“Good food is expensive.” As a Riverford customer, you are probably more aware than most of the clichés around food. I wonder how many of you might even have had conversations about your veg box: “It’s alright for you, but most people just want cheap food.”? It’s lines such as these that have thwarted campaigns to improve the UK’s food for decades – usually deployed by industry lobbyists to frighten politicians into inaction. But do these comments really reflect what people think? It’s a question the FFCC set out to answer.
Over two years, we’ve held 12 Food Conversations, from Caithness to Cornwall – citizens’ assemblies which ask: what do we really want from food? Inviting a representative cross-section of the community to join, citizens find out, over five meetings, how the food system actually works. With expert input and different perspectives, they discuss farming and land use, supply chains, processing, retailing, food, health, climate and nature. And talk a lot about power and fairness.
People are astonished by what they learn. “I’m really shocked, first of all about the fact that there’s no food policy and there’s no food minister. Secondly, that farmers, who are the custodians of our land and the producers of our food, are squeezed so flat,” said Catherine from Derry. They find it hard to believe that successive governments have, essentially, outsourced food policy to ‘big food’ businesses. The result is that the food system works well for them, with profits booming, while we all pay the true cost of so-called cheap food in the impacts on our health, our environment, and in the UK’s lack of food resilience.
We found that across all demographics and communities, people care about food. They expect governments to care too, and they want ministers to act to ensure healthy, sustainably produced food is easily available for everyone, everywhere. In spring, we’re releasing the Citizens Food Manifesto, a thoughtful and thorough set of ‘oven ready’ recommendations. For a government on a mission for national renewal, it should be a welcome gift.
Learn more about the Food Conversation here.
Sue Pritchard is chief executive of the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission (FFCC), an independent charity working for greener, healthier, fairer food and farming.
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