I sometimes get asked to speak at business conferences – the kind where people talk in ever-changing acronyms, and no one rocks the boat. They want a token lefty, a maverick, or someone who actually believes in something other than money, to keep their audience awake. Ugly, windowless auditoriums, stages and lobbies lined with trade stands… These events rob me of the will to live. Mostly, I decline the requests. Sometimes, I accept, charging as much as I dare to raise funds for our charity partner, Ripple Effect. I reason that I should pull my head out of the hedge now and then, to understand who is making the decisions that shape our lives, what their justifications are, and how they manage to corrupt every radical movement and trend to support their own profits.
Last week, it was the £1000-per-ticket “Sustainable” Foods conference in London. This was populated by the world’s largest food manufacturers and retailers, their bankers, accountants, and lawyers, and, increasingly, the data companies that will primp, analyse, and trade their environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performances. Hearing their confident assertions, I had to ground myself by remembering that there is no reliable way of measuring soil carbon, and that regenerative farming is ill-defined and has little meaning beyond aspiration in the hands of PepsiCo. However clever your analyses, if you put crap in, you will get crap out – and this was some of the most delusional crap I have ever heard.
Travelling there on the Tube, I estimated that 25% of the ads were for pills, bars, powders, shakes, and supplements; not a fruit, veg, or unprocessed product to be seen. Inside the conference, we were told that the problem is, in fact, the solution; that scale, intensity, and corporate control will save us. The President of Danone UK told us that the science on the health impact of processed foods is “unclear.” There were few questions and no challenge. Any authenticity or independent thought was screened out at entry or crushed by the collective dissonance.
Despite my gratuitous provocation on stage, quite a few people told me that they liked my contribution. As is so often the case at corporate events, individually the people in the room are not monsters – but the combined impact of their endeavours is monstrous. We will never have truly sustainable food until there is humility and diversity on these stages, and challenge from their audiences.
Our News from the Farm posts come from Riverford. They are the digital versions of the printed letters which go out to customers, every week via Riverford’s veg boxes. Guy Singh-Watson’s weekly newsletters connect people to the farm with refreshingly honest accounts of the trials and tribulations of producing organic food, and the occasional rant about farming, ethical and business issues he feels strongly about.
Thanks Guy for all you do. Particularly talking to people way out of our reach.
I’d love to know what you said at the conference. I looked up the speakers and I see what you mean. Very corporate.