Pick-up truck populism

The Prime Video series, Clarkson’s Farm, has made Diddly Squat farm in Oxfordshire world famous. It’s a great show, which sheds welcome light on land-use, farming and food policy in the tradition of William Cobbett. 

But Jeremy Clarkson's visceral hatred of local authorities as they regulate planning and food safety is dangerous version of personal freedom.

Jeremy Clarkson makes excellent TV programmes. The former Top Gear presenter has a rare ability to reach through the screen and grab his viewers' attention. 

His latest Prime Video show, Clarkson’s Farm, which has just finished its third series, has brought the attention of very large audience – up to five million people a week – to a topic normally destined for 5.45 in the morning on Radio 4, or the cocoa-assisted Sunday evening rural idyll slot on BBC 1. It’s also big in China. The Clarkson brand travels.

The show isn’t about food safety – obviously – but food is at its very centre – where and how it is made and the societal, legal and cultural structures that determine the nature of farming. However, Clarkson’s Farm isn’t a branch of public service broadcasting, or the lush backdrop to a former Blue Peter presenter put out to pasture. 

Populated by well-defined and likeable characters, it’s down and dirty visceral TV – up at four o’clock in the morning to milk the cows, down in the straw with a heavily pregnant, Oxford Sandy and Black sow, heaving bags of decomposing mushroom compost onto a trailer, scything through stinging nettles.

Topic and format work perfectly. It’s a reality we (urban dwellers) don’t normally see, mediated by Clarkson’s everyman persona, nurtured for years on Top Gear – bumbling, amateurish, somewhat work averse, loving gadgets and dangerously immune to instruction manuals. This is in a real world that matters. We all go to the countryside, or live in it, we all eat. 

Jeopardy and resolution

In reality, Clarkson has the financial means to do whatever he wants. He purchased 1,000 acres of prime Cotswolds land, in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty in 2008 and began farming it, full-time, in 2020, alongside a lucrative reality TV deal.

Surprise, surprise, here’s the spin. Clarkson – middle England’s Mr Petrol Head – is now ‘into’ the environment. Over three series, he re-wilds a large portion of the farm with wildflower meadows and native woodland, dams a stream to create a trout pond, tries regenerative farming – a two-crop system of beans and cereal – and makes forays into jam, nettle soup and mushroom production, in nearly always doomed attempts to sure up Didley Squat Farm’s meagre income.

Series three of Clarkson’s Farm was filmed in 2022, so this is serious stuff. War racked up the prices of fertiliser and diesel and the weather was a peculiar and, for farming, catastrophic, mixture of torrential rain and extreme heat and dryness. 

TV shows love jeopardy and resolution. We, the audience, want Clarkson, his partner Lisa, his go-to Chipping Norton rustics, Kaleb (yes, that’s his real name) and Gerald Cooper (who speaks in an incomprehensible Oxfordshire dialect), and his dry and shrewd agronomic adviser, Charlie Ireland, to succeed against the odds. How could we not want to? 

This man calls milk ‘cow juice’ and mushrooms ‘space penises’. We see him fail to harvest blackberries with a Henry vacuum cleaner, spend money on a bramble clearing gadget that does not work (he decides to use goats instead), fail as a wasabi farmer and get stung, literally, trying to turn a profit from selling nettle soup in his shop. When Clarkson says, ‘I’ve had an idea’, you know that it’s going to go wrong. One of his ideas works – very well. It’s a in-piggery crash barrier, designed to stop sows from rolling on and crushing their baby pigs. It’s called ‘Clarkson’s ring’.

Rural Rides re-visited

The show is a re-tread of the utopian and nostalgic idea, promoted in William Cobbett’s 1830 book, Rural Rides, of the self-sufficient ‘yeoman farmer’. That book looked to the past, before the enclosures of common land, as a golden age. Clarkson’s farm looks forward to a re-wilded, regenerative, carbon negative golden age. 

We know that Clarkson loves his over-powered Lamborghini tractor a bit too much. We know that his Barber jacketed neighbours mine bitcoin for a living in the city, and that the wealthy Cotswolds have, for the most part, become a rustic theme park – a Marie Antoinette-style fantasy of rural life. We also know that subsidy driven, over-intensive arable farming has degraded English soil and led to biodiversity collapse, while making fortunes for the wheat barons of the arable heartlands – or it did.

Didley Squat’s timely and topical experiment in green farming – ‘farming the unfarmed’, as Clarkson calls it, is a reiteration of Cobbett’s Cottage Economy (1821). The book, still in print, is both a pollical tract and a practical manual. It contains Information ‘Relative to the Brewing of Beer, Making of Bread, Keeping of Cows, Pigs, Bees, Ewes, Goats, Poultry and ... of the Affairs of a Labourer's Family’.

Cottage Economy comes wrapped in a flag of freedom – what if I could live self-sufficiently, as a ‘yeoman’, free from the tyranny of alienating employment, aristocrats and pollical and economic control? This ‘what if’ is embedded in the collective psyche of the over-industrialised English, with their historically dreadful food and penchant for bottled condiments to make it edible.  

Three-mile tailback

It’s in all of us who are not aristocrats – even in wealthy Jeremy Clarkson. His Didley Squat Farm – with its three-mile tailbacks of visiting car-encased Top Gear fans, newly enthusiastic about eco farming, is emblematic of an England that we would like to live in – one with flowers and bees (Clarkson sub-lets to a Ukrainian bee keeper in one of his few successful ventures), beer (he has a sideline in Hawkstone Premium Lager), home-made jam and a pig being nicely fattened up for Christmas, with household scraps.

It's the freedom part of the dream that is problematic. For all his radical credentials, William Cobbett, like Clarkson, was deeply socially Conservative. A US version of Clarkson might be a redneck in pick-up truck, denying the legitimacy of federal government to raise taxes and to prevent massacres with assault rifles.

Listen, England is a small country and we need to be nice to each other, right? The Didley Squat brand, sadly, has traces of toxicity. Let’s unpack freedom from planning laws. The farm’s local authority, West Oxfordshire Council is portrayed, throughout each series, as a monstrous Kafkaesque bureaucracy, solely devoted to crushing personal initiative and all pleasure – the enemy.

You see, the council dared to object to Clarkson converting his lambing barn into a highly successful restaurant, without planning permission. That’s when the traffic started backing up to the local village, Chadlington, because of Top Gear tourism, much to local people’s annoyance. Planning may be boring and, yes, bureaucratic but it is still run by democratically elected local government. We need planning, so that homeless people are not forced to live in tiny units in poorly converted office blocks, under ‘permitted development’, exempt from public scrutiny and controls. 

Truly painful

Freedom from food safety and trading standards laws? Er no, don’t think so, Jeremy. It must be truly painful for an EHO to watch Clarkson’s Farm, especially the kind who believes in coaxing the wilfully ignorant into compliance, rather than serving notices. OK, it’s a bit of an act – Clarkson stumbling over the clumsy, non-phonetic acronym Haccp (thanks NASA), or thinking that CCP stands the Chinese Communist Party, rather than critical control point. But isn’t that a bit worrying for a food business operator? Clostridium botulinum is a thing, Jeremy. It kills people. 

It’s a good job that his proposed mushroom-based product line, powdered lion’s main, was subject to a bacterial and water activity test, in an ACAS-accredited lab. The sample was contaminated, and it failed. Actually, Clarkson had been sceptical from the beginning, viewing the product as a new age fad for the over-leisured Chipping Nortonites.

To be fair, Didley Squat’s emporium, now the most famous farm shop in the UK, if not the world, is fully Haccp-complaint (live with it, Clarkson) and it suffers the tyranny of a level five food hygiene rating score. Clarkson’s colleague in the show, his adviser, Charlie, is a shrewd and intelligent man, moderating Clarkson’s bluffness and impatience and providing a welcome balance.

He knows what a Haccp is and that you have to have one. He speaks the language of council planers and knows how to navigate sensibly their rules and conditions, without dumping manure on the town hall steps, or using a verbal blunderbuss. ‘Cheerful Charlie’ provides the show with much-needed balance.

Jeremy Clarkson is a powerful and influential man. That gives him responsibilities. A new law was introduced as a direct result of the show – ‘Clarkson’s clause’. It extends farmers’ permitted development rights, outside Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, to convert farm building to other uses, such as homes and shops – probably a quite sensible idea, but we’ll see. 

Few challenges 

To millions of people, Clarkson, rightly or wrongly, is a folk hero, akin to a rich Robin Hood – an everyman (not an everywoman). Here, the distorting, amplifying and dumbing down effect of social media comes into effect. Look at any thread beneath a review or story about the show – typical comment “you are helping everyone, fighting the government and getting raked over the coals for it. The UK’s Trump”.  

There are few, if any, challenges to his council-hating orthodoxy. This gives Clarkson a fast track to politicians, like Rishi Sunak and Michael Gove, who wish to demonstrate their deep understanding of what the man on the Chipping Norton omnibus is thinking (whoops, there isn’t one – privatisation). 

Now look at this comment on Clarkson’s Farm, from a very reasonable, and nice, West Oxfordshire District councillor, Dean Temple, who, following series three, felt obliged to resign. He said: "I was sitting there watching it as a fan, laughing away, thinking, ‘This is brilliant, this is fantastic, this is... ah, sugar'. All of a sudden I was getting calls, death threats from all over the world because, apparently, I’m a nasty individual." 

You have created something culturally important, Clarkson, like Orwell did, with Animal Farm, an allegory for the state. You understand global warming and you are advocating farming and landscape policies, including diversification, with which most reasonable people agree. Your lager is probably quite good (I’ve never tried it), unlike your cider (which has a tendency to explode, because it’s still fermenting). Personally, I would steer clear of your powdered lion’s mane until it’s proved to be safe – not that you are selling it. 

Your council is trying to be nice to you. Its online statement says: “As a planning authority, we have a responsibility to make sure that national and local planning laws and policies are followed correctly by everyone. We have worked with the owners and planning agents of Diddly Squat Farm for many years, offering to help the business with planning applications and supporting them to diversify and make changes on the site. 

“The work [the farm] is doing to highlight the wider challenges faced by farmers is commendable. We will continue to treat Diddly Squat Farm fairly and we will be happy to work [with it] on any future plans. Our door has always been open and will remain open should they choose to work with us.” 

Underneath the statement are two hundred and ninety-five negative comments, with not a single dissenting voice: “As a Council you are a great example of what's wrong with this country...” “It is clear that you DO NOT help local farmers.” West Oxfordshire District Council, killing the countryside one farm at a time.” 

That says a lot about councils’ failure to get messages across about positive service delivery. One of problems of environment health is that, if it’s done well, it’s invisible. All the more reason to point out its successes. 

Will Hatchett has been a journalist since 1986 He was editor of Environmental Health News from 1998 until 2018 and his written for many publications including The Guardian and The Observer. The views expressed here are purely his own.




 

Guarding the borders

Border health checks for EU food are back. Will a simplified digitised system with less human inspection make us safer? Or is it just hype?

Normally, it takes a health scare for port health to get into the news. The service, which is designed to protect us from infected, smuggled and misdescribed food, is well below the radar. It's essential – as the health threats of dioxins, eggs infected with salmonella and ‘horsegate’ in 2013, have recently shown us.

In most EU countries food safety controls for animal products are organised under veterinary services. In the UK, the job falls to officials known as EHOs or EHPs, who work for councils and port health authorities. We don't have a national system.  

In 1993, when the single market began, official controls of live animals and animal and plant products imported from the EU ended. This January, after long delays, they came back. The government has long promised us ‘frictionless trade’. It has taken Defra's civil servants five years to design a Single Trade Window in an attempt to match the hype, not just for the EU, but for the world.

Civil servants love acronyms. We now have a Border Target Operating Model, or Border TOM, border control posts, BCPs, including airports, some newly-created and some, controversially, inland. Common health entry documents, CHEDs, are now channelled through a national Import of Products, Animals, Food and Feed or IPAFF system.

Digitised health certificates are applied to both imports and exports, through a single gateway. Under a ‘trusted trader’ scheme, businesses offering evidence of meeting regulatory requirements, will be exempted from some official controls. The system is designed to be self-financing.

There was always going to be a giant clashing of gears in January, when the UK's border control system, locally funded and designed in the nineteenth-century, was reconnected to the EU. A huge problem is that we don't have enough European style vets to work at our ports, checking the riskiest animal and food imports. Perhaps, our EHPs could do the job?

It could be argued that our leaving the EU has facilitated, by default, a streamlined and digitally enabled biosecurity system that we should have had years ago. Or, at we at greater risk? 

Martin Walker, independent port heath consultant, says: “It’s difficult to argue against the rationale of having risk-based controls. My feeling is that it will all depend on the detail. My main reservation is about the reduction in physical controls and checks.  

“Generally speaking, they are going to be reduced from 20% to an expected level of 1%, as the default. There will be fewer consignments being looked at. A lot of the new system will be purely based on paperwork checks, rather than looking at products of animal origin, which is how you often pick up problems.” 

Will the new system work? It will only be tested by a threat or crisis. Experience tells us that these turn up fairly often. 

Will Hatchett has been a journalist since 1986. He was editor of Environmental Health News from 1998 until 2018. The views expressed here are purely his own.

 

Battle for safe milk

Buying milk used to be a life-or-death gamble, especially for the poor. But laws ensuring public safety were resisted for more than a century. In an age of novel pathogens and growing scientific obscurantism, it’s a warning.

How safe is the milk you buy from local shop? We’re talking about cow’s milk here – not the kind made from oats, peas or soy beans. Pretty safe, right? If you aren’t allergic to it, you can be almost 100% certain that legally-compliant milk consumed before its expiration date isn’t going to make you ill.

Having said that, recent exchanges between environmental health professionals on RHE's 'Communities' platform indicate that milk being sold via vending machines, now popping-up in a myriad of locations across the UK, may present significant risks to the health of the public, unless careful and diligent management is exercised by those owning and operating them.

The sale of unpasteurized or ‘raw’ cows’ milk is prohibited in England except from farm premises, where microbial controls can be more confidently guaranteed, thanks to visits from EHOs. Legislation and effective food safety enforcement normally protect us.

But that wasn't always the case. Bovine TB was identified as health risk to humans who drank milk from infected animals in the 1890s. Yet milk pasteurisation did not become compulsory in England, Wales and Northern Ireland until 1985. It is estimated is that a million deaths were caused in Great Britain by bovine TB contracted from infected milk from 1850 to 1950.

As we saw with BSE and, more recently, Covid-19, new zoonotic pathogens can emerge at any time. Political delay while science is uncertain is understandable – even advisable. But, in the case of milk, proven aetiologies between animal and human disease went unheeded by policy makers for a century. It’s a shocking example from history and a warning – especially as the links between science and policy are now loosening, in era when social media channels amplify ignorance.

The first laws allowing EHOs to crack down on filthy dairies and cowsheds, that were known incubators for animal and human disease were passed in 1879. Buying milk was a life-or-death gamble, especially for the poor, who needed it most for its fat, carbohydrates, vitamins and minerals.

Milk could be watered down and adulterated with chalk, flour or arrowroot. It could also be contaminated with bacteria causing typhoid, enteritis, diphtheria, scarlet fever and TB. In 1907, a Royal Commission stated definitively, following a debate that had raged since the 1880s, that bovine TB could transfer, in a lethal form, to humans.

Despite this significant announcement, legislation protecting the public was successfully resisted by vested interests for decades. In rural districts, adoptive laws imposing hygienic standards on dairy farmers were rarely and unevenly enforced. 

Milk was poisoning the poor

That was less the case in large cities. But their medical officers of health knew that, each day, trainloads of TB-infected milk were arriving from the countryside to serve fast-growing populations. It was an issue of grave concern – a public health scandal – especially for infants who relied on milk, ‘nature’s perfect food’, to avoid rickets and malnutrition.

From the 1890s, the Liverpool and Manchester Corporations and the London Council used private acts of Parliament to assume powers allowing them to prevent the sale of milk from tubercular cows. Uniform national legislation was urgently needed to tackle what was now a well-known and preventable threat to public health, but the implementation of Herbert Samuel's 1914 Milk and Dairies Bill of 1914, designed for that purpose, was postponed by the onset of the First World War and it took many more years for uniform protection of the public from infected milk to be assured.

Clean milk’s most persuasive champion of the new century appears in The Sanitary Journal in February 1916, in which a talk he gave to EHOs is recorded. Wilfred Buckley was born in Birmingham in 1873 and amassed a fortune from his family's exporting business. Returning from the US in 1906, he purchased a 1,000-acre estate in Moundsmere, Hampshire, and set himself up as a sheep, poultry and dairy farmer.

Buckley had a personal interest in hygienic dairy farming. His daughter contracted bovine TB in 1902. With a fellow dairy farmer, the wealthy newspaper proprietor, Waldorf Astor MP, owner of the Cliveden Estate and vice president of the Pure Food and Health Society of Great Britain, he had set up the National Clean Milk Society (NCMS) in 1915.

The society advocated the mandatory refrigerated transportation of 'certified' milk of guaranteed cleanliness and hygiene score cards for dairy farmers. These had been successfully adopted in the US but not in Britain, whose farming practices remained firmly rooted in the nineteenth century. 

Buckley was a persuasive campaigner. He used multimedia techniques – pamphlets, posters, articles, films and lectures illustrated with magic lantern slides – to put across his shocking and compelling message – an average sample of milk contained the same number of bacteria per cubic centimetre as a municipal sewage farm.

As a result, he was gaining powerful allies, including the king's surgeon, Sir Frederick Treves. A 'milk drought' was also impelling government intervention in the milk supply, as had taken place in munitions and housing. In October 1916, milk reached the shocking price of 6d a quart in some London districts, resulting in a demonstration by mothers and infants in Hyde Park.

Wars tighten standards

In December 1916, a Ministry of Food Control was created. Its second minister, Lord Rhondda, adopted unprecedented national powers. In October, Buckley was appointed director of milk supplies, a position in which he was able to exert considerable influence on Lord Astor's official inquiry into milk production.

Milk prices were now fixed and the Local Government Board was given powers to regulate distribution and sale, including reduced prices for mothers and children. Most significantly, from Buckley's point of view, milk grading was initiated, on a small scale.

From September 1918, dairies with high hygiene scores could be licensed to produce grade A milk, which was awarded a 3d a pint premium. Grade B milk was slightly less clean, but still of a high standard. The scheme was inherited from the Local Government Board in 1919 by the new Ministry of Health but, to the frustration of the UK's first health minister, Liberal MP, Christopher Addison, it was not mandatory and was patchily adopted.

After the war, Buckley continued to give lectures for the NCMS and helped to set up the National Milk Publicity Council. He died aged 60, in 1933, un-knighted despite his years of valiant campaigning.

Through the 1920s and 1930s, the opposition of the farming lobby to dairy reform prevailed. It would take another war and further technological developments for effective mandatory national standards to be introduced. The Milk (Special Designations) Bill of l949 ushered in certified TB-free herds and the widespread use of pasteurisation, the efficacy of which had been known in the nineteenth century. One of the strongest advocates of the bill had been the Labour MP, Edith Summerskill, who was Parliamentary secretary to the food ministry and a campaigner for women's rights. As a doctor she had seen, seen first-hand, the effects of poor nutrition on mothers and young children in the 1930s.

Will Hatchett has been a journalist since 1986 He was editor of Environmental Health News from 1998 until 2018. The views expressed here are purely his own.

 

How the poor eat

The UK’s obesity crisis is getting worse. And the government is doing less and less.  Meanwhile, just as they were in Edwardian Britain, the poor are blamed by the well-fed for their irresponsible behaviour.

In 1901, social reformer and chocolate magnate, Joseph Rowntree, calculated, from a comprehensive survey, how much money a family in York would need a week in order to sustain “physical efficiency”. It was 21s and 8d (£1.08 in today’s money). By his calculation, a little more than half of that would be spent on food. But such an income, he asserted, would only provide a meagre diet, less varied than that enjoyed by able-bodied paupers in workhouses.

Rowntree concluded that around half of York’s population were living in poverty and 28% In extreme poverty, unable to acquire even basic necessities, such as food, fuel and clothing. Echoing the conclusions of a similar survey, conducted by a wealthy shipping line owner, Charles Booth in the East End of London between 1886 and 1903 this assertion caused shock and, in many cases, frank disbelief, among the affluent.

How could this be possible? These people must be improvident or feckless, the wealthy opined, in their favourite newspapers, wasting their money on alcohol, tobacco and trips to the music hall. In any case, if they were educated in healthy diets, they would not need to go hungry. 

In reality, the poor lived on white bread, tea, sugar, stewed greens and cheap cuts of meat. The thrifty and eagle-eyed would shop at antisocial times, such as Saturday nights when spoiled food was disposed of. They would buy food in tiny quantities. Groceries were generally bought by the ounce, meat and fish by the halfpennyworth. Popular purchases included cheese crumbs from the grocer and cods' heads for fish cakes, 'pairings' from the tripe shop and bones from the butcher that could be boiled into a watery soup. No KFC or McDonald's then.

Life on a pound a week

For the poorest, bread could account for an eighth of family income. Some food was, frankly, weird. In Birmingham, a dish called 'slosh' or 'slop' consisted of the leavings of a tea pot, poured over a slice of bread and drained off, with the addition of a knob of margarine. Universally, a stale loaf would be toasted and mashed with tea and sugar (milk was too expensive) to provide an alternative to rusks for babies. 'Cag-mag' was butchers' trimming, often of dubious quality, parcelled together. A shilling's worth of cag-mag could be made into a stew on a Saturday night and served up for breakfast on a Sunday morning. Yum.

For comparison, Edward VII, Britain’s monarch from 1901 to 1910, known by his subjects as ‘Bertie’ and ‘tum tum’, enjoyed four meals a day and dinners of 12 or 14 courses – pheasant stuffed with truffles, quails filled with foie gras, sole poached in Chablis garnished with oysters and prawns and boned snipe with Madeira sauce were favourites. He would have a cold chicken placed at his bedside, in case he became hungry in the middle of the night.

An Australian-born journalist and feminist, Magdalene Reeves, researched typical expenditure and diet in south London in 1911. It was the year after King Edward, died, aged 68, his demise hastened by his heavy smoking and gluttony.

Her pamphlet for the Fabian's Women's Group, ‘Family Life on a Pound a Week’,  breaks down the 50p that were spent by a city warehouse worker, Mr W, and his wife every week on food. At 15p, meat made up the largest part of the budget. In descending order, came bread, butter, flour, milk, tea, sugar, dripping, potatoes and greens. She writes: "Cold meat, with bread and butter and tea, would be provided for the evening meal. The "eternal bread, butter and tea” would be breakfast.

Life wasn’t that different for the hard up when author George Orwell travelled to industrial Lancashire and Yorkshire in 1936 to research, ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’. Publisher Victor Gollancz had commissioned an account of unemployment and social conditions in the north of England. It was. But he took violent exception to Orwell’s description of how ordinary people perceived socialists – as bearded sandal-wearers, vegetarians and nudists.

Orwell’s description of the psychology of the poor and their attitude to food is acute. Like Booth, Rowntree and Reeves, he carefully itemises the weekly budget of an unemployed Yorkshire miner and his wife. It totals £1.60 with almost a third allocated to rent. He observes: “The miner's family spends only tenpence a week on green vegetables and tenpence halfpenny on milk and nothing on fruit; they spend one and nine on sugar and a shilling on tea. The basis of their diet is white bread and margarine, corned beef, sugared tea and potatoes.”

He adds: “Would it not be better if they spent more money wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. When you are underfed, harassed, bored and miserable, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something little bit ‘tasty’.” Like “three pennorth of chips” he suggests – in today’s terms, a Deliveroo Big Mac or a pizza.

Obesogenic environment

Our food choices are not rational. They are governed by emotions and volitions that we do not understand and by simple proximity and convenience. The same arguments that were deployed against Booth and Mayhew are still used today – that the poor could eat healthily, if they wanted or chose to. But the odds are stacked against them more than ever.

Unhappy humans are still governed by perverse instincts of immediate gratification from energy-rich sugar and carbs, as identified Orwell, but they face additional problems that he did not anticipate. We live in a world which encourages us to eat unhealthily from every supermarket aisle and billboard and in which sugar and salt-laden, ultra-processed and additive-filled foods are relatively cheap and ubiquitous. It has been called an obesogenic environment.

A hundred years after Orwell’s journey to Wigan, the food landscape has changed radically. Today, just eight companies control 90% of UK food supply. A quarter of places to buy food on the high street are fast-food outlets and food advertising is dominated by confectionery, snacks, desserts and soft drinks.

According to The Food Foundation, the most deprived fifth of the UK population would need to spend 50% of their disposable income on food to meet the cost of the government recommended healthy diet – a metric that is worsening year by year. This compares to just 11% for the least deprived fifth. The default UK diet – low in vitamins and minerals, high in starchy carbohydrates, fat and sugar, has produced an epidemic of obesity. And it’s getting worse.

A Defra select committee reported this July that rising food prices caused by the Covid pandemic, Brexit, climate change and the Ukraine mean that a fifth of UK households are resorting to unhealthy, high-calorie diets, due to trouble in accessing good quality food at reasonable prices. The report says: “The promotion of cheap, calorie-dense foods lacking essential nutrients has resulted in 30% of the population becoming obese. This figure is expected to rise to 40% by 2035, with NHS spending on Type 2 diabetes treatments outweighing current expenditure on treating all cancers.

Government retreat

The government has retreated in the face of this unravelling catastrophe. Attempts to modify our obesogenic environment appeared, in a modest form, in 2011 in the form of a ‘voluntary public health responsibility deal’ for the food industry. In 2016, a sugary drinks tax was introduced. But in June 2022, Henry Dimbleby’s 300-page Defra commissioned food strategy, proposing taxes on salt and sugar, free fruit and veg for those on low incomes, advertising restrictions and expanded free school meals was kicked into touch, causing Dimbleby to resign.

Introducing, in his Conservative party conference speech, a modest progressive restriction on the sale of cigarettes, Rishi Sunak said that the smoking is the UK’s biggest entirely preventable cause of ill-health, disability, and death. However, as campaigners pointed out, obesity costs £27billion a year through its knock-on effects – £10bn more than tobacco.

Why act on one public health issue and not another and fail to save the NHS billions? Put on the back foot in an interview with the BBC, Sunak said that here is “no safe level of smoking” and it “isn't the same as eating crisps or a piece of cake”. These statements are misleading and disingenuous. The argument that we are “free” to choose junk food, or not to, is a fig leaf – especially for the poor. 

The tobacco industry is also in retreat and has shifted its gigantic marketing budgets in wealthy countries from smoking to vaping, especially among the young, with flavoursome addictive options. The UK food industry, led by the Food and Drink Federation has lobbied hard, and successfully, against measures that would risk reducing its profits, so that nearly all healthy food options are more expensive than the alternatives. Where is the freedom in that?

Will Hatchett has been a journalist since 1986 He was editor of Environmental Health News from 1998 until 2018. The views expressed here are purely his own.

This blog was posted on the RHE Global website

How we didn’t starve in the First World War

In a striking parallel to Brexit, the outbreak of the First World War led to acute food shortages in the UK.

 

The country was caught off guard in August 1914 by a war that was not supposed to happen. The British Expeditionary Force was dispatched to France. By the autumn it was bogged down in the killing felds of the first Battle of Ypres.

 

It was now clear that millions of servicemen and civilians would have to be fed. Yet the country was ill-equipped to do so. The national diet was simpler then – its staples were meat, white bread, vegetables (especially potatoes), jam and tea. But the country relied heavily on tariff-free imports (80 per cent of wheat, 40 per cent of meat and almost sugar were imported).

 

Over the next two years, the lack of food security became increasingly acute. Imports were restricted and prices rose sharply. From March 2016, national conscription robbed agriculture of its most productive labour force. Munitions factories were also diverting labour and materials from agricultural machinery.

 

Although the Defence of the Realm Act in 1914 had anticipated the government requisitioning land and Royal Commissions on sugar and wheat had been set up, the state was slow to adopt wide-ranging national powers.

 

By 1917, the poor harvest of the previous autumn and the escalation of German u-boat attacks made emergency measures vital. In December, the new prime minister, David Lloyd George created a Ministry of Food Control. The first minster or ‘food controller’, a self-made grocery magnate, Lord Devenport, was ineffectual and ridiculed in the press. He was replaced in July by a newly-enobled Welsh colliery millionaire, Lord Rhondda. Lord Rhondda stepped up price controls for essential foodstuffs (a measure that had been resisted by his predecessor) through ‘food orders’ imposed by local committees, which also advised on food economies.

 

The food controller allocated grain to millers and corn merchants, through the wheat commission, set prices, reduced the wheat flour content of the national loaf and urged the country to ‘eat less bread’. Householders could receive badges and certificate proving their commitment to the cause. The food controller appointed a director of milk supplies, campaigner Wilfred Buckley, who set prices, ensuring that they were lower for mothers and children.

 

Voluntary rationing

 

Voluntary rationing was introduced in February 1917, setting guidelines for the consumption of bread, meat and sugar (the new diet was publicly adopted by King George and Queen Mary).

 

With wheat supplies down to a few weeks, working with the Board of Agriculture (later to become MAFF), Lord Rhondda ordered pastureland to be ploughed up for arable production and for munitions factories to turn out tractors.

 

The crisis was changing the cultural landscape. The feeding of stray dogs was forbidden, even the flower beds of Buckingham Palace were dug over for vegetables. Popular magazines like The Bystander and companies like Oxo published recipes for frugal but tasty meals.

 

At the vanguard of ‘doing its bit’ the newly-formed Women’s Institute found an important role teaching housewives how to substitute sugar in jam and wheat flour in bread for less scarce ingredients. And the Women’s Land Army (quarter of million strong by 1918) joined prisoners of war to weed, till, plough and reap the farms of Britain, wearing special armbands.

 

In May 1917, Queen Mary opened Britain’s first ‘national kitchen’ in Westminster Bridge Road. State-funded and staffed by female volunteers, the kitchens served meat-based meals for as little as 6d (£1 today). The food ministry said that they were not be regarded as, ‘soup kitchens’ but places where ‘ordinary people could sit down together at long canteen tables for a cheap meal.’ Some were so busy that there was actually nowhere to sit. By 1918, there were more than 600 national kitchens across the country.

 

By the final year of the war, thanks to blockades and submarine attacks, German people were dying of starvation. But, somehow, thanks to the stepping up of home production and unprecedented interventions in food quality, composition and price, Britain had stayed one step ahead of catastrophe.

 

Compulsory rationing was not implemented until 1918. It began, in January, with sugar (Britain had created a domestic sugar industry from scratch since 1914). By April, meat, bread, butter and margarine had been added to the scheme, which was to be repeated in World War Two. All households, including, in theory, the Royal Family, received ration books and had to register with a local butcher and grocer.

 

Ironically, rationing improved the nation’s health. Worn out by his arduous campaign, Lord Rhondda died prematurely, in July 1918, four months before the armistice. In the next war, his famous and equally successful successor as food minister, Lord Woolton, would give his name to the ‘Woolton pie’.