Book review: Feeding Britain by Tim Lang

"Any hope that his new book might produce its own Blue Planet moment for the food industry looks likely to be dashed"

The Evening Standard's journalism is supported by our readers. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.

The food Britons eat is unhealthy, catastrophic for the environment, and reinforces inequality between rich and poor despite being unrealistically cheap.

On top of this, the way it’s produced and delivered to us rewards the wrong people, leaving farmers dependent on subsidies, and relies too much on imports with long supply chains that are vulnerable to disruption. In short, it’s an unsustainable system. This is the argument put forward in this forceful new book by Tim Lang, a professor of food policy at London’s City University, in which he argues that a “Great Food Transformation” in this country is essential.

The advent of coronavirus has added timeliness to Lang’s warning about the fragility of our food supply and he makes many illuminating points as he sets out his case. These include how our diet’s environmental impact is masked by “embedded” water and greenhouse gases in imports, and how there’s an “attitude-behaviour gap” between what people say they support when it comes to food and how they behave in reality.

Lang’s principal target, however, is not individuals, but the way the “food system” shapes diets through advertising, the excessive production of unhealthy processed food, and a pricing system that creates the wrong incentives at every stage from the farm to the dinner plate. In response, he calls for a “radical” new approach in which environmental, health, social and quality factors are taken into account in determining what this country eats.

Specific solutions include producing more food here (he says it’s ludicrous that we don’t already), plus legally binding sustainable diet rules to govern production. He also advocates eating less meat, a new network of farm colleges and treating food skills as being as important as driving. Other prescriptions range from a worthy Royal Commission on food defence to an eye-catching call for global harvesting of human urine and faeces to reduce the use of phosphorus in agriculture.

It makes for an ambitious manifesto. The trouble is, it’s very heavy going. To begin with, there’s an overload of facts, too many of which are extraneous.

It makes for an ambitious manifesto. The trouble is, it’s very heavy going.

Martin Bentham

Lang tells us how many destroyers and frigates the Royal Navy possessed in 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010 and 2016 while making a laboured point that we no longer have the firepower to protect our food supply routes; something few surely imagine could be the case. A list of statistics on trucks, cars and people using Getlink, formerly Eurotunnel, ends with Lang telling us about dividend payments, a fact of marginal relevance at best. Acronyms infect too. One sentence talks about “interventions such as TACCP or HACCP, as suggested by the PAS 96 report.”

The author has explained what these mean many pages earlier, but if it was hard going reading them then, it’s baffling to be confronted with such an impenetrable alphabet soup so much further on with no easy way of reminding oneself what it all means.

There’s also exhausting repetition. Lang tells us six times in eight pages, for example, what Part Two of his book is going to communicate. The reader just wants him to get on with it.

It’s a shame. David Attenborough’s TV pronouncements on plastic pollution are transforming attitudes - and Lang‘s arguments deserve a similar effect. But any hope that his new book might produce its own Blue Planet moment for the food industry looks likely to be dashed by its turgid style.

Feeding Britain: Our Food Problems and How to Fix Them by Tim Lang (Pelican, £25), buy it here.