Opinion: It’s time to ‘chew the fat’ on our food systems
Molly Biddell © Molly Biddell The concept that “there is no love sincerer than the love of food” (George Bernard Shaw) is something pretty much all my friends and family wholeheartedly agree on. We are very into food.
Our love language is recipe sharing, and dreaming up our death-row meals is an all-time favourite activity.
And yet, I’m always surprised that a lot of the foodies in my life know relatively little about the realities of how food actually ends up on our plates.
See also: Young Farmers – Why we need to redefine the word ‘productive’
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It’s not their fault – we’re not encouraged to ask, and it’s simpler to take comforting branding at face-value than to ask tricky questions.
But every time we eat, we make a choice about the type of planet we want to live on.
It’s empowering to know that what you eat can help create positive change. As beef producers, it’s easy to scoff at vegans, but I applaud anyone who’s that committed to changing their diet for the planet.
I just wish everyone was better informed and we could help swap avocados for pasture-fed British mince.
It’s hard to know what “good” looks like when it comes to the ideal plate of food.
We glibly talk about the need to reconnect people to where their food comes from, but farming on TV is either Clarkson’s health-and-safety nightmare or Countryfile’s bucolic sheepdog trials, neither of which will tell us much about our food system.
When we open our farms up for visitors, it’s too tempting just to showcase the cute, the fluffy and the “loaf of bread that came from this wheat”.
This doesn’t really bring the public up to speed with the real challenges of our food system – such as the fact that the costs to Britain of our unhealthy eating amounts to £268bn every year, that 17% of children in the UK were living in food poverty in 2022-23, that the food we eat accounts for 30% of our carbon emissions, and that more than a quarter of food grown in the UK is never eaten.
Everyone deserves to know more, and the conversation on our food system needs to be louder and more inclusive.
Food Conversation citizen assemblies
I’m really inspired by the Food Conversation citizen assemblies that the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission have run up and down the country.
Encouragingly, there are more and more people writing brilliant books and podcasting on our food system.
Last year I gave Henry Dimbleby’s book Ravenous to my dad for Christmas and was chuffed when he told me it had gone down a storm with his beer-drinking blokes’ book club.
Talking about how to eat is hard, and often something only the privileged can afford to discuss. The conversation is too often left to mums at Pilates classes and keto gym bros only.
Or you risk sounding like your grandma, reminiscing on rationing and lamenting the days of home economics classes.
The problem is that food is really personal, and it’s easy to point fingers and blame individuals.
But it’s not as simple as baddies and goodies, it’s not black and white. Our food system is complex, messy and grey and we are all complicit in this knotty web.
To begin to untangle it, and find creative spaces for solutions, we need to first understand it, and to do that we all need to get round the table, face up to the challenges and chew the fat.