Food policy debate essential - even if it’s not to your taste
‘Give us this day our daily bread – but how?” was the provocative title of a public debate hosted by SRUC last Friday.
Far from being a sensation-seeking head- to-head set-to between vegans and omnivores, the event took a more cerebral look at the underlying complexities of the issues surrounding food policy.
Maybe it was the topic, maybe it was the company or maybe it was because I’d spent the morning patching drains with the drizzle slowly turning to sleet, but I really enjoyed the thought-provoking event.
Until you take a step back and think about it in its broadest context, it would be easy to miss the fact that, just as in farming – and indeed repairing field drains – in high-level food policy nothing is as simple as it might seem.
Professor Corinna Hawkes, director of the Centre for Food Policy at City, University of London, pointed out that food policy covered a staggeringly huge number of areas, including diet, pesticides, self-sufficiency, poverty and social inequality, land use, international food standards, human and animal health, waste, greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity and even the knockon consequences of global issues such as the coronavirus outbreak.
Covering such a wide range of aspects, the door has always been open for the issue to become highly divisive.
And I guess it might be fair here to invoke the old cliché that “a well fed man has many problems, a hungry man only one”. In recent decades, as food has apparently become more plentiful – at least in the developed West – there has been more scope for division and for “food tribalism” to become one of the leading issues of the day.
Not being drawn into the widely prevailing “good food/bad food” argument must be difficult because we all have our own beliefs as to what foods – and underlying production systems – are desirable or not. Yet for almost all the arguments there is a counter viewpoint which is likely to be just as strongly held by someone else.
Some would argue that small-farm production of quinoa in Peru is good because it fulfils social and environmental needs while industrial farming of soya in Brazil is bad because it harms the environment and needs little local labour.
Others might take the view that the quinoa production is bad because it only serves the comfortable middle classes in other parts of the world while soya production can feed more people on a much wider social scale.
Also speaking, Mads Frederik Fischer-møller, senior adviser on food policy to the Nordic Council of Ministers and leader of Nordic Food Policy Lab, highlighted how using gastronomy and the love of food had helped to get Scandinavians involved in improving their traditional Viking diet which revolved around “eating pigs, cows and potatoes”.
And the success in “getting more green on the plate” – and turning the country from an epicurean wilderness into a top foodie destination – by using this route had contrasted starkly with the short-lived “fat tax” which had been introduced ten years ago in Denmark to help improve the national diet.
After her address, Professor Hawkes said that, while she hadn’t focused on the UK’S uniquely vulnerable position in her presentation, she admitted she was far from optimistic about the political groundswell and the route that Brexit looked set to follow.
Stating that free trade was a nice experiment, she added: “Pity it didn’t work, now let’s try something else”, but the bullish nature of the UK and US governments on pushing down this route didn’t bode well for the food sector. Although she was speaking before yesterday’s repeated assurance from Westminster that food standards will be upheld, her hopes were not high for this promise being delivered.
While such debates may sound a bit highfalutin for the farming page, I suppose that the complex issue of food policy isn’t all that different from fixing drains: you can see where the mess is and what needs fixed – but while you know where you want things to end up, with the route being obscured and often convoluted, it can take a lot of digging to find out how you’re going to get there.