The corporate food system must be democratised!

Dr Jason Edwards reviews Ravenous: How to get ourselves and our planet into shape by Henry Dimbleby with Jemima Lewis, published by Profile

“The problem at the heart of Ravenous is this lack of analysis of the way in which the current food system is a product of the political and socio-economic power of the major actors in that system… Dimbleby nods to these problems in relation to his own experience of rejection by the Tory government – he knows the power of the corporate food lobby and the influence of ideological libertarians on food policy under Johnson, Truss and now Sunak.”

Dr Jason Edwards

Ravenous is Henry Dimbleby’s (more readable and political) follow-up to the National Food Strategy and a spirited defence of the plan constructed in that report to deal with profound problems of dietary ill-health and environmental degradation generated by the food system. Dimbleby was commissioned to produce the report by Michael Gove, then Environment Secretary, in 2019. The second (major) part was published in 2021. It’s main proposal – the levying of a sugar and salt tax on major food manufacturers – was rapidly rejected by the government. Some proposals – such as an increase in the value of Healthy Start Vouchers and the Holiday Activities and Food programme, championed by Marcus Rashford, have been adopted to some degree, but most of the other proposals have only been partially accepted and some completely rejected.

There is a suspicion held by some on the left that Dimbleby is simply a Tory stooge and his report largely a sop to market-based, ‘nudge’-style policy tinkering. But this is a misjudgement. Dimbleby takes the need for state intervention very seriously and thinks that any long-term solution to the problems of the food system requires a fundamental change to the national ‘food culture’ rather than minor adjustments to consumer behaviour. His approach and policy recommendations merit serious consideration. The difficulties lie elsewhere than in his supposed ‘politics’, and in the remainder of this brief review I’ll discuss some of these in relation to dietary ill-health and questions of national and global food security.

The first section of the book deals with the problems of dietary ill-health and in particular the current ‘epidemic’ of obesity and type-2 diabetes. Dimbleby is right to point out that these health problems are systemic in character and not the product of poor individual dietary choices, as Tory libertarians argue. The system has constructed an ‘obesogenic environment’; this is an outcome of the ‘Junk Food Cycle’ where cravings for highly processed food rich in sugar, salt and fat prompt the big producers to churn out unhealthy goods thus further stimulating the growth of junk appetites.

Dimbleby recognises that the problems are compounded by issues of poverty and socio-economic marginalisation. For example, low-rent housing tends often to be located in ‘food deserts’, where without access to cars or a budget that stretches to supermarket deliveries, poorer people have very limited access to fresh fruit and vegetables and have to subsist on cheap takeaways and the kind of Ultra Processed Food (UPF) that is often commonplace in local convenience stores. But of course these problems, as well as hurdles to do with time poverty and falling real incomes, today affect not just those at the margin but many millions who do not possess the means to enjoy a healthy diet.

Rightly, Dimbleby is concerned with how we tackle the problem of this obesogenic environment. A number of his key proposals would strike many as sensible and likely to be effective in tackling poor diet – the sugar and salt levy on large producers, the extension and eventual universal provision of free school meals, and an expansion of the Healthy Start scheme.

But while Dimbleby makes some gestures towards the greater inclusion of people in the food system – the proposal for a ‘Community Eatwell programme’ for example – he tends to overemphasise the power of ‘the system’ over the individual food agency of ordinary citizens. This leads to a blindness to questions of food democracy – the widespread participation of citizens not just in practices that are immediately connected to dietary health, but in food production and in the shaping of the spaces in which food is distributed and consumed. Dimbleby never really questions whether the food system is best left in the hands of political, economic and cultural elites – just whether those who currently control it possess the political will to tackle its problems.

The problem at the heart of Ravenous is this lack of analysis of the way in which the current food system is a product of the political and socio-economic power of the major actors in that system. Again, Dimbleby nods to these problems in relation to his own experience of rejection by the Tory government – he knows the power of the corporate food lobby and the influence of ideological libertarians on food policy under Johnson, Truss and now Sunak. He is consistently critical, for example, of the power of the big supermarkets.

But he doesn’t join up the dots sufficiently to see the threat that this combination of corporate self-interest, political corruption and ideological zeal poses to both national and global food security. In part, this is a failure to appreciate the extent to which the ‘national’ food system is embedded in a global system dominated by large food corporations.

In the UK, the danger to food security and growing food poverty has been authored by Conservative governments wedded to the marriage of libertarian economics and an increasingly national-populist politics. Astonishingly, in a book on the problems of the UK food-system in the present, there is hardly any discussion of Brexit, and only then in relation to the potential threat posed to British food standards in the signing of new trade deals.

Ravenous is a book worth reading, though while many on the left will be sympathetic to some of the policy proposals Dimbleby makes, it gives us little insight into the kind of politics that is required to make the transformational changes needed to tackle the conjoined crises of dietary ill-health and environmental destruction. If there is a Labour government after the next general election, it must tackle head-on corporate food power and take seriously the democratic empowerment of citizens in all areas of the food system.

Current campaigns around the right to food in the UK recognise the importance of not just enshrining that right in law, but establishing effective means of citizen participation across systems of food production and consumption. Such forms of participation are necessary for the development of an ‘everyday economy’ that addresses the inequalities and food poverty hard-wired into the existing system, as well as promoting the sustainable and efficient forms of production and consumption needed if there is to be any hope of meeting the daunting challenges of climate change.

This review by FAWN founding member Dr Jason Edwards was first posted in Labour Hub