Reclaiming the Public Plate
Professor Kevin Morgan from Cardiff University summarises the core arguments of his new book, Serving the Public.
‘In the absence of a progressive political agenda, which strives to promote the public plate and fashion sustainable foodscapes, local food movements can easily degenerate into an exclusive form of green gentrification, which amounts to sustainability for the few and not the many’.
I’ve been a researcher and campaigner for ‘good food’ in public sector institutions for twenty-five years and I was recently invited to write up the main findings for a book series called Manchester Capitalism, a series that I rate very highly because it aims to make critical research available (and affordable) to the concerned citizen.
At the core of my new book, Serving the Public, is a deep dive into three public sector food systems - schools, hospitals and prisons - where I chart the struggle to serve good food against the odds.
The Meaning of Good Food
Good food means different things to different people. In certain circles, it is synonymous with fine dining, exclusive restaurants and celebrity chefs. But I understand it to mean food that is appetising, nutritious, culturally appropriate and sustainably produced.
Seldom is good food associated with public canteens. While pupils, patients and prisoners are clearly very different people, operating in radically different institutional settings, they nevertheless have one thing in common: they are all highly vulnerable people whose wellbeing depends on a nutritious diet. Because of its unique role in sustaining life, shaping our physical and cognitive development, food is the universally accepted index of our capacity to care for ourselves and for others.
The ‘good food revolution’ refers to the struggle - locally, nationally and globally - to create a fairer, healthier and more sustainable food system. Because this is clearly work-in-progress rather an accomplished reality, some critics might say that a sustainable food system is merely an ideal. But the well-worn dichotomy between the ideal and the real is misleading according to Martha Nussbaum, the moral philosopher, because ‘Ideals are real: they direct our striving, our plans, our legal processes’.
Chapter one sets the scene by examining the evolving international debate about the food system and its role in the multiple crises of health, environment and climate change. Although global summits are belatedly trying to craft a reform agenda for the food system, I argue that the national level remains the key arena where food policy reforms are fostered or frustrated. Taking the UK as an example, I show that more than forty years of neoliberalism have bequeathed a noxious legacy in the form of a food system that is dysfunctional for producers and consumers and a public sector that has been denuded of capacity and resources.
Pupils, Patients, Prisoners
The school food chapter outlines three models of school food provisioning from the welfare model of collective provision, through the neoliberal model of consumer choice under Thatcherism to what I call the ecological model of sustainable provision, a model that is emergent rather than fully realised. Having outlined the historical context, I focus on two key themes: firstly, the whole school approach that aims to align the pedagogy of the classroom with the food served in the dining room; and, secondly, the campaign for universal free school meals. The whole school approach is analysed through the prism of the Food for Life programme, the gold standard in the world of public sector food provisioning. The campaign for universal free school meals is the most exciting development in school food policy in the UK since the creation of the welfare state in the 1940s. In the chapter on the NHS, the main argument is that hospitals are essentially clinical treatment sites rather than health-promotion sites. In this over-medicalised culture, a low status has been attached to food and nutrition by both hospital management and the clinical profession. Yet the real costs of malnourished patients – which involve longer stays in hospital and poor recovery rates - are rarely factored into the financial equations of the medical-industrial complex. The chapter highlights the paradox of the hospital, which consists of the Sisyphean task of trying to provide a clinical solution to a societal problem – the problem of diet-related diseases associated with the rapid growth of cheap, ultra-processed food.
The final empirical chapter focuses on the prison, a unique public sector setting because the consumers are incarcerated. I include a vignette of the US along with the UK because these are the liberal democracies where the carceral state is most pronounced. The chapter begins with a scene-setting section about prisons and prisoners in the UK and the US, focusing on their conditions of life, their poor state of health and the hugely important role that food plays in their daily lives. Thereafter I explore two key themes: the carceral diet and the prospects for rehabilitation.
Regarding the carceral diet and its discontents, I focus on two extraordinary aspects of prison life – the Aylesbury Mystery in the UK (where successive governments refused to act on evidence that showed a clear link between nutritional supplements and anti-social behaviour) and the Nutraloaf Controversy in the US (where a gross food concoction that allegedly meets nutritional guidelines is used to discipline and punish prisoners in a manner that evokes the carceral analysis of Michel Foucault).
To assess the prospects for rehabilitation, I examine the food training programme of the Clink Charity in the UK, which runs a network of gardens, kitchens and restaurants through which prisoners are trained within the prison and mentored afterwards in the community to find gainful employment, which reduces the incentive to re-offend.
Toward a Good Food Revolution
A concluding chapter shifts the focus from the sectoral world of public food systems to the spatial world of place-based food movements. This charts the rise of what I call the Good Food Movement, one of the aims of which is to mobilise the progressive forces of cities and other localities to utilise municipal and civic power to fashion more sustainable foodscapes by harnessing the public plate (ie the power of purchase) as part of an integrated suite of local food policies.
The analysis focuses on the dynamics of the movement in the UK and the US. In the UK the Sustainable Food Places network is the most significant example of the emergent food movement, a network that aims to overcome the limits of purely local action. Forming a national network yields a double political dividend: it raises the profile of cities and regions as agents of change, and it enhances the voice of localities as advocates for sustainable food systems.
Although local food movements have done remarkably well to survive the Age of Austerity in the UK, many of them are struggling to sustain themselves financially despite the vital contributions they make to food security.
One of the challenges for the movement in both the UK and the US is how to build durable alliances for change to enable localities to learn from each other and to become more engaged in national and international food policy forums. In the absence of a progressive political agenda, which strives to promote the public plate and fashion sustainable foodscapes, local food movements can easily degenerate into an exclusive form of green gentrification, which amounts to sustainability for the few and not the many.
