In the 1920s, in an effort to boost trade from Britain’s ‘colonies and possessions’, the Empire Marketing Board famously rebranded Christmas Pudding as ‘Empire Pudding’. King George V put his shoulder to the campaign offering up the Palace’s own recipe, which the Board tweaked to feature ingredients from the dominions: beef suet from New Zealand; eggs from the Irish Free State; dried fruits from Australia; spices from India, Ceylon, Zanzibar and rum from Jamaica. Marketing posters went up, pudding bowls came out and Britons steamed and ate their patriotic puds with gusto.
Imperial delusions
The sun may have set on Britain’s Empire, but it certainly hasn’t stopped us expecting the world to feed us. Almost half of the food on our plate is grown outside the UK and we are only 30% self-sufficient in land terms. This leaves us rather vulnerable to international supply chain disruptions.
To quote food policy expert Professor Tim Lang, “A country choosing NOT to produce what it could either has imperial delusions or sees food exports as its route to wealth. Neither of these motives fits the UK.” In fact, the latest Government data shows Britain has a £36.7 billion food trade gap.
As Britain learned painfully from both World Wars, the longer the food supply chain is, the more it is at risk. Shifting food supplies away from Europe, as per Brexit, was never a good idea. As well as running on oil, an environmentally filthy business, food shipping traffic is more vulnerable the further it travels, as we have seen in the recent Red Sea Crisis.
The UK has limited means to protect a globalised food supply. Once the world’s greatest seafaring nation, our diminished Navy and tiny Border Force would struggle to protect busy shipping routes around our 7,000-mile coastline.
This hints at how reliant we have become on the EU single market. In 2019 most of our food imports came from the EU via the South of England, ports such as Dover and on lorries through the channel tunnel. A fact former Brexit Secretary, Dominic Raab, famously failed to grasp.
The vulnerability of our supply chains
Climate change, pandemics, geopolitical events, and economic crises have variously exposed the vulnerability of our supply chains and the consequences can be severe for nutrition, for livelihoods and the wider economy.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, for example, caused a spike in input costs such as energy and fertiliser which disrupted the food supply chain and triggered the highest food inflation spike in 45 years.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization defines food security as “when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life”.
Just hot off the press, the UK Government’s Food Security Report 2024, revealed “a notable decrease in food secure households …which has coincided with increased financial pressures to household budgets from both high general inflation and high food inflation.”
Unsurprisingly, those on low incomes and disabled groups continue to be “at disproportionately high risk” of food insecurity. More and more British people worry about the cost of food. Last year, according to surveys carried out by the Food Standards Agency, food prices became the top food-related concern among UK consumers.
The Government has less control over our food than you might think
UK land is largely in the hands of the aristocracy, corporations, oligarchs and bankers. The increasing concentration of power in a few large multinational corporations has undeniably shaped the global food system, leaving it more centralised and less resilient.
Mega-companies control everything from seed production to food processing, creating monopolistic structures that prioritise profit over food security and sustainability. Even England’s ports are owned by foreign investors.
Operating on ‘just in time’ systems, our food system is vulnerable to traffic logjams as revealed by the Covid-19 pandemic and Brexit. We have no infrastructure to stockpile in case of emergencies, food is now effectively warehoused in lorries travelling up and down our roads.
While the UK largely leaves the business of food security to Tesco et al., countries like China and India have strategies to mitigate against sudden shocks with policies to protect and diversify their agricultural bases and improve land-use efficiency. They even buy up agricultural land in Africa and Latin America to reduce their dependency on international markets.
Like all complex systems, the food system can exhibit sudden, non-linear changes. This means that even though we might see warning signs of a collapse, fluctuations in food prices, for example, it is difficult to predict exactly when it will happen or how severe the consequences will be. Systems might appear stable until a tipping point is reached, after which the collapse could occur rapidly and unpredictably.
Food security in an ever-changing climate
Global warming can extend Britain’s growing season and make crops such as grapes and tomatoes more viable in parts of the UK where they previously struggled to grow. But extreme climate events are becoming more common. This year’s spring crops faced a tough start due to persistent wet weather, late frosts, and cooler-than-average temperatures.
This is expected to result in lower crop yields and higher prices, highlighting the vulnerability of UK agriculture to unpredictable weather patterns.
As the climate changes, maximising what can be grown to feed us is key. British farming is dominated by animal production. Livestock takes up 85% of the UK’s total land use for food but gives us just 32% of our calories. Land that could be used more effectively to feed us is instead used to feed farm animals, which outnumber us by a factor of three. Despite this, we still import billions of pounds worth of meat. The UK once had an impressive, and much healthier, horticulture sector but unlike the Netherlands, we have allowed it to decay.
While our food is at risk from the climate emergency, it also exacerbates it. Agricultural land emits approximately 11% of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions. We could reverse this by reducing food waste, restoring peat lands, increasing woodlands and hedgerows, improving soil and better management of livestock.
The industrialisation of farming has undeniably helped feed a growing human population, but it comes at great cost to the environment and, ultimately our own food security. The UK is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world, just 13% of our land is tree covered compared with 44% across Europe. More than a third of our soils are degraded despite their amazing capacity to store carbon. Industrial farming is fast depleting the insects needed for pollinating crops.
Our food system uses 70% of the world’s fresh water. Since so much of our food is produced in other countries, many of which face increasing water stress, we need to think carefully what we eat and the impact on those populations. The UK’s avocado consumption, for example, has the water footprint of 10,000 Olympic sized swimming pools. You may now regret that tub of guacamole you forgot at the back of the fridge!
Eating to extinction
Our increasingly globalised and industrialised food system tends to prioritise a limited number of high-yield, economically valuable crops that are grown in vast monocultures. Just four plants – wheat, maize, rice and soybeans – account for almost 60% of the world’s farm-grown calories, while crops have lost three quarters of their genetic diversity over the last century leaving them susceptible to pests, diseases, and pathogens.
In his book ‘Eating to Extinction’, Dan Saladino explains how ancient grains like spelt and einkorn, which were staples in Europe for thousands of years, are being replaced by more commercially viable crops like wheat. Wild foods, such as wild mushrooms, edible seaweeds, and certain fruits and herbs, face extinction due to overharvesting, habitat destruction, or lack of sustainable practices in foraging.
Livestock breeds are going much the same way. Intensive agricultural practices are endangering up to 80% of traditional UK farm breeds – hardy natives like Herdwick sheep and Tamworth pigs, which have evolved over centuries to adapt to the local landscapes. Like crops, genetic diversity in livestock fosters resistance to disease.
Can we become more food secure?
Recently, Secretary of State for DEFRA, Steve Reed, announced that the National Food Strategy was back on the table. It was received by those in the food sector with some cautious optimism and a consultation period will begin in the New Year. However that unfolds, it’s clear that we need some radical changes to the food system.
To be more food secure, we must prioritise resilience, sustainability and equity over profit-driven, industrial-scale production. That means supporting small farmers, investing in local food systems, creating landscape-scale nature recovery programmes, tackling food waste, improving food education and skills, transforming public sector food procurement and tackling the root causes of food poverty.
The proof of the pudding, as they say, will be in the eating.
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