 Welcome to this food season event solutions for a food system in crisis. It's wonderful to have you all here, it's also wonderful to welcome people who are following us live online. It's just so great. It's great to have the online people, but it's just amazing to have people in real life as well. So this is really exciting. We're in the fifth year of the food season. My name is Polly Russell. I'm the founder and curator of the food season working with guest directors Angela Clutton a yma'r mynd i'r Ffodd. Mae'r bydd yn ychydig yn ychydig yn ymlaen yma, mae'r bydd yn ymlaen i'r ffodol, a yma'r bydd yn yr ymlaen i'r ffodol yn ymlaen i'r ffordd arlaeddau, yn ymlaen i'r ffordd. Yr ymlaen i'r ffordd, mae'r bydd yn ymlaen i'r ffordd o bob y ffordd yn cyfnod i'r Llyfridol yng Nghymru. Mae gydag am 5 a 6 mae'r wrthynas. Mae'n gwybod yn ffrodd yn cyfnod yn llwydiol, liksom y method American food and come up on Monday we've got on Monday the legend chef ainsley Harriet another legendary chef on Wednesday beamed in from California Alice Waters talking about her slow food manifesto so very relevant in a way to this evening's event then on the 18th of may we've got Eliza Axon and mrs Beaton going up for i'r cymdeithasol, gweld y gallwn wedi'i gweld bwysig. Mae'n gweithio'r ddweud o'r hyn o'r gweithio, ond hynny'n gweithio'r gweithio allwyr ar y maen nhw. Mae'r gweithio yma yn ymddangos i'r gweithio'r ddweud, felly byddwn gwneud i'r gweithio'n gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio. Felly, yn y gweithio'r gweithio ar y gwirioneddau gwahanol, mae'n bwysig i'r gweithio'r panel yn ysgrifennu, a ddyn nhw'n cael ei gynhyrch am ychydig o mylyn, felly rydyn ni'n mynd i ddim yn ddigonio ar y cwestiynau. Roeddwn i'n gweithio'n gwybod y panel ym meddwl yma. Roeddwn i'n gweithio eich cyflwyno i'r cyflwyno. Rwy'na gweithio i'r gweithio gyda'r bys, ac roeddwn i'n gweithio gwybod bwysig i'r bys. Rwy'n gweithio yma, Rhyw Ynogiys, i'r campainau, Mae'r slaveryd bod yn ei weld y cwmdwyr yn rhan o'r ffordd. Rydyn hi'n effaith ymgyrch. Rydyn ni wedi gorod o'r Llyfrgell Llyfrgell. Rydyn ni wedi gorod i chi'n gwybod ei ein bod y meddwl, allan yn y Wall Street Journal a'r analysts. Rydyn ni wedi bod yn llw'r llach yw o'r rhan o bobl ar y bwysig a'r bydd eich rhai oherwydd ei ei adeiladu o'r cyffredinydd, bydd eich hwn yn hystafel, o'r pwyloedd, o'r geograffii, i'r rhan o ein ddud ac oedd yn ffwrdd. Mae'r hyn o'r llyfr yn dod i'r hyn o'r cyfrifio. Mae'r llyfr o 7 llyfr. Mae'r llyfr o ychydig ar y cwrdd. Rydw i'n rhan o'r llyfr i'r llyfr i'r llyfr o'r llyfr, yn cyfnodol yn y ffordd a'r hyn o'r gyfrifio'r ymddangos. Rwy'n meddwl am y dyfodol ac yn ei ffwc ar ac yn gweithio yn tarru. Mae'n unig i'r ffordd mewn gwirionedd ar wneud y gwirionedd agelogau ar y hwn. Mae'n ddod ar y chyfodol ychydigol ar y ddiwedd. Beth Fyrgylch yn hynny'n ddod ar y panel? Ychydigol. Dyma'r ddod ar gyfer gweithio. Dwy'n gweithio. Mae'n ddod i gweithio i chi'n gweithio i'r gwirionedd ar ei wneud. Mae'n ddod ar y cyfodol. Mae'n gweithio i gweithio i chi 150 ymddangos o'r rhan, ac ydy'r gweithio ar hynno gwybod, yn dda'n cael ei ffordd i'r pethau fel y cyflwyno. Y swydd yn y Llyfrgell Llyfrgell Llyfrgell yn 2022. Ysgolwyddiad ymlaen i'r hyn yn fwyaf ymddorol yn ddawnt, ymwysig, siaradau'r ffyrdd. A yw'r fydda i'r cyflwyno, rydyn ni'n gwaith i'r Gweithwyr, yn gyflaenio a'r gweithio'r cyflwyno o'r ffrigilidau yma ymddangos cyflwyno. with huge rises already in the price of wheat and sunflower oil contributing to the crisis and the cost of living. One of the big questions we'll be asking is whether a crisis of this magnitude can lead to the transformative changes in the food system that are so desperately needed. I can't think of anyone better placed to answer these questions than these four people here and I'm going to introduce them in turn. First, I'm completely honoured to introduce Frances Morelapay. Is it Frances or Frankie? You just signed an email, Frankie. Frankie is fine. I like Frankie. Frankie! I kind of can't think of you as anything other than Frances Morelapay, but okay. Frances Morelapay aka Frankie, who's diet for a small planet first published astonishingly in 1971, is one of the most influential and galvanising food books ever written. It was reissued last year in its 50th edition. If you haven't already read it, there is no better time. I mean, it's just scintillating. Even if you think you know all about this subject, she writes with such immediacy and urgency that it just seizes you and you want to go away and eat differently immediately. It makes you want to change your breakfast and change the world. She has said that she was first shocked into action as a young woman by the spectacle of hunger in the midst of plenty. It sold close to two million copies in half a dozen languages. And it was hugely ahead of its time in pointing out some of the vast contradictions in the American way of eating, which has become the way of eating of so many other countries in the world now in the subsequent 50 years. I mean, you didn't know that. The sad thing is it was so prescient and so many things went in the same direction that you were describing as being wrong then. For example, why did Americans produce so much grain to feed animals when it would have been so much more efficient to eat the grain direct? Why did people obsess about getting enough protein when their diets already contained too much? And why, when no one actively chooses to be sickened by what they eat, does so much of what is for sale as food do just that? But it's also a deeply hopeful and practical book, one with lovely recipes. And the new edition has a whole new set of recipes from lots of the best chefs in America and beyond. And I wanted to start by quoting a whole paragraph from it, because there is something that Frankie says in a chapter called Recipe for a Personal Revolution, which I think sets a tone of optimism for tonight, which I hope we will keep returning to over the next hour and a half. I should also have said we will chat among ourselves for an hour and then open it to audience questions after an hour. And I hope we'll keep coming back to this optimism even as we are looking with clear eyes at the sheer, often bleak seeming scale of the problems facing us. She writes, Mamath social problems, especially global ones like world hunger and ecological destruction, paralyze us. Their roots seem so deep, their ramifications endless, so we feel powerless. How can we do anything? Don't we just have to leave these problems to the experts? We try to block out the bad news and hope against hope that somewhere, someone who knows more than we do has some answers. The tragedy is that this totally understandable feeling that we just leave big problems to the experts lies at the very root of our predicament, because the experts are those with the greatest stake in the status quo. The solutions can only come from people who are less locked in, people like you and me. Where do we begin when everything seems to touch everything else? Food, I discovered, was just the tool I needed to crack the seemingly impenetrable facade. What we eat is within our control, yet the act ties us to the economic, political and ecological order of our whole planet. So I hope I'm going to ask you some of the questions to elucidate and expand on that. My next speaker is Henry Dimbleby, who will be known by many of you in the room as the co-founder of the Leon Chain of Restaurants, but he's also among many, many other roles, most relevantly for tonight, the lead behind the national food strategy, which is another thing I urge you to read, it's free, you can download it. Just the graphs alone are absolutely eye-opening, it's an amazing piece of work. It was published in two parts and most of the food policy experts I've spoken to see it as the greatest chance for a meaningful change in British food policy in a generation or more. A hugely ambitious report, it sets out a series of recommendations to align the food we eat better, both with human health and the needs of the planet. Henry is also one of the co-founders of chefs in schools, which is a wonderful charity which trains chefs to transform the food served in school kitchens, and which is another example of positive, hopeful change in action. Next we have Neil Ward, Neil is a professor of human geography specialising in agrifood and rural development at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. He was the university's deputy vice-chancellor and he's the author of a really fascinating book that's coming out this summer, it's published by Routledge. It's called Net Zero, Food and Farming, and it has a look at what policies it would actually take to get Britain to Net Zero and agriculture, but also why the historic past that British food policy has taken isn't going to be what we need to get us to the next stage. And crucially what I'm hoping Neil will bring to the discussion is some deeply needed historical context for the ways in which the very imperfect food system that we've now inherited was largely set up after the war by people with good intentions who felt that producing ever greater volumes of food without really considering the quality was the urgent priority, but also that things don't have to be this way. So when people think that the kind of food that we have is just a kind of act of nature of God and we just need to leave it to the market, they're missing the many, many ways in which our food environment is something that has been shaped by countless human decisions. And finally, I'm delighted to welcome Tom Hunt, who's an award-winning chef, food educator, writer, climate change activist and the author of a fantastic cookbook called Eating for Pleasure, People and the Planet. You may have read some of Tom's brilliant articles on food waste and how to salvage deliciousness from leftovers in the Guardian, and he has an ethos which he describes in his book Eating for Pleasure as root to fruit eating. And I'm hoping we're going to be hearing a lot more about that in the solutions. So introduction over, I think we need to start the discussion. Tonight, as I've said, is building solutions to a food system in crisis, but I think we need to start by doing some work to define the crisis, both for humans and for the planet. So I wanted to start with Frankie. What is the food crisis? Well, I will begin with the observation that began. You so kindly told my beginning when I was so shocked as a young woman, and we were told that we'd run out of food in the world, and then, wait a minute, I realized when I went to the Berkeley Library and checked out the numbers that, in fact, we were creating scarcity out of plenty because of meat centered, particularly the meat centered diet that used such vast quantities to create so little and even today 80% of our agricultural land is used to grow livestock that provide us only 18% of our calories. So that was my beginning. And as I've peeled away the layers, I'd like to start with an even bigger observation that we human beings don't see the world as it is. We see it as we are, we see through culturally determined frames. So I started saying that for humans it's not seeing it's believing, it's believing is seeing. And my work now is very much about what is the frame, the limiting frame that keeps us from seeing solutions. And I'm so glad we are focusing on solutions. And certainly here in the United States, still the idea that we have a free market, that it channels resources in ways that serve us all and the better competitors win in this free market, that that still has such a grip that we cannot see the vast waste built into our food system, the vast hunger that is totally needless. And now biodiversity and increased climate risk from agriculture. So I just want to begin with that, that notion that we must go deep to the underlying assumptions that keep people from understanding what the real problem is. And so that's really led my life led me and in all my remarks I'm going to be sharing today, hopefully not repeating myself too much about this thing, but that beneath the scarcity of healthy food and healthy diets that so many people suffer from is a scarcity of democracy. And so I've come to understand democracy as not simply a structure of government, but as a way of life, as a way of life in which we, we grow from the classroom from home on to knowing that we have a voice that counts. And in our, I'm speaking now is that your citizen and we're one of the most flawed democracies where private interests have come to control come to influence come to warp our public decision making. So we now have about 1000 agribusiness lobbyists who influence policy in Washington corporate donations that have such influence in our system, in particularly in agriculture. So that is, is, you know what I want to share. And I want later on to talk about where I see people actually creating a participatory form of dispersion of power of transparency and a culture of mutual mutual accountability, which for me is the definition of democracy. So definition of the crisis. Do you have anything to add? Well, I completely agree. I only to add that it is another thing that is the problem is that most people don't recognize how big a problem the food system is. And just to kind of frame that, in terms of the environment, it is by far by a country mile, the biggest cause of biodiversity collapse. It is by far the biggest cause of freshwater scarcity and freshwater pollution. It is by far the biggest cause of deforestation. It is along with energy, one of the two major causes of climate change. It produces 20 to 30% of our global emissions. And on the health front, it is now by far the biggest cause of avoidable disease in the NHS in this country. The estimate is that by 2035 type two diabetes alone, which is only one disease that is caused by food, is going to cost us more than all treating all cancers put together. And if you think about the human misery of those suffering of their carers that sits behind that, it is just impossible to overstate how big the problem is. The second thing I would say is to your point about Neil and how we got here is it is worth remembering that it really was a miracle our food system. It is a miracle and a disaster. After the Second World War, there were 2.5 billion people on the planet. Up until that point in history, pretty much, when we increased our population, we dug up more land, we ripped out forest and turned it into farmland. Scientists projected that we would be 9 billion people by 2050. They were broadly right. There was literally no way that we were going to be able to with current methods and current diets feed the whole planet. And so the Green Revolution, which involved the creation of short-stemmed, high-yielding wheat, chemicals, nitrogen and pesticides and modern irrigation techniques, meant that we fed that huge increase of people from the same amount of land, we now produce 1.7 times calories per person in the world than we did back then. But in doing that, as is often the case, we inadvertently, because we got the measurements wrong, created something that is destroying the environment and destroying our health. And I do think, I am optimistic that if we actually focus on the right things, then there is no reason that human ingenuity cannot be put to play out in such a way that you solve those two problems as well. We'll get to that in a moment, but Neil, the crisis, continue on the crisis. I mean, so what Henry has just said about, can you talk to us a bit more about the extent to which the post war completely understandable focus on hunger got us here in some ways? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think, you know, one feature of the crisis is that lots of society's problems are kind of reflected in the food system. And actually the food system itself drives quite a lot of the problems as well, and those connections aren't really made. So in the current sort of political environment, there's not the profile given to the food system and food politics that perhaps there should be. And I wonder whether the climate crisis and the net zero commitment is going to mean that over the next five to ten years there will have to be that opening up of that political debate in a way that hasn't really been in recent years. The thing that motivated me to work on my book was I spent quite a lot of time way back thinking about the history of agricultural policy of the evolution of the food system and the pivotal moment at the end of the Second World War when the Agriculture Act was agreed. And we set off on a path which was a revolutionary path and productivity was completely transformed in the UK. And the broad word you give to that set of policies is productivism. And you contrast this with previous 70 years of British food policy which had been largely laissez faire. Yes, after the Corn Laws were repealed, so 1850s through to the First World War and actually beyond that up to the Second World War really, we had an empire and there was a sense that you just bought food in from where it could be produced as cheap as possible. So it was quite a globalised kind of food system and there was no support for British agriculture at all. It was a really poor dock and stick farming. There wasn't much money to be made in it. It was impoverished countryside. And the Second World War was a crisis which just catalyzed a whole new direction which was we should produce as much food as possible in the UK for balance of payments purposes. And because we had a dollar crisis in 1945-46, so there was a need to try and reduce the reliance on imports from elsewhere. But that led to particular technologies being really heavily supported and adopted. It was the adoption of an American model actually. A lot of the technologies had been developed prior to the Second World War and were already taking off in the US and breaking sort of signed up to an American style of evolution of the food system. And it was hugely successful in its own terms. And this is something that gets repeated all over the world, isn't it? I mean the short stork wheat that Henry was referring to was invented by Norman Borlaug or pioneered by Norman Borlaug and was grown in India, in Pakistan. Francis has a phrase in her book about blind focus on production, which kind of chimes with what you're saying about productivism, that actually all over the world quite understandably in response to populations who'd suffered in many cases much, much worse hunger than we'd suffered in Britain. Populations on the brink of famine in the case of even in Western Europe in the Netherlands, that getting enough calories into people or more than enough seemed like the most immediate focus, didn't it, for policymakers? Yes, and it was a really potent model because I think it was reinforced technologically. The economic incentives were all going in a particular direction. And I think ideologically it was really robust as well in that it was seen as virtuous to be producing more and more and more as cost effectively as possible. And I kind of want to bring in Tom here so like in that model of agriculture, I mean you're someone that grows a lot of your own food as well as cooking it, what limits does that have, like if we're just sticking on just describing the crisis, like what's the problem there with that kind of focus on quantity over diversity and quality? Well, I think the main issue really is a complete disregard for the environment. I mean a lot of people describe it as having two food systems altogether. We've got the industrial food system or the conventional food system and then the organic or agroecological or even regenerative food system. There's two kind of separate entities. I think in reality there's a lot of blurred lines between the two and I think now conventional agriculture is actually learning a lot from regenerative agriculture and applying it to, if it's possible, to that kind of scale of production. That has its own problems, of course, and I'm always an advocate for kind of small farms and agroecological farming, but yeah I mean the main issues that I can see with it are just that it's a different mentality. It's a sense of let's kind of, rather than working with nature, it's working against nature, it's okay, the nutrients in the soil are depleting, let's add more chemicals. Whereas agroecological farming methods are more okay, how can we support soil health, biodiversity and so on? So coming back to biodiversity, I mean that's a huge part of your report Henry, isn't it? Can you just outline a little bit more the crisis in biodiversity? I think to understand the crisis in biodiversity you have to understand why you care about biodiversity at all and there are three reasons really why you care about it. The first is that it is the richness in the genes that are out there, a very utilitarian reason. There's all sorts of untold gifts for mankind in those genes. So over 50% of the medicines that we have now are from plants largely, are from nature. Medicine is full of discoveries of drugs from a small plant that no one thought was anything which solved huge amounts of human problems and 99% of animals and plants that ever existed are extinct and we are destroying them at a rate that since actually we started hunting the megafauna back in 10,000 BC. We're destroying this rate faster than any time since then. The other reason is that there are all sorts of services, so Parther Desculptor and his review on the economic value of biodiversity, which was Treasury, the Economist points out that while we all think about the products that we get from those systems, whether that's wood or air or food, actually those ecosystems are regulating our planet and in particular they're circulating water and carbon and nitrogen in incredibly complex ways that if they collapse again bring the whole of human life to an end. And then the third reason you care about biodiversity is that for many of us there is a value in it that can't be measured. There is a spiritual value, a kind of sacred value in these ecosystems and a strong sense I think for a very large amount of the population. Some people won't even have thought about it, they just know they feel better in nature, but I think many of us feel there's a sacred value to maintaining biodiversity and I think biodiversity is one of the things about carbon, so we talked about carbon. You talked about why don't people care about the food system and I thought about this a lot, why does no one care about the food system? And the answer is that people care about outputs, so you can get people to be interested in starving children, you can get people to be interested in floods, you can get them to be interested in people having their legs amputated because of diabetes, but you can't get them to be interested in systems and at the moment you can't get them to be interested in biodiversity and one of my real concerns with climate change is we've finally got people interested in climate change. But that is a classic, it is one number, it is one measurement and nature is so much more complicated than that and I really worry that in focusing on this one number in climate change we may well inadvertently cause as many problems in trying to solve that as we did when we solved, when the number we focused on was calories per hectare. I wonder if another reason people don't care, which is another aspect of the crisis I want to return to Francis Franke now, is people simply don't see the problem. You're just eye-opening in so many ways and there's a chapter that is called Who Asked for Fruit Loops? Fruit Loops being the highly coloured, highly sugared breakfast cereal which if you think frosty is a sugary or cocoa pops a sugary that you haven't eaten fruit loops. And the point that you're making there in an incredibly eloquent simple way is a point that's also made by Neil and Henry and Tom in their respective work which is that there's this kind of illusion of choice. A part of the crisis is people don't see it as a crisis because they think we have choice and actually a lot of that choice is fake. I wonder if you could talk a bit more about that. Oh, I so agree with what you put that. Yes, the illusion of choice. I mean you walk into a US supermarket and you see aisle after aisle with all these different labels and you don't know that they're just a few corporations that are providing these and particularly, you know, that is a US reality. So I am so glad about the focus on biodiversity because I agree that so much I want you to know, I want you to know Henry that I've been including that as a key point, key point in everything I'm talking about these days because it is much less, it's much less, you know, get your hands around it kind of point for people, I agree. And it's so absolutely key. One of the stats I use, I'd love your feedback is that 40% of insects will be predicted to be extinct in the next few decades and of course insects are basic to it all so it's just terrifying. And so I, in my efforts, I always try to focus on possibility. I use that word, not optimism because I don't think optimism is possible right now. All humans need is a sense of possibility that we can, we can get our heads around this conversation and make it real. And so it's exciting. And so I love to talk about it as we don't have to believe in that all it's going to work out. All we have to see is that it's possible that our acts can make a difference. And so that's why I, you know, like to throw in examples of say, should I, should I go into some of my glimmers of hope? I think I'm going to, in a moment, I just want one more little bit of crisis. So I want to just kind of sum up. It's just that I'm really aware that, I mean, Neil's book is a really sort of stark vision of why Britain, Britain's agriculture right now is not going to meet anything close to net zero. So could you just very briefly give us the kind of the climate overview of the crisis? And then I want the Sivers of Hope. We need some Sivers of Hope. So I think the food system overall is contributing around about a third of emissions globally. It's around about a quarter, I think. I mean, the numbers vary from year to year a bit. But as we sort of grapple with electricity generation and we've got the ban on diesel and petrol cars coming in from 2030 and there's lots of progress on transport, as those other big polluting areas get sorted out. So the food system is going to become more and more prominent as a cause and there's lots of methane emissions from livestock, fertiliser use is a key contributor. And then the way that all of the machinery and the mechanisation and the way that agricultural buildings are managed and run as well. So there's all sorts of different sorts of emissions. And I think it's only really in the last decade or so that we've begun to get a perspective on that. And it comes after a huge succession of environmental problems around biodiversity and landscape change and public health scares. But I wonder whether having that net zero target for 2050 and emissions. I know Henry's worried about carbon sort of suffocating all of the other issues, but it does provide a new kind of orienting principle and a goal. And maybe it might be a way that some of these other issues can be tackled in the round. So I do want to get to the Sivers of Hope. I've just raised this one more huge bit of the crisis we haven't mentioned. I want Henry to talk a little bit about the ways in which Ukraine has made the pre-existing crisis even worse. I just wanted to summarise some of what's been said so far. So there's agreement that, I mean things said so far, it's a crisis of democracy. I mean I actually searched for the word crisis in Francis' book and I found a food and farming crisis, a water crisis, an environmental crisis, a nitrogen overload crisis, a toxic waste crisis, a democracy crisis. And then these other things that we've said, what Tom's talked about, about the biodiversity crisis and the ways in which Henry has talked about this system which began as a miracle but now in many ways is a miracle and a disaster. The massive, massive public health crisis that you've described and then the biodiversity crisis that can't actually just be reduced to numbers because it's something much bigger and more important and beautiful to all of us. To anyone that is living on this planet. But Henry, taking all of these terrible crisis, Ukraine, you said we've been discussing this topic a little bit via email and Henry, very scary, except he didn't use the word very. Can you tell us about your very scary conversation you had recently with an expert on distribution? Yeah, so we've been through in this country three food system crisis, all man-made. So we went through Brexit, we then went through COVID, which was man-made because it was our decision to shut down supply chains, whether or not that was right. You know, it didn't stop food growing. And now we have Ukraine. And Ukraine is pretty straightforward, really, and it comes from the fact that we got very good at storing and transporting food. And that's fantastic because it means that if you have a failure of harvest somewhere, you can transport food to those people and you can stop them starving. It's also led to very large human populations in areas which would never be able to produce enough food to feed those populations. Egypt, for example, is one of them. Egypt imports 50% of its wheat. And Ukraine and Russia between them exports 17% of the world's wheat to the world, along with a lot of the sunflower oil. And at the moment, I was talking to David Beasley last week, who's the head of the UN's World Food Programme, and he had been in Odessa the day before. And he was saying that the grain silos from last year's harvest in Ukraine are full. They think that this year's harvest is likely to be 60, 70% of normal, so not a complete disaster. But it's going to have nowhere to go. So when they pull in that harvest in August, there's no way of getting that wheat from the world. Normally it goes through Odessa and some of the other ports on the south coast. And the volume of that seabound traffic is so huge that you would never be able to get it out by road through Poland. So he said that the Ukrainians described that as trying to emptier a swimming pool with a teaspoon. And so we basically, in his view, have a number of weeks until September to work out how to make Odessa, which currently has two scuttle ships blocking the Harbour Scuttle by the Ukrainians, surrounded by mines, the most dangerous piece of ocean in the world, to work out how to get Odessa to be a neutral, worst port so we can get that grain out. And if we don't get that grain out, what happens? Well, it depends where you live. So what happens is food shortage, prices go up. If you live in North Africa, Middle East, where prices are a huge part of your daily budget, that means societal breakdown, riots, regime change. You'll see what we had in the Arab Spring plus a lot. And here it means those in food poverty, a plunged deeper into food poverty, which is a different... There are solutions to our problem. I wouldn't want to be the Minister for Food in Egypt at the moment. We're going to come back to the solution to our problem. I want to come to Frankie with some Sivers of Hope and then I'm going to go to Tom with some others Sivers of Hope. I think we've had enough crisis now. Well, I like to point out very specific examples, but I'll start with our own country. It's not really a story, but just one fact I included in the new chapter is that in one decade, the acreage of organic agriculture grew doubled in one decade. And that to me was one of the big surprises because you never hear about it in this country. But I often go back to a trip I took in 2000 with my daughter Anna to this city of Belo Horizonte. Do you know Belo in Brazil? Have you heard their story? Well, when we were there in 2000, they were just beginning a commitment by the city government to bring all sectors together from religious groups to business people to farmers of all sizes and come up with a strategy to end hunger in Belo Horizonte. They haven't ended it, but they have done what a lot of people would think would be impossible. But by bringing all the voices together, they managed to cut the child mortality rate in half over this period of actually less by in about 15 or fewer years. And they did it in the most creative ways by allowing and supporting again the market was not golden, right? You could make the market work for our values so that small farmers were enabled to have their stands of fresh food in the poorest areas with prices that were held in a place that people could actually afford them. They created people's restaurants and I ate in one of them and they're sprinkled around the city so that you can get a good meal for really, really cheap. They include now really healthy additives into the flour that is baking the bread for what the children eat for breakfast and on and on and teaching kids about plants. And they have, as part of their curriculum, children work every week in the school garden and orchards. So they brought many pieces together and had this incredible effect. And I'll just end this little example with this. We talked to the woman, Adriana Rana, who was a key player then in the year 2000. She said, she was very emotional and said, what upsets me so was how easy it is to end it, to end hunger. Once you bring people together, once you can empower people to come up with creative solutions, well that's my addition, but I was so moved by that. The cliche, it's not rocket science, that once people are enabled to actually come up with solutions, it really has worked, not perfectly of course, but made enormous difference. And so I like to spread the story because many people have not heard it. And I suppose the more stories we hear like that, the more that other places might become empowered to act like that. And it is striking, it comes back to this point that several people have made that once you see how much food matters, then everything changes. I mean another example of comparable change would be the city of Amsterdam that was one of the first places in the world to bring down child obesity. And again it was through completely shared action across schools, food businesses, politicians, parents, all of whom came together with a shared understanding of child health is all of our responsibility. It's not just your responsibility or that person's responsibility, we're never going to blame the child and we're just going to create a set of shared values around health. And it made a huge change. Tom, I want to bring you in with whether cooking can become one of the solutions. I was very struck when I first read your book that one of the words in the title is pleasure and your chapters are a series of manifestos really about cooking. But I think your very first one is something like cook with love and confidence. How can that help? Well, earlier when Henry was talking about the kind of enormity of the crisis, I just wanted to jump in and say and therefore it's really one of our biggest hopes for a solution. Is the kind of massive impact and far reaching impact of our food system from everything to people in Brazil or around the world in famine to the overproduction of food in America and the UK and elsewhere. It's just this incredible opportunity. And through my work, which began to be centered around food waste and the food paradox of food waste and famine, I wanted to create really as a chef, as a practical person, a manifesto for people to take on board or the incredible academic work that had been done over the last several decades and make it into this kind of actionable and tangible approach. Having said that, what became clear to me also was that actually food is pleasure, food is life, food is everything, but to ignore that would be a huge issue, not just for ourselves as human beings, but for the sake of sustainability. How could a diet be sustainable if it's not pleasurable, because it's not going to be adopted by the population or by people. I've read a lot of slow food in Carlo Petrini and I feel quite close to the slow food values, which are all about local solutions. That's worked its way into my work in a deeply ingrained way. Beyond cooking with love, confidence and creativity, which is one of the first chapters in my book, I quite quickly found myself thinking about biodiversity and the sixth great mass extinction that everyone's been talking about. Then referring to and thinking about how we can support biodiversity. Cooking is one of the ways, because it's one of the easiest ways you can take back control of ingredients and use a greater variety of ingredients than the ultra-processed foods written about in Francis' book. Importantly, the best way I think you can do that is through supporting agro-diversity and better farming, but we can talk more about that later of course. The raw ingredients are not a given either. I wanted to bring Neil in now because there was a phrase that jumped out that you used of something about a crisis being an opportunity. This is something that Neil's book suggests reflection on. Do you see solutions potentially coming out of the crisis in the same way that the Second World War was a crisis that produced a radical shift in British food policy in the past? Well there's that sense of don't waste a good crisis and crises do open up opportunities for more fundamental change and the current food system can be thought of as a product of the crisis of the Second World War. So I guess it's a hope and I raised the question of whether the climate crisis coupled with the kind of COVID convulsion that we've been through opens up that question to ask more sort of fundamental questions about the way that we've organised things. People can also I think see through something like COVID a means of government and public agencies and society acting for a common public good in a way that we've got a prevailing political ideology of sort of neoliberal markets are the best way of sorting everything out and governments should have as little to do with interfering in that world. That is something that's a product of the last 40 years in particular. It hasn't always been that way and crises do sort of unsettle some of those fundamental assumptions and having a lockdown and everyone having to sort of... We've seen it with the great resignation and people moving to the country and office rents in big cities and working from home and all of that. We're seeing quite a lot of reorganisation of our economy and our way of living. So why not think about the food system in the same way? Henry, coming to solutions. One of the examples you write about in the report is Finland as an example of how solutions can come about by doing lots and lots of things at once. That's one of the repeated themes in the food strategy that it's not going to be this solution or that solution, it's going to be lots of things overlapping. I think you first of all have to recognise what is causing the problem and fundamentally there are two things causing the problem on the nature side. We treat nature as a resource, we don't cost it into anything we do, you can't count it in your wallet, it's not in the balance sheet of companies, it's not in the way we measure GDP and we have pillaged nature to create prosperity. Again, Dasgupta in his report estimates not only do we not cost it, governments worldwide subsidise nature-destructing activities to the tune of $500 billion a year causing $3 to $7 trillion of destruction to nature. So we know that if we bring nature into the system, which is something only governments can do, that there is a solution there. On the health side, and we touched on this a bit with the fruit loops, last time I counted, which was last January, there were 28 kinds of KitKats available for sale in the UK. You say, why is that? It's not as if the company bosses wake up every morning and think, what dastardly ways can we think up to kill our children and destroy the NHS. They are thinking of ways to make money. What is happening, we call this the junk food cycle in the report, is you have a feedback loop between our evolved appetite, which evolved to seek out and eat highly calorie dense foods in vast quantities and if they didn't contain fibre to get full less quickly. Over time, companies therefore have invested more marketing and R&D budgets into those foods. We've eaten more, they've invested more, we've eaten more, they've invested more and we've got sick. A lot of them don't like it. I went to speak at Weetabix's annual get-together the other day and Weetabix is really interesting. On the cereal front, they are pretty good compared with fruit loops or crunchy nut corn flakes, but all their last releases have been Alpen with chocolate, Weetabix with sugar and chocolate. They don't like that, but they'll get fired if they don't do it. The CEO will get fired if he doesn't do it. They don't like it enough to leave the company. That's all he's done, that's all he's learnt. He knows how to market things. Interestingly, more and more of them as they come out of the thing are saying this is bad. So, Dave Lewis from Tesco, Roger White side from Gregg's ex-CEO's are saying I was stuck in this. The only way that you can break that though, you can't rely on personal morality. It's no good just saying why don't you all leave your jobs. It's not going to happen. So, you have to break that with a commercial intervention. The government has to intervene to make that food less commercially attractive. So, we know the solution. The second thing that is interesting is those two things, which people like Frankie Francis, Frankie... Frankie, Frankie, Frankie! I respect you so much as the Francis more lapid. We just need to adapt to Frankie. Some people have known this for a long time, but until very recently, most people in the UK, for example, most people in the western world on health, thought that you got sick because you didn't have self-control and you didn't exercise enough. So, if you had diabetes it was your own fat fault because you didn't get off your ass and do something about it. That now, within the NHS and in the Tory party, is understood not to be the case. We now know that exercise is great for all sorts of things but doesn't help you lose weight. And we know that it is about the food environment. And that is accepted. But people are still struggling even when you don't name it fully as ultra-processed. It is clearly the case that the majority of what you would call ultra-processed food is high in sugar, salt, fat and low. Yeah, but a lot of it is also high in artificial sugar. I understand, I understand. And you know it. So, what I'm saying is, it may well be, that is a big problem, it may well be that there are other things in that food that are causing problems as well. But I think that the, you know, getting into debate about, you know, about ultra-processed food, I do quite, I go into it, I say it's a problem. I'm not as obsessed by it as you are. I'm obsessed by the fact that the food companies are creating stuff that's killing us and that needs to stop. So, whether you call it ultra-processed. I think the definition matters. I think it matters that you state what the crisis is in order to come up with solutions. But I wanted to, I wanted to bring Frankie back in at this point because of some of the things, I mean, I think that was really useful inside in terms of like the inside thinking of what it's like for the people in the cereal companies and how difficult it is to get change within that locked-in system. And one of the themes in Frankie's book that comes up again and again and again is, well, you can wait for change within that system or you can just buy away out of it completely. I mean, one of the liberating thoughts you keep coming up with is like, well, you go to the supermarket and there's all this choice and it's not really choice and it's fruit loops or it's something that pretends not to be fruit loops but it's still not that healthy. And you keep talking about the fact that you can shop somewhere else and how amazing it is when you go and buy your food in a different environment and suddenly all of the choices available are ones that aren't going to impact your health in the same way. I just, I wanted to, as another sliver of hope, I mean, I completely agree with you, Henry, that there needs to be structural change. There needs to be governmental intervention. But in the meantime, what can we as individuals do? Are we hopeless and powerless? Well, you're not going to be surprised that I'm going to say that every act that we make and don't make changes the world around us. And so as we make new choices, somebody is always watching and so that is rippling out. But as we talk about this, this particular point is that we have to confront the extreme economic inequality that is coupled, that is a product of, are corrupted in, I'm speaking now in the US, but in different forms in many countries that has corrupted our democracy. And so that, as I was pointing out earlier, I believe that there are a thousand agribusiness lobbies in Washington that are working toward what brings the highest profit for their clients. And I just want to add this back for the US, 60% of our calories now come from this ultra-processed food, empty, empty, empty. And that is just really alarming to me. So back to your question, changing where we shop. Yes, I can shop in places that I can access whole foods and delicious tempting even processed foods that are very rich in nutrients. I can join my community support agriculture, which I love, I just have to go up the hill and grab it, but not everyone can do that. So that's why most people can't in this country. So we have to also bring into our conversation the extreme economic inequality that must be part of, I think this conversation because it's this access question. So I'd love to have a response to that. And I also, anyway, I'll stop there. Yeah, there's just so much more to say and I'm aware that we're coming up to five to eight and eight o'clock is when we said we go to audience questions. I just maybe I'll just go around each of you and just for a kind of, I feel like each of you have so much more to say on this. So maybe just go around each of you and each of you say one thing that you hoped you could have said when we started that my questions haven't allowed you to. So just freestyle, Neil. Well, I think we should bear in mind that we've we're stopping the sale of diesel and petrol fuelled cars from 2030. So taking a regulatory move, set it a few years ahead and that's forcing system change in private road transport. And I think we need to think in those sort of terms about about the food system. It does require government action. And I think we will get there actually before too long. Tom, I guess I'd just like to say that I think actions as individuals do hugely matter and even more so as chefs and businesses as food businesses because our impact is multiplied by the mouths that we're feeding. But as individuals, we're part of a kind of food community, whether that's around the table or the kind of global food system. And I think that the humble veg box is the keystone to a sustainable diet. And luckily in the UK, most people have access to that. And I also think it's one of the most affordable ways to to kind of eat and base your shopping around those ideally seasonal local and if possible, organic vegetables and then kind of bolt on those more exotic and meat products if you want. It's problematic, isn't it? Because the, sorry, I've said I'm just going to let you to present now. I just have to answer that. But the point that Frankie's just made about extreme economic inequality, I completely agree with you that anyone that can afford to get a veg box, I mean it's transformed the way I eat. I think I've probably had one for 15 years now and it makes me eat seasonally. I would otherwise forget about so many root vegetables in the winter months and it just enables you to do that in a way that's very simple and it's local. But there are people on bare bones budgets who, as Henry was saying with the Ukraine crisis, are now going to be pushed even further into poverty who are living in housing where their kitchen doesn't have an oven. They might be lucky to have a microwave and a kettle. What time do you even cook? So when I just think it's worth mentioning that affordable means a whole bunch of different things, doesn't it? Depending on income and there are these bigger issues, the issue that Frankie raised at the very beginning about democracy that there are these things. I mean the food itself I think is bigger than food but there are also these things which like food itself isn't maybe able to meet in a vacuum. Henry. I'll say a couple of things. First is inequality has increased in all human societies since the Stone Age over time in the absence of mass mobilised warfare or famine and we cannot expect the food system to solve the problem of poverty. There are ways in which we can make it less harmful to those in poverty. But in the end people who are in poverty have much less, worse effect by the system for all sorts of reasons have less ability to get themselves out of it for their own free will and that we cannot expect the food system to solve that problem. That's an economic problem. That's for different kinds of brains. The second thing I would say is just really reinforcing what these guys said. So the government action is absolutely necessary. You cannot break those two feedback loops, the junk food cycle, the invisibility of nature without government action but it is not sufficient. So you cannot shoot people if they don't serve good food in schools. You can't imprison someone for putting up a, well yes you probably could, putting a chocolate salad in hospital lobbies, maybe you should do that. You can't prison a lot of people. If I think about what local means to me because there are all sorts of questions about what, and economically there are all sorts of things that are local that aren't particularly useful or good but every single plate of food that was, nutritious plate of food that was served, delicious plate of food that was served to someone, was served by someone who cared. And I think that the most important thing about the local and the community solutions, and I, and funnily enough the description in Brazil of getting community together, getting doctors to talk to farmers, to talk to schools, to talk to politicians. There is an awful lot that can be done by harnessing that local care and so I think you have to have both. I think that's a wonderful note on which, and this part of the discussion and now I, let's open it to audience questions. So there will be some audience questions coming in by probably Russell from our online audience and then I hope people here as well, Gavin. I think our microphones coming round or they will be okay so we've got someone over here and then we've got someone here. Gavin, can you hear? Yeah. My name is Gavin. I'm a food systems consultant and food policy expert on Tik Tok and now food systems people love a crisis. Frankie's been writing about them for 50 years. Edward's Pomi and wrote about the trouble, how people didn't have enough time to cook over 100 years ago. So we love a crisis. I was wondering if anyone on the panel, if they would like to share any positive stories of things that they see coming up in the near future that they have a lot of hope for or they feel more positively about. Frankie? Well, this probably isn't enough direct answer to your question, but it is definitely something positive that addresses what we are so concerned about and that is biodiversity. Can I go with that? Yeah, go for it. Because it all relates. One of the things that has most encouraged me is the spread of agroforestry and I'd love others to comment on it because now I just checked it's about the area worldwide, the size of the country of Canada is now using agroforestry, the mixing of crops and trees in the same fields, which helps in biodiversity maintenance and hopefully restoration and also deals with, you know, the cooling the earth from climate crisis and it is empowering for farmers in Niger where I've been so impressed particularly there where farmers are teaching farmers and converting to this after and re establishing forests with crops that have been ruined, you know, destroyed under colonialism and I just see this approach as empowering. It's power is dispersed because farmers are working with farmers and it's addressing biodiversity and it's improving diets and it's working well for protection from climate chaos and I just would like to throw that in. Does anyone else want to jump in to answer that? Well, I do feel quite intellectually energized by the net zero thing. I mean it was 2019, we were the first country to make a statutory commitment to move to net zero greenhouse gas emissions and now I think it's something like 80% of countries in the world have a target and a plan to power down greenhouse gas emissions and I think that that's sort of catalyzing an awful lot of science and intellectual activity about what's that going to mean for our systems of organizing ourselves and 2050 is not too far away really and so I feel quite positive about that. You look at countries like the Netherlands, they've got plans which include their food system with targets so I think increasingly we will see that and we've seen in this country how it's worked with electricity generation. I mean two very quick ones. One is in the UK and it now looks as though it's going to happen in the EU. We're going to stop paying billions and billions of pounds a year to farmers to produce food and destroy nature and we're starting to realize that is a crazy way to spend money and we're going to spend it to produce public goods and it looks like we might be in for a big revolution in the UK that would be incredible. The second one which you're going to hate is if you... Why am I going to hate it? So there are, basically you can boil it down to if you have to do two things on the environmental side you would eat less meat as Frankie pointed out it's just absurd how much land we use to grow meat and you need that land to restore nature. On the food side you need less ultra processed foods, less high in fat, salt and sugar etc. On the meat side I think that the protein alternatives, a large amount of that meat is eaten in junk food in the form of milk powder and protein alternatives are very soon going to undercut that and so you will see because of that junk food which you hate you will actually see a short... But you will see that there is huge, suddenly huge amounts of dairy production and meat production will become economically unsustainable. Why do you think I'm going to hate it? Because it's going into food that's making people ill. So the dream is everyone eats pulses and nuts and lots of vegetables. I don't believe you're going to move that processed diet fast enough to prevent the environmental catastrophe and therefore I welcome stuff that doesn't do anything to make that processed food less. But both things could happen of course. Exactly. I mean my sisters vegetarian and two of her kids go between vegetarian and vegan and my feeling is if you're going to eat a hot dog why not eat a vegetarian hot dog because it's such an ultra processed product in any case. And it doesn't taste that different and the impact as you say is completely different. But I mean long term I don't think ultra processed... No, I can't, I can't. You don't want to make more people ill through their diet and neither do I so I think we agree about that. I got sent a bag of fake chicken nuggets from the states the other day which includes certain GM foods that we can't, we're not allowed to sell here. And my son only, I've got a son who eats meat and fruit and a vegetarian daughter and these chicken nuggets tasted disgusting, flash delicious. They tasted like really cheap chicken nuggets, incredibly more-ish and both of them I got sent five kilos. I had to secretly throw them away because they weren't eating, they wouldn't eat anything else which could be a disaster for their health but great for the environment. We had a question over here and then also just too along and then I should see from Polly whether there is some online. Can you hear me again? My question actually is really interested in the comparisons between the past and the present that you're talking about the 1940s which was a decade of very progressive thinking. You think about Howard, Balfa, these kind of books and then somewhat everything got kicked into touch by the war and dream revolution and this desire to sort of control, scale, industrialise process, if you want to call it that. And we're in a kind of similar period now if you like and you're touching right there on the meat free and the whole push to veganism and the processed role within so many of those products which are obviously very profit driven as well. As to whether that's a little bit of out of the frying pan into the fire in the longer term issues that that might raise for us, not only our health but also the whole situation. I was thinking, do we need now almost a, whereas Rachel Carson and what she did regarding DDT in the 1970s for example, a voice such as that to Paul, one of the biggest issues I think is around glyphosate in the food production system. It ties into GM. It's something that is very well covered in the US and there are some great voices out there, people like Zach Bush and people like that who talk a lot about it and doing a lot of campaigning with regards to glyphosate. And it's very little talked about as far as I can see here. In fact last week I heard Patrick Holden on his Sustainable Food Trust podcast. It's the first time I've heard two English voices discussing glyphosate on a podcast and it came off the House of Lords decision last week with regards to the future GM in the food system. So I just wanted to ask really the question is, would it take something like a DDT moment relating to glyphosate to really push the debate forward with regards to what is really wrong with the food system here and that people really understood the impact of that kind of thing on public health? I guess I mean since you're asking about moving the debate forward in Britain I'm going to ask one of the three Bush, I mean Neil, do you have thoughts on that? I mean agrochemical use generally just became really central to the functioning of food production very quickly after the Second World War. I think it was being adopted a little bit earlier in the US but we sort of took that technology and it's just become vital to rotations and the whole system. One of the eye-opening things I found in your book, you talk about the extent to which pesticides were sort of mandated and there was a language about sort of cleanness or like farms as if it was their duty to keep them free of pests. There were committees at the county level of farmers and advisors who would go around and inspect whether you're keeping your weeds down and farmers who weren't modernising rapidly enough. Tenant farmers could have their tenancy ended and could be moved off the land so there were really quite strong interventionist regulatory powers which proceeded right through to the mid-1950s and farmers were kicked off their farms for not modernising and not entering into the spirit of the agricultural revolution. Hundreds of them. You asked a question on health as well I think. If you look at health, we talk about the boil, there's a kind of system trapped known as eroding of expectations or the boiling the frog syndrome. And the comparison that we make in the food strategy is that. Dietary disease kills more people every a kill more people last year than covid. And if that problem, self-inflicted man made problem had hit us at once, you'd say you know who knows what mankind would do about it. Well we now know what mankind would do about it, if it's what it took they'd lock up the world's population indoors, they'd take huge interventionist measures. But because the problem has creeped up on us year over year, you know if you look at obesity it's just like a wave that's gradually moved since the 50s when almost no one was obese all the way through. It's just hit us very slowly each year increasing. And so your question is like do you need a Rachel Carson you know silent spring type voice. It would help. But it's you know it's it is a I think we've now because so many people suffered from you know it was interesting I speak to James Bethel who was the minister in the NHS during covid and he's become a massive kind of campaigner for diet now within the Tory party trying to change their view. And he said I was just on every morning we had a call with the hospital and they were talking about who was an intensive care. And it was all like so often it was diet related disease that was driving those people in and that's completely changed his personal view. And I think you know we need to we still do it. We regret if there is someone who can do the Rachel Carson job in this country but it couldn't hurt. So we have another question in this row. Yeah. Hi. A big thank you to the panel that was depressing and inspiring. And you've talked a lot about crises and I just like to unfortunately add another crisis that we're experiencing at the moment and that is a very real and devastating cost of living crisis here in the UK at the moment. And I was just wondering what policies the panellists would advocate to encourage sustainable diets during this cost of living crisis. I'm maybe going to go back to Frankie first like what policies to deal with the cost of living crisis. Well I certainly think that to make more and more clear to everyone that a plant based I now call it plant and planet based centered diet can actually save a lot of money and make you all year at the same time. So I think that it's it's really the access again back to that challenge of such extreme concentration three people control as much well in the United States is the bottom half right. So who has access even to you know the healthy legumes dried legumes and grains that together are just so healthy for us not to mention the fresh foods. So I hope I'm not seeing the same song over and over I am I guess that that we have to see all the pieces woven and constantly address. And I feel that so strongly in our corrupted democracy that how do we make clear that without a political democracy answering to citizens we can have economic democracy that answers to our human needs and and it's only as we make that that change. And I just feel that that's got to come up in every conversation about about food and so I'll leave it at that moment. Neil, policies to address cost of living crisis. I mean this doesn't this doesn't feel very complicated or difficult really it's pretty straightforward there is enough money and assets and resources in the economy really. So it's not really a food system thing it's just about how you use your resource and it's a tax and welfare really that there's no need for people to be going hungry and suffering to the levels that they are. And the existence of food banks that we see on the rise both in the US and UK is that something that you see that should be existing in civilized relatively wealthy societies. I don't think the increasing number of food banks is is a positive indicator of the way that societies work. What it is is a positive reflection of the efforts that people will go to to try and make a sort of difference and help others but you know that they don't have food banks in Germany do they? I mean I just kind of very specifically answering that question because I think that France is right in the long term a cultural shift will help but in the short term you can do two things. You can give people food or you can give them money and we made the argument that actually although some people see it as paternalistic why don't you do both? As some people see it as paternalistic if you look at programs such as Healthy Start which gives fruit and veg and milk to families where either the mother is pregnant or they've got young kids, school food meals, holiday activity and food programs there is clear evidence that they get better nutrition than if you gave them the same amount of money. At the same time financial exchanges, money is important, my instinct if I was the government at the moment would be to give that to local authorities rather than through the benefit system because the local authorities are the ones who know exactly where the real problem is. They know where the problems in their community are and those problems don't always cut as neatly across what your welfare payment is because of people's circumstances. So at the moment if you were dealing with a crisis if you were going to increase the benefits by X I would actually deliver that through local councils rather than just through a blanket increase of benefits. Tom did you have anything to say on the cost of living crisis before we go to the online? I was just thinking that really I think a lot of the man made crises that we're talking about stem from really a disconnection with nature ultimately and that's a conclusion that I came to through writing my book as well that really actually the solutions are about us trying to reconnect with nature and what better way than to do that through food. So reconnecting people with cooking and just and with the farms and with the countryside as much as possible. I don't understand food policy so I don't know how you do that but that's the kind of direction I want to go in. Polly are there some online questions? Yeah there are absolutely loads of online questions so I'm going to apologise already because we're not going to get to all of them at all or any of them. Or we can give short answers maybe. Yeah yeah but a lot of questions. Yes and no. You've touched on this across the panel but I think it's a kind of good question probably lots of people are thinking which is just how can the average person make a tangible difference to improve our food system? And that comes from Bella. Frankie how can the average person make a tangible difference to improve our food system? Well we all have a sphere of influence right? We all do and so the more that we align with what we know is necessary for us and for others the planet, we definitely have influence and every opportunity through our churches and synagogues and community organisations and through who we elect to represent us. We become spokespeople for the kind of insights that I'm so appreciated today and so we have power and I think that that is so important for us to realise because the greatest danger is that more and more of us feel powerless and resigned. So the power that we have, we're all influencers, we all are. Tom did you want to add anything to that? Oh sure. So well reducing your waste is something that we can all afford to do and that will save us money, eating more plants, having a plant rich diet again is going to save us money and I think if you can put that towards a budget of supporting better farming, buying your veg box, buying organic if you can. If you can't afford an all organic diet then there's a brilliant thing called the dirty dozen which describes the kind of most pesticide ridden fruit and vegetables but yeah going back to the keystone veg box. Thank you. Next question. So this one is Henry, thank you so much for this brilliant discussion, this is from Chloe. Henry and Neil and others rightly highlight the urgent need for government intervention in the food system. Can Henry give any insight on the barriers that seem to be preventing the government acting comprehensively on his review and what can be done to address these when force critical action needed? So it's interesting. So the things that have been put in place already, quite a few of the food poverty recommendations were put in place because Marcus Rashford decided to campaign for them which was quite helpful and so that is where you get enough political momentum. There was then there was a bunch of stuff on food education and on community work on health in the community that went into the levelling up white paper and that was because Michael Gove who is now in the department for levelling up originally was in DEFRA when I was commissioned to do this work and he cares about the food system and he slipped it in without people spotting it. We've now got the kind of big environmental things which DEFRA is responding to the Department for Environment, Food and World Affairs and then there's going to be a health inequalities white paper following after that. And the blocks is we don't have it nearly as bad as in the States but there are definitely through the federations, the industry bodies huge amounts of disinformation going into government. I'm always trying to get them to speak to the CEOs rather than the federations and then secondly there is still you know there are some very real at the moment you've got it was interesting. When we did the on the salt and sugar reformulation tax when we did the focus groups on that people actually even people we did focus groups all across country even people in poverty like the idea because it was going to get the crap out. They hate their chick kids being sold the stuff it's going to get it out of the system whereas meat they just didn't want the government to go anywhere near it. And we and the government's kind of what we hired one of the lead advisers to the government on electoral issues thought they could get that across the line spending a bit of political capital. The government doesn't have a lot of political capital left anymore and therefore I think kind of big structural things that don't play to kind of levelling up you know those big themes you're not going to see happen in this administration. But I think you you know you still part of policy making is you change the ideas. You change the way people think about the system and then you're quite kind of entrepreneurial about when you get specific you kind of jump on specific policy and get it put into place. Are there any more online questions or should we. Oh OK because it's unfair on the people in the room isn't it. We have this one here. Yes. Yes yes you and then there's one in the front. Yeah I have a question about communication and of course that means language in us using hopefully some of the same terms. And that would be plant based plant forward plant centric. I guess I'm from America but I live here in in London and I was blown away by the number of vegetarian and vegan everywhere on menus and food products in the grocery stores. And I'm just I'm concerned that we're not people aren't using plant based in the same way some people think it means vegan. Some people think it means flexitarian plant centric plant forward Tom you mentioned eat more plants does that mean people eat some meat are not doing the right thing or some chicken or some dairy. And just concerned that we're we want it we want to communicate this so that people can think about it during breakfast lunch dinner snacks their next snack and by the way fruit loops are plant based. So what do we do. I wonder I might give this to Neil because Neil just before the session was saying you didn't like the way things get polarised into this or that. Do you have a thought on. Well on the meat question it does get quite heated and it's sort of understandable that there's quite a lot of people whose livelihoods are at stake and they feel threatened. But to talk about less meat in the diet is probably desirable in the UK so you can progress you don't have to go vegetarian or vegan but I am really struck by the way that those meat free sections of the supermarket aisles are getting bigger and bigger and bigger. You know as the as the months and years go by Frankie do you have a preferred term out of plant based plant centric plant forward. Well excuse me I have come to say plant and planet centered or based or you know I want to include the idea that by our choices that we have a planet wide impact. So it's a little awkward but I'm trying it out. I totally agree that scolding people does not work invitation is what works and all the good things that a plant centered diet can offer in terms of health and biodiversity all the things we talked about just offering you know that that's my approach and that's what I use. We have a question in the front row and I'm not just aware that each of these we've got five minutes to go so we'll get as many more questions in as we can. We'll try and keep everything. We've got front row here and there was somebody in the back. Hi I'm Susan Ilocot and I'm a cook and a journalist and a food writer. I have a quick round the round robin question for all of you to save our health to save biodiversity and to save the planet. What's your dream dinner that a family should have? Who wants to go first? Tom we haven't heard your voice for a while. What's your dream dinner to save planet biodiversity health? Yeah fair enough. Or it could just be a dream dish because two dishes are coming to mind in my book I've created one recipe called a rotation risotto inspired by Dan Barber's dish that he did for an event I went to. Essentially acknowledging the whole farm and the crop rotation of the farm so I created a risotto out of spelt, rhai and clover as well which I thought was good. I wanted to mention earlier that perennials and also buckwheat is a bit of a miracle crop that I think could be included in that rotation risotto. Because it's a brilliant cover crop that just kind of helps bring back nutrients to the soil naturally. And then for dessert very quickly I had to go on James Martin for COP26 and I spent ages kind of thinking about this really quirky brownie with wild mushrooms in it instead of flour. And it went down like a lead blue. But I wanted to talk about these two great ecosystems, our forest and the ocean. So it had seaweed and mushrooms in this brownie that did work and it did taste good. It just was a bit too heavy for the audience. Really quick answers because then we want to try and get two more questions than if we can. Anything with beetroot in it. Great answer. Thank you for the decision. Frankie. Well beans and rice. Black beans and rice. Excellent answer and there was a recipe for that in the 50th edition, isn't there? Yes beans. Found by the bus. Great. Another question here in the front row. But very quick. I just wanted to ask. I care a lot what's been said today. But things that have been addressed like the technological aspects of farming and agriculture. In particular the agriculture of 4.0 and the fourth agricultural revolution using technologies to address such problems. For instance like Internet of Things blockchain technology where food can be tracked and traced and thereby improve food security and reduce wastage. I just want to know what your views are on these aspects and how they can be brought forward. And do you think they've got some kind of credibility? This is something I mean for Neil I think if you could give us a very short answer. There's sort of two idealised worlds. There's the sustainable intensification. More technology, more knowledge, data science, genetic science goes into agriculture. And then there's the kind of agoricology which is think about the environmental constraints and start your agricultural system from that basis. And there are a little bit of sort of two contrasting models at the moment. I think we'll probably end up with a mix of the two. We had one person in the back there, one person in the back there and I feel guilty if we don't go. And I can see there's other hands up. So if we get your question then your question and then we'll just see what we can do in terms of answering it all in one minute. I think the problem with old processed foods is that A, they're inexpensive. B, they taste great and C, they're super easy to prepare. I've seen supermarkets like Waitrose, for instance, recently pairing with a mindful chef to create food boxes. Do you think there's more that supermarkets can do in a way to kind of like encourage people with their income to be able to create these easy dishes using sustainable vegetables? And there was a question over here. So we'll have yours as well. You can shout very loudly but maybe... You mentioned about the petrol and diesel being stopped in 2030. What would be your recommendations from a food perspective for the government to kind of put something in place related to that? Oh, there's a lot. I mean you could start with... I think it would be important to look at the greenhouse gas emissions alongside water pollution and think about those two things. Don't have separate sets of civil servants operating separately on those. If you brought those two together, I think you could go a long way and it would solve a lot of the biodiversity stuff as well. So think about emissions to air and water pollution holistically. That would be a good first step. And I'm going to give the very final word to Frankie to answer this question about ultra processed foods and supermarkets. Is there something you think or believe supermarkets could do in terms of teaching people to cook differently? How would you approach this? What do you see right there at the counter as you check out? It's all of the worst food, right? So what if we had a totally different incentive system so that you walked into a supermarket and you saw samples of dishes that made out of whole foods and that we had a government that was making it possible for all of us to access that that at the supermarket level we could be tempted by what's good for us instead of what is destroying us on the earth. So I strongly, strongly believe that every sector of society has to make this turn and it is really about truly the voice of all of us in who makes these decisions. In our case, you know, in Washington. And that's what I hope that, you know, all this brilliant input can weave together to empower us to do that. Thank you so much. It's been such a privilege to all four of you. I could have listened for another hour and a half. Thank you so much. I'm sure you'll join me in thanking this amazing panel. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Great questions from the audience. So sorry everyone online. You didn't get to ask a question. What an amazing panel be dealing with this huge topic, this fantastic incredibly expert panel. You did it so kind of masterfully and skillfully. Thank you so much. And what a huge honour, Frankie, to have you all the way from California. Thank you for coming to join us here in London. There were a number of people who online were saying, I read Frankie's book, It Changed My Life. I became a vegetarian. This is amazing. So a lot of people really inspired by you, been the most fantastic conversation. I've taken so much away from it. I love this idea that beneath the scarcity of healthy food and scarcity of healthy diets is a scarcity of democracy. And that for me is incredibly powerful as we sit here as citizens who can do things to change things in many complicated and difficult ways. But how inspiring. Thank you everyone. We have got Tom's book and we've got Frankie's book out there. Tom can sign, Frankie can't, but the book is brilliant. So buy it even without a signature. And Neil's book is out this summer. Neil's book is out this summer and it's really brilliant. It's cracking and it just clarifies everything. Henry's book is free. NationalFoodStrategy.org. You don't even have to pay for it. It's brilliant and important. Don't forget other food season events. Thank you everyone for being here and have a great night.