasting improvements to individuals and society in the short, medium and long term. Recently, Impact on Urban Health commissioned an ambitious analysis of the societal and economic benefits of increasing free school meal provision in England. They found that for every £1 invested, £1.38 would be returned through social, health and educational benefits, with further indirect economic advantages, such as growing the school food economy through the expansion of school catering employment opportunities.

Feeding the Future

Now, celebrity chefs Jamie Oliver, Tom Kerridge and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall are backing a new campaign to increase the number of children eligible for free school meals. At present, children of parents who are on Universal Credit and have an annual income of no more than £7,400, or are on other benefits such as jobseeker’s allowance, are eligible. However, a further 800,000 children from families on Universal Credit miss out on free school meals because of their household income. This is causing growing concern for schools, many of which have taken it upon themselves to feed the children who don’t quite qualify for free meals.

It’s not just celebrities recognising the urgent need for change. In September, the Labour Party promised to provide every primary school child in England access to free breakfasts under their plans to modernise the childcare system and support lower-income families. Wales and Scotland have already announced plans to provide universal free lunches to all primary school children, whilst Northern Ireland has almost doubled the eligibility income threshold to £14,000.

Edible school gardens and local procurement   

At Damers First School in Dorset, school lunches are supplied by Local Food Links, a Dorset-based social enterprise that aims to source fresh ingredients and support local businesses. Growing food is also an important part of school life. The school’s kitchen garden has ten raised beds and an allotment, growing a diversity of vegetables and herbs, many of which are used during Food Technology classes. There’s also an orchard area with native apple and pear trees, as well as a sensory garden and wildflower meadow. In the garden, children learn how to sow seeds, care for the plants, harvest the produce and even compost any waste! The space also allows opportunities for the children to spend time in nature, whilst learning to identify the variety of birds and insects that visit the grounds.

Gardens like this appear to be popping up in schools across the UK and internationally. ‘Edible education’ is an idea coined by Alice Waters – chef, author, food activist and founder of Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, California. Waters founded the Edible Schoolyard Project in 1995 and has since been on a mission to transform the education system by using organic school gardens, kitchens and cafeterias to teach both academic subjects as well as the value of nourishment, stewardship and community. Today, the project works with nearly six thousand schools and continues to build relationships between schools, farmers and food growers.

Connecting schools to food producers is something that the Sustainable Food Trust believes passionately in too. In Wales, together with The Harmony Project and the University of Wales Trinity Saint Davids, a new collaboration seeks to incentivise local procurement in primary schools. “If schools were encouraged to buy directly from local, regenerative farmers and growers, they would not only be supporting UK food production (something that Jamie Oliver has also shown his support for), but in doing so, they would be offering children the high-quality, nutritious food they both need and deserve,” says Patrick Holden, Chief Executive of the Sustainable Food Trust.

On the nutrient point, many of the fruits, vegetables and grains sold in supermarkets today have been shown to be far less nutritious than they were seventy years ago. “To improve the health of our young people in the long term, school leaders should use their purchasing power to support farmers and growers to build soil health and produce nutrient-dense foods,” says Holden.

Nourishing food for people and planet

Serving local, agroecologically produced food does not have to break the bank. In fact, as Richard Dunne, Director of The Harmony Project, demonstrated during his time as Headteacher of a state primary school, serving seasonal, local produce can be extremely cost-effective. The lunches served at his school were 90% organic and within the school’s catering budget. Achieving this meant thinking creatively about the menu, including serving starters instead of desserts, limiting waste and pairing back the menu to include less meat, but of higher quality. “Key to this” says Dunne, “is that senior leaders in schools recognise the power they have as customers to influence what is delivered on children’s plates. There will be challenges, particularly when schools are in more urban areas, but with some creative thinking and a determination to make it happen, anything is possible.”

Such examples show the potential for improving the quality and availability of food served in schools, not to mention increasing opportunities for learning about seasonality, taste and nutrition. We have the chance now to improve not only the provision of food in schools at a time of great need, but to simultaneously support UK farmers and growers to produce foods that benefit climate, nature and human health.

To support the campaign to increase the number of children eligible for Free School Meals, visit the Feed the Future website. Feed the Future is being driven by The Food Foundation, School Food Matters, Sustain, Bite Back 2030, Child Poverty Action Group, Impact on Urban Health, Jamie Oliver Ltd and Chefs in Schools, representing more than 500,000 teachers.

Executive director Adele Jones recounts a recent trip to the US, reflecting on the distance still to travel in the journey towards a more sustainable food system.

I was recently lucky enough to spend a few weeks in the US – visiting farms, catching up with new and old friends of the Sustainable Food Trust, and finally culminating with Climate Week in New York City, an event which now runs alongside the UN General Assembly. Time away from my desk and Zoom screen is always incredibly valuable, but this trip, in particular, made an impression on me and in many ways left me with more questions about the future of agriculture than I had expected before I went.

A need for change

I started off in Iowa for the US Farmers and Ranchers in Action (USFRA) ‘Honor the Harvest Forum’ – a great event hosted on a 12,000 acre, family run, corn farm. The group (about 150 or so participants) comprised a mixture of farmers, food companies, banks, investors and NGOs and the theme was how to scale-up investment in ‘climate smart agriculture’. However, it became clear to me pretty early on that there was still very little consensus on what that really meant, particularly in the context of the Midwest of the US. However, where there was agreement, was on the fact that things need to change and this takes some MONEY, and lots of it. Erin Fitzgerald, CEO of USFRA challenged the food and farming industry to up its ambition and start talking about transformative investment requirements in trillions rather than millions. The money is out there, it just needs to be directed in the right way to the right places.

Joanna Blythman explains the five foods that she no longer eats, and why.

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Factory-farmed chicken

My aversion to factory-farmed chicken is visceral as well as philosophical and ethical. It’s one thing to read about the sordid conditions in which these ‘broiler’ chickens are reared, quite another to witness it first-hand.

We had managed to talk our way into an intensive chicken shed in the middle of England – quite a coup, in fact, as producers generally don’t like the public seeing what goes on. The people who ran it, let us in because they were pretty proud of their operation: it was more spacious, less densely stocked with birds than most. But for me it was a vision of chicken hell, a football pitch sized shed, dimly lit, with what looked like a moving white carpet. Only when our eyes adjusted could we see that the carpet was actually a sea of birds, so packed in that we couldn’t tell where one started and the other stopped. No way would they be able to run around as chickens naturally would.

The place smelled of ammonia and damp sawdust, rather like a badly run pet shop. The air quality – a hot, fetid fog of circulating dusty particles – was choking. No wonder factory-farmed chickens suffer so badly from respiratory infections. I found the air unbreathable. Even with a mask on, I could only take a few minutes of it until I started coughing.

Just before I headed for the door to fill my lungs with fresh air, a worker appeared doing his daily job of walking through the seething mass of chickens, picking out those that were dead and putting them into a bucket. Factory-farmed chicken has a routine toll of casualties caused by a range of problems: aggressive pecking that is characteristic of poultry kept in stressful, low welfare environments; various diseases and infections that dog intensive poultry production methods; and the nasty leg ailments (broken bones, sores) that stem from lack of exercise and standing in faeces-soiled litter that progressively gets dirtier throughout the birds’ truncated lives.

And yet, the sad ‘crop’ of these repellent chicken outfits is ubiquitous. On supermarket shelves, you’d have to hunt for that infinitely smaller display of supposedly ‘free-range’ chicken, and an even smaller section with organic chicken, if you’re lucky.

Factory-farmed chicken accounts for a hugely disproportionate number of ready meals and convenience foods. Urban parades are lined with fried chicken shops, the pavements around them littered with bones. Chain restaurants champion this miserable meat, as do school and hospital caterers. When you see the anonymous word ‘chicken’ on a menu without any accompanying qualification, it’s most likely this debased, poorly treated animal. Our food environment seems to beckon us to eat cheap chicken again and again, several times a week, even daily – a chicken sandwich for lunch is followed by chicken tikka for dinner.

Government ‘healthy eating’ guidelines promote chicken as a healthier alternative to red meat, even if the former is reared intensively, and the latter extensively. Chicken, however badly and cheaply produced, counts as healthier than red meat, we’re told, because it is lower in fat – but I think this is spurious. None of this, cuts any ice with me. I won’t allow factory-farmed chicken over my doorstep or knowingly eat it anywhere else for that matter. I have seen the stinking, unsanitary, cruel conditions in which it is reared, and it doesn’t qualify in my book as clean, wholesome food.

Refined vegetable oil

There was a time when I used the standard odourless, flavourless cooking oil that lines our shelves. I had taken on face value, the received wisdom that it had its place in the kitchen for certain culinary uses, notably frying. But I was puzzled by the recommendation to use it for mayonnaise. Ever tried sipping a teaspoon of ‘pure’ vegetable oil? It’s pretty revolting. There’s no inherent flavour to balance the oiliness. This is why a carrot cake made with vegetable oil is deeply inferior to one made with butter.

I soon started using extra virgin olive oil instead. My mayonnaise only improved. Contrary to the received wisdom, the olive flavour wasn’t too dominant, for my taste at least. Then I started to unpick this received wisdom about oils. I never accepted the now heavily-challenged nutritional mantra that animal fats – lard, dripping, goose and duck fat, ghee – were less healthy than vegetable oils (tree, seed or cereal derived). From a cook’s perspective these are stable oils. They rarely go rancid and they have a high ‘smoke point’, so they don’t burn easily.

But I had swallowed the line that it was a waste to use quality oils of provenance for high temperature cooking because they burned. A process of observation led me to realise that you can use extra virgin olive oil for shallow frying. The art is adding the food before the oil gets too hot, then leaving it to form a crust before you start trying to turn it over. This technique even works with falafels.

The cheapness of ‘pure’ vegetable cooking oil – as little as 70p a litre – suggests that it isn’t likely to be a high-quality substance. Some oils specify one source. Sunflower or groundnut, for example, sound better than ‘pure vegetable’, usually a blend from sources such as rapeseed, corn, safflower and soybean, the latter mostly grown using GM crops.

These days, most vegetable oils sold in the UK use rapeseed. The bad news for all those who promote rapeseed oil as the local alternative to imported oils, is that rape is typically grown using regular treatments of chemical fertilisers that have a habit of ending up in the local watercourses. It is also a notoriously pesticide-dependent crop.

Irrespective of source, when I scrutinised such oils in depth, any notion of purity seemed misleading. They are known in the trade as RBD oils, short for ‘refined’, ‘bleached’ and ‘deodorised’. They owe their neutral flavor and prodigious keeping quality to a thoroughly industrial refining process. The oil seeds are crushed, and the oil is extracted using chemical solvents, usually hexane. They are then ‘degummed’ with the aid of either acids or enzymes. The oil is hot by this point and doesn’t smell so good; it’s also darkened in colour, so it must then be bleached. Following this, it will be deodorised. This entails heating it to an even higher temperature, usually over 200 degrees centigrade, at least twice. These ultra-processed industrial oils acquire a benign aura that they most certainly do not merit, largely because they come from non-animal sources.

We’re only just beginning to clock the damaging impact they have on health. Bear in mind that when we’re told our taste for fried, fatty food is making us obese, we’re not talking about the animal fats that have sustained us down the centuries – we eat less of them than ever before. It’s the products that are fried in these modern ‘vegetable’ oils – crisps, battered fish, chips, and much more – that are making us fat. Meanwhile the intensive methods of industrial farming – prairie monocultures that deplete soils and GM crops – provide the raw materials destined for such oils, and their impacts are ignored in the rush to embrace ‘plant’ foods as a more environmentally friendly alternative to animal foods. Knowing all this, refined vegetable oil has no place in my food.

Farmed salmon

For me, salmon farming is the marine equivalent of land-based intensive farming. Vast concentrations of closely packed fish genetically programmed to swim the oceans are confined to underwater cages, a huge restriction on their lives in the wild. They’re fed on pelleted food made from ground-up wild fish with added vitamins, minerals, and binders such as wheat flour and soya, none of which figure in the diet of a wild fish. Salmon and trout usually have chemical colourings added to their feed because they don’t eat the varied diet of wild seafood that would naturally give their flesh its attractive pink hue.

Fish farmers present their industry as the saviour of wild fish. They claim that they are helping to take the pressure off endangered wild stocks by offering the farmed equivalent – but globally, fish farming has been identified as a net reducer of fish stocks. Farmed salmon are fed on pelleted food made from stocks of smaller fish further down the marine food chain, anything from three to five times their body weight in wild fish.

In Scotland and Ireland, fish farming is a significant contributing factor in the worrying reduction in numbers of wild salmon and sea trout. Escapee fish from fish farms infect wild fish and interbreed with them, so reducing their ability to cope in the wild.

Large populations of farmed fish, just like land-based factory farms for livestock, are a magnet for disease. Sea lice infestations are endemic on fish farms and many farmed fish suffer sporadically from diseases that plague caged fish production, such as infectious salmon anaemia, amoebic gill disease and salmon gill poxvirus. The mortality rate on Scottish salmon farms is around 26%. Chemicals piled into waters in a vain attempt to keep a lid on disease and infestation are another cause for concern. These include hydrogen peroxide – essentially bleach – and emamectin benzoate. This latter chemical is known to kill lobsters.

Another harmful environmental impact of fish farming is the thick layer of uneaten feed and faeces that often settles below the cages. This reduces water quality, which harms wild shellfish and other marine wildlife.

In a couple of respects, organic farmed salmon isn’t as bad. Their feed isn’t artificially coloured, it’s made using fish waste – blood, guts, tails and heads of fish that were harvested for human consumption and have been certified as sustainable. But even organic salmon have the flabby body tone and herringbone of white fat characteristic of this debased form of aquaculture. Farmed salmon, to me, is a tragic travesty of a wild fish. I won’t eat it.

Bananas that aren’t Fairtrade

Why buy any old bananas when you can choose Fairtrade? I’ve travelled in the Caribbean, Ghana and Costa Rica learning about how this most popular fruit is grown for our tables. What we need to realise is that most global fruit production is pretty shocking. Plantation workers are forced to work long hours in dangerous, gruelling conditions. Hazards include: indiscriminate aerial spraying of pesticides that often end up on workers; pay pegged to unreasonable targets; shanty town accommodation with inadequate sanitary facilities; 12-hour days with extended travelling times; victimisation, and even murder of workers and union activists who challenge management.

The only robust alternative is Fairtrade. I have met many Fairtrade growers who told me of the tangible difference this more equitable model of global trade makes to their lives. It’s not just that Fairtrade growers are guaranteed a minimum price for their products, that shields them from fluctuating market prices, it’s also that they earn a ‘social premium’: extra funds earmarked for community projects of their choosing. For instance in Ghana, on what was the world’s first Fairtade plantation, the extra revenue from Fairtrade funded the building of a school, an operating theatre in the local hospital, potable water storage tanks in three villages and educational grants for workers’ families.

What struck me particularly in Ghana was how worker empowerment programmes, run by local trade unions in collaboration with Fairtrade organisations, were transforming womens’ lives. Female workers on Ghana’s Fairtrade plantations, even when hired on a temporary basis, enjoy working conditions that many UK women would envy: a written contract; a guaranteed minimum wage; an eight-hour day (with an hour’s break, or two for breastfeeding mothers); three months paid maternity leave; paid public holidays; two weeks paid annual leave; even paid sick leave. The evolving Fairtrade model is now moving to tackle other under-recognised problems, such as sexual harassment by foremen. On many plantations around the globe, women are scared to take the generally higher paid field jobs because that exposes them to assault.

There are, of course, alternative, progressive-sounding schemes to Fairtrade: Rainforest Alliance, Cocoa Life, Waitrose Foundation, M&S Field 2 Fork and Tesco Nurture. None of these certification schemes delivers the two key promises of Fairtrade proper: a guaranteed minimum price for growers and the “social premium”.

My first-hand experience convinces me that Fairtrade is the most ethical, most progressive choice available to us, and worth every penny. Unless you’re on an austerity budget – and sadly too many people are – then Fairtrade bananas, even though they cost a bit more, are still highly affordable. Buy them loose and there’s no plastic bag to clog up the environment.

Supermarket in-store bakery bread

For years now, I haven’t eaten the standard ‘wrapped and sliced’ industrial loaves that line store shelves. Limp-crusted, clammy, inflated with air and the texture of loft insulation, ultra-processed bread that includes up to 26 different hi-tech ingredients and additives? No thanks. And that’s before you think about all the unlabelled ‘processing aids’ – notably man-made enzymes – that are used behind the scenes to increase volume and extend ‘freshness’, among other things.

But at least you know what you are getting, as all this is detailed on the label, which is more than you can say for the in-store ‘bakery’ equivalent sold in supermarkets and takeaway chains. Unlike the pre-wrapped bread, in-store baked products don’t have to carry ingredient labels. The Real Bread Campaign worked hard to expose this ‘Great British Fake-Off’: such operations are really little more than tanning parlours for chilled or frozen, factory-manufactured dough items that are merely ‘baked off’ on site, following a push-button programme. Most supermarket shoppers are still unaware of this and believe that when they buy from the store’s ‘bakery’, they’re getting bread made from scratch.

What’s just as bad about this legal smoke-and-mirrors trade, is the fact that the contents of these products are largely inscrutable. Products from such bakeries, must flag-up allergens, but neither ingredients nor additives need to be detailed on these loaves. This is a staggering exemption, a loophole in labelling law that needs to be closed.

You might think that the composition of products from in-store bakeries would be much the same as the pre-packs on the shelves, but you’d be wrong. When I researched them, supermarkets weren’t prepared to provide me with detailed ingredient and content listings for individual products. I used my journalistic skills to access the product information sheets. These are not open to the general public. What I learned is that in many cases, in-store bakery products contained more additives and low-quality, hi-tech ingredients than the pre-packed equivalent. A ‘raspberry jam filling’ (for doughnuts and Danish pastries) was an amalgam of sugar syrup, raspberry purée, pectin, citric acid and calcium chloride E509, a ‘sequestrant’ chemical that acts as a preservative and firming agent. The custard in the pain aux raisin had never seen an egg. Instead it was made from water, sugar, modified potato starch, dry whey (a milk protein), dried milk, maltodextrin (a starch that helps increase volume to create what food manufacturers refer to as ‘a rich mouthfeel’), xanthan gum (a gluey thickener), a product charmingly called ‘spent vanilla seeds’, as well as synthetic flavouring and colouring.

In-store bakeries are hoodwinking us. It’s time to call them out.

This article was originally published in May 2018. 

It’s easy to miss Food Co-op BCN when walking past. In Barcelona’s affluent Eixample district, home to a high concentration of psychedelic Gaudí buildings and glassy boutique facades, only those who know to look will catch the bumblebee-coloured sign tucked away down a quiet side alley. Beyond the threshold, lies a brand-new supermarket. There are gleaming dry goods dispensers, crates full of fruit and vegetables, and beautifully stacked shelves. A few shoppers wander the aisles, stopping frequently to chat with each other.

A community run supermarket

“In the supermarket I used to shop in, I would get my things and not speak with anyone,” says customer and co-op member Cristina Gil Gomez. “Here, it’s a totally different experience. It’s like coming into a family.” Everyone knows everyone, and for a simple reason: they all work together.

“We work three hours every four weeks on tasks for the supermarket,” explains Cristina. The supermarket, which opened its doors in February, employs no paid staff at all. The usual supermarket chores are divided up amongst the 518 members of the co-operative.

This model is different from a usual cooperative business. In simple terms, a co-operative is a business owned and democratically controlled by its members. The profits of the business are directed to the common good of the membership. The members are those closest to the business: usually either workers, producers or customers. Food Co-op BCN is a novel iteration of the co-operative economy, however. It elides the distinction between a consumer co-operative and a worker co-operative: as customers, members buy into the business with a €90 investment; but they are also active participants in the daily running of the supermarket, from unloading deliveries to stacking shelves to working the till.

Co-operative supermarkets around the world

The Barcelona shop is not alone in experimenting with the co-operative model in this way. It is part of a blossoming of participative and co-operative supermarkets across Europe. In recent years, independent initiatives have been established in Brussels and Liege; Paris, Montpellier and Bordeaux; Madrid, Valencia and across Catalonia. The longest standing supermarket in Europe is La Louve in Paris, which opened in 2016 and has so far demonstrated that such initiatives can be financially viable. But for all these projects, it’s an American beacon which has provided the blueprint: the Park Slope Food Co-op in Brooklyn, which has been running on participative cooperative principles since it opened in 1973 as a way of pooling communal resources to get affordable food.

“We had basically no money,” says Joe Holtz, who helped open Park Slope back then. “We received deliveries on Thursday and Friday and sold the food on Saturday. We wrote checks on Thursday and Friday that we didn’t have enough money in the bank to cover, and then we made a deposit on Saturday night.” For five years, members were initiated based on ‘sweat equity’ – their commitment to help in the work of the co-operative – and no initial joining investment. It was only in 1978, when the coop signed its first lease for a ground floor retail space, that they began to ask for a $10 equity investment into the business. A couple of years later, Park Slope Food Co-op bought the building, later expanding into a second space, and it has managed to keep its hold in Brooklyn even as the demographic of the neighbourhood has changed radically over the years.

In its punkish, ad hoc way, the Park Slope Food Co-op created a novel form of the co-operative economy – riffing on an organisational model that has deep roots stretching back to 18^th century Scottish weavers and 19^th century English cotton mill workers.

The Park Slope Food Co-op was also born in a particular historical moment. In mid-1970s New York, the city government nearly declared bankruptcy and there was an inflated moral panic over ‘Fear City’ as a place of high crime rates, blackout riots and general lawlessness. It was in this context that the new co-operative found its informal beginnings. These days, the financial barriers to setting up a new supermarket are stark. “Could you secure a lease in New York City today? It would be tight,” says Holtz. The conditions would need to be right. It would probably take years of patient planning and momentum building to gather a few thousand people across a neighbourhood willing to make a small initial investment, as well as the backing of a progressive financial institution.

For Tom Boothe, an American in Paris and one of the founders of La Louve, the story is one of personal perseverance and institutional benevolence. The early development of the supermarket began in 2010, and it finally opened its doors in 2016. “We had two very big, helpful friends,” he explains. “One is the city of Paris [the local government], who got us access to our space.” The co-operative leases 1500 square metres of commercial space in the 18^th arrondissement, thanks to a social landlords scheme which the local government oversees. The second is the not-for-profit financial institution France Active, which invests in small businesses and social enterprises.

Boothe sees the social democratic values of France’s political and social life as key to securing early funding for the project. “We got about a million euros in loans,” explains Boothe. “In the States that’s not such an easy thing to do.” In France, he thinks things are different. “The idea of a co-operative supermarket that’s not there simply to make money for the people who own it, that’s extremely normal to people.”

The democratic principles of co-operativism run throughout the organisation: everything is decided by the co-op members, from organisational matters to the products on shelves. Both Park Slope and La Louve strive to serve the needs of their membership in a way that is inclusive and egalitarian. If they can source it, La Louve will stock any product a member requests. “We sell conventional products, we sell everything you can find in a regular supermarket, but we sell a lot of organic products and luxury products too,” explains Boothe. But, he adds, “we’ve never had a request for Coca Cola.”

At Park Slope, where membership has peaked at around 17,000 members, the ethos is the same. For many products, such as carrots and lemons, both conventional and organic versions are sold. But it only makes sense to stock what customers want to buy. “We let members vote with their dollars,” explains Holtz. It was many, many years ago that conventional collard greens came off the shelves when customers stopped buying them. “The organic collards were just a better product,” says Holtz.

Food co-op BCN has taken a different approach: members democratically voted for a series of principles that guide the selection of products. Wherever possible, products are organic, local and offer producers a just price, explains Cristina. But given the barriers to certification for would-be organic producers, these principles have been flexible. “We have evolved over time to register the fact that the aspiration to have everything organic isn’t viable,” she adds. In that case, the products tend to fulfil the other requirements, coming from would-be local organic farms. “We can visit their farms, and the producers themselves come with their trucks to the supermarket,” explains Cristina.

Boothe disagrees wholeheartedly with this prescriptive approach, though. “That is not at all our philosophy,” he says. “If you wait for a product to be ethically perfect, your supermarket will never exist because the world is in a terrible state.” More importantly, it’s an issue of inclusivity. “It’s fine to say to people who are making good money that you have to pay the ‘real price’ for food, but you cannot say that to people who are making 600 euros a month,” he explains. For La Louve, 8% of members receive benefits, meaning they earn less than a thousand euros a month, and another 2% are students living on grants. In a world where people aren’t paid a true living wage, there is a very real tension between the ambition to promote the best food and farming practices and the accessibility of affordable food through the co-operative economy. “You can either start a club or a co-operative,” says Boothe. A participative food business with such prohibitively high product standards and prices would be more ecological club than egalitarian co-operative.

The difference between co-operative supermarkets and Community Supported Agriculture

It’s important to understand, moreover, the distinctions between co-operative supermarkets and Community Supported Agriculture. The CSA model can’t be extrapolated to a large, multi-purpose food store, Boothe suggests. He is sceptical of supermarkets working directly with delivery from lots of small producers. “That’s the least ecological choice in terms of logistics,” because it multiplies the number of truck journeys drastically. “Economically, those projects won’t work,” he suggests, advocating working with distributors instead.

Both La Louve and Park Slope know what it means to come up against extreme financial difficulty. The great financial strength of this model is also an Achilles’ heel: member participation means there are fewer labour costs, massively reducing one of the most significant supermarket overheads. During the pandemic, that apparent advantage quickly became a major liability. No longer able to ask members to come in for shifts, Park Slope hired 130 extra staff while La Louve hired five and relied on ‘spontaneous co-operation’ from members coming in and stacking the odd shelf while they shopped. Another weakness of these co operatives is that they tend to draw from a much wider geographical circle than conventional supermarkets. During lockdowns, that meant some of the members living farther away came less often or not at all. Despite these challenges, La Louve and Park Slope have endured and continue to be vibrant centres of community and sustenance for their membership.

These co-operatives demonstrate that there is nothing inherent in the concept of a supermarket – a single shop where a person purchases all their food supplies and household necessities – to make it a cold, soulless, monolith. On the contrary, supermarkets could be a rich social resource – “the public libraries of food” as Boothe puts it – that offer affordable and accessible food to all, and act as practical centres of learning about the food system.

Are co-operative supermarkets the future?

In these precarious times, it might be hard to see a future for supermarkets in which participative co-operatives have any major role to play. Venture capital has placed its bets on ‘dark stores’ and the gig economy as the future of groceries: Gorillas and Getir motorbikes patrol big cities from dawn till darkest night, steered by zero hours workers who carry groceries from ghostly, customer-free supermarkets to the front doors of those that can afford it.

In the UK, the economic and energy crises of the time can make the prospect of a bold new project like a supermarket for the communal good feel remote, if not impossible. It is worth remembering, however, that the Park Slope Food Co-op emerged in one of the bleaker moments in New York City’s recent history. Answering the needs of its community, it was a practical effort in imagining a different, more egalitarian future, through collective action. The cost-of-living crisis presents a gloomy, difficult winter for many in the UK. But it’s precisely moments like these when necessity can drive imaginative approaches to co-operation and food provision, sparking new ways of organising in the service of the public good.

 

 

Who can resist the siren call of the supermarkets – open till late, filled with food catering to most tastes, often at bargain prices? But if we widen the lens to take in the bigger picture, we find society is paying a huge price for this convenience. Our food system is controlled by forces which may not have our good health at heart. And their power is growing globally, with a relatively small number of corporations monopolising the food system at every stage of the food chain, and at an ever-increasing rate. In the UK, four supermarket chains control over 91% of the market value of grocery retail, predicted to increase to 96% by 2027.

Better Food Traders offers a similar service, connecting shops, food hubs, market stalls and veg box schemes with their customers. Suppliers must adhere to their principles, and apply for membership, ensuring consistency across the network.

Oddbox offer a veg box with a difference, sending out veg that would otherwise be rejected from retailers for being too small, big, wonky or strangely shaped, delivering overnight to avoid traffic and unnecessary engine idling.

This article was originally published July 2018. Updated October 2022. 

It seems hard to comprehend, living as we do in the twenty first century, that food security would ever be something we would need to concern ourselves with. But it’s a thing now. It’s a sign of the times when a cargo ship full of grain sailing across the Black Sea becomes a major international news story. And you’d better believe that this is just the tip of the iceberg; the impact of war, as terrible as that is, is nothing compared to the effect that climate change is going to have in terms of our food security.

One thing that we really must be doing, both in terms of preventing the worst-case scenario of climate change and also helping us cope with the inevitable food security troubles we will face in the future, is to create resilient local food economies. And for qualification of that statement, should it be required, simply cast your mind back to the lockdown in March 2020 and remember how local food enterprises up and down the country not only continued to supply their customers, but quickly scaled up to meet the surge in demand, while supermarket shelves were bare for weeks.

Such local food economies would be characterised by an abundance of independent food enterprises: farmers and market gardeners who grow food specially for the local market, artisanal processing businesses who lovingly add value to locally grown food, and independent shops and restaurants which sell local food. And more to the point, when a local food system has taken root, it is possible to coordinate the supply-chain between these local enterprises according to ‘circular economy’ principles, and dramatically reduce the environmental impact of food in comparison to the industrialised system currently in place.

These days, I have the privilege of meeting small-scale food producers and other food enterprises from all over the UK, as I travel from place to place doing my workshops on ‘Pathway to Local Food Ecosystems’. These incredible people, who I have the utmost respect for, invariably tell me the same thing…they are finding it hard. They are finding it really hard, especially financially. Many of them exist on a knife-edge, where the smallest of things could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

This staggers me.

Not that they are finding life tough, that’s very easy to relate to. The thing that staggers me is just how undervalued these people are by society. These are the people who produce our food, for goodness’ sake! And they do it sustainably. These will be the people who are feeding us if (or should that be when?) the next global catastrophe strikes. If we don’t get our act together soon and change things so that someone can earn a decent living running a food enterprise at a local level, then we risk losing something very precious indeed.

How can we support local food economies?

Well, we can encourage people to buy and eat locally grown food, of course. But then, we’ve been putting that message out there for decades and most people that are inclined to support local growers through their buying habits are already doing so.

To my mind, we shouldn’t be thinking in terms of ‘protecting’ our grassroots, sustainable food industry. No, we should be thinking in terms of making it thrive, giving it the opportunity and resources to scale to the point where it is no longer ‘niche’, and rather, representing a significant portion of the total amount of food eaten in this country. Achieving this is not at all impossible, but it’s going to take a lot more than a publicity campaign. This is where local authorities and government can step in, by implementing policy and providing resources to put infrastructure in place that would support local food production and trade. This could take the form of ‘food hubs’: local food storage and distribution centres whose purpose is to manage local food supply-chains in ways that enable producers, processors, retailers, caterers and food related social projects to work in unity with one another as part of a sustainable food system.

The solution to our food security problems does not end with the provision of this infrastructure. If we really want to do something transformative with our food system, we’ve got to be bold and start re-thinking the economic models that underpin it. The economic model currently driving our food system is based on exploitative, linear systems which are destructive, wasteful and geared to meet the needs of shareholders above the needs of people and planet. This economic model is the only thing we’ve really known, which makes it very difficult to look beyond, or indeed, to change. But, that doesn’t mean there aren’t other ways of doing things. In this respect, we can certainly look to ‘Principles of Harmony’ for inspiration, as described by His Majesty the King in his book Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World. And we’ve also got to be brave enough to put them into practise.