#074 - Prof. Tim Lang - How Bad British Food Policy Risks Starving The Nation

Prof. Tim Lang is the emeritus professor of food policy at City University London Centre for Food Policy. He was professor of food policy at Citi from 2002 to 2021 and had founded the Centre in 1994 at Thames Valley University, now the University of West London. After a PhD in social psychology at Leeds University in the early seventies, he became a hill farmer in the forest of Boland Lancashire, which shifted his attention to food policy. 

In this episode, Tim and I think out loud about the pressing issue of food resilience in Britain highlights the fragility of the food system and the historical context that has led to its current state, why Tim believes we need to take a public health approach to food security, the role of supermarkets and the importance of preparing for potential crises, why food policies and practices needs to be re-evaluated, what the pressing issues are around. 

Enjoy the show Classmates. 

You can find Tim's work here:

• University Of London
• ResearchGate
• Google Scholar
• X/Twitter

You can follow and subscribe to Thinking Class on:

• X/Twitter
• YouTube
• Substack

You can watch the full show on YouTube

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, classmates, and welcome to Thinking Class. I'm John Gillam, and today I'm speaking with Professor Tim Lang. Tim is the Emeritus Professor of Food Policy at City University, London's Centre for Food Policy. He was Professor of Food Policy at City from 2002 to 2021 and had founded the Centre in 1994 at Thames Valley University, now the University of West London. After a PhD in social psychology at Leeds University in the early 70s, he became a hill farmer in the Forest of Boland, Lancashire, which shifted his attention to food policy. In this episode, Tim and I think out loud about the pressing issue of food resilience in Britain, highlighting the fragility of the food system. And Tim takes the time to explain the historical context that led to its current state. Tim also explains the need for a public health approach to food security. We talk about the role of supermarkets in the provision of food. Tim also talks to us about the importance of preparing for potential crises, which he thinks Britain is not well prepared for, and why food policies and practices need to be re-evaluated immediately. He also talks to us about the pressing issues surrounding food security, the impact of centralization on local food systems, and the need for resilience in the face of climate change. Tim also shares practical steps individuals can take to prepare for potential food crises and much, much more. I think you'll hear from this conversation that Tim comes at this from a pro-bureaucracy and technocracy stance, insofar as he believes government committees and food policy experts can provide the tools necessary for Britain to navigate, avoid, prepare for a food crisis. I believe to a degree that might hold some truth, but I'm not fully sold on this. I'm I'm typically quite skeptical of those approaches. I think personally, if we're if there's anything that's leaving us open to a food crisis, it's probably because of the crisis of bigness that we're suffering. And I think Tim would perhaps recognise this too, at least as far as supply chains being too long and complex. And I believe his report, which you can find in the show notes, mentions that. However, I also think we're drunk on the idea of artificially growing our population and having huge urban centres reliant on either supermarkets or government machinery or or state capacity for food is probably not a good idea. And I don't think it's historically the case up until the second half of the 20th century. You'll hear Tim suggest that not everyone can buy food from a regenerative farm like I do. But I bet more people would if they knew what was in their food. Of course, they couldn't actually do this. It's physically impossible owing to the size of our population and the land available. Or maybe it's not, I don't know. But I think if people knew what was in their food, what government bodies, supranational institutions were allowing into their food, and the cost of this financially and non-financially, I think more people would move away from being so reliant on centralized systems, both private and public. I know also that England was a very well-fed nation from as far back as records go. The anthropological record has Italian and French merchants who we like to think come from countries who are very well fed, remarking on how well we eat in the Middle Ages and how we ate from the land, that our land was for cuns, and it gave us lots of meat and milk, and we were more well constituted than those on the continent. So, no, I'm not on board with the idea that we should grow the population, that everyone should rely on processed plant-based food, which will be put in front of us by commercial food enterprises as part of net zero policy, or indeed because some distant technocrats decide it's a good idea and it's for the global good. So that's my position on it. But you can listen to the practical advice from someone who's been around food systems a lot longer than I have. Before we dive in, you'd be really helping me out if you click subscribe on whatever platform you're listening to or watching the show on, because the more subscribers we have, the more guests we can attract, and the faster Thinking Class grows. Enjoy the show, classmates.

SPEAKER_01 4:23

Thanks. I think you're the only person who's called me Timothy, Professor Timothy. My grandmother, one of my two grandmothers who died, used to call me Timothy, and after that, no one. But now I get called Timothy, and I think it's because email turned Tim into Timothy. I've asked my university to change it. Bill Gates is more powerful, so there you go.

SPEAKER_00 4:44

There you go. Well, I I will call it, I shall call you Tim from now on, so we're not on formalities.

SPEAKER_01 4:50

Uh I don't mind if you call me Timothy, you just become Bill Gates to me.

SPEAKER_00 4:57

You you are the professor of emeritus of food policy at uh City of London University, and you have recently written a report for the National Preparedness Commission about food resilience in Britain. And within that, you make the argument that Britain is uh facing into uh a crisis. Um, should there be food shortages, that the people of Britain will find it hard to feed themselves because of, I suppose, uh, historically contingent factors that have taken hold since the end of World War II. So I won't steal your thunder. This is an incredibly important topic, and I see it almost as a public service announcement. So let's begin from the top. Why do you think that Britain has become exposed to a high risk of experiencing food crises or shocks? John, that's not quite right.

SPEAKER_01 5:52

Uh some headlines have made my report uh uh apparently about that, that we're we're not producing enough food and what sort of doom faces us. It's not really what that report, my report is about, although there's an angle which is partly about that sort of stuff. Let me explain. About two and a half years ago, the National Preparedness Commission tapped me on the shoulder. This is a group of the great and the good, um, some very serious people inside the state, people out, who came together essentially saying, How prepared is Britain, the sixth richest economy on the planet, for shocks? And shocks are coming, politics is changing. There are some big ones that we know about climate change and so on, but others are crowding in. Um they said, look, we're we're aware food is sort of part of this picture. Um would you do this for us? You know, I'm a retired professor, I'm pretty busy, but I said, Yeah, I'll do that. And we agreed. Uh I said, Look, I I'll do it focusing on the public, because you've got people inside the state and in the secret strait, actually. Um you assume we're going to be providing good information about cybersecurity and you know secret stuff. Uh, I'm not in that world. I'm a social scientist working in public health and in the the state of food systems generally. I'll look at that. And we thought I'd do it in a year. Well, it took me two and a half years because the first thing a social scientist does is go and ask people. Now I've spent 50 years working on food systems and how they work, mostly but not entirely, in the rich world. I was interested with a group of friends and colleagues a long time ago and still have that, in how the rich world deal. Uh because we have inequalities within us and between us and great, great dynamics that people don't study enough. They tend to study the poor, not the rich. Um, and yet it's the rich who shape things. And uh, for various reasons, Brexit and other reasons, I started taking much more interest in my country, Britain. And I wrote a big book for Penguin that came out the week of lockdown, and it sold out in a week or so, and has rolled on. And I have a long interest in strategic interests and um what we call food security. Can a population feed itself and what does it need? It's not just about growing food, it's about can they afford it? Is it available? Is it accessible? Do people know how to handle it? So I, you know, I know I know my way around this. Um, and I started asking people how fragile do you think the British food system is? What are the risks that face us? And a very different picture emerged when I talked to people anonymously, and very straight away I said, I will not quote you by name. Uh, and people who are very busy, who said they'd give me half an hour, ended up talking for an hour, two hours, uh, because they really felt very interested in this. They too had been thinking about it. Uh, and so my report came out in uh early February from the National Preparedness Commission. It's a public document, I wouldn't have done it otherwise. And there's a short version of it, an executive summary, which is 14,000 words long, so it's quite hefty in some respects. But the main report is 380 pages long. It became very big, and it's got over 800 references, and I interviewed 75 people, uh, uh sort of great great and the good and uh down to very small enterprises, civil society inside the state, outside the state. I looked at 10 countries, I looked at cities and regions, I looked up and down. I tried to give a sort of panorama. I said at one point to uh uh uh people, you know, that this shouldn't be one old professor doing this, this it needs to be a sort of bigger enterprise. But nonetheless, it's come out, and I'm very pleased it's come out, because what it does is raise questions for British society. Uh but they're questions that other societies have. We may have floated off from and imposed barriers to where we get most of our non-produced home-produced food, namely the European Union, but EU countries have not unrelated problems and stresses and strains, and they're beginning to address them. Critically, to summarize what I came up with was actually if we want to make British society more resilient, prepared for shocks, prepared to bounce back from shocks, firstly, we've got to start talking about it. Secondly, we've got to be quite brutally honest about where we are. And in some respects, we have good things, in some respects we have very bad starting point. Um, but shocks are coming, and they're with us already. And I applied a public health approach. Some are chronic, they're just with us, and some come hard and acute and they hit. And almost all the serious analysts in food now talk everywhere of uh cascading risks, amplification, or poly crises. It's not one crisis hits, like we said, oh, wasn't it funny? No one starved with COVID, and it was all okay. Then I talked to people who said, we got there by the skin of our teeth, and we had to suspend competition law, and we had to uh uh apply sort of emergency powers, and the planning system wasn't there, and uh the food industry went to a government and said, Um, do you think we should actually have a regular meeting about this? So, you know, can we feed people? Uh because we've got a just-in-time food system, and we've got rid of storage. Historically, thousands of years, people have dealt with crises and wars by storing food or secreting it away. Uh, and invading armies knew they could hold societies and cities, blockade them. Well, we're seeing that back. It's back. Look at what Russia's been trying to do to Ukraine, bombing the heck out of Mariupol and the desk. Why? It's the food export point uh of Ukraine, a provider of food to 55 countries. What whatever you think about what's going on in Israel, Gaza, you know, you're seeing blockading of food and water. Actually, one of the points that came out to my report was that food is very important in crises and shocks, but water is much more important. You know, I went back and looked at in crises, what do you need? You you can survive uh uh 30 days with no food, but you can't survive more than three days uh before going downhill without water. And then just as my report was actually finalised and gone to the National Preparedness Commission, an election was called, and that morning the then Deputy Prime Minister of Britain said, Oh, dear Britain, will you please store three days of food? Where'd that come from? You know, other countries said a lot more than that. And you know, Britain isn't just eating one diet. What? How? For what emergencies? A few bottles of water, what would that do? Well, I'd looked, I'd looked already at the World Health Organization's experience of how much water you do you need? Do you need those bottles of water that the prepare website of the emergency planning college in North Yorkshire, part of the MOD Ministry of Defence, said, do you need that to wash your hands after you've you know defecated or gone for a pee? Do you need it for cooking? Is it just to feed your body? Well, you need a lot more than a few bottles of water, let me tell you. I looked at what at other countries addressing that. They were saying store a lot, so you know two gallons per person, uh, you know, so and so on. You know, this is much more complicated than just saying, oh, keep a bit of food under your bed. I mean, I'm basically what my report is saying, John, is can we start getting a bit more real, please? Can we start a process which isn't about frightening people, but is about being real? We've developed a food system for affluence in globalization as a member of the European Union, and none of that fits anymore. So let's start rethinking it.

SPEAKER_00 14:28

What were the policy decisions then you mentioned and alluded to some of them that brought us here? And and and I suppose specifically, uh, what is the state of play in Britain with regards to food, how things long things will last, and and where people typically get it from and who we rely upon.

SPEAKER_01 14:52

People typically get their food from a supermarket or a carryout, as uh they would say in Scotland, takeaway or delivery. You know, there's a whole new sector emerged in this uh value-adding competition called the food system. You know, and yet children's books imply that farmers grow their food and somehow we get it. That's not how it works. Food goes through incredibly long supply chains, even if you get it, quote unquote, from Britain. It's belted up and down motorways, it's done everywhere. Just as it's about to go down your mouth, someone, a new sector emerges and takes value out of it. Um, you don't even walk to the shop, it comes to you now. That's what it was when I was a child. I'm a lot older than you. I'm in my late 70s. I remember, you know, uh home delivery uh being something very different from a grocery shop, not from some mega corporation with software siphoning money off to California and exploited immigrant workers pedaling on bicycles to get it to you. You know, it's a different world out there, actually. And there's a bit of fantasy going on about how simple that is. It's a complex system with multiple dynamics, with power brokers and ruthless competition going on, in which almost feeding the public is the afterthought. The good news, let me say good news, is some of the food industry think tanks and insiders are actually coming clean in what people like me, analysts from outside academics, were beginning to say 20 years ago, more longer, saying, look, there's a crisis here. This is we we're building a system that's got fragilities in it. And the industry said, no, no, no, it's all fine. We we just answer what the public does. Uh the reality is nine companies provide 94.5% of food that's bought from a shop. You've then got 20, depends on the figures, how you calculate it, 20, 25% of food coming from the food service sector. People walking down streets holding a burger and a coffee in each hand. They've just bought it walking to a station or, you know, on the way to their office or to their non-factory. There's that sector too. And interestingly, in COVID, that was closed down, which was bonkers, because they were in communities. Some bits maybe close it down, but why close it all down? It actually just gave more power to the nine companies that provide the 94.5%. Uh, you know, that's why people like me, and I coined this phrase, said, you know, you could summarize British food policy as leave it to Tesco et al. But your question was getting uh to the long history of Britain. It was a very powerful imperial nation with a powerful navy. It beat the hell out of people and was nearly beaten itself from the 16th century to the 20th century, but it ended up going into major conflicts in World War I and II with a very powerful navy, which suddenly had to protect supply lines. Well, we don't have those anymore, and we haven't got the powerful navy either. It comes across the European Channel, even if it's come from Africa, it goes to Rotterdam and then to us, you know, by ship or through the tunnel. And so I actually was looking, you know, I'm I'm not a defense man, but I started looking at what the Swedes call total defense. Uh, they say the population has to be part of defending a country. And so they have a much more realistic and harder approach to defending a country if there are real crises. And I was actually increasingly intrigued as I did my report in that concept. And indeed I've used it at one point said, look, we can apply what I've called a total food defense prism lens to analyzing potential shocks to the food system. But in Britain we have a back to your question, John, a very idiosyncratic history of um uh being arrogant, basically, thinking other people will feed us. We've got rich soils, rich land, uh, and we don't grow food in it for people. Uh commodity barons who produce huge amounts of grain. Where does that go? It feeds pigs, it feeds cattle, which is a very inefficient, slow way of uh getting nutrients from the land or from the air, from ecology into humans. We've we've created very wasteful food systems. Uh, you can go, and I put in my report, you know, big anti-waste campaigns had to be run in World War I and World War II. Because if you're shipping food, which they did in World War I and World War II, people died and were damaged getting that food and protecting those merchant navy tugs, uh tubboats bringing food from far away, because we hadn't grown it. Well, we're in crisis, Britain had to start growing it very carefully. And a public health lens was applied to what do we want? What do we want from our land? It's about feeding people, stupid. And at the end of my report, I say, well, actually, it's still about feeding people. And I so I have a whole model a model uh um uh of saying, you know, if food in crises for feeding people, what I call civil food resilience, being fed when a shock's happened and you bounce back in that shock and from that shock, uh, still the priority must be feeding people. And indeed, Sweden, unknown to me, while I was doing my report, even though I was actually tried to get information from Sweden, uh, clearly the closer I now know why I didn't get some information, it's because the the central government was doing a report from central government, very similar to mine. Um, and and you know, it's a so it's a very powerful support kind of for my the analysis I too had come to, which is modern societies, the rich world, back to my first answer to you, John. The rich world has not fought through its fragilities. Um and indeed when it comes to public dynamics, I think my report has only opened the lid on that. We don't know how rich societies would really deal with a food crisis because we think food comes from Tesco et al. Or you get a takeaway, or you go on the web. What if the web goes down? No, I'm not being hysterical in saying that. Two years ago, the British state did an exercise called Exercise Mighty Oak. It's in my book, in my report, uh, where it said, Well, what would we do if the energy system went down? Is that unthinkable? Well, look at Heathrow. I've Just been on a call with key people actually, anonymized. They said, Well, look at the lessons of Heathrow. Heathrow, the busiest airport in Europe, uh, closed down when uh one energy source went out. Um and was Heathrow right to do that? Had they thought about it? Well, now think of that. What would happen if, as I put in my report, precisely 121 regional distribution centers, hubs, where food comes from suppliers, whether they're importers or manufacturers, into hubs and then go to 12,500 food shops. Tesco is supplied by 20 hubs. Okay, Tesco provides 30% of uh food from retail. Okay, just think about uh uh the the lack of resilience planning going into design designing such a centralized system. Any management consultant would know this is bonkers. And indeed, I went back, and in the opening chapters of my report, I said, well, let's look. What do we mean by resilience? It means different things to a psychologist, to an ecologist, to an environmentalist, and to an economist. And I indeed use a report from the Rand Corporation, that's a well-known management consultant, actually an offshoot of the American military. And they did a review uh in the the early 1960s of uh telecommunications and said, Look, uh we've got telephone hubs. They can be easily not knocked out, they were using that sort of language. But if we wanted to be more resilient, we'd have fewer hubs, but still dealing with the same spokes. And then said, Well, actually, what if we got rid of this of the hubs? If we just had what he called distributed systems. And actually, I applied some of that thinking throughout what I then wrote, based upon the interviews, based upon the findings of my report, and said, We can do better than this, Britain. And if we want to do that, we've got to do quite serious strategic thinking. I'll give an example. In public health, one of the key things that matters is not just providing protein and sufficient sort of calories, but you've got to get certain certain nutrients down people's throats for long-term health. In Britain, we don't eat enough fruit and vegetables and so on. Britain hardly produces uh uh any uh any fruit, about 15% of what we eat, 16% is grown in Britain, and we underconsume dramatically, about 50% of vegetables, and we underconsume dramatically. So let's just say roughly, let's double those. Uh, you know, we wouldn't be very good in a long-term crisis. We wouldn't do what Ukraine is doing. We couldn't cope with how people in Gaza are coping, or Sudan, where it's Sudanese against Sudanese, and food being a weapon there. We wouldn't stand a chance there because we'd be faffing around and saying, please, Mr. Tesco, will you send me some food wrapped in plastic? That's not the way to think about resilience. So I stood back and tried to think through much more. What do we know about how British society would cope? And what do we not know? And there's a lot that we don't know, actually. We don't know whether the skills who people have to order online can transfer to dealing with a crisis when you think food needs to be heated in a microwave and the energy system's just gone down. Or I want to order from Tesco or from Deliveroo or something else, uh, or some WhatsApp group. You know, I'll ask WhatsApp group, what should I do? It's just gone down. Actually, it comes down to what I talk to a lot, uh, and I've just done uh uh a meeting before this, uh, with the sort of official, very hard-pressed community support networks at local level. And food is quietly creeping onto their agenda that we don't know how Birmingham would deal with, or little villages would cope uh who've lost their food shop if there was a food crisis. Well, it's time we did know, actually.

SPEAKER_00 26:42

Tim, there are lots of threads to pull on there, and a few of them, I think, which should be really instructive to how we've ended up like this and how people might find their way out of it without centralization in some way. So you talked about how we've ended up with these big centralized food systems, we've ended up with big centralized decision-making systems as well, often far removed from the localities in which they are responsible for, if indeed they're they're thinking about it at all. And as you've mentioned, the um the mores of the public of this country has changed quite remarkably over time uh with regards to how we feed ourselves and the choices we make. And um, I think even though you mentioned you're you're you're much older than I is I do remember growing uh, you know, I was born in the in the late 80s, uh growing up in the 90s in a small market town in Northumberland. And we only had one supermarket at that point, and we went to it from time to time, but there were still good quality butchers and grocers, we'd still go to the farm shop. You know, my my parents still thought about how that was obviously good quality food, uh, and we know what had gone into it, and it would be made on the land around us, and so you'd go to the supermarket for those more fancy bits that you didn't really need. And then the Tesco arrived in town around the time I was 18, and it was almost like the whole town started to change overnight, all of its shopping habits started to change overnight. Of course, this had been happening in our cities much more. Anyway, I obviously got caught up in that life of convenience as I go through my 20s, finding my way in the world, all those things. But I live in at the moment, I live in Scotland, I live in Edinburgh, and there's a local farm, a regenerative farm, where it doesn't use anything from outside of its farm to create its food. It's got it's got pigs, it's got uh lots of land that it moves around, so it leaves an area fallow over time. If it compares it with other farms, it has you know higher, higher, much higher densities of all the bacteria and insects and all the things that you would need to be able to create nutrient-dense conditions to make food. And it works with other regenerative farms in Scotland. So we get we get meat and veg that are delivered to our door from either that place or from other regenerative farms in Scotland, and it tastes so much better, it's around about the same price, we feel healthier for it, and it makes me think when you're talking about, you know, what is it that communities need to do? It's almost like we've we've become so used to looking toward the state and the private sector to a certain extent to just solve our problems. We don't really need to think about it. We just need to show up with a contactless card and we can just get what we want whenever we want, and it's there. Um, as you say, if things get real, where are we going to find that instinct within us and the ability to go and uh live? You know, do do we do we even know whether our closest farm is regenerative or not? That we can go and buy food from? Uh, do we even see the the need for that? Or would we rather, I think you might have mentioned it in your report, would we rather just always focus on a seasonal food? And and that was the one thing, you know, going back to my point about going to this farm shop myself, is we get seasonal veggiorizing because it's everything that's there. And we do still use the supermarket from time to time, and it's to go and get those things that we might want as a treat, but we kind of recognize that they're not they're not there all the time. So I suppose my question to you is if we're going to fix this resilience problem, where's the balance between having it coordinated from centralized institutions that ultimately might create a fragility in itself and somehow ging up the population to start finding out ways of living more locally again and knowing what their local supply chains are, if they even exist. Dear classmate John here, this isn't an advert, so you don't need to reach for the skip button. If you're enjoying the show, then show your support by liking, subscribing, and sharing on whichever device or platform you're watching or listening to Thinking Class on. You can find me in the show on YouTube at Thinking Class. You can also subscribe to me on Substack, searching for the at thinking class handle, or by entering thinkingclass.substack.com in your browser, and you can receive reflections, blog series, and recommended reading to your inbox. You can also follow me on X at Thinking Classes. Thanks for listening, thanks for sharing, thanks for showing your support. Enjoy the rest of the show, classmate.

SPEAKER_01 31:17

Well, that's the issue, isn't it? Um uh so what what you said there is absolutely uh what comes out of my report. Um and and you know, I'm not a soothsayer. Others have begun to point in that direction, but I don't'm not aware where the National Preparedness Commission is not aware of anyone who's written something like I've done for a very long time. Um and certainly not about a rich country. The assumption is just money buys you out, and and to some extent, that is what history shows that the rich can buy their way out, but you've you've now got a different scale of inequalities between Musk world, if you like, of so rich uh uh alongside so poor that we don't know quite quite what those social dynamics are. And you raised uh, you know, quote unquote, the return to the local. We saw that in COVID, actually. It was one of the things interviews uh uh said that, you know, box schemes and local farmers and local butchers suddenly did did um good business, big business. Uh but the beginning of your question or your your uh response to me, you said about the state. Uh we either rely upon the government or upon companies. Actually, we don't rely upon government very much. Government has spent a lot of time keeping out of these questions. The assumption is and has been for the last 50 years, your lifetime, John. But I saw it come in in Thatcherism, the arrival of what was then called monetarism, now we call neoliberalism, you know, let market economics rip. Uh, and that came in in the late 70s and then was actually most accelerated through the food system. Uh, and indeed was heralded very much at the time as being, you know, let's nurture the retailers to get bigger and better. They'll apply competitiveness, they'll cut the cut the corners and cut out the deadwood and cut out the unnecessary fat. All of those metaphors were displayed. And now we're looking at the situation we are through the lens of resilience theory, which says you need redundancy. You what resilience theory calls redundancy. So you need excess. Well, we've got excess, but it's waste. Uh, and we've got the wrong sorts of foods in the wrong places, and we stop farmers producing food because we don't pay them enough to incentivize them to do so. So they're kept afloat by uh declining subsidies. And we've left the European Union and are now declining it further. Uh, and Scotland's doing one new system of post-EU, Wales is doing another, and England's doing another. So there's not even coordination in what we want from our primary producers, let alone fish and sea. Um, so um your example of the regenerative farm uh that sounds great at one level, but now apply that to Birmingham or to London, the biggest city in Europe, where I live in London. I'm in the middle of London. Excuse me. Or apply it to an area with not such good lines of communication, uh, rural areas, the the southwest of England. Uh, you see the legacy of empire, the legacy of London-centeredness, with all the transport has been determined to run coming into London and going out of London. You know, we've seen that politics play out, nothing to do with food, with the immediate view was of HS2, was you start in London and go outwards. Why? Why wasn't the British state uh saying actually the priority is from Liverpool to Newcastle uh via York and Leeds and Bradford? Why wasn't it from Bristol down to the southwest? Um, why was that assumption of centralization the the unthinkable? Uh why is uh in um today's Chancellor's statement uh £10 billion being given to another Thames crossing when £10 billion wasn't given and isn't given to something servicing transport in the north of England? You know, that is a mentality where you can say, and this is my answer to your point, actually, the state's not been involved. It's just allowed a certain market system to develop. Of course, there are regulations, of course there are frameworks. I'm not stupid, I spent my working life in that, and looking at food standards. Indeed, I had a small part in uh helping create the arguments and the detail for the food standard system within the EU. Uh uh and in Britain more more importantly. So we're talking about back to basic needs for a new world, a new era, climate change, just take climate change, which isn't something about climate, it's about how the earth operates, how systems of uh nitrogen circulation and all these fundamental things that keep the planet going, um, are altering. And that's altering where we get and what we can grow uh and how it will grow. And Britain suddenly says, keeps saying, Oh, it doesn't need to affect us. You know, leave it to Tesco at all. Get real is the subtext of my report. So when you say, John, this is my gentle uh uh response to your response to me, saying it's great if you're living somewhere where you can have a get your food all from a regenerative farm, great. Now apply that to London, it's not happening. It's apply that to Manchester, it's not happening. So one of the challenges, I went and I interviewed cities. I w I I looked at Melbourne, because Melbourne's been in Australia been beginning to think about resilience issues. Why? Because Australia and those cities, legacies of the British Empire, are actually in the forefront of big urban concentrations of population trying to deal with climate change. Well, you know, think Beijing, think Shanghai, cities of, or think Mexico City, or think um uh you know uh Lagos, 20 million people that can't go to a regenerative farm. It's got to be organized in a systematic way. Um, if we've created this now what appears to be a distorted, inappropriate food model for the 21st century, we've got to do some pretty rapid thinking. Let me give you one example. I was born in Lincoln, up the hill, so a long way from where flooding and rising um sea levels will affect, behind the cathedral, so high up in but but the fens that began to be drained by the Romans and then under Cromwell and the Dutch uh uh experts coming in in the 17th, 18th century. Um, the fens are we going to protect them to be one of the only areas we get horticulture from? Or are we gonna have to move horticulture uphill, as I say in my report? Well, you can't do that overnight. You can't just pack up and move up the hill. Which hill? Where? How can we do that? Well, that goes into uh another aspect of your uh uh raising the issue about the role of government, the role of companies. Um that can't just be done in an ad hoc way. So I looked at the system of government and governance in Britain. Um, and it's highly centralized. Uh, we know that. Uh and Britain, England, and Britain has reluctantly given a little bit of power to Wales, a little bit to Scotland, and a little bit to different mayors in little bits of England, uh, but there's no coherence. Other countries, France, Italy, and the British to Germany after World War II, said this will be a regional structure. Uh, and you will be and have powers and fundraising and governance-raising capacities to address this. Now, Britain hasn't got that. But in Wales, and I looked particularly in Wales, partly because I'm Welsh, partly my uh father's uh mother's family were impeccably Welsh for a century, so I'm interested in Wales and have family worlds. Um I looked at this sub-national level and said, there are some really getting interested in food. Some cities are really interested. Birmingham, Manchester, London. I actually sit on the London food board that Ken Livingston set up when he was first mayor, and Boris Johnson maintained and supported, and Sadiq Khan has too. And you know, before the COVID crisis, we'd started talking with London Resilience, which under the Civil Contingencies Act, England and Wales has 42 resilience forums that are supposed to be about preparing for shocks. And when I interviewed and surveyed them, they said we're aware food's coming on, but we, you know, we're mostly ambulance and police and fire. We don't know about food. So I took that very seriously. We've got to rebuild local planning of resilience at a regional and city level. Now, central government's got to do that actually. So don't think that they've got it all under control. They're not even thinking about it, John. And they need to be. And my report takes that very seriously and says, Dear government, uh, and indeed I met a minister yesterday who said he was reading my report. So I'm really pleased about that. But the cities have probably got to pressurize central government to say, give us powers. Now, why do I say that? One old professor. Swedish government has said that's what they want their regions and their subnational level. And they've said they're putting it into law to say, in a crisis, it is going to be your duty to ensure your people are all fed. Whoa. Well, I read that, I thought, goodness me. And I talked to people in Sweden and they said, well, actually, we're we're suggesting that. Why? Because it'll make the mayors do it, or at least be accountable to the public to make sure that it's done. So I think you were, if I may say, too glib in saying government and the and the companies have got it under control. They have the under control.

SPEAKER_00 42:39

Well, actually, that wasn't what I was saying, Tim. So I was saying I was more referring to the mindset that the public has, which is we we have a mindset of convenience. And actually, we don't really take responsibility too much because we we float along towards just wanting to have a free and easy life in some way. And actually, if you look at where the way people uh want to be governed, they are always looking at either government or the private sector to do it for them. There's very little let's coordinate and cooperate, you know, these little platoons, I suppose, that Roger Scruton and Burke and whatever have talked about in the past, where there was a civil society in England that was emerged organically, and then we've gone into this big organized society. So I hear exactly what you're saying, Tim. I think what is going to be a big struggle here is getting the public on board because institutional trust has been eroded like nobody's business. And some of the names you've got to do.

SPEAKER_01 43:35

Well, the what you can balance in trust is sorry, I can't accord you then, but my my um system suddenly uh uh wobbled. Um the issue of trust is really important. Food is a trust relationship, and one of the things from looking at preparedness for crises, you know, immediately after a crisis, people used to want to I raise people. People used to want tea and uh tea for a crisis. Well, would they want Coca-Cola now? Would they want um would they want coffee now? You know, where where's the barista who's going to be there for a crisis? I mean, it's it's a joke to even ask that. Um but maybe it's not. People expect it, I think. Well, some people, exactly. So that was part of what I concluded, John, was that no one set of advice is going to be appropriate for such uh different sets of societies as Britain has, or indeed the Netherlands has, or or Germany has, or France has. It's a myth to think there is a Britain. It's it's very divided in good ways and bad ways. And we're not doing the planning for that, and we're not doing the thinking about that. And the US type reflex is well, put it on a website, and that's what the Federal Emergency Management Agency did. Uh but the Federal Emergency U Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, which Mr. Trump wants to abolish, by the way, um, it does a very interesting survey every year of saying, are there are the US public planning to look after, be prepared? And uh if not, why not? Etc. So they are uh, I think, in a different form of complacency than Britain. Uh Britain doesn't even think about supply, um, it just assumes it'll be there. Uh why? Why do we assume that? I don't think we should assume that anymore. Um, and nor do much more importantly, I'm saying that because my interviewees said that. And they were inside the machine, they were from the big companies and medium companies and small companies, and people placed across the food system. They didn't read it as something that would just automatically work at all. So uh my my long answer to your previous question was picking up on well, really is the state there? And are companies there? I don't think they are actually. Some of the big companies are now talking and picking up on it, and people writing to me who'd been in big companies and saying, actually, you're right. Even as I was partly driving this system forward of the just in time super lean mean machine, I was actually thinking, are we right to be doing this? But it was all driven by the assumption that cheap food is good food. Actually, food isn't cheap. We're dumping it on the environment, we're dumping it on public health. Diet is the biggest cause of premature death and disease and illness, long-term expensive health care. Um, and uh yet we need it. So we've got our needs distorted. Uh and uh, you know, the end, you know, the end of my process, and I've been working this sort of well for 50 odd years, um, and I'm very sober about how prepared the rich world is. It's actually arrogant, and it just assumes food or cross borders. Why?

SPEAKER_00 47:14

Tim, I know we're down, we're running down the last five minutes of your time with me. So I've got two questions. One that I ask all of my guests, but before we get there, a very, very short one for you, which is what's the key takeaway for the common person? What what would you recommend that they go and do right now?

SPEAKER_01 47:32

Uh know your neighbours. Um uh if you can store a bit of food, be prepared to share it. Um if you're in a civil organization, um try and help pull together, if it doesn't exist, but they probably they might exist, a community body which can think about food and learn lessons. Um in my report I answer your question at great um carefulness for different levels, but a key notion in my report is to do what some academics taught me and are trying to develop, an approach to audit community food assets. Um, you know, could a local pub that was being closed down actually be a mass kitchen in a crisis, uh, close down in COVID? Um could uh a food bank become a food storage point? Could um uh people who are in different parts of the food system do things differently? Could some land be made available now for community gardens to grow food that won't feed the population, but will get people together to have the networks that are important in crises. There are lots of suggestions about that in my report. Different things for different circumstances. Don't think that US prepping is going to resolve this or closing the borders will somehow answer everything and you know, uh British food for British people. Actually, um food moving has been very helpful politically and culturally over history. Um, but at the same time, the the the lack of thinking about Britain uh and people in Britain thinking, actually just growing some food if you can, is quite extraordinary. Whereas when I first used to go to Greece 50 years ago, you saw people growing food. The longer they've been in the EU, they've they've got fatter, uh, and they've got more foreign foods coming, you know, dairy stuff coming down from the Netherlands uh into Greece. Um, you know, think what you could do. You're not going to feed yourself from being in a city, but actually, studies show, and I summarise them, very interesting studies done by academics. And actually, cities could produce a lot more food than they think they could. So there are things you can all do, um, but don't get into a panic. Uh the best thing is, you know, and that sort of happened in COVID, neighborhoods coming together, WhatsApp groups. But what if the WhatsApp groups go down? Um, I repeat, exercise Mighty Oak uh done two years ago was actually looking at what how would the state respond in that? Uh we don't know what their results were. Um, they wouldn't tell me. Uh but I can tell you everything uh gets very, very different if electricity goes down. I think to that extent, having some stores is a sensible thing to do. But don't think that you're going to be able to cook it and have oat cuisine, but think water above all.

SPEAKER_00 51:01

Thanks, Tim. Final question. What have you changed your mind on in the course of your life? You might have had something that you thought was an absolute, unchangeable, and then it fell apart. And what was it that made you think differently?

SPEAKER_01 51:17

Oh, well, I was brought up uh meat eating. Um, I was a child in India, um, but but born in Britain and backwards reform, then came back to Britain um by the time I was eight, uh, but was brought up in a classic sort of old-style British meat and two veg household, ate well. Um, and I started thinking very differently um uh in in the 1970s. Um uh actually at one point I was a farmer uh and produced meat, uh, but uh dramatically reduced the amount of meat, and then um uh uh in in Mad Cow disease, again stopped eating meat, mostly in protest at the consequence uh and I thought stupidity of of uh of what was exposed there. Um I'm not against people eating meat if they want to, but I think being prepared to eat very differently is a very hard thing to do. Changing your diet is a very hard thing to do. We all like to eat what we were brought up with and think that's the right thing. But yet diets are plastic, they're malleable. We can eat differently, and in crises that may be very necessary indeed.

SPEAKER_00 52:41

Well, Tim, I would usually give you some kind of a response to that, but I know you are a very busy man, so I would like to thank you very much for coming on the show and talking about your report. I uh implore everyone to go and read it and make up your own minds about it and what that means for you. Tim, where can people find you on the dark corners of the internet? And what can we expect from you next?

SPEAKER_01 53:04

Well, I'm not in LinkedIn, I always say I want to be linked out. I have my my colleagues used to say uh nicely, I hasten to say, Tim's generally useless, but he's got a he's got a great contacts list. Um but um uh I'm I'm not in LinkedIn and things like that. You know, it's not me you need. Um you can look at my report, the report I did, and I took on two research assistants, it became so big to have to do it. Um it's on the National Preparedness Commission website, or if you Google me, Tim. I'll put the links in the show notes. Yeah, it's called Just in Case, quite deliberately. Not my idea. People in the logistics industry told me that's what we think about this, Tim. Um what's a just in case approach? And I think that's the theme, just in case. You know, it's a humbling thing to think about crises. And and that's not, I don't wallow in crises, I enjoy my life like everyone else. Um uh, but just in case is pretty good advice. It's what parents do. Uh, we've uh been a neoliberal's cause that triumph in saying the nanny state and you know, Elon Musk bringing his chainsaw out and saying let's get rid of bureaucracy. Actually, the state is quite important for some things, and this is one of them.

SPEAKER_00 54:29

Okay, Tim, thank you very much for joining me. Good luck. Thank you. Take care. To keep up to date with all that I am doing, please subscribe to the Thinking Class YouTube channel at Thinking Class and follow me on X at Thinking Classes. Thinking Class seeks to understand the civilizational issues we face and why what our leaders do in response matters. Here I seek to explore the ideas, values, and culture that made our civilization, those that are unmaking it, and how leaders at our public and private institutions should respond. Engage with me on YouTube or X or write to me at thinkingclasspod at gmail.com to tell me who you want me to speak to and what topics are important to you. I look forward to seeing you there and for joining me on this journey.