Joanna Blythman

WHAT a year 2020 turned out to be. Who won’t be glad to see the back of it? But whilst our minds have been focused elsewhere, on the food front there have been some positive developments. Here are the six that heartened me most.

FAT IS BACK IN FAVOUR WITH YOUNGER PEOPLE

New research shows that younger generations don’t share their elders’ low-fat orthodoxy. For instance, it would have been unthinkable a few years back, but M&S and Tesco are now selling a 10% fat Greek-style yogurt.

A five-country study by food industry analysts New Nutrition Business has found that 34% of 25- to 44-year-olds want to eat more healthy fats, but only 23% of 55- and 65-years old. If you’re still reaching for the low-fat product, you could be showing your age.

SUPERMARKET CASH-BACK AS YOU’VE NEVER KNOWN IT

Bill Grimsey, determined champion of independent shops and living high streets, embarrassed our supermarkets into paying back the financial windfall they’d made out of the Government’s business rates holiday scheme.

As I write, only M&S, Waitrose, and the Co-op are still holding out. Food retailers benefited from a big transfer of consumer spending during the first lockdown when pubs and restaurants were forced to close. Grimsey is now pushing to create a fund from the repaid relief that can be used to help hard-pressed independents. Good man!

FILMS SET THE RECORDS STRAIGHT

An antidote to vegan propaganda documentaries,

2020 saw the release of two US documentaries that make a cogent case for mixed farms (enterprises that combine both crops and livestock), as part of a regenerative farming system that builds soil fertility, and acts as a carbon sink. Kiss the Ground, narrated by Woody Harrelson, and Diana Rodger’s Sacred Cow, both show why animal-sourced foods are healthy and can be produced in an environmentally sound way. Fitting companion pieces to

(www.researchgate.net) revealed how this narrative rests on of a small number of rickety mathematical models. Called the Myth of a Food Crisis, it concludes that there is no global shortage, in fact, there’s a glut, even if you apply all plausible future population growth scenarios.

So let’s not be scared, or emotionally blackmailed into accepting more intensive agriculture, pesticides, and risky genetic manipulation of food, in the name of feeding the hungry. Food security everywhere is best built by supporting smallscale, local producers, not by buying into magic bullet global ‘solutions’.