The veteran BBC broadcaster and former organic farmer John Humphrys says he struggles to be optimistic about the goals of the sustainable food movement and thinks only a catastrophe will persuade the majority of people they should pay more for their food.
Humphrys made the comments in a disucssion with the director of the Sustainable Food Trust, Patrick Holden, as part of the SFT’s new podcast series.
Over the course of the conversation the pair debate whether the sustainable food movement has been successful, along with how the food system has coped with coronavirus and what it will take for people to question where their food comes from more rigorously.
Humphrys argues that basic tenets of the sustainable food movement – ideas like food security, and the word sustainability itself – mean very little to most people. “The problem with using expressions like more secure, as in more food security, is that what people will say is, ‘look, I go to the supermarket and I get everything I need, it’s absolutely secure’. You and I might not like everything they sell, but they (supermarkets) are meeting the nation’s needs week in, week out in a time of great crisis. The fact is, when crisis struck the supermarkets did keep running, the supply chain kept running, so we were able to buy the things we needed.”
My problem with the use of ‘sustainable‘
While the pair share deep concerns about many aspects of intensive farming systems, Humphrys admits to “having a problem” with use of the word sustainable. While acknowledging its usefulness as a technical term, he says the word – “the whole argument, in fact” – is meaningless to many people. What is meaningful for most people, he says, is “is there enough food, can I buy it at a reasonable price, and is it of reasonable quality?”.
Expanding on this, he says: “I know you don’t like the fact that you can buy a £3 chicken in a supermarket. Nor do I on the whole. But if it was a choice between buying a £3 chicken or seeing my children go hungry I’d buy a £3 chicken. So it seems to me that it is an infinitely more complicated picture than use of the word sustainable might seem to suggest”.
Holden says he “can’t really disagree” with Humphrys’ analysis. And, since he’s already acknowledged that the sustainable and organic food sector has a market share of around 2%, has to admit that “we have not succeeded in mobilising anywhere near enough people to act differently in their food buying behaviours…(and that) we don’t even have a buying proposition that is an alternative to the supermarkets. Even though we’re so close to the cliff edge in terms of a food security catastrophe – the phrase ‘nine meals from anarchy’ comes to mind – we still struggle to get attention, and achieve change.
“Even though we’re so close to the cliff edge in terms of a food security catastrophe – the phrase ‘nine meals from anarchy’ comes to mind – we still struggle to get attention, and achieve change”
“But as you you know I’m not short of congenital optimism and our work at the Sustainable Food Trust is built around the premise that we have to avoid a shock of such depth that it might threaten the whole of humanity, and that’s what we’ve both been concluding in our conversation, unless we get some change in food system.”
Not optimistic
Humphrys thinks that change is unlikely to happen unless there is a catastrophe: “The only thing that is likely to really change the situation is if there is a public outcry. It could be, for example, that we simply run out of food, or the price of food goes right through the roof. Or we’ve travelled to the final conclusion of this, when intensive farming becomes impossible because we have totally exhausted the soil and it is dead. By which time we might actually need a new verb to replace the term farming, because it won’t be farming anymore!.
“Look, this will always going to come back to politics. And there is one rule that every politician in the world in a democracy has to respect, if that’s the right word. Which is that you have got to get re-elected. And you are not going to get re-elected if you say to the population, sorry, the price of your food is going to increase. People will not forgive that. That’s why, much as I admire enormously all the work that you and the Sustainable Food Trust are doing, I cannot share your optimism about this”.
Near the end of the discussion, Holden asks Humphrys whether he thinks the way he shops for food himself – “90% from local markets, and from farm shops when I can” – is scalable? “In all honesty, I don’t think it is. The hard fact is that we do the vast majority of our shopping at the supermarket as a nation. Yes, if we got a nice corner shop we’ll use it but we’ll go to the supermarket for all the other stuff.”
- Other contributors in the SFT Podcast series include Guardian columnist George Monbiot, Eden Project co-founder Tim Smit, NFU president Minnette Batters and American regenerative agriculture pioneer, Joel Salatin.