Tim Lang is Professor Emeritus of Food Policy at City University of London’s Centre for Food Policy which he founded and directed from 1994 to 2016. Hill farming in Lancashire UK in the 1970s formed his interest in the relationship between food, health, environment, culture and political economy. He was policy lead on the 2019 EAT-Lancet Commission proposing the planetary diet. His most recent book Feeding Britain (Pelican pb, Feb 2021) explores the UK as a case study of a rich country’s food system going awry. He proposes that the best route to food security is to put sustainability, health and social justice at its heart.
Can you share more about the experiences that shaped your interest in food policy and other food-related issues?
After leaving school in the mid-1960s, I didn’t really know what to do, so did a variety of jobs in a giant sweet factory, a men’s department store and then an Italian orphanage before returning to the UK to do a joint Sociology-Psychology degree. I got so interested that I did a Phd in Social Psychology in the early 1970s, both at Leeds University. When a doctoral researcher, I lived in a dilapidated farmhouse in the Yorkshire Dales. It was cheap, fun, and started me looking seriously at landscapes and asking myself what land and farming are for. My doctoral research was into phobias and, although food wasn’t central to that work, I did start wondering how people could become neurotic about food and whether this had a cultural or systemic dimension rather than (as was often said) just being a personal matter. I’m still interested in that. How can food become pain not pleasure, and how can societies so mess up cultural signals that bodies, minds and food get locked into a mismatch? Back in the early 1970s, I began to read widely and was influenced by the emerging new and vociferous environmental movement as well as cultural analyses. I switched direction, went farming after the doctorate, working on a small Lancashire hill farm for seven years. In that time, I joined an agri-food discussion group hosted by the then British Society for Social Responsibility in Science. This BSSRS working group had been started to explore the role of science and technology in agriculture but widened into food, health, work and the land. I say all this because, while some people’s careers have (or appear to have) straight lines, mine certainly didn’t! But this zigzag of interests and experience undoubtedly shaped my thinking once I really got engaged in food policy. It posed questions in which I remain interested – not just on the role of science but on the importance of clarifying what society wants from its food system. Food isn’t just nutrients or farming, but a matter of social and economic policy, too. I have continued to try to explore that breadth of perspective, convinced that we in the rich world needed to analyse our approach to food, not just to pigeon-hole food as a problem for developing economies or one simply of production.
Indeed, like many, I now think we must redesign the entire policy framework which was put into place in post-World War II reconstruction. This gave priority to raising food production and to making food cheaper. This was understandable at the time; good ideas in some respects but could not have anticipated the astonishing impacts modern food systems have unleashed on the environment, public health, trade injustice or consumer culture. If I think about what’s happened since the mid 20th century, I’d say that rich societies’ food systems are now conclusively associated by major fault-lines, distortions and troubles, and that these need to be juxtaposed with the more frequently trumpeted successes of choice, range, price. Indeed, we are now having to rethink what we mean by efficiency. I tried to apply this kind of broad or ‘multi-criteria’ analysis, to be formal about it, in my recent book on the UK, Feeding Britain (Pelican pb). Here is a rich society making an unnecessary mess of what should be good news. It fascinates me, worries me, and intrigues me.
In your many years of experience advising the UK government and multinational organisations, what is the most challenging part of this advisory role?
The challenging part is that governments often ask for thoughts when there is a sectoral problem, only to find that the difficulties can be traced across sectors. It’s a food system not just a bundle of sectors. So societies need to take more integrated overviews of that food system. And Governments need to do more than react when there’s a crisis. We can anticipate some problems. Look at how the climate change crisis has been allowed to creep up on us. And look at the abject failure to prevent the spread of obesity. Or to downplay how food helps drive biodiversity destruction. But this requires societies to acknowledge that food’s problems are not now just a matter of preventing shortages but of managing its over-production and over-consumption. Over-, under- and mal-consumption coexist. The policy challenge today is really complex. And governments tend to duck this. If they listened to the evidence, everywhere a radical new strategy to realign food systems to planetary and public health would now be the policy norm. If only!
Governments rhetorically may say they are bothered about climate change or obesity, but they are still arguing about who can do what, even though the science says action by 2050 is already too late. I find this policy reluctance disturbing – the psychologist in me comes out! There is reluctance to take things seriously when the glaring dangers are in front of us. It’s everyone else’s problem. But on the optimistic side, pressure continues to build up on the need for serious change on multiple food fronts: environment, health, culture, economy, governance. Here, we academics can be useful in combining rigorous thought with practical components of change. I am heartened at how thousands of academics come together these days to push simple messages for an environmentally and socially better food future. Whether the issue is biodiversity or climate or water or soil or human health or inequalities or Big Data or low waged food jobs, the messages are clear. A new better model of food progress is required. The rich world is not the model. Let’s hope this September’s UN Food Systems Summit faces this and captures not just politicians’ but the public’s imagination. It must.
Any career advice for young people who are passionate about food sustainability and want to create an impact?
Get together with others! Talk, listen, question, argue, engage! One of my Grannies used to say ‘if you don’t know what to do, do something’. It sounds trite (almost infuriating!) but I know what she meant. My own life was shaped by getting together with others in the 1970s. We met to talk about what we cared about and to decide what if anything we could do. We wrote, did street theatre, leafletted, argued, shared different insights, and pooled research about food. Of course, everyone goes off in different directions but with clearer reasons why. Whatever your direction, enjoy working with other people! When I returned to academia nearly 30 years ago – after a decade in think-tanks – to set up our Centre for Food Policy and Masters Programme, that teamwork approach was the core of how we conceptualised food policy. No one discipline has the solution. Multi-disciplinarity is needed because food is a multi-criteria, multi-sector, multi-level challenge (global to local). You geographers are so good on this. You tend to be multi-disciplinary. But not even geographers can understand the totality of what’s going on in the food system! So my advice for anyone starting off: set up a discussion group, do something, join groups, and don’t narrow your interest. Then focus on what you can do, of course, but always look outwards, exchange ideas, join things and work with others.
You’re very well-known for coining the influential term ‘food miles’. Do you think this term remains relevant in the current context with global pandemic and climate change?
Covid has certainly disrupted food systems in ways still emerging. Even in rich countries like the UK previously normalised food inequalities surfaced and worsened. People are shopping in different ways too. The concept of food miles is an example of me trying to think 30 years ago about communicating with the general public about how food supply chains have changed enormously: new logistics management, data controls and power structures. I wanted to pose the question to the British public at the time: are you aware of where your food has come from? Is it on the label? Are you bothered? And what are the hidden social relations which pass under our noses into our mouths (if we are lucky and have food)? Animal welfare campaigners picked it up over live animal trade calling it ‘misery miles’, and the fair trade movement argued for ‘fair miles’. Whilst academics are often very good at drilling down knowledge mineshafts, to the public our messages can be complex and confusing. More research is needed, we cry! The term ‘food miles’ was simply an attempt to open up the web of economic activity within modern supply chains, and an appeal to think about where your food comes from. The term was originally coined as the theme for a short Channel 4 TV film I was given to explore a topic of my choice. Then a small NGO I chaired decided to work it up more seriously into a report, and it took off, capturing public imagination.
Food mileage is a proxy for only some factors in food. In a famous example, if you had a British strawberry in mid-winter, it may be ‘local’ but would be from heated greenhouses (probably plastic) and have a heavy environmental footprint. A local strawberry in mid-summer might have a much lower footprint. So food miles isn’t the only factor. The term was criticised for missing this. But my intent was to raise the question of origins and to prod the ‘it’s cheap and all-year, so it’s ok’ complacency. I stand by that. It raises difficulties which need to be raised. Trucks belting up and down motorways, returning empty. Food being flown around the globe. Long-distant, a-seasonal consumer arrogance. And allowing distant land and labour to feed you cheaper, sometimes rather than feeding needy populations nearer by. Perhaps importantly, the food industry began to adopt the term, accepting the need to reduce the rate of empty return trucks. Food miles has become a kind of proxy term for environmental impacts of food. If it helped on that, I’m content.
Written by: Belinda Ng
Image: Unsplash
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