 Welcome everyone. It's great to see such a cool room. My name is Sarah Stefano. I am a post-doctoral fellow in the Economics Department here at SOAS, and I would like to welcome you all to this seminar on behalf of the SOAS Research Cluster on Food and Nutrition Health in Development. This is a new research cluster led by the Economics Department bringing together students working on issues of food, nutrition and health in low and middle-income countries. So, the research cluster is led by Professor Jane Harrigan who is here and also by Dr. Delver Johnson who unfortunately is not able to be with us today because she's busy. So on behalf of the cluster I would like to welcome Professor Tim Lange who is very pleased to have him here as the speaker of our first public seminar. Tim Lange is Professor of Food Policy at the Centre for Food Policy at City University London. I'm sure many of you are familiar with a lot of his work. He's been working for many years on the relationship between food, nutrition and health with a specific focus on policy, if that's correct. So I'm not going to mention all of the roles that Professor Tim Lange had, but I want to say that Tim was a food commissioner on the Sustainable Development Commission between 2006 and 2011. And a member of the Council of Food Policy Advisers between 2008 and 2010 is currently a member of the London Food Board advancing at the mayor of London since 2009. He has written extensively on the subject. The one thing that I want to mention is that the talk he's going to give today will give us a flavour of his new call for food, sustainable diets. The title is right there on the first slider. Perhaps I should also say that some of his very recent work is on Brexit and food policies, so any of you interested in this subject should check out his work on that. Now we'll hand over to Tim. The way he's going to work is that Professor Tim Lange is going to speak for about 20-25 minutes. Then Professor Jane Harrigan, who I'm going to introduce now, is going to give a short discussion. And then we'll have time for questions and answers. So this should last for about an hour from now. Okay, over to you. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. When I was sort of... I couldn't remember whether I said to Sarah I would do any slides at all, but now I'm regretting it actually because I think I've done about 40 slides. It creates all the rules that one should do in 20 minutes. I'd actually forgotten it was a 20 minute. But I mean I can say what the talk is. Now we can go to sleep and work up in 25 minutes. Basically, this term, sustainable diets, has come in to mean diets which are not just good for health, but good for the environment. That's the simplistic view. We in our centre tend to champion and explore the more complex view which I'll talk about, which is that it's also culture, it's economics, it's other things. But essentially why we're talking about it is because food is the main driver of climate change, water use, we've got Tony Yalham, my guru here in the room at the front, from the sides, and King's biodiversity loss. You name it, food is the big factor. It's the big factor in non-communicable diseases. It's the big shaker, it's the biggest employer on the planet. If we don't sort out this, essentially we're in very serious trouble. So this term, sustainable diet, has come to be a code for thinking through the consumption end of the food system. So I'm a food systems type of thinker. My friend Ben found here, so I was also likewise where we were young when we started, but now we're the old fucks. Sorry, not in Ben's case, but it's a young fuck, where we've been doing it for 40 years, trying to apply a new understanding of how food works and the supply chains and what it means and the inequalities of power. So when I use a term like food systems, I'm meaning a structural analysis, not just a sort of a narrow dietitian's view or something. I tend to do headline, chapter, headings, or like this. So what's the problem? We can do this very quickly. I've said it, it's basically health. The evidence about this is now just overwhelming. We have a problem of overwhelming evidence not being answered. That's our problem. The problem is not what's going wrong. We know what's going wrong. There are some bits that we're arguing about but not much. And it's immediately, I think, a complexity problem. You can go, what I do as a generalist, as a policy analyst, and go across all of these different disciplines, different takes, and essentially in all of these, the problems are coming up. The slides are for you, so I'll go through them very fast. I mean, just start with health. If there's one thing that gets people's attention, it's usually health. I mean, food is the cluster or the cross-cutting issue that explains the cluster of the main causes of disease. The global burden of disease done by the World Bank and the World Health Organization initially has been updated many times. The methodology changes. It doesn't matter whether you look at standard epidemiology or look at global burdens of disease and dailies and quarries and all of these metrics. It comes out that diet is now actually the biggest factor. It causes all these deaths, but what's involved is this key notion my good friend Barry Popkin planted about 25 years ago, this notion of the nutrition transition. As fast as we get this evidence, the world carries on going through the nutrition transition. It's eating differently. The moment we get more affluent, we start eating like the rich, or how only the rich is to live, and the result is a very contrary public health world. The costs are just astronomical. I'm not someone as Ben knows only too well from discussions we had well 30 years ago. I'm not someone who thinks that economic factors shape what politicians and policymakers do, because here, for decades, we've had evidence of the costs of ill health, diet-related, and yet the food system carries on churning out overproduction, malproduction, malconsumption, and externalised costs. If the evidence from the communists really did have an impact on policy, the data would surely overwhelm it. And the big thing is now that the costs are in the lower middle income areas, exactly your area. The rich world is barely afforded that the middle and lower income countries cannot. This is away from that area. This is, again, my good friend Johann Rockström and well Stephanie in Australia, Rockström at the Stockham Resilience Institute. This work that they're looking at planetary boundaries, not as food, but just looking at how is planet Earth doing, and basically it's not being very well, and across all of the main boundary issues that these interdisciplinary scientists are looking at, these planetary scientists are looking at, food is a cancer of about 60%. It doesn't matter where you look in the evidence. If you look you're getting more honed into food, the FAOs, livestock's long shadow report in the mid-2000s, and then updated by also Steinfelter, I know, good agricultural economist who's head of the Division of FAO, they redid all the data and found, whichever way you look at it, particularly meat is a driver of greenhouse gas emissions. The FAO was trying to give a positive spin to all of this and saying, look, the best farmers with the lowest emissions, the best management of emissions can reduce emissions from capital by 30%, but then on page 43, I think it was, if the world carries on eating more meat, all of those efficiency gains are better. In other words, somewhere along the line a big issue of livestock has to be addressed. Whether we look at it as national level, by land use, by different types, Brazil, they can chop down the whole of the rest of the Amazon, but it's still actually, there's a squeeze on land, this is grid, grid arendall data, I was looking at India, because I was a child brought up in India, and you just see that, this is by hectare, Brazil's got four and a half hectares per person in population terms, India about a third of a hectare, and then you look at the land use, forest pastures, cropland and other, cropland is the interesting one, because that's plants, that's what we really depend on, and if we spend our cropland feeding animals there, we're making cars to compete with us. That's problematic in India for religious reasons, as I'm sure you know. There is a very big difference in different regions of the world, different nation-states. We've got Tony here, you know, this is one of my standard slides from Chapkin and Herkstra, you know, the average westerner eating one burger, you know, a hundred gram burger is basically using two and a half thousand litres of embedded water. This is, you might say, OK, that's fine in white Britain. We'll actually get real, Britain is not white actually. The south-east of England is water stressed. In north Wales, where part of my family are from, it is white. So what are we talking about? Relocating where we grow animals. If we grow them, what does it mean? Well, you can't grow wheat on the mountains of Snowdonia. It's wet, but it is not a great place to grow and harvest serials. So if you're feeding serials to your animals, which is what the world does, this is a problem. This is the squeeze, the notion of squeeze. Thinking of here a lot, here are the figures on rice, you know, I had cancer about 12 years ago and all I wanted when I was in the hospital having operations was to eat my childhood food of the rice and dal. I mean, psychology has gone wrong, why should not be surprised by this? The rice and dal is actually very heavy. Well, the dal is not so much, but the rice, well, look at the embedded water in the rice. If there's one crop that comes out as under threat from climate change, it's actually rice. Meantime, on the social dimension, we've got 1.7 billion people overweight and obese, and only about 1.9 in Hungary. This is a messy world. We've got this nutrition transition going on, sweeping into more and more what the great Brazilian nutritional epidemiologist Carlos Montanero at Sao Paulo University calls ultra-processed foods, a shift from simple diets to ultra-processed diets which are made in factories with the fats and the salts and the sugars and what we, in my world, call the new adulterations happening. This is a shift which has been an indicator of success. Don't let's forget that. And it's happening very rapidly. This is from my colleague and indeed my replacement as director of our Centre for Human Policy at City, Corinna Hawks, co-editor of the World Nutrition Report. This is from the Globe panel report that she corrode for the Global Panel of Experts on Agriculture that came up a couple of months ago. This is worth looking at. Lower income, middle income, sort of upper middle income and higher income. The blue is ultra-processed foods just in every area except the high and the high income countries like Britain, the United States, the OECD, rich elements of the OECD, consumption of ultra-processed foods is leveling off, but look at the level it's got to. And it's this that worries us, this upward rise. And indeed the shift from cooking food to receiving pre-prepared food is a key part of the picture I'm painting to you. You can look at these later. This is from Carlos Bonteras, a paper as well. I'm going to go through this faster. To get into the economics, don't let's forget, actually I regret putting this slide in because I've just done a better one of literally figures of the prices since the 1860s. Essentially food prices have come down over the last century and a half in world terms and in rich countries. It's varied by country and varied by circumstance, but this is the FAO Food Price Index over the last 50 years from 1961 to 2016. Initially last month, so it's pretty up to date. And you see this is basically the banking and oil crisis. And if I had done a logograph I'd have shown you World War I, World War II, but it went up and then it was oil. It's moved from war crises to oil crises. And sometimes they're the same. Here's a nice way of showing it's not just food, but how oil peaks. Here is the early 1970s. So agriculture fertilizers and energy process and you see fertilizer rockets for the moment I think. And it's fertilizers that has given big increase of output for the last 70 years. It's not? Agrochemicals is fertilizers. This is a long slide, a lovely piece of work done by USDA, ERS, which I really like. You can look at research services over 100 years. Basically it was in 1909 to basically 2000. You could see how the U.S. actually, the U.S. had very high availability of calories in the 18th and 19th centuries upon the reasons people emigrated. And it got squeezed actually, but then it rose too in the United States. It's all in the second half. Post-Second World War we're dealing with what we call the New Food Revolution. It's the productionist paradigm. Or the next colleague of Ben's, Michael Eastman, and I wrote a book called Food Wars. If you want to look at it, a new edition came out last year. But what is interesting is that in the amount of money over time, this is from 1929 in the states to 2000, the amount of money people spend in the nutrition transition goes down, even though in real terms it's going hard. So it's quite important for you need to buy a more mass collection of jumpers and take your kids on holiday and go and eat burgers with your mates after boring lectures by professors. I've said this really, but I really want to stress this on sustainable diets. Look at this later and I'll put it in actually, because here we are, so else. The meat eating, the top meat eating country, the thing that governments do not want to face is meat. They just don't want to face it. And you can see why when you start looking at where the high meat consumption is. I'm not going to go into that any more details. It's not just meat, by the way. There are very different pictures. This is from great studies by Ripple and colleagues. Different animals have different emissions. Methane, I'm sure you know, is 24 times more climate change inducing than CO2. But the problem is ruminants rather than rice, but rice ain't particularly a good diet. This is why the theme I'm giving you is sustainable diets. Is it just simply nutrition plus environment or is it nutrition plus culture plus price plus social issues? I think it is and that's what I've come to say. I think we cannot address the challenges that are coming from the evidence about the food system unless we get a grip over what, with our panelist and Michael and our book, a multi-criteria approach to sustainable diets. So what do we need by sustainable diets? Well, one of my heroines, Joan Gassau, a very nice woman, still alive, a nutritionist at Columbia and Kate Clancy, a PhD student who first wrote a very short paper in 1987 where the term was first coined and it's sort of ground. I was an immediate early fan of it and basically what they meant by it was nutrition plus environment. Joan, a very keen organic girl, now her husband, she's a wonderful woman. She was thinking about ecosystems, things as any of us from the 1960s do and the most pared down, when I sat on the government's kind introduction and I was on various committees at the end of the Labour government when the banking oil crisis had happened, they suddenly panicked and said, my God, we've got sought out our food problems, that's just no income, it's us. And we had a huge fight inside the British state machine over some reports called the Food Matters Report, if you're interested in it. What I was across Whitehall was that the British state would say, the British food systems got a shift to address nutrition plus environment or actually heart disease plus carbon. So that was the compromise and the food industry was, enough of it was prepared to buy into that and actually we were prepared to compromise saying, okay, that's good because if you lower carbon you're lowering meat actually and you're doing all sorts of other things. But the evidence in this very quick course tour I've given you says that it's more complex than just nutrition and carbon. It's culture, it's people's aspirations, it's what they want, it's their pleasure, it's their social dynamics to food. I'm a social scientist, I suspect, so maybe you want to. So it becomes, as you've already read here, the issue of sustainable diet, institutions, John Gosar and Kate Chansey did their paper 30 years ago is complexity. But that in political terms and policy terms is tricky. No politician wants to say it's complex. They want something very simple. So I'm now speaking as a pragmatist. Someone who's had to be inside a machine but also studies it. You can get a toe in the door with a simple issue, and as long as you're dragging the complexity behind you, fine, then you get changing. We're actually beginning to do that. But that's a different talk. I had the pleasure and privilege of co-chairing the FAO's report, sorry, FAO's scientific symposium to review and think about sustainable diets. And I chaired the element strand of that which came up with this definition, which I'm not going to read out, which is now obviously highly cited. This is the UN, so it's quite useful. And you can see the complexity, you can see certainly mine, my job is to steer this last group of people into agreeing something that's multi-criteria. So it's moved on from Kate Chansey and John Gosar. Well, but this is the difficulty policymakers have. There is an evidence policy gap, is the picture I'm giving you. If you think policy is made by evidence, grow up. It's not how it is. Sometimes evidence is very important in policy. Very often policy is completely in all's evidence. And that's not just a conspiracy, very, very rarely is it, a conspiracy. It is much more that there are bad champions, no one's organising it, no one's articulating it, it hasn't been translated. There are other dynamics to the policy making. But the reality is we have a lot of evidence policy gap. We've got a problem which is for 17 years the food system has been asked to do what it's done. Produce more, intensify, enable food to get cheaper, feed people's aspirations, on every store, on every corner. This is liberty. Professionally part of the problem has been that the academics were also driven, I don't need to say that in Britain, were all reft and now little silos being judged for how successful you are. Work harder is always rule number one. This is bonkers. When actually we need to put across the evidence, walk across the evidence and put it together, that's what we should be doing as academics. So it's been a half. We've not had any. And I think the problem for me, I genuinely will think, but I think it was a political failure. Not just a political failure of academics, it's a political failure generally. But I'm going to give you some good news from that. In a moment. Well, it is complex. But then you go to Qatar, which I can never say the most correct. Qatar. Whichever way I say it, it's wrong. There's Qatar. It's got sustainable dietary guidelines. Did you know that? It's astonishing. My PhD student was the person who wrote them. His is the recollection. But the interesting thing is, hey, do they practice it? Well, that time will tell. We'll see what difference it makes. But why and how did that happen when the United States last year rejected turning its five-yearly reviewed dietary guidelines for Americans, which the scientific advisory group had worked for two years and produced, I think, a 500-page report on the reasons why there should be environmental factors in the dietary guidelines. The Secretary of State for Agriculture in the U.S. turned it down. 35,000 submissions were made to the consultation process. I don't know how many, but let's be charitable. Maybe 1,000 came from the food industry. 33,000, 32,000 were from everyone else, saying we want them to become sustainable dietary guidelines. But the Secretary of State for Agriculture outvoted the Secretary of State for Health and the dietary guidelines for Americans ignored in line. So the biggest emitter of diet-related greenhouse gases put its head in sand. So we've got the Democratic evidence-based scientifically literate America says no, but Qatar, a small oil, delivers something. How has this happened? That's very interesting politically. What Hamila Mason and I have done in our book has ended up saying, OK, well, we are where we are. We've reviewed lots of different things. Different governments tell the story of the Americans and Qatar. The most interesting story of all is Sweden. Sweden was the first country to produce evidence-based sustainable dietary guidelines in 2008, 2009. It's Environmental Protection Agency and it's National Food Administration, so it's two scientific bodies worked for a year and a half, two years and produced a report published being in Sweden. Everybody's in the open. They're environmentally conscious, environmentally conscious consumers. Being good Europeans, they submitted it to the European Food Safety Authority as there's an overarching responsible body of the European Union who told them to remove them. This is a very marquee bit of politics. It is strongly suspected that a very big American meat company, Smithfields, then owned by the Americans, now owned by the Chinese, which had bought all the former Soviet Union and Polish meat interests in Eastern Europe, lobbied through the Polish government to get them withdrawn. The reasons for them being withdrawn is that the Swedish dietary guidelines said if possible to eat locally and eat seasonally, and that was against the single market. Well, that's maybe an ostensible reason, but the point is in Australia something very similar happened. In Britain, we started going down the route as the era I was involved and then the coalition government came in and stopped in the first month after election. It stopped the project of creating integrated advice for consumers, linking health and environment being done through the food standard policies. And then why is this going on? What on earth is wrong with saying to the public in rich countries, poor countries, actually we've got to eat within environmental limits for health, for culture. But apparently this is very hot politics. So, the journey so far, I think just the evidence is going on. If you use a tide analogy, there was a rush up in the late 2000s and it's been driven back, but it's building up. Actually not at the national level, but at the international level and at the local level. A very interesting move happening at cities. I was in Milan in October on World Food Day, October the 16th and the day before we launched the Milan Urban Food Policy Act which was signed by 100 so-called world cities. Actually it was very moving. I'm not easily moved, but I was moved actually. We were in the building that the British bombed when trying to drive the fascist sort of Italy in 1944, 43, 44, which the Italians had restored very beautifully right next to the Milan Cathedral which is a stunning building if you've never seen it. The Italians decided they would not rebuild it but they would restore it so that it was safe and that's the key meeting hall of the city. So here we are in something the British had bombed, but all over the world there were mayors from Shanghai, Beijing, Copenhagen, Melbourne, every continent except Antarctica. I won't go into here, but we've got at the global level we've got this really interesting slow growth at the UN level. We've seen two international conflicts on nutrition, the Sustainable Development Goals passed last year and signed and now ratified by half of this Mr Trump turns them up, which he might, or what he might, you cannot deal with the 17 SDGs unless you deal with food. You can't do it. In which case the picture I'm trying to paint is the move for sustainable diets is inexorable unless it's political. We've got experimentation happening at the national level, but not getting anywhere. No country except Qatar has it. Sweden was made with druids but then came back with new cultural guidelines so they didn't give up, which was terrific. But actually the enthusiasm is down here and I've put the link there if you want to look at it. There's now 120 cities signed on. So what are the issues arising? Why does this matter to so has? I think because, well, for people like me there's a very important issue, formal versus informal guidelines, the difficulty of multi-criteria approaches, which we can talk about more, but what can LDCs do? If you don't know the literature, bit by bit, I am very heartened because this used to be a discourse that was seen as the rich consumer world. This is where fancy people inhabited. But it's not if your country has a massive NCD, it's non-communicable diseases. It's not if your country is in the front line of climate change and that's why this is becoming a hot development issue. If you don't know them, the ODI reports are good. I've put them there. Here's Qatar and here's Brazil. I think Brazil has made an absolute blinder on this. Their national dietary guidelines review was led by Carlos Montero conveniently and he, who we're close with, gets the point and starts to the brief that this was revising nutrition guidelines but proofed them against the environment. Didn't make them sustainable dietary guidelines but said, actually, if we follow the nutrition guidelines we're recommending the environmental footprint will come down but they sold it to the ministry and to the Brazilian public on cultural grounds. And here they are. And this was the blinder. You can look through these later. I mean, essentially they're talking in very everyday language, which I like. And this is the official, passed by the minister of health. Avoid fast food chains. Think very carefully of some things being advertised. You know, these are the messages that actually are needed if we're going to address the enormity. Be critical of commercial advertising and food products. Whoa, is this boy happy? You know, a child in the world today has seen 10,000 advertisements within their first three years. You know, we talk about democracy and power. Actually, over food, it's a walkover. Now, don't lose sight. There are very powerful faucets. Here's one of the richest men in the world going down the route of funding that based meat. That burger cost a quarter of a billion dollars. There are all sorts of possibilities to deal with the objective evidence I started with. All sorts. So don't lose sight of those. But I think what's interesting is if you look at this issue of sustainable art through the multi-criterion lens, you'll see that there are very interesting pressures building up on all sorts of fronts in companies. I always say that PepsiCo is my second least-favoured company on the planet. If ever I meet anyone from PepsiCo, I say, I really want you to go bus tomorrow and then we'll be feel better. For some reason, they don't take any notice of me. But they did astonishing things in Britain. They're experimenting in this 50 in five. They've reduced the greenhouse gas emissions in Britain as an experiment by 40% in five years. I mean, you have to say that's quite interesting. Now, why are they doing it? They're doing it out of self-interest. It's not out of nationalism. They want to be around. So even though the politics has pushed back sustainable dietary guidelines, there are some very paradoxical counterforces to say we have to do things. This is the biggest pasta company in the world, Barilla. These are very famous. They're actually very good. And it's a really extraordinary company. In some respects, they get the point. They've done this inverted pyramid. So there are lots of things. I mean, here, companies replacing the state is giving guidance. This is messy. We're not happy with this. Actually, they're the type of people. Different countries have been doing different things. I've told you that. The biggest conservation body in the world, WWF, concluded six years ago that if it really was bothered about pandas, albatrosses, and polar bears, it had to help stop the nutrition transition. So a conservation society has become the biggest activist on sustainable diets. And it's extraordinary what they're doing, actually. It's very interesting. And I love this sort of world of where localized experiments are going on. It's civil society. I'm almost there. What have I said? I've painted a big picture, which I don't apologise for. I think we're at a point where we have to review history for the last 70 years. The productionist era. The second world war reconstruction of agriculture has been highly successful, but highly damaging. And we now know enough that this has got to stop and it's got to change, and the consumption element of that has to be a face. You can't just deal with it at production. The sustainability of consumption is a key, if not the key factor. I think we end up, and that's what Pamela Mason and I end up in a book, talking, saying this has to be what we've called the SDG-squared strategy. Sustainable diets, dietary guidelines to meet the sustainable development goals. And that requires, you know, broad front politics, but it actually raises very delicate and very hard issues that are as old as food issues, namely democracy versus control. And that's why I poet Qatar versus America. Just think of the politics of that. It's not lost on you, I'm sure. Okay, that's it. Thank you very much for giving us such a big picture. I'm sure it's true there's... I'm sure it's true there's lots of thoughts. Sit down, please. I'm going to sit over there. And people will have many questions to ask, so we'll start with our discussion. Professor Jane Harigut, who's a professor of economics here at SOAS, some of her recent work, work has focused on food policy in the Middle East, but he's clearly looking at the role of food prices in the Arab Spring and the following shift to food sovereignty in the Middle East and in the Pacific region. I just wanted to say a couple of things. One is that for those of you who use Twitter, you're welcome to tweet and use the hashtag SOASECON. And also for those of you who didn't get the chance to get tea or coffee before, there will be chance after we end the seminar, so don't worry about that. Thank you, Tim, for a fascinating talk. It's a shame we couldn't let Tim speak for longer. I've been lucky enough not just to listen to Tim this afternoon, but also to read the first draft chapter of his forthcoming book, which is also called Sustainable Diets. Again, it's a shame that that book's not out, I think until May, March next year. It's always a shame that publishers take so long to get these books on the shelf once people have delivered the manuscript, but I urge you all to go and buy a copy of that when it comes out in March. I certainly will be published by Routledge. Borrow it. Or borrow it. Yes, it might be a bit expensive. Anyway, thank you, Tim. The three key and critical insights I took from both Tim's fascinating talk and reading the introductory chapter of his book was firstly how topical and pressing this issue of sustainable diets has become. Secondly, how we've ended up in a position that is so far away from sustainability in terms of what we eat and drink. And thirdly, how complex the concept of sustainable diets and associated issues actually are. So those were the key three key messages I got today and reading the chapter. So I want to talk about each of those three issues very briefly before we open it up for a discussion from the floor. Pressing. Why is this such a pressing issue? Well, I think Tim's made it very clear that if we continue to eat following the sort of North American, European dietary pattern, and if middling come and lower income states continue to aspire as many people in those countries do to those type of Western diets, then the implications are quite devastating. They're devastating for biodiversity, they're devastating for climate change, land and water use, food availability, food waste, public health, and much, much more as well. And I think Tim, particularly in his book really makes a powerful case that we can't ignore this any longer and if we do so, we do so at our own peril. Now, he provides some fascinating facts and figures, we saw lots of them up on the slides to drive this message home and they all make for pretty alarming and depressing reading when you look at that data. But a couple of the key figures that really stuck in my head, some of which Tim presented today, some of which are not today, but in his book. Well, firstly, around 1.7 billion overweight in these people globally, that's a staggering figure, resulting in the fact that between 2010 and 2030 the estimated cost of non-communicable diseases related to diet, that seems like, diabetes, strokes, heart attacks will be roughly 30 trillion US dollars. That's about 48% of 2010 global GDP. That's a huge, huge global cost. Another figure he gives us and most of that hitting middle income and lower middle income countries that can least afford that huge healthcare bill and other associated costs. So, another fascinating figure, agriculture emits over 13% of all greenhouse gases. Another figure that really, really struck me, I had no idea of this, even though I work on food myself, 220 million tons of food waste globally a year doesn't mean much to me, but when Tim says what that's equivalent to, it's equivalent to the annual food production of South Saharan Africa is wasted every year. That's a stunning figure. And approximately half global cereal production goes to feed livestock in order to satisfy our desire for meat and dairy products. Some of these facts and figures really drive home the position we're in at the moment. The second thing I think Tim does, he didn't talk so much about this today because he had very limited time but I think it's done very well in the book. He traces the way we actually have ended up in this position. So, he talks about the huge increase in food production since the middle of the 20th century, but also the fact that this has been combined with an ethos which supports the idea of development as being rooted in the market and consumer choice. In other words, what he calls the industrialization and the marketization of food, which is all part of sort of neoliberal thinking and ideology. So, at the same time, he argues that power over land is no longer residing with agriculture itself. It now resides with traders, processors and retailers, the big food giants who work off the land and who help shape what we eat and drink. But what he does in the book, which I think is fascinating, he shows that the drive to produce cheap food is not really cheap food after all. It has what economists would call major externalities, in other words, external costs that are not usually captured by the market price of food. And to quote from his book, he says, cheap food isn't cheap, extra costs like elsewhere. So, he traces how we've ended up in the particular position we're at right now. And then finally, he tells us what sustainable diets really mean, and he sort of carefully unpacks this concept of sustainable diets. And as he mentioned in his talk, this concept goes beyond the earlier simplistic definition where you just combine healthy diet with a concern for the environment. And it's a much more complex concept than that. It involves things like culture, costs, values, production, social norms, governance issues, et cetera. And he argues and shows how the idea of health and the idea of sustainability are as much social, cultural, economic and policy constructs as they are simply technical issues. And again, to quote from his book, he says, a sustainable diet is one which optimises good sound food quality, health, environment, socio-cultural values, economy and governance. And he uses those six-board categories or those six-board headings in his book to provide the structure for the analysis. So he gives us a really good feel for what we mean by this concept of sustainable diets. And then the final issue that sort of I thought was a key issue that came from the talk in the book, and this is perhaps one we can discuss more in a second, is what is stopping the transition to more sustainable diets and how do we overcome those barriers and move towards greater sustainability. And here I want to press Tim a little bit and ask him for some views on various issues. He shows this is not just a fringe importance and it's not just a technical challenge, it's a cultural challenge as well. And he also argues that the gap between evidence, policy and behaviour is widening, not getting smaller and asks how can I stop this. Well, this is a question I'd like to pose. How can we actually get the change and the movement towards more sustainable diets? And I recently had a fascinating discussion with Bea Wilson, who some of you might know used to be the food columnist in the Telegraph. And she actually has argued in some of her writings that things like national dietary guidelines and a public health approach to changing our diets where government gives the populations messages, gives them guidelines, dietary guidance. It doesn't actually work in the sense that the message gets through. We all know we should be eating five food and veggie day. We all know it's bad to buy things with a traffic light symbol in the supermarket that has lots of red and green on the little circle for fat, sugars, unsaturated fats and such. We all know that, but very few of us really act on it. It's not significantly changed our behaviors. So she's very skeptical of some of the initiatives that Tim was pointing to towards the end of national dietary guidelines, government public health messages to get us to change the way we eat. And she actually approaches dietary issues from a psychological perspective. She argues that eating is a learned behavior. Humans are one of the only animals not built within innate knowledge of what is good and bad for us to eat. We learn it as children. And her approach is a psychological approach starting right off in the earliest years of childhood that we need to learn how to eat sustainably and we need to learn how to eat healthy diets. And she's talked a lot about fascinating experiments in schools, particularly in some of the Scandinavian countries, to try and get children to change their whole approach to eating and diet. So I want to press him a bit in terms of asking him what his views are, particularly on this idea that public health messages, sustainable dietary guidelines are not necessarily the most effective policy measure to get the change we need. And if they're not, what are the alternatives? How can we really get these changes? I mean, you mentioned towards the end perhaps it's the big food companies, the companies like Barrilla who might, with the right kind of pressures, see it to be in their own interests to change their behaviors, their advertising, their marketing. Is that the way forward if national guidance from governments don't work? Or is it something which is a much more individualistic approach based on the psychology of eating which really involves educating parents, going into schools, the Jamie Oliver sort of approach. So I'm quite fascinated to hear more about how we operationalize this whole concept of sustainable diets and how we actually get the change that is really necessary to address the questions and the dilemma or the crisis that Tim has so eloquently outlined for us. So I'd like to ask Tim that and I'd like to hear from anyone. Thank you very much indeed. The bad thing about coming to someone like so else is you get lovely discussions. You get to the heart of the matter. I couldn't have wished it were something better than that. Thank you. Well, you've got it. That's exactly the problem that we pose in the book. And that's why I was in a low key way saying what our answer is. There's no single answer. I mean, I know, like in Mexico, I mean, Wilson, I've just had spent an evening discussing and debating with her. I know for years and I'm a great fan of her writing. I mean, she's a really smart historian and has become a journalist. Our answer, my answer, both in the book and generally after 40 years of thinking about this, is that there's no one else. I mean, as I reminded B as a historian getting interested in the psychology, I had a PhD in psychology and got interested in the structural issues. The answer is everyone always says their area isn't the answer. And that's right. It's because it is a multi-criteria, multi-level problem. And that's where actually I'm going to defend sustainable dietary guidelines because you'll only get the multi-level, multi-factor interventions, multi-agency interventions, multi-actor interventions if you have the framework which is agreed to be necessary. And that's what we mean by sustainable dietary guidelines. It's about saying that the framework for food for the 21st century has got to be about linking the six criteria that we pose and frame the book around quality, health, environment, social values, economics and governance. And those six headings bring order to what at the present the neoliberal experiment of the last 40 years is chaotic. That we know. But we're not going to have a single answer. We just said within the social area of our six headings if we just focus on child education that consigns adults to what? You know, everyone is always happy you'll get political movement around children always even the most recalcitrant andy and estate person wants to look after their children just. But actually we've got to address population change in the next 30 years very rapid. It's taken 70 years to get into this mess but we've got possibly 20 or 30 years to get out of it. We can't put all the emphasis on reteaching children because that won't deal with the population the population exposure. So that's the first point. The second point is what I said earlier I think there are lots of interventions that are possible. What we have to do is coordinate them. Thirdly, as an academic I've started our masters that we've run that city that's doing the world's only master's programme in food policy or there are a few others about to start up I'm about to say around the world because I mean this is the big issue why is there just one master's programme on food policy? I've said I will start our course by saying what's the evidence for population doctor change? Have a war. Have a war. That's the time that populations at population level change. And it's the time at which state and capital interventions occur. That's a very soda I can see all the brains going the camera should be the camera should be looking at your faces I mean I'm not saying have a war but I'm saying it's at moments of total crisis that possibilities have been changed occur. Indeed, the productionist paradigm we're in was articulated policy ground sees in World War II actually it's a very good demonstration but at the domestic level crises are moments where people change. When people have a heart attack they start thinking about their diet that they didn't think about before when one of their loved ones has a heart attack they're more prepared to but then that's just one individual to pick up one of your points change. The individual level of change is not enough. It has to be as the great epidemiologist just the other side of the square Geoffrey Rose in the University College always said his U shaped curve we are here over here the mean of fat consumption in countries like Britain is 42% of calories from such a different fat we need to get it down to about 20, 25, 30 do we target those who are at the top and try to get them to become reformed and eat us? Well actually you've got to move the whole curve so it's got to be at the population level it has to happen. You'll always get variations in populations even in authoritarian states even in rationing circumstances so the questions you're asking are absolutely right but our answer is there is no one answer it has to be multi level multi intervention point action so it has to be structured Thank you very much Shall we take some questions for the audience? We're just clearing our throat May I please ask you to keep your questions or comments fairly short because we're very concerned Does this resonate with you? You all look like you're interested the camera won't be able to show they're looking very interesting I always expect everyone to give you a sleeping up or lunchtime so that allows me to berate so as for having biscuits biscuits God damn it Questions? Questions Comments? Rude remarks I'm just over at the level of hygiene and tropical medicine I'm a master's budget nutrition for global health but I have a big interest in policy assessment and my question was you mentioned that we have to walk across the evidence and that there's been a bit of academic failure and I was wondering what you meant by that if it was in the way we're teaching nutrition to the up and coming people who are going into policy or if it's that we've taken maybe too high a brow Can you stand on that? I can I'm actually delighted you picked up on that because I think I'm at the stage of my life I'm about to be 69 and I've stood down as a full-time running on centre where I think I'm sort of looking back at everything, what have we done what's my generation done well I think we've helped get these problems onto the agenda we have little moments of where the tectonic plates have shifted we have little moments of entry but not enough has changed a lot has changed but not enough has changed and I put that bit in that slide because I think part of the challenge we've got at the moment is we're not good at inter-disciplinary and that is always a problem, you don't get rewarded for it, you don't get the Nobel prizes in inter-disciplinary contributions of this sector or that sector I do think that is an issue I think most people you know the former head and the current head of the school of hygiene are actually very good on this point they understand and know that the huge public health calamities the world has to address cannot be resolved just by doctors or by drugs they do require multilevel multi-hectare multi-disciplinary interventions so I think education that means we need to have that element built into our programs more I don't think we do that well I think we need to reward it I think it's very hard to be an inter-disciplinary academic the notion of policy is one of the few areas you can get that actually from the range across although still the pressures are that you specialize in one area I mean to some extent cakes will always be cut up in slices in different ways you can't do everything all of the time so one has to be grown up about it but it is a very important reminder of the need for specialists that we do so well in this country and in Europe specialists need to have some education in to know what they don't know and to be prepared to work with others and to know that most of the problems that we all deal with cannot be resolved on our own by our expertise if they listen to it all what's your view? No absolutely I'm from the US and I've brought up my whole life to specialize and choose majors and a particular track and now I finally feel like I'm on a track that is interdisciplinary to a certain extent but there is a pressure to specialize, specialize, specialize and you certainly close yourself off to other views and you certainly can't tackle an obstacle like the current food crisis without taking in all the different components for doctors, there isn't just a miracle through I mean that's absolutely right people like me, social scientists have gone wrong, drawn to public health because public health is actually the history and reality of public health as it has to be interdisciplinary public health, Geoff Rainer and I in our book Ecological Public Health we're called it, reframing the conditions Thank you very much Sophie Fiorella, Matteo and Ben who are members of the Sauras class on Food Nutrition and Public Development for the contribution to the organization of the Serial and Astana Finian who's our poster the Long and Middle East study in this room in this part of Sauras and thank you all for coming I really enjoyed it I thought I'd save you having to Thank you I would like to thank you to Sarah who has actually been headed up by Sarah who's really been a huge driving force in getting the cluster off the ground and pushing ahead in organizing this first very successful event so thank you