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.
Unfortunately, the intensive farming methods he pioneered have had unintended consequences.
“It’s not surprising that when you solve one problem, you create other problems,” says Dimbleby. “Particularly when you solve a problem in a complex system by focusing on just one thing, such as how many calories you can get out of a square metre of land.”
In the UK, as wheat yields have increased, nature has suffered, with a loss of wildflower meadows, woodlands, birdlife, etc. And the bigger the food system has grown, the more destructive it has become. Every stage of the process exacerbates the carbon crisis – from the forests cleared to plant crops to the energy-intensive manufacture of fertiliser, the methane produced by livestock and the energy used by manufacturing plants and retail outlets.
Meanwhile, the cheapest, most abundant foods in the modern system are the ones we have evolved to crave – sugars, refined carbohydrates and fats – and as a result, about one in three adults is classified as obese. Modern food has trapped us in what Dimbleby describes as a “junk food cycle”, and it doesn’t matter how often we are exhorted to eat 5+ fruit and vegetables a day; if we are surrounded by unhealthy, highly processed treats, we find it hard to resist.
“Behind the scenes, the CEOs of food companies will say they know all that, but there’s a commercial incentive for them to sell more and more of the stuff.”
In the UK, food manufacturer Nestlé was criticised in March for a claim that a new high-sugar breakfast cereal based on its popular chocolate wafer biscuit KitKat was nutritious. There was an outcry, with Dimbleby and shadow health secretary Wes Streeting calling for a greater degree of responsibility from the food and drink industry.
“They got an absolute kicking and had to take off the word ‘nutritious’,” says Dimbleby. “But, clearly, we’re going to struggle if this is what companies are doing.”
Taxes and carrots
He has found limited public support for some of his ideas, in particular any suggestion of reducing meat consumption for the sake of the planet. He describes focus-group sessions where the air “crackled with hostility” every time the idea of introducing a meat tax was brought up.
“Compared to that, actually there is a very strong public appetite for intervening on health.”
In the past, those sorts of health interventions focused on public education campaigns: guidelines on what to eat and how much to exercise. In the US, where one in six adult deaths is related to the country’s obesogenic environment, according to a University of Colorado study, the war on obesity has geared up, with recommendations that children as young as 12 should be prescribed weight-loss medications and over-13s offered bariatric surgery if their obesity is severe.
More than half the world is on track to be overweight by 2035 and Dimbleby is more interested in changing the wider food landscape than he is in preaching individual responsibility. He is influenced by the experience in Finland, where physician Peka Puska helped turn around the heart health of a nation using a scattergun approach, doing everything from lobbying food companies to reduce salt and sugar in their products to improving school lunches and building bike paths.
Among Dimbleby’s proposals are restrictions on the promotion and advertising of junk food, especially to children. He is also pushing for taxes on sugar and salt that will hopefully motivate manufacturers to reformulate products and deter them from launching new high-sugar foods like the KitKat cereal. The introduction of a tax on sugar in drinks in the UK five years ago removed 47,000 tonnes of sugar from soft drinks on supermarket shelves.
“What we don’t know yet is what has happened to that sugar,” admits Dimbleby. “My guess is that it has moved. Instead of getting it in drinks, people are consuming it in sweets, chocolate or whatever. On its own terms, the tax has been very successful, but with a complex system, we know that if you act on just one part of it, the system is liable to fight back.”
Dimbleby wants more scrutiny of food companies and stronger government procurement rules so that taxpayer money is spent on healthy, sustainable meals for those in the armed forces, hospitals, prisons, government offices and most especially schools, which is where he identifies an opportunity to provide a foundation of sound nourishment. Extending eligibility to free school meals and holiday food programmes is, he believes, a priority, to protect the health of future generations.
In New Zealand, there is a similar push to expand school lunches, with a Health Coalition Aotearoa petition to double the number of schools eligible for the Ka Ora, Ka Ako programme. Researchers from the University of Auckland have just published a study supporting ongoing funding and expansion of the programme, which they say improves both child health and educational outcomes.
There is also evidence to back food taxes in this country, including modelling from Otago, Auckland and Melbourne universities, published in 2020, which found that a tax on the saturated fat, sugar and salt content of food, accompanied by a 20% subsidy on fruit and vegetables, would lead to significant reductions in most chronic disease rates as well as cost savings for the health system.
Low-intensity farming
Dimbleby’s proposals extend to the health of the planet. For example, rather than subsidising farmers to grow only food, he is in favour of incentivising them to farm in a different way, so some of the least-productive land can be turned back into woodlands and peat bogs, and a further percentage converted to low-intensity, nature-friendly farming.
His vision is that new technologies, alternative meats and high-yield crops will mean this can be done without creating food shortages. Besides, as he notes, farming as it is done today is wasteful, with produce that is wonky or the wrong size often discarded, and overproduction built into the system.
A 2019 California-led study found a third of global food is lost or wasted, and much of it never even leaves the farm gate. This is partly due to weather, pests and diseases but also, says Dimbleby, “because farmers habitually produce more crops than we need”.
Countryside stewardship is one area where it does seem progress is being made, with the UK’s Environmental Land Management Scheme, designed to support farmers to make sure their food production isn’t achieved at the expense of nature, scheduled to begin next year.
And since Ravenous was published, Dimbleby has seen an upsurge of interest in his solutions. “The most exciting thing for me is that the political parties have been reaching out and saying can we talk about this again. That suggests it has had an impact beyond the food strategy. People are realising we’ve got a real problem, and I’m very thrilled by that.”
Although there are lessons for New Zealand from Dimbleby’s work, we are not a mini-UK and can’t simply fit the framework he has created onto our own food system.
Empty shelves
Since 2020, an organisation called Eat New Zealand has been campaigning for Aotearoa to have its own national food strategy and is currently running a petition.
The organisation’s story goes back to 2015. Chilean chef Giulio Sturla had opened a restaurant, Roots, in Lyttelton and couldn’t understand why it wasn’t possible for him to wander down to the harbour and buy fresh seafood direct from the fishing boats he could see there. Sturla has continued asking questions ever since. Why don’t we have access to the very best of what is grown and gathered in Aotearoa? Why in a country that each year makes enough food to feed 40 million people are one in five children experiencing food poverty?
Angela Clifford, chief executive of Eat New Zealand, says, if anything, the situation has worsened since the not-for-profit food collective was formed. The empty shelves seen in supermarkets during and since the pandemic have been an eye-opener, showing that supply chains are not as robust as we might have imagined, that food resilience deserves attention, and that the system needs to be focused on more than just profits.
“We produce incredible food, but our own people are sick and hungry,” says Clifford. “So, what can we do to develop a thriving local food system?”
She has a 6.5ha permaculture farm in North Canterbury where her family produce the food they eat. Most of us aren’t in a position to do that; we are reliant on growers and grocery stores. But we can still be part of a move towards change.
“Have a look at your shopping list and work out what you can source from local food systems,” says Clifford. “If you want access to good, fresh, nutrient-dense food as we move into a time of climate crisis, shoring up your local food supply is super important.”
Recent research conducted by Farmers’ Markets New Zealand revealed that buying fresh food direct from the grower or producer is 18% cheaper. “So, this is not some middle-class fancy,” she says. “Our local food systems right now are cheaper than our supermarkets.”
The Spinoff writer Charlotte Muru-Lanning recently posted how a $26.50 basket of vegetables she bought at the Ōtara market in South Auckland cost half what she would have paid online at Countdown.
Eat New Zealand would like to see its “lots of little” philosophy form part of a wider food strategy that reflects our values and the principles of te ao Māori. “It has to be a co-design between community, industry and the government,” says Clifford, who remains hopeful it will happen.
Profits & priorities
Waiheke-based Emily King has been working in food-systems change for a decade. She runs a consultancy, Spira, and has just released a book, Re-food: Exploring the Troubled Food System of Aotearoa New Zealand. She believes we are on the cusp of a major shift in awareness.
“Multiple things seem to be pointing to that,” says King. “Obviously, climate change is a big one. We’re starting to see pressures on land use and our growing capabilities. Then, at the other end of the sector, are the pressures on human health and the flow-on effects of an unhealthy diet. And more and more, we’re seeing the pressures on actually being able to afford food.”
New Zealand may be unique, but it still sits within a global system that is concerned with money and profit. Food is the foundation of our export economy, totalling $42.3 billion in 2022, and represents 62.8% of our total export goods. The trouble, says King, is the food we are sending away is nutrient-dense and high quality, while the food we are importing is mostly highly processed and unhealthy.
Meanwhile, the basics needed to produce food, from seed, to farm machinery, fertiliser and pesticides, are controlled by an ever-shrinking number of large international companies.
It is such a huge system, with so many moving parts, that redesigning it seems overwhelming. But there are some pieces of good news. One is that our distance from the rest of the world now seems less of a problem, with food miles recognised as a relatively small part of the carbon footprint compared with the ways crops and animals are farmed.
At a grassroots level, King is seeing lots that is encouraging: regenerative agriculture techniques that protect soil and water; initiatives such as Common Unity, which have set up urban micro-farms and a compost hub; māra kai (food gardens) on marae around the country, turning areas that were once lawn into productive land. On a larger scale, she is heartened by the way farmers in the Taupō catchment area have worked to change farming practices to protect the lake from rising nitrogen levels.
Lots of little is already happening. However, we can’t just focus on one part of the system, whether that is tackling the supermarket duopoly that has been in the government’s sights or ending the ban on gene-edited crops, as the National Party proposes.
“If you are just thinking about one issue, there can be unintended consequences,” says King. “That’s why we need a full food-systems approach. Now is the time to start thinking about how we redesign it so that farmers and growers can earn a living and feed people healthy food grown in a way that supports our environment.”
Change is coming for us, whether we like it or not, warns Dimbleby. In Ravenous, he illustrates this with two photographs of New York’s Fifth Avenue. In one, taken in 1900, horse-drawn carriages crowd the road and there is one lone car. In the other, taken just 13 years later, the street is full of motor vehicles and there is one solitary horse.
New technologies are being developed for the food industry, such as precision fermentation, which uses genetically modified micro-organisms to produce proteins such as meat or milk. That could disrupt our food system and economy just like the motorcar disrupted horse transport and the industry that evolved to support it – from grooms to whipmakers and wheelwrights.
“The thing that I would be most frightened of if I was a New Zealand farmer would be the fact that China imports much of its milk as powder,” says Dimbleby. “As soon as we can ferment a milk powder that looks and tastes the same as one produced by a big heavy ruminant, I think that will completely cut the bottom out of the bulk-milk market. There’ll be a huge transition there. I don’t see why any of those processed food manufacturers would use real milk powder. It could be like the cars in New York.”
Lots of little
Because we are cogs, we can help to move the machine, says Ravenous author Henry Dimbleby. While real systemic change is going to take the intervention of governments, there are all sorts of things we can do at home and in our communities to make a difference:
- Subscribe to a fruit and vegetable delivery box company that rescues surplus or imperfect produce from growers, such as Wonky Box or Perfectly Imperfect.
- Source heirloom seeds for your vegetable garden.
- Practise nose-to-tail vegetable eating. Lots that we throw away – such as the leaves and stalk of broccoli and cauliflower – is actually edible and nutritious.
- Support local orchard stores and farmers’ markets and shorten your supply chain.
- Ask for information about where and how your food is grown and made.
- If you own a food business, tell your story to consumers, whether that is how you are caring for soil, conserving water or offsetting carbon.
- Eat more foods with lower carbon footprints such as fruits and vegetables, and fewer foods with higher carbon footprints such as meat, dairy and rice.
- Reduce food waste. Love Food Hate Waste NZ says our households throw out 157,389 tonnes of food a year, often because we buy too much and don’t store it correctly. Bread is the most wasted food; we throw away 29 million loaves a year.
- If you grow nothing else, grow salad. Lettuce is one of the more wasted vegetables, with around 40% of bagged leaves getting chucked out.
- Get involved with local activities such as community gardens, crop swaps, seed swaps, food banks and composting hubs.
- Be aware of the food environments around you and consider how you can change your interactions with those environments.
- Cook alongside children and grandchildren and pass skills on to the next generation
- Write to your MP about a food policy if it concerns you.
Ravenous: How to Get Ourselves and Our Planet Into Shape, by Henry Dimbleby with Jemima Lewis (Allen & Unwin, $39.99); Re-food: Exploring the Troubled Food System of Aotearoa New Zealand, by Emily King (Mary Egan Publishing, $45).