 Hello everybody, and a very warm welcome to the British Library food season, and in particular this event for feeding the world, farming the planet. I'm Angela Clutton, I'm one of the co-directors of the food season, and together with Mr Thompson and our curator Polly Russell, we've worked on putting this season together. And welcome too to our online audience, we have people joining us via that way too. We have a little line-up change, Abby Allen from Piper's Farm is sadly unable to be with us tonight, and we have Peter Gregg, who is the founder of Piper's Farm, so we are all set. A cracking panel and a cracking chair, Dmitri Huta, who is the BBC's Rural Affairs Champion. If you've heard much on BBC Radio 4 or sounds to do with rural affairs, food, natural history or the environment is a very strong chance that Dmitri has had something to do with that. He's passionate about food, food production and the environment, so I think we couldn't be in better hands for this very very interesting and important conversation tonight. Dmitri, over to you. I'll start here. Thank you and thank you for all of you for joining us here tonight, and for those of you following us online as well. And thank you to the British Library as well for organising an amazing range of talks. What should we feed ourselves? How should we grow food? How do we ensure that we grow food sustainably and without destroying the planet? How do we stop the giant biodiversity decline? All those questions, in my opinion, are probably the most important and pressing issues society needs to resolve. If you go on Twitter, you'll probably find quite a few people who seem to know what the answer should be. But social media has favoured highly polarized debates where, to be heard, many of the answers seems to have to be black or white. And tonight I hope we can go a bit further than this because I'm sure everybody here knows that the answers, as ever, are much more new. In the UK, those questions are crucial, especially because around 70% of our land is used for agriculture, but only 13% of our UK land is covered by forest. This compared to around 39% in the EU. Globally, food production as a whole contributes to around a third of global emission. And so looking at all died and how we farm is key if we want to have any chance to get to net zero by 2050. And if you like me, this brings some huge personal dilemma. I love food, I love feeding people, I love feeding friends and family, I love cooking, I love eating, especially a good steak. My wife is Brazilian and we just love to put an entire cut of meat on the barbecue or pecania on the ferrasco. It's delicious, but the moral dilemma each time I eat a steak is really difficult. Am I contributing to climate change? Even the choice of charcoal is an issue. But globally, two-thirds of lands used for food production is actually used for grazing animals. And a lot of the rainforest that is being cut down is to grow soil to feed livestock. Then on top of that, we have the biodiversity crisis, the cost of living crisis, which makes it very difficult to feed their family properly. Food inflation grew by 17% last year. We have the war in Ukraine destabilizing the global food chain. We have the effect of Brexit, which affects access to farm seasonal labor. We have the effect of climate change, which was partly responsible for the tomato and cucumber shortage we had a few weeks ago. But then another dilemma I've got after saying all that is I'm currently in the middle of doing some academic research on how best engage audience in those issues. The empirical research is quite clear. The results are quite clear. Doom and gloom is a switch off, and we need to be more fun. So with that in mind, in an effort to bring a bit of fun to the party, I'm going to ask my panel to play along with my favorite game, Death Row Dinner. Basically, imagine you on death row what is going to be your last meal that you're going to be requesting. So first on our panel, we've got Henry Dimblebylby, as you know, the author of the National Food Strategy. He also published his highly acclaimed book, Ravenous. He was a death row non-exec director. We resigned a few weeks ago after what he called an insane lack of action on obesity. He's the co-founder of the restaurant chain Leone. He's co-founded chefs in school, which aims to improve school lunches and food education. And he has been a journalist for The Telegraph. He also was a commie chef at the Michelin star restaurant early in his career. Henry, what's your death row meal? I'm not trying to be that hungry on death row, to be honest, but I guess it would probably have to be some delicious Sri Lankan curry with lots of turmeric and lime and maybe some eggs in it as well. Dr Tara Garnett is a researcher at the University of Oxford, whose work looks at how the food system can become sustainable and resilient and ultimately good. She's the director of Table, a global platform looking at the future of food. Table is a collaboration between the University of Oxford, the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and Warkin University in the Netherlands. Tara, your death row meal? Well, I'm going to answer it in two ways. So probably a Greek or Cypriot mese because I'm half Cypriot and it would be something like that. But the other way I'd answer it is it would probably be crap because I used to eat it. I love it. I'm now very allergic to it, but it wouldn't matter. Nick Saltmarsh is the co-founder of Hot Mudodds who works to increase diversity on farms and in the food we eat for the benefit of farming, the landscape, the environment, individual health and our food culture, bringing brings back to the British kitchen proof to be the catalyst to build a network of farmers who started diversifying their arable rotation by introducing poles, grain and seeds. Nick and Hot Mudodds, one best food producer, are arguably the most prestigious food accolades the BBC Food and Farming Awards. Nick, your death row meal? Well, I think I'd need something very comforting and there's nothing more comforting than a bowl of dal. So I'd have a dal made with British split peas, of course. And finally, peas are great from Papyr's Farm. Papyr's Farm is a 50-acre permanent pasture family farm located in Devon. Peter believed in working in harmony with the natural landscape with his wife Henry that are determined to produce the very best of meat, which means they farm in symbiosis with the environment in a way that promote carbon sequestration and increased biodiversity. Once I was sitting next to Peter at a dinner and I asked him if his food was organic and he replied, Dimitri, my food is not organic. It's orgasmic. Maybe he can expand on that later. Peter, what is your death row meal? Thanks, Dimitri. Well remembered. Yeah, it's cooked on a fire pit using some very, very local Exeter charcoal. It would be scallops hand-dived out of Lyme Bay, followed by a piece of peccana from our red ruby beef that's been eating this stuff all its life. Yeah, and the vegetables thrown on the fire pit as well. Dreamy. I'm coming with you. So, I'm going to start by asking a few questions. I will come to the audience to get a few questions a bit later as well probably in the last half hour. If you do want to ask a question, please make it a question and not a political statement otherwise I will stop you and try to make it brief so we can go through quite a lot of them. If you're following us online, there's a Q&A option and you can put your question in there and hopefully they will appear on the iPad here. And also feel free to use social media to comment and share your thoughts. My hashtag is BL food season and most of us on the panel are on Twitter. Henry, if I can start with you. We know want to use or learn to produce foods to secrestrate carbon to improve biodiversity. Is it really possible for farmers to do all this and improve soil at the same time? It is, so I think it's a very good way of framing. Up until late 18th, early 19th century, we used sunlight on the land to produce everything we needed to produce the clothes that we wear, the material for our buildings, our food, so on and so forth. And then we discovered millions of years of trapped sunlight in the form of fossil fuels and through the 18th century into the 19th, 21st century, we've basically used fossil fuels to not only produce the materials for clothes but produce all the energy we need it and we've used the land to create food. And we're now in a situation where we actually need to ask more of the land again. So it's like solving a simultaneous equation. Can we produce enough food to feed ourselves, secrestrate carbon and restore biodiversity using the same amount of land? And the answer is yes, but only if we stop wasting as much. And that's not just the food that we throw away. It's how we farm. So often a lot of the most destructive farms farm unproductively and we need to farm more productively. But also, you mentioned in your introduction, 85% of the land that we use to feed ourselves here in the UK is used either to graze animals or to grow plants to feed to animals and that is a very inefficient way of creating food and we need some of that land back just to end by giving a scale to which animal agriculture has taken over the world. The animals that we rear to feed us at any one time now weigh twice as much as all of the human beings on the planet and 20 times as much as all of the wild animals, land running, birds and birds. So I'm not a vegan, I'm not vegetarian. It's just we are eating way too much meat and we need to take some of the pressure off. We need some of that land back to do other things. I'm sure we'll come back to the subject of meat later on. But Tara, with table you've been really investigating how we should produce food sustainably, bringing academic rigor to your work. What are some of the key findings you've found? I think just to echo what Henry's been saying, we have a growing global population with increasingly resource intensive demands. We have finite land that has to do more and more things and we need to somehow square the circle and I think if we have to make some big decisions as a global society, we have to decide what's really, really important and to give my personal opinions what I think is really, really important is that we feed people adequate nutritious food and we protect other living things. We make space for the non-human world and if we are to achieve both and I think we can just about do it but what does need to take a hit is our assumption that we can have anything we want in any quantities we want, any time or day we want and the consequences be damned and I think that's what we really, really need to be addressing and there will be difficult questions to... there will be a difficult juggling act between how much land we appropriate for ourselves and for our needs and what we retain for wild creatures and the extent to which we can share land with other species and the answer is going to be different for different parts of the world. Yeah. Peter, regenerative agriculture is no-branded by many politicians, business farmers as the solution for farming and Pibrous Farm, it probably wasn't called region agriculture at the beginning but are you doing region agriculture? Is what you do region agriculture? And if so, how do you define it? Because there's no agreed definition of regeneration. Yeah. As you alluded to in your remarks earlier about me not wanting to use the word organic, Dmitri, I'm equally averse to using the word regenerative just because it's become a contemporary label and it's trying to box everything into something that isn't nuanced. Again, as you talked about earlier, this is a highly complex discussion and a very finely balanced argument but I think a couple of points Henry made are spot-on. He referred to the fact that pre-industrialised agriculture we harvested the energy of the sun to produce food. Productivity was about using the sun's energy efficiently. Tara has talked about good nutrition. They're the basic building blocks. It's why I brought a lump of the farm because inside that bit of Pibrous Farm there are many hundreds of times the number of bacteria there are human beings on the planet. So to even begin to think that as an industry producing food we should not really treasure and respect and harness the unbelievable power that goes on in the soil because they're the ones who convert sun's energy into food and if our gut health is aligned to the soil biology it delivers nutritious food. So I'm not good on these sort of labels I'm afraid but if you want to say are we regenerative I'd say back to the future it's back to the future let's go back to when it was basic building blocks of food systems and farming we won't be far wrong. Nick we talk about we need to change our food system is it all responsibility as an individual do you think those change or whose responsibility is it and what kind of change do we need to achieve? So we do need significant change in the food system from farming right through to what we eat as individuals and those two things obviously have to go hand in hand we need change in farming and we need dietary change as well for the sake of the environment but also for the sake of our health and nutrition and one incredibly fortunate thing that I'm grateful for is that those two things farming for the environment and eating for our health and nutrition they do go hand in hand it's the same changes can achieve both of those aims I would resist though the idea that it's incumbent and the responsibility lies entirely with us as individuals or as consumers as we're often called which is a word that I hate we're not just consumers we're people, we're individuals we share food, we grow food we're all part of a giant food web rather than being discreet components in some simplistic food chain it's not our responsibility we need to be part of the change but for the system to change we need wider political change we need the businesses that work within that system and choose the food that is made available to us in the shops it's very convenient for them to say that everything is down to consumer choice but our choice is only what we're faced with in the shops largely and as individuals we can be very powerless in shaping that so we need the businesses to change and to enable that we really need political change we need the government to have the courage to take responsibility for the food that we eat and the way that the food we eat is produced and it's continually disappointing that successive governments fail to rise to this challenge and I'm sure Henry has seen this close up that governments can be presented with fantastic ideas and proposals and yet taking those ideas and converting them into policy that will actually drive change in the food and farming system never seems to happen and we need to collectively agitate for governments to take on that responsibility Henry, I think Nick is probably right that to achieve systematic change the best way I think history shows us is through legislation if you look at the 5P tax on the carrier bag it was hugely successful the amount of plastic bag used completely decreased why is governments so... you were there at DEFRA for six years so you actually need a combination of legislation and love so government intervention is necessary but it is not sufficient and there are fundamentally two things that are going on two feedback loops that are going wrong in the food system one is on the health side and in the book and the food strategy we call the junk food cycle which is the fact that our evolved appetite is in a toxic feedback loop with the corporate incentives of companies so we're not going to talk about that today we're not going to deal with it as going to bring down the NHS and make us impoverished and sick on the environmental side Partha Dasgupta in his economics of biodiversity described the invisibility of nature so what he pointed out was that nature not only is hard sometimes to quantify it's invisible, it's mobile, it's silent but also that all of the systems that we use to measure human success don't include nature so you can't count it in your wallet it's not in the balance sheet of companies it's not in the GDP and in fact it's worse than that we don't give it a zero cost we actually incentivise companies government pays companies globally governments pay companies about $500 billion a year to destroy nature causing payments to fossil fuel companies to farming companies to fishermen and that caused about $4 to $6 trillion of damage so you need fundamentally to change the incentives in that system at the moment you make much more money farming in a destructive way because we have basically our economic growth has been formed off the back and we've just been borrowing from nature and there's a terrifying equation in Dasgupta's report where he basically shows that the current path leads to extinction mathematically if we carry on as we are now we destroy nature we become extinct so that's the context so given that why is it so hard it's so hard because there are vested interests so if you look actually the government is doing nothing it's going backwards on health it's an absolute disaster but on the environmental side we have structurally the right approach which is to pay money for public goods not for farming to raise the level of regulation not come to that but every step of the way they are lobbied by different players in the system who throw grit into their gears who shed obfuscation and any misstep is treated by the press as if the world has changed and if you're trying to change a complex system in that kind of environment when actually you don't really know you have to kind of play with it it's very difficult for governments and it requires a combination of both visionary politicians who can explain this is what the future is going to look like and this is what we need to happen plus people who are all over the detail and that is a breed of politician that is very rare and we certainly haven't had it in our last two prime ministers maybe things will be a bit better over the next few years but it's a difficult thing it requires skillful politicians and we don't have those in high high numbers because it's a shit job right I wouldn't want to do it but I mean sorry excuse my language Tyra have you found some in the research you've done because you do research not just in the UK but globally have you found some example of how it's been working I don't think there's really a single country where obesity levels have been I mean the Finland example gets used a lot as an example of a country where public health problems of heart disease have been overturned by strong concerted government action but more or less everything seems to be going backwards and I think you know the other thing there was a Finland example a bunch of very unhealthy men who were eating butter with meat more or less and the government stepped in and introduced fruit and vegetable production schemes and got them adding vegetables to their meals and all the rest of it because these went down etc etc but that was a strong government with a I guess in a society with some faith in the state a sort of culturally homogeneous society lots and lots of issues were quite different from the situation were in today and I mean just going back to your point about how you hate the word consumer I really hate it as well but we have worst of it is that we think that we are and we think that's all we are and I think in addition to visionary leadership we need a collective sense that we are more than mouths and wallets that we are a kind of community of citizens with the possibility of having other goals than just going shopping and so but that's very very hard to achieve and I think the other thing that's really hard to achieve is is a sense that as soon as a member of the government a policy maker dares to make noises about regulation the headline lines are nanny state nanny state you're going to take our burgers away from us whatever it might be and I think we have a real problem as a society with getting our heads around the idea of subtlety that if one says something like you need to eat less meat then suddenly no one is ever allowed to eat any other product ever again when in fact what we're talking about is gradations and modifications and it's not a be all and end all but the debates and the discussions become very very polarised and nothing gets moved forward Henry in some of the focus group you've done I think you found out that the public in general would be in favour, except for meat the public actually would be in favour of those there's a big misunderstanding and it's on both sides so we've got the Tories who in the book we talk about the fact that the phrase nanny state was invented in this country in the 60s when most of the ruling class had been brought up by nannies and had ambivalent feelings about them and so they find it complicated the idea of intervening but the Labour now because they're so frightened of the red wall they're beginning to talk about junk food as if it's some kind of patriotic act to eat brown food and they're nervous and actually they've got it completely wrong it's going to an old Labour grandee this morning who thinks they've got it completely wrong and is going to go and talk about it but basically if you go to the red walls if you go to areas where people are really struggling with diet related disease they are fed up with having junk food bombarded at their children they want intervention and so again it the road through to policy intervention in that area is there it needs someone to make the case Andy Haldane who is the former chief economist at the Bank of England made a speech a few weeks ago saying that the number one thing holding back growth in this country is the ill health of our population the number one cause of that non-communicable disease is diet related disease and so what that looks like all the money getting sucked into the NHS and tax receipts going down it is an absolute disaster and whatever government is in place in 10 years time of whatever colour is going to be dealing with that and as Tara says fundamentally we need to change the narrative on it because this idea that we all deserve our milkshake as if that's even what it's about it's nuts, it's completely nuts Peter do we value food in the UK? A slightly indirect answer to your question Dmitri is one of the reasons I'm a poor substitute for Abbie tonight is last year she produced what I think was a fabulous book and it really is all about what you were just talking about there Tara that sort of is steak and butter fundamentally a bad idea and Nick was talking about all of the pulses and so on that Hodmer Dodds now produced so Abbie produced this book which was inspired by growing up with her grandparents who had that very old fashioned approach to how you fed yourselves you wasted nothing food was made from very basic building blocks you know meals were assembled from just individual items of food people you know they have that old saying isn't it that if your grandmother wouldn't recognise it as food don't eat it and that's not far off the truth because fundamentally then it's from a big corporate and it's ultra processed so this idea are a bit like with the farming we need to go back to the future and inspire and encourage the next generation to be excited by going using individual simple ingredients to feed themselves really well and it is a myth I think that sort of good, honest nutrition is expensive junk food is a dreadful investment and as a nation our culture around food isn't very good but all I can say is our four year old grandson is the generation who don't take this sort of top down you've got to do this because we think we're going to make money out of you doing it I think they're going to be a much more inquisitive demanding generation who say A why are you screwing up the planet and B why are you persuading us to eat that rubbish that's the exciting positive outlook that I think the food culture in this country could move towards Henry do you think that currently the price of food reflects the true cost and I mean not just the cost of production but also the environmental costs or even the social cost no it literally doesn't that doesn't mean so as part of the food strategy we looked at there were a lot of NGOs non-governmental organisations who'd done costings of food what would food actually cost if you added in the cost of treating ill health the cost of the environment and they all said actually food would be about twice as expensive if you built that in and I thought when I saw that I thought oh yeah come on that's just campaigners and they've taken the numbers and they've given them a good spin but actually I had a civil service team of 20 people working for three years on this I think the cost of food is actually probably more than that that's an underestimate I don't think they estimate the health cost in any of those estimates so food currently if you talk about the British Economist Arthur Pigu who invented taxes on externalities food does not cover the cost of society however that does not mean that food has to be twice the cost because at the moment all of human ingenuity has gone into making high yielding crops that's what they've focused on above anything else and foods that we love and eat lots of that kill us sold by processed food companies is unhealthy if we focus and this is where government intervention has to come in if you make the incentives focused on creating environmentally friendly food that was healthy I think other than meat actually you could argue that food wouldn't go up by a lot I think it's quite difficult to produce meat if you put in animal welfare in there without significantly increasing its cost and that has a political incentive so is much cheaper than the real cost of production no it doesn't necessarily mean we have to double cost of food Tara we've talked about the fact that livestock production takes so much of global lands should we just grow meat in a lab in factories and release the land to help with biodiversity and tree planting so the simple answer is we shouldn't just do anything because I think I mean the idea of going back to the future has a lot of appeal and have a lot of sympathy for that idea but we are in a situation that is unprecedented at the moment we're going to be perhaps 10 billion people on this planet and the reason we are where we are today is because we were where we were in the past the present is to an extent a response to the challenges of the past and we developed our now disastrous food system because in many ways it felt like a solution to the problems of us running out of land et cetera et cetera running out of nutrients for the land and that's why we developed mineral fertilisers and all the rest of it so which you know every solution brings new problems and that's where we are so this is a kind of long way around to saying that the past wasn't necessarily that great certainly not for lots of people and so I think we need to have some faith in our ability to imagine ways forward while retaining the knowledge and the skills that we had in the past so to get to your point on microbial protein lab grown meat and all the rest of it I don't think it's the solution I think there are lots and lots of problems with it partly to do with who is investing in it and the the extent to which if this is the solution then what is the problem and the idea that the world needs more protein is very much open for discussion and the idea that the problems of hunger are to do with an absence and insufficiency of food which again we know that it's not so much that there isn't the food it's that people are not able to afford it or they don't have the means of production so they're forced to rely on these so the causes of hunger are very complex so the idea that you invent a food and Bob's your uncle that's your solution is very very questionable that said, as Henry said we're using vast vast tracts of the world to rear animals either directly for rearing them or indirectly to grow feeds to produce them and land that is used for animals is is not available for other wild things now you can many wild herbivores have been now substituted by grazing animals and to some extent in some parts the world they fulfill the same ecological functions as wild herbivores do but we had those wild herbivores with a greater range of diversity than we do today so in so far as you can take some livestock out of the system and free up land by using technologies such as microbial fermentation then I think they can provide a certain part of the solution but they free ecological space for the sorts of grazing systems the grazing production systems that you do so well and they also free up space for nothing at all to do with humans which is desperately needed but they are not the answer because there is no single answer to a problem as horrifically and fantastically complex as that of the food system I think it's just worth pointing out just very briefly Tara and I are constantly talking about land and one of the misconceptions about meat is that it's about methane and the methane produced by women is a problem but it is dwarfed by the problem of land use so you see people on Twitter getting angry about the fact that methane falls out of the atmosphere after 12 years etc etc etc it is land that is the scarce resource here methane is important but it's almost a side issue and just to kind of emphasise you can you look at fields with cows and sheep on it and you think there's so much nature coexisting with it and in our landscapes that have been kind of managed by humans for so long arguably the kinds of biodiversity that we value in this country are as a result of the kind of coexistence of our livestock and those species but there are other kinds of biodiversity that can only survive without our intervention in that respect and that's definitely true because of the global south the Amazon and other parts which are being deforested largely because of livestock and the feeds that they require Peter you operate quite an extensive system should you just release your land for biodiversity? No I'm really conscious I think in this part of our discussion there's a very clear distinction between industrial food and food produced in harmony with nature and that particularly applies to meat my father pioneered industrial chicken production in this country post war exactly as you refer to Tara and Henry there was a desperate concern that we as a country should never be held to ransom again by you boats in the north Atlantic and so the demands post war were produced, produced, produced and as young farmers we were paid eye watering amounts of taxpayers money to basically intensify we farmed in the Yorkshire Dales at the time a high hill farm between a thousand and two thousand feet and we were being paid taxpayers money to put drainage channels into the steep hillsides to grip the peat more land and to spread fertilizer with a helicopter on land you could hardly walk up that was government policy post war my father the first chickens he produced post war took 53 days to grow a four pound chicken it now takes 28 days when I was a kid we had 7,000 chickens in a shed on the farm they now have 100,000 there's a factory near us in Devon processing 3 million chickens a week while he was alive he said I never expected that industrialisation of the food system to be exponential and that's the point we've lost control of where there is a balance between technologies that can be very helpful and looking after and respecting nature and what has happened is the food system as Henry talked about earlier is dominated by a very small number of giant corporates and they're the ones who keep insisting grow the chickens faster because drive down the unit cost because we make more money and in the middle the farmers have certainly not come out of it well and that's another point that we might want to talk about but it is not individual farmers who are driving this food system and I think it's something that's very important to allude to because if we are going to go back to a system which isn't simply about flooding the world with industrial calories because we already produce 50% more calories than we need to feed what, approaching 10 billion people so it's not like there's a shortage of industrial food but there's a desperate shortage of balance and control and looking after the role that nature must play Talking of that on who control the system I'm just wondering if it'd be interesting to bring up the role of supermarkets in the UK and also the fact that supermarket in the UK seems to operate in a slightly different way than European supermarket that was quite illustrated with the shortage of tomato and peppers and salad where a few weeks ago which yes it was because of the droughts at the end of last summer in southern Europe there was a shortage but a lot of people would have seen picture of European supermarket with the shelf fall and that's because the supermarket in Europe works differently they will pay the market price where in the UK they don't they've got a kind of fixed very low price driving the price down we talked to a Belgian co-op tomato grower during the shortage and said I've got loads of tomato for this British supermarket they're just not ready to pay the price so I'll sell it to the Germans it's the way of supermarket operating in the UK a good thing the fact that it's different that's quite during the recent shortages I got sent two things one was all the French were complaining about the two euro lettuce so we had no lettuces and their lettuce cost two euros because our supermarkets see a lettuce as being a kind of price signifier so they keep it at 70p and if the price goes down they refuse to discount it so farmers are forced to turn the lettuce into their field because they won't discount it and if prices go up they hold the price and then all of the wholesalers and restaurants go into the supermarkets and clear the shelves which is why there are shortages that's why they say you know when you see the shortage in the supermarket it says like maximum five lettuces and you go well no one's going to need five lettuce the answer is that the barobois are coming in and filling the whole trolley so that's got worse Aldi and Lidl have come in here and those guys and there's ferocious price competition in the UK but actually all of that is problematic I think in the long run we have to the supermarkets are the ones who are least threatened by the transition because they're going to sell the food anyway and so I actually think the ones who are fighting tooth and nail are the processed food companies they're the ones who there is no way out of this there is no way that they can sell their food and so I do think we have problems with supermarkets I do think that the supermarkets they're the ones who more often than not to governments say give us a level playing field give us the legislation and we will fight, they hate each other we will fight tooth and claw whereas the processed food companies say no, nothing to see here, no problem because it really is existential for them they can't exist in a good food system they would be a third of the size that they are now and that's a lot of profit moved to another area of the economy Nick we talked about fake meat or meat alternative earlier but what role protein alternative like pulse can play both in terms of diet and for sore health pulses so yes coming back to the question of fake meat I very much agree with Tara that if that's the answer then we're asking the wrong question and going back again to something that came up earlier Tara again said that we need to learn that we can't just have what we want more positively I think we can change what we want and I think the it's quite a trivial example but the example of the plastic bag tax does illustrate that we thought from the choices we all made 10, 15 years ago that we all wanted plastic bags we all wanted to go into the shop and have loads of plastic bags that's what we were doing and yet that tiny change in taxation has now completely changed what we do and what our habits are and I don't think people are feeling oh I wish we could go back to the time when we could have as many plastic bags as we want I mean it's what we want can change and I think our diets can change not through being told what we should eat in a sort of dictatorial nanny state kind of way but through a cultural change that changes the way we value different foods changes our appreciation of different foods and through a sort of holistic approach to what we eat and awareness of the impact of it and closer connection with where it comes from we can very much want different things that are better for us and better for the planet and pulses are a big part of that answer I think also coming back to the question of fake meat I'm very wary of anything being proposed as the solution there's never a silver bullet and when there have appeared to be sort of big answers to problems in the past they always come with unexpected side effects consequences that we then have to clear up the mess of afterwards and I think fake meat runs the risk of creating new problems as well as being in the control of those very big sort of agribusiness corporates that we've been talking about but pulses and more broadly diversity what I believe really strongly is that we really need more diversity in our farming and in our food and pulses can be a big part of that diversity in farming all arable farmers have arable rotations they grow a succession of different crops but because our diets have become so dependent on a very limited range of crops even globally so across the whole of the world 75% of our food comes from just 12 different plant species 5 different animal species and in the UK that's even more narrow we're essentially feeding ourselves primarily wheat, wheat is the big crop and the big food that goes into most of the processed foods that we eat and is also used to feed the industrially farmed animals that we eat if we can get more diversity into crop rotations then we get significant benefits and if some of that diversity comes from introducing more pulses into the rotation then we get the fantastic benefit of the magical property that leguminous plants have and pulses are the various seeds of leguminous plants beans, peas, chickpeas, lentils those leguminous plants with help from the microbes in the soil that Peter talked about and I hope there's some clover or something in his sod there leguminous plants with help from those microbes have the magical property of taking nitrogen from the atmosphere excellent they take nitrogen from the atmosphere and put it into the soil both for their own requirements in terms of nutrition soil nutrition, the nitrogen that all plants need but they also then leave excellent there's some clover they also then leave a fertility legacy for the crops that follow them when we're just growing a very narrow range of crops mainly cereal crops that's so demanding on the soil and the nutrition that is in the soil and available to those plants that we have those systems require huge inputs chemical inputs to control the pest and diseases but also fertility inputs and artificial fertilizer is essentially made from that concentrated sunshine, the fossil fuels we use the fossil fuels through a process called the Haberbosh process to take nitrogen from the atmosphere and put it into a form where we can put it on the land and we then put too much on the land and it runs off into the water causes and causes other problems but if we can move away from that dependence on huge chemical inputs and particularly huge inputs of fertilizer then we can significantly reduce the impact, the environmental impact of arable farming and pulses are a great way to do that getting a leguminous plant into the rotation every arable rotation should have pulses somewhere in that rotation and other farming systems should have leguminous plants like clover in them to get that nitrogen out of the atmosphere and then on the other hand pulses are also fantastic for us to eat both in terms of health and nutrition I mean they are just fantastic nutritious they're a source of protein full of fibre and resistant starch and micronutrients that give us what we need obviously we need a wide range of food we can't just exist on pulses but as part of our diverse diet they bring huge benefits so pulses definitely something we should be growing and eating more of very very brief point the point Nick's talking about diversity in farming the really exciting and positive news that we need in this debate for farmers to move away from high input industrial systems and go to diversity there's a guy called Andy Cato who started something a wild farmed wheat good old fashioned heritage wheat nature friendly farmers they've proved farmers make more money by stepping back from these high input industrial systems and having diverse rotations old fashioned traditional rotations they make more money and that's a really exciting prospect I think there's just so many things we can talk about I'm thinking gene editing science but actually Tara I just want to quickly ask you something because some Indians may may have read about some beef system with people claiming that they actually secretrate more than they produce using often the people using mob grazing sometimes claim that they secretrate more than they produce mob grazing for those who are not familiar with is kind of high high density grazing on a small patch of land and you move them every day it promotes growth of the pasture and people like young savoury and young salatin sometimes make big claims about that have they found a solution shall I comment on that so just for those of you who aren't familiar there is this idea that if you mass graze for a very short period of time cattle on a small patch of land they will eat the grass right down to its roots and they'll kind of shock the system shock the grass system causing it to put down deep roots and in so doing draw down carbon from the atmosphere and by then you've moved the cattle on to another patch of land and you give it time to recover and so the cycle continues and there have been claims that well firstly that grazing animals in this way mimics the actions of wild herbivores and so you're actually kind of mimicking natural processes and secondly that in doing so you can draw down so much carbon from the atmosphere that some claim that it could even help the most extreme proponents of this idea claim that you could even reverse climate change so the evidence there depends on firstly what agroecological system you are talking about where in the world whether those they are originally grassy landscapes which where the grassy savanna ecosystems have actually co-evolved with the animals so that's the first thing not all landscapes are naturally grassland for example Britain was originally forest and through human intervention we now have the situation where we have as you pointed out Dmitri and your introduction very very cool forest left and secondly that there is indeed evidence that these systems of management can lead to the drawing down of carbon from the atmosphere but what happens is that over time this can happen perhaps into quite an impressive degree for the first decade or so of this intervention but then the soil gradually the level of carbon in the soil starts to saturate equilibrium so more carbon in is counted by carbon going back out so after a period of time it's not sequestering drawing down more carbon so it doesn't represent a solution so I think what I would say there is that there's always interesting experimentation to be done with better ways new ways of grazing animals and they're always worth looking at but just as there is you know microbial fermentation is not the solution to anything nor is mob grazing the solution to everything because there are so many different things that we need to do and I think one other point I would make again just to kind of push back on the idea that we need to kind of go back to traditional systems and again I agree that we do but we are going back to this point that there are 10 billion of us going to be on this planet we are in a situation that we have never been in before and that we may it may turn out that we have to do some unnatural things to save nature from us and these won't be choices that we necessarily want to make it goes against our intuitions and I think that the really serious issues are when we think about new technologies the really serious questions to me are about corporate control and again the failure to think about what is the problem to which this is a solution we constantly have to be thinking about what we are actually trying to address but I don't think we should just throw out new ideas and new thinking out of hand we just can't afford to Actiwn I wanted to bring GE into the discussion because since Brexit we have signed the role I was going to say chartered the role ascends which means that we can build a country quite easily I'd like to do a show of hands if you went to the supermarket and you bought some potato it saves genetically engineered potato who would buy them so very unscientifically I would say around 5% of the audience Henry should we embrace science and new technology and the reason I sorry for putting you on the spot I've used potato is because for example potato blinds it's a real issue we've been talking about waste and actually if somebody like Rothamsted can't come up with a new GE potato which means it doesn't get potato blinds we've got far less waste probably less inputs potentially everybody's a winner isn't it? So genetic editing makes you probably know but it says you don't there is a technological crisper which means that you can cut very easily cut genes within the same species between different varietals and the argument for genetic editing is that it's not like genetic modification when you're bringing in a bit of genetic material from a different species it's simply speeding up the process of breeding so we've all referred a little bit to this existential problem that we had after the war we were going to go from a population of 2.5 billion to 8 billion and two thirds of the people on the planet today would not exist without our modern form of farming that was created by a man called Norman Ballog who scuttled about in Mexico between the sea and the uplands and created a new form of wheat which was very high yielding and short stemmed and resistant to wheat rust the argument is that rather he was very lucky to succeed because you just have to keep breeding things and hope that you get the right genes coming in so the argument for genetic editing materials you just speed up that process in my mind without a doubt that is something in particular for countries that are for crops like the banana where you've lost a lot of genetic diversity in drought ridden areas trying to create rice trying to create rice paddies that don't need to be wet so produced as methane there are all sorts of applications of this technology that could as Tara said you might not it might be the first way you go but if you're going to have 10 billion people on the planet it would be irresponsible not to investigate those technologies the other thing I'd say about GE vs GM which I think is really interesting because the technology is so cheap if you look at a country such as Argentina where it has been polluted to do this for quite a long time the number of patterns the number of new crops that have been created is a huge range of small and medium enterprises whereas GM which was highly regulated and more expensive was controlled by a very small number of corporates so I'm not sure how many GE products we will need in this country but I think it's a huge number that we will need in this country but I think it would be reckless on a colossal scale not to allow people to try and find ways of solving some of the problems of feeding ourselves without destroying our bodies and the environment by using that technology I'm just wondering if anybody's been convinced by Henry's argument does anybody didn't raise their hand before who would know would buy those GE potatoes to save the planet we've met some change tonight by the way you asked more broadly technology yes you now have drones with AI that can monitor the health of every single plant in a field and thereby you put on this nitrogen you put on this pesticide there are all sorts of ways there's now a trial being done to measure the amount of carbon in soil using the same technology that you use to measure oil there are all sorts of amazing ways in which science is going to stop us using so many chemicals and reduce carbon that we use I'm going to start there's just so many things we can still talk about but I do want to give you the opportunity to ask a few questions as well I'm going to start asking questions I'm assuming there's a roving mic somewhere I'll start at the back there so why don't we start with the gentleman over here before he asks his question ask one from Chris Payne who's in the question online I'll bring this to Nick what actual practical measures political, market-based or social would you absolutely prioritise to begin to better align what we eat with the environmental imperative so I think briefly we need to stop subsidising industrial food production and food processing that just needs to go and we talked earlier about the cost of food the cost needs to reflect the true cost of production and the externalities and we need to change that we also need taxation to disincentivise the production and the selling of the wrong type of food that's damaging the environment and that also damages us so when we're faced with choices choosing what food to buy we're making the choice what the true cost of the food is to us individually to the farmer that grows it but also to society more widely gentleman over there so you've obviously described Timothy Timothy and you've obviously described a very complex system that needs to be changed but I want to pick one element that I don't want to let the quote unquote consumer off the hook on there is a dynamic between the grocery stores and the consumers making choices about what they buy that does affect the behaviour of the rest of the market and of course one really good example I'd love you to comment on was Whole Foods grocery store in the US brought together food producers ranchers the FDA to develop a one through five scale about meat from highly industrialised to barely touched they then started to label all of their meat one through five and offer that at different price points to consumers to try to give a reasonable market driven approach to how to change behaviour very mixed results because consumers just in the end wanted to pay 99p for their ground beef and weren't willing to spend 299 or 399 for a level 4 so this interface between the consumer and the grocery store and looking for innovative market driven opportunities to make those changes why isn't there more of that going on in the UK because that's where you're going to get things to do if you can get the market to respond to signals that are being sent Peter you sell direct to the consumer Yeah we do and this morning down in Devon I was getting absolutely drenched by an April shower as we were trying to make a piece of video for our Instagram feed and it was demonstrating another version of mob grazing and it's interesting Tara because actually it differs slightly from the one you described we are moving our bullocks out of a section with that much forage left and the reason we leave that much is because those are the solar panels to nourish the soil biology and in 50 days time we come back again when hopefully it's up here but we are saying our job the soil biology because as I said earlier nature is the most powerful resource we have on the planet to produce food the second part so information is king but real information not a simplistic label that somebody might take 2.3 seconds to make a purchasing decision real information which in a digital age is very achievable I know there's a plethora of maybe misleading information but I would say our customers are discerning enough to really dig deep and get the fact just the other point I would make is the technology which empowers customers to actually scan every piece of food to measure nutritional value is very close and that's the game changer doesn't matter what the label says when you can actually measure nutritional density you are almost definitely getting a window into the system of production and crucially it is a game changer when customers realise the very direct link between what they stick in their mouth and everything about their well being from mental health to physical health and everything in the middle is dictated by the quality nutritional value what you stick in your mouth and if you can measure that on an iPhone suddenly the food system is going to have to be very careful not to simply label industrial foods as having nutritional value that it simply doesn't we're going to take a question from there in a minute there has been a lot of discussion so far about how we should be shopping and what we should be eating but what about the 27% of people in the UK who skipped a bill in March 2023 were very limited choices how can we make sure this debate is about sustainable for people as well as the planet that's probably one for you Henry I think there are two things going on here we have the most unequal one of the most unequal societies in the western world and environmentally and health destroying foods are not a long term solution to the problem of poverty so we need to sort out poverty in the meantime there are things that you can do to help people who are really struggling food insecurity has doubled since last year and the government should be increasing their threshold on free school meals which you only get £7,400 on income, increasing healthy start and rolling out schemes which Alexander Rose are doing and hack me incredible schemes giving access to fruit and veg to families in poverty but we can't go on using cheap food as the way that we deal with poverty in society because that is literally not sustainable a question from here and then we'll go to the gentleman here at the front my name is Iqtoa and I am a sustainability executive working in the corporate sustainability function of a large UK supermarket I think a lot about what it's going to take to transform our food system and Tyra you mentioned that we need to be imagining new ways forward to our problems and I completely agree I think the change we need lies in pursuing novel methods and approaches that are outside conventional corporate practices and BAU and I don't think we can expect to escape the system feedback loops you talk about Henry or drive meaningful food system transformation without first focusing on transforming the businesses that have committed to and are working towards delivering this change the transformation must also be internal and cultural and I think to drive this change needs to come from the top down but also the bottom up through younger sustainability executives bringing in their perspectives my question to you is what are your thoughts on the importance of cultural transformation and bringing new ideas and perspectives into the conversation like younger executives that can provide innovative solutions to the systems that we face and for example someone being able to sit on a panel like this and bring in that kind of youth perspective and that new idea and kind of brave approach which supermarket are you from I'd rather not stay but pizza if she won't say which supermarket it matters hugely because I think you'd lump them all into the same boat on the way up from Devon there was a very interesting question posed to the president of the CBI talking about their current woes and he said the problem we have with our culture is we have too many layers of middle management so information does not travel up and down the corporate structure and I thought you know what that is the problem with the farming corporate food industry if we go back to farmers who genuinely are closest to nature being connected with the top of the food supply system problem solved when you have a corporate structure all of these separations between the big the big bosses making corporate decisions they are so far removed from the basic incredible wonder of nature that is a massive cultural problem quick question for Tara from Nicola here online question for Tara when food originates in a lab and not in the soul where are we getting all micronutrients from it's a very good question and I have to say that I am not I am not an advocate of lab meat I just feel that we need to keep lots of things bubbling away as solutions I think with micronutrients this is a real concern that I have if they have to be added in and my concern with them is that the complexity of a real food grown in the real soil can never I can't see how it could be replicated by growing something in a lab but I come back to my point that we seem to the question is kind of predicated on the assumption that we can have it all and we may only be able to get just about good enough and it may be that our health is going to take a hit we have to make a choice between the long term viability of the future totally super-duper bright-eyed bushy-tailed optimal health or something that just about works out for 10 billion people and I would love it if we could have win-win-win all round but I fear that that might not be possible Gentleman, the front here and then we'll go to the lady here over there I'm a very old hack and her author and my question to you is to Mr Dimbleby and Mr Gregg but to the panel as well both of you spoke about the virtues of the pre-industrial age the only politician major politician of the last 80 years to advocate that was Amun Das Karamjan Gandhi to use the words of Winston Churchill and even in his own country that was not followed apart from instituting banning the consumption of alcohol India went for industrial growth the green revolution of the 60s much pursued by the Johnson administration and so on how are you going to convince the villages in India and I've been to the villages in India which don't believe in using dung their houses as Gandhi would have wanted them which are using television to watch the Premier League unfortunately Manchester United and not my club but that's a different story how are you going to persuade them and what are you going to say and I don't mean to put this question to you in a hostile way in any way what are you going to say to them and India is now the largest most populated country in the world and very proud of it when India wanted family planning and all that that this is not another Eurocentric view having profited from the industrial revolution you are now lecturing the rest of the world and saying no no you can't do that I'm not saying you're doing that but I'm just asking you how are you going to do that so two things first of all the strategy that I did I was always very clear that the work that I was doing was a strategy for England how do we in the UK feed ourselves without destroying the planet here and abroad and without destroying our health and it is relevant for western countries more broadly but there are a whole bunch of questions around food security food sovereignty in countries like India which I am not an expert on I think that more broadly the question that you are asking is are we denying which is a much much bigger question the food system is denying people in developing countries the opportunity to be as comfortable to enjoy the things that we enjoy for me the only hope in that front is at the moment is solar energy which is collapsing so quickly and causes much way beyond food that you can actually there is one potential way forward that energy costs collapse and stuff becomes stuff that consumers want becomes less environmentally damaging almost you could get a case where if solar cost comes down hugely that we have a huge in the northern hemisphere we have huge excesses of energy in the summer that we can use to make stuff but that is beyond was beyond the scope of what I did by the way I think I was a very young journalist at your newspaper when I was my second job I talked to you enormously there is a question quite similar actually from the delightful Felicity Cloak actually do we in the global north have the right to advise emerging economies on the growing but still tiny consumption when this problem is almost entirely down to our own ongoing history of over consumption should we be the one making the change not them I think if I could answer because I think your question here was directed at me too and I think I too am not an expert in India by any means I've never been there I think there are two things that I would point out though one I think I'm right in saying there was considerable protest by the farming sector when there was a suggestion there would be top down political imposition of sort of forcing the farming industry to become part of the global commodity pricing structure that is fundamentally the cause of a lot of our problems the food system globally I believe should be regionalised we should be looking at what are the resources of different areas of the planet and optimising the use of those but that again I think is why I unashamably suggest we need to go back to the wisdom that's handed down through generations of smaller farmers who really knew how to optimise the use of resources before there were industrial inputs and that is why I believe it is worse saying look those smaller farmers in India they have a very important voice in this discussion because they are closer to the natural resources of that part of the world the other point I would make is that I think the increase in demand for material goods which is what you're alluding to yes that has sort of flooded the western world whether that actually is what our grandson will reflect on as being the way to satisfy life and I think that farming in harmony with nature agroecology the farmers should be closely integrated with societal goods health education those young people should be part of a landscape farmed in harmony with nature and that is very different from being excluded from an industrial landscape where there are signs up saying biosecure area nobody admits it Peter do you think that is slightly I don't think we should but if you take Egypt for example Egypt already has a population because of the way in which we have this very much to tomorrow's point about what we'd like and what we have to do in transporting food has a population that is now twice as large as any possible estimate of what the food it could produce from its own land because we feed it from Ukraine we feed it from Russia and in the next 50 years that population is going to double again so I don't think that there is a one size fits all I don't think you can apply I think Egypt as soon as it becomes economically viable Egypt will have huge solar powered protein plants making alternative for men to protein because it's scaring the life we worry about our food costs going up they have almost half the country living in poverty and they import 75% of their wheat from Ukraine and Russia they are on the brink of societal collapse I think you've got to be really careful of applying one part of the world's solutions I totally agree but I'm just making the point it is not a one size fits all we should not be looking at a globalised food system we should regionalise and if sunshine is a hugely available resource then solar energy is something that they can produce in abundance in Egypt but the grain which is shipped to Egypt to satisfy that huge demand should be produced without massive fossil fuel supplies so let us not fossil fuel should not underpin production of food anywhere in the world frankly but the recognising that what I'm describing it's not a fantasy land if you don't use fossil fuel then you don't have the fertilizer you might get solar produced fossil fuel it might be aware of hacking the harbourbosh but also harbourbosh harbourbosh totally destroys the power of the soil biology to harness the energy of the sun why is that a good idea it simply doesn't make any sense to use tonnes of energy to produce nitrogen fertilizer if you look at the carbon calculation of that it makes no sense if you look at the power of soil biology to harness energy of the sun which is a bit like solar energy in Egypt the power of that is immense it's unlimited because it's harnessing the energy of the sun the production of industrial fertilizer makes no sense on any level in my book it just doesn't and the farmers who have learnt like Andy Cato with wild farm grain to move away from it and to go back to farming with traditional diverse rotations harnessing the power of soil biology they don't need the fertilizer and they make more money it's not quite Andy's yields it's organic yields farms and strips with half being wheat and half being legumes and clover his yields are organic yields which is about 30% less than industry produce yields so at the moment if you were to look at what happened to Sri Lanka if you were to remove now industrial fertilizer you would lead to mass starvation so I think there is it's not quite as simple as going back to organic rotating you both made your point very well question over there hello hi my name is India and I'm another young person here I just turned 20 and I'm very passionate about all these subjects that we've covered here and I find it exciting because it's both terrifying but also there are hundreds of solutions in the farming and food world and I just wanted to touch on one aspect of it that I think we didn't really go deep into in terms of a solution of redefining our value system and perhaps kind of redefining our the way that we see beauty in things in terms of food waste and kind of how we can build that more into both as individuals and as corporations like how we can build waste as part of that value system maybe alluding to like a circular economy and how we can kind of progress towards that because I just I mean I think a lot of young people would feel the same that like we wake up every day kind of in one way or another thinking about the climate anxiety that is present at the moment but there are so many solutions out there and we want to be doing things about it and like how can we do that as well yes so I think you're absolutely right and it's part of what I tried to touch on when I said that we can change what we want and I guess for those of you who are young rather than those of us who are from older generations you can sort of come into adulthood wanting different things from what we have wanted and referring back to the earlier question I think it is incumbent on us in the global north to demonstrate that we can change because we have messed things up and we can't the way of life that we have come to expect and come at the moment to appear to want is not sustainable, we can't carry on like that and we certainly can't afford to demonstrate to the rest of the world that that's the way to live and that's what people should aspire to all over the world so I think there's a lot of hope in what you're suggesting that values can change culture can change food waste you know our attitude to food waste we just need to see waste we've I think those of us in older generations we're blind to waste we just don't notice it we don't you know and it should it should be there in our in our heads and in our face and it should be horrifying us, disgusting us and thereby changing our value system so we don't live in a way that creates that sort of waste and so you know in a similar way with all the other values that we've been talking about I'm just going to take one last question because after we need to leave the auditorium so I'll take one more question from the lady over there I'm very sorry for everybody else My name's Anna-Marie Julian and I'm a freelance food journalist I write regularly for Waitrose weekend and my question is how do we ignore the role of convenience because if we're going to eat and prepare whole foods then we need time Okay, very briefly Although Piper's Farm has been going 33 years I think probably the most important thing Henry and I have ever created is presentation of our product in a convenient way I think 70% of what we get out of bed every day to do is provide convenience just because that is the way society is I have a slightly outspoken view that I think the supermarket system and you suggested earlier Henry's supermarkets are here to stay I think the supermarket system of retail is history I think it is just mad because it is so dysfunctional because it's driving this unsustainable corporate globalised food system and this race to the bottom on price I think it's incredibly exciting both of those last questions it's your generation as Nick says I'm afraid we've screwed it up us lot Thank God Will and Abby are now driving the next vision of Piper's Farm it's your generation who are going to completely reimagine the way that the food supply chain needs to work and you will drive it and be bold and don't think the supermarket model is part of the infrastructure the furniture going forward because it's nuts the farming industry in this country my final point I think you mentioned the woes of Sri Lanka going totally organic cold turkey overnight I'm totally with you Henry that sort of speed of change doesn't happen we've been on this planet half a million years the bats flying around our hedges have been here 60 million years let us be patient let us though your generation have a vision of where we need to get to which undoes the unsustainable current status quo if you like but be very positive and optimistic because you guys I'm sorry we screwed it up but I'm damn sure you're going to sort it out and nature look after nature and nature will help you sort it you'll sort it out and you'll screw up something else for your kids that's all we've got time for tonight I'm sorry for everybody else but their hands up and there's many more questions online as well very sorry we couldn't get to everybody but the food season at the British Library continues there's a lot more amazing events so do check the website for what's coming up I'd like to thank the British Library for to set this thing up this talk up and especially the amazing Angela Clutton here who's been creating all those events and thank you all of you here for coming and for those of you joining us online thank you as well and there's a lot more we could have covered today which we could have spent a week here but I would highly recommend Henry's book actually because it covers more or less every single point we've talked about tonight is actually available to buy it I'll be signing it outside and Peter as well has got his book in there I've cut from Peter's book I hope you don't mind if I sign Abby's book but for now thank you to my panel Henry, Tara, Nick and Peter thank you very much