A new report from economist Tim Jackson at the University of Surrey tells us that our “addiction” to junk food is costing Britain £268 billion per year — which far exceeds the total budget of the NHS. Professor Jackson calls for “bold, ambitious leadership aligned across government” to provide a more propitious “legal, fiscal and regulatory framework”. But, argues Colin Tudge only the grassroots – people at large – can do what’s really needed
The reason that junk food is causing us such (expensive) ill-health, says Prof Jackson, lies with the usual dietary suspects which, individually and together, lead to various forms of “metabolic dysfunction”:
“Modern diets are too high in sugar, salt and saturated fats and too low in wholegrains, fruit and vegetables. Food processing tends to strip out dietary fibre and nutrients which are essential for a healthy digestive system and help lower the risk of heart disease and Type 2 diabetes. Fertilisers, pesticides and chemical additives introduce toxins into the food chain. The combined effect on our health is devastating. Particular concern has been raised over ultra-processed foods (UPFs) which today constitute 57% of the adult diet in the UK and 66% of the adolescent diet. Far from keeping us well, our current food system, with its undue deference to what is known colloquially as Big Food, is making us sick.”
“Particular concerns have been raised – both in the medical literature and in the public – over the impact of what has been called ultra-processed food (UPF). These are characterised as ‘industrial formulations’ manufactured by dismantling agricultural products into their component parts, altering them and recombining them. UPFs tend to contain artificial additives such as colouring, sweeteners, flavours, preservatives, thickeners and emulsifiers in order to enhance the appearance or the palatability of food and increase its shelf life. They rarely contain any intact or unprocessed whole food. In other words, they incorporate many of the dangerous characteristics of modern food-processing practices. UPFs were far less prevalent in 1948 than they are today. They now constitute over half (57%) of the adult diet and almost two thirds (66%) of the adolescent diet. The UK has one of the highest proportions of UPF in its diet among western nations after the US. The medical consequences of this relatively recent and almost entirely uncontrolled experiment are already becoming abundantly clear.”
The direct cost of healthcare for our food-derived disorders – around £92 billion — accounts for only about a third of the total £268 billion. But then we must add in the cost of social care and welfare support – and then add in the cost of lost productivity because people are off sick, or less able to work; and the estimated “shadow costs” of the consequent human misery. Taken all in all indeed —
“The costs of trying to manage that sickness are rapidly becoming unpayable.”
Indeed so. But an immediate question arises, “How come?”
Why do we like food that’s bad for us?
Human beings, so Charles Darwin told us and is now widely accepted, evolved, as all creatures have done; and, like everything else, we have been shaped by natural selection; and natural selection favours the survival of those individuals who are best adapted to their circumstances – and their circumstances include the available food. In other words, natural selection should favour animals, including human animals, who eat what’s good for them. So why have human beings apparently evolved a predilection for foods that make us ill, and lay us low before our time?
There’s a simple explanation – which may be too simple, but it fits the known facts well enough. It is that in the wild it’s hard for animals of any kind, including human animals, to get enough – and in particular, in the short term, it’s hard simply to get enough energy for day-to-day living and for reproduction. Plants and animals on the whole don’t like being eaten and protect their precious flesh with all kinds of thorns, fibres, spikes, teeth, claws, and scales, and also some potent toxins, some of which kill at a touch, like Novichok, for which we must thank Russia. Grasses are more obliging than most plants but even they, in a state of nature, are tough, fibrous, and siliceous: strictly for specialists. So all wild creatures seek richer fare and gorge on it when they can – including or especially honey and fats. Elephants on their normal unprepossessing fare must graze and browse and chew for 17 hours a day just to get enough, and are only too keen to break into farms and plantations, and breweries and wineries, for richer rewards (they readily become addicted to alcohol). Asian elephants will even eat carrion, bones and all, as many rodents do too. Salt is also at a premium. Desert-dwelling oryx are more drought-resistant than camels and can do without standing water altogether, but they will walk many miles over the burning sand to find a salt lick.
So it is that animals of all or at least of many kinds including us have evolved a special predilection for sugar, fats, and salt (preferably enhanced with plenty of alcohol and caffeine). These are the very foods that we now classify as “junk”. But a special predilection, evolved in the wild as an adaptation to otherwise too frugal fare, may soon turn into a literal or at least a de facto addiction. Commercial companies know all this of course and pander to our appetites. Indeed they spend billions stoking the fires of our less fortunate predispositions. They are obliged after all in this ultra-competitive neoliberal age not merely to be profitable but to be maximally profitable, or the shareholders go elsewhere. Where big-time commerce leads, the farmers are obliged to follow. They don’t grow the UPFs of course but they are encouraged to supply the raw materials thereof, from high-tech monocultures on the largest possible scale.
In practice, indeed, in this as in all things in these modern times, the root causes of our ills lie not simply with biology but with the economy.
The economics of bad eating
As everyone knows, food in the UK, as in the world as a whole, is getting dearer it seems by the day. Specifically, says prof Jackson,
“Food prices have risen by more than 30% since the end of 2021.”
But as everyone knows, too, incomes are not rising commensurately, and because of this, and partly because everything else is getting dearer too, more and more people can no longer afford to buy enough for themselves and their families. And although we have been told otherwise, real poverty is increasing. Thus, says Prof Jackson,
“The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has estimated that 7.2 million people were living in households with low or very low food security in 2022–23. That number accounts for 11% of the UK population and 17% of children. It represents an increase of 80% in the space of just three years.”
As a result:
“The use of food banks has increased exponentially … In 2023–24 the Trussell Trust distributed 3.1 million emergency food parcels, the highest number ever recorded. That represents a 94% increase in the last five years and a massive 240% increase from just a decade ago. Clearly there is absolutely no room here for complacency in tackling what amounts to a crisis of food insecurity.”
Yet the real point is not that food is too dear. After all, the average UK household spends less than 12 per cent of total income on it, which among much else raises the question posed in Isaiah (55:2-3) —
“Wherefore do ye spend money for that which is not bread?”
— to which the most obvious answer is that in modern Britain people who do not already own their own house are obliged to spend at least a third of their income on a place to live (and often more than half their income).
Neither is Britain (or the world as a whole come to that) short of money, even though the present Labour government evidently agrees with Ms Truss on the urgent need for “Growth, growth, growth”. For as many have pointed out, what really matters in Britain, as in the world as a whole, is inequality, both of income and of total wealth. Thus according to the World Inequality Lab, in 2021 the top 10% of the UK population owned 57 per cent of the country’s total wealth while the bottom 50% owned less than 5%. And the gap seems to be growing. After all, in 1995 the top 10% held a mere 52.5% of the UK’s loot. Worse: among the rich are the super-rich, the top 1%, who in 2021 held almost a quarter – 23% – of the nation’s wealth. For good measure — the icing on the cake — Britain now “boasts” 165 billionaires.
At first sight inequality of income seems to be less extreme than inequality of wealth. Thus the average income per household in the UK now stands at just under £35,000 while the top 1 per cent average £182,000 – only six times the general average. But “average” does not mean “mean”. It means the grand total divided by the number of participants, and there are many more people earning less than the average than are earning more. Then again, while the very richest people in Britain bring in several million a year by one means or another, the poorest earn or otherwise scratch only a few thousand – so the discrepancy between the very richest and the poorest is probably nearer 1000-fold. As everyone knows, too, the ultra-rich typically contrive to pay remarkably little tax.
But the modern diet is making us sick. So the rise and rise of Big Food is matched by the rise and rise of Big Pharma, to undo the evils of Big Food. To certain kinds of economist this all makes perfect sense. After all, there are huge profits to be made in both. The logic is as described by John Maynard Keynes – that it can make perfect economic sense to pay people to dig holes and fill them in again. (I’m never sure whether he was being ironical). Or as Tim Jackson puts the matter:
“In the absence of strategies to prevent its onset or to reverse its progress, chronic disease demands treatment. Pharmaceutical companies have deployed a panoply of prescription (and non-prescription) medications designed for that purpose: pain killers and analgesics to combat chronic inflammation; antacids and proton-pump inhibitors to counter digestive problems from eating badly; statins to lower cholesterol; metformin to reduce blood glucose levels; and most recently, the antiobesity drugs semaglutide (eg Ozempic) and tirzepatide (eg Zepbound) to induce satiety and suppress appetite.”
And yet:
“All pharmaceutical products have side effects. Some of those side effects are serious. Most prescription drugs are dietary toxins and almost all of them are known to interfere with metabolic function. Some of them act in ways that appear to alleviate short-term problems but exacerbate health conditions in the long run. To be effective they require long-term usage and expose patients to a sometimes debilitating ‘rebound’ when they are withdrawn. But for the pharmaceutical companies, these are massively profitable characteristics. Chronic long-term disease is a gold-mine for drug companies.”
Furthermore:
“Both industries – Big Food and Big Pharma — are also coopting government policy into a dysfunctional dynamic, in which the promise of an easy fix to chronic disease obscures a long-term lock-in to costly medical strategies.”
In short, the modern economy, both the theory and the practice, is out of synch with the real needs of humanity and the natural world – which is the very opposite of what ought to be the case, and indeed accounts in large part for all the ills of the modern world. For as Keynes argued, the economy should not be seen as an ideology but as a practical device; and as such, I suggest, its task should be to enable us to translate our reasonable ambitions and aspirations into reality. If our aspiration is to make rich people richer then the present economy is succeeding admirably. If however we aspire to create a world that is good for human beings and our fellow creatures to live in, and indeed can survive in a recognizable form for more than a few more years, then the present economy seems spectacularly unfit for purpose. Neither can any existing economic model do what’s needed – or none at least that is put into practice by the people with most influence. Neither Karl Marx nor Milton Friedman or anyone in between has supplied the necessary solutions to the world’s present ills, despite the evangelical zeal of their disciples.
And yet – as always it seems – the answer to all our problems is not to complicate the economy still further but to go back to first principles. In particular we need to acknowledge that an economy that’s based, like the present one, on all-out competition for material wealth — “Growth, growth, growth!” – just isn’t sensible, and indeed had led us into all kinds of trouble. As Denis Healey famously remarked –
“If you dig yourself into a hole, stop digging.”
We need instead to devise and promulgate a diet that can feasibly be provided within the limits of the Earth (which for example rules out the over-zealous pursuit of fish); and is good for us; and which people at large find agreeable (which seems to rule out veganism). I suggest that this could very easily be achieved, as outlined below. Already, though, back in 2016, the then government sketched out the main dietary requirements in its Eatwell diet, devised by the Committee on Medical Aspects of Food Policy (COMA) and the Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition (SACN). In its bare-bones form the Eatwell diet doesn’t seem that alluring but it is certainly a good place to start.
But, of course, the Eatwell diet stresses the need for fresh food and particularly fresh fruit and vegetables — and as outlined above and as everybody knows a great many people in the UK these days can’t afford fresh food. Such is the absurdity of the modern economy, and so great is the gap between economic dogma and good sense (let alone sound ecology and common morality) that food that has been “mucked about” (as my mother would say), and imported from the farthest corners of the Earth (not least from places that used to be tropical forest), is typically far cheaper than food that has been grown locally and sold in its pristine state. Or at least it’s cheaper if we discount the huge and crippling cost of the morbidity and early death that mucked about food brings with it.
Even so, says Tim Jackson,
“ We calculate an incremental cost to the nation of providing the Eatwell diet, of £57 billion. This represents a substantial (55%) increase on current food spending. But this increase is less than 25% of the total health-related costs (£268 billion) attributable to diet. It is considerably lower even than the direct health-related costs (£92 billion) spent each year in the UK to tackle food-related chronic disease.”
Overall, indeed:
“We are incurring economic productivity losses (through long-term inactivity and early mortality) that are more than twice what it would cost to ensure access to healthy food. And we are suffering ‘shadow costs’ – associated with a declining quality of life – that are greater than the subsidies that would be needed to ensure a healthy diet for every household in the land. Taken together these direct and indirect costs of our dysfunctional food system are more than four times higher than the costs of fixing it.”
Absurd or what? So where do we go from here?
What’s to be done?
In general, of course, we need what many have called “joined-up thinking” – something that seems beyond governments, departmentalized as they are, and subject as they are to the edicts of the Treasury. In practice, says Tim Jackson, what’s needed is:
“… bold, ambitious leadership aligned across government .. to create a new economy for food. The mission should be to ensure everyone has enough healthy, nourishing and affordable food, through viable, sustainable farm businesses, in a resilient and prosperous economy.”
Government’s task is to create “a legal, fiscal and regulatory framework” to make this possible. Indeed, I suggest, this is the general task of all governments: to provide conditions that enable and encourage good things to happen – a conceptually simple requirement that very few governments in the world have ever seemed able to achieve, and have rarely even attempted.
Yet as I have described in not a few books (starting in particular with Future Cook in 1980) the real and conceptually far simpler solution to the world’s food problems lies with traditional cooking. All the world’s greatest cuisines on a broad axis from Italy to China are heavily plant-based – built mainly around cereals and other non-cereal grains; pulses of all kinds; nuts (notably coconut, but also in different cultures at different times, chestnuts, hazels, macadamias, others too); and tubers (especially potatoes, but many others too including cassava and yams). The staples are extended with abundant quantities of whatever leaves, fruits, and fungi are available, by far the bulk of which is grown within easy distance; and are made more interesting and generally improved with low-volume but high-value spices and herbs that may be brought in from far and wide without placing undue strain on the planet, and, if properly organized, can be of huge benefit to the producers as well as to the consumers. In all the world’s truly great cuisines meat and fish are used sparingly, primarily as a garnish and for stock. Meaty feasts are strictly for special occasions, from the Sunday roast to the Christmas goose. Thus as I have discussed in a series of books including Feeding People is Easy (2007), Good Food for Everyone Forever (2011), and The Great Re-Think (2021)), the essence of modern nutritional theory may be summarised in an irreducibly simple one-line slogan:
“Plenty of plants, not much meat, and maximum variety.”
Now, according to nutritionist and epidemiologist Prof Tim Spector, there are literally tens of thousands of different books out there recommending special diets of one kind or another. Yet, I submit, as John Keats said in a slightly different context, the irreducibly simple nine-word formula, “plenty of plants, not much meat, and maximum variety” says —
“ … all ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know”
As former smallholder and academic Chris Smaje argues too in A Small Farm Future (2022), we should generally strive to produce our food on small to medium-sized farms rather than the vast monocultures that have been favoured in recent decades, and the methods of production should be those of agroecology. Small farms run on agroecological lines do indeed provide “plenty of plants, not much meat, and maximum variety”. In short,
There is a perfect, one-to-one correspondence between agroecological farming (which largely means traditional farming informed and refined by the science of ecology), sound nutrition (as defined by modern nutritionists), and great cooking.
So all we really need to do is farm according to the principles of agroecology, and re-learn how to cook.
And so it emerges too that most of the modern, over-hyped, over-financed food industry in which governments like ours have placed such faith at best is surplus to requirements, a waste of time and resource; and at worst is undermining the world’s health to the tune of £268b per year in Britain alone.
But modern economic dogma has it that all human endeavour should be profitable, and that all commercial enterprises should compete to be as profitable as possible. The myth has it that the wealth thus generated “trickles down” to society at large even though has long been abundantly clear that in practice the bulk of the profit goes to the shareholders and senior executives. Thus the demands of the economy and of the minority who benefit most directly from the economy are absolutely at odds with the real needs of people at large, and of the biosphere at large, and indeed with what may be seen as the “bedrock principles” of morality and ecology.
So we see once more that to put the nation’s diet to rights we need, as always, to dig deep. The weight of the whole economy and all that hangs on it – which is everything – is brought to bear on our food supply. So if we really want a different diet – one that doesn’t predispose us to obesity and diabetes and heart disease and various cancers and depression and a premature demise – we need a different economy, and for that we need a different mindset. Indeed if we were serious about our own health, and the state of the world, then we would need to build the whole economy around food and farming, and to redesign the countryside: not, as now, for the purposes of maximizing and concentrating wealth and of perpetuating mediaeval and 17th century concepts of land ownership but to produce good food for everyone, and provide truly fulfilling careers, and to respect and take care of our fellow creatures.
But governments are stuck in the ideological, political, and economic groove that they have helped to carve out and consolidate over the past few centuries, and cannot do what’s needed, and would not even if they could. The required transformation is beyond their brief and their capabilities, and indeed is beyond their mindset. It simply would not occur to the neoliberal and land-owning Tories, or the irredeemably urbanized Labour, even to attempt such a thing. Once more indeed we see that if we really want significant change then we need to take matters into our own hands. Though not in the manner of Donald Trump (who is the subject of the following blog)
Government says this cannot happen because people at large are not interested – but, says Tim Jackson’s new report:
“…the claim that ordinary people have no interest in healthy, sustainable food is not borne out by the evidence. Over the last year the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission (FFCC) invited nearly 120,000 people to take part in a robust process of in-depth dialogue as part of The Food Conversation. Hundreds of citizens, representing all socio-demographic groups, have taken part in more than eighteen hours of workshops. National polling has reached thousands more. The results are surprising and hold the key to an abiding paradox. Why is that we are seemingly locked into unhealthy and unsustainable diets?”
In fact of all conceivable solutions to the world’s food problems the one that makes most sense – or indeed the only one remotely likely to succeed – is what I for some years have been calling “Enlightened Agriculture”. EA combines the principles of Agroecology – which aspires to operate in harmony with the natural world by treating farms as ecosystems; with the principle of Food Sovereignty, which says in essence that every society should have control of its own food supply. The trouble is of course that neither of these two lines of thought are designed to maximize disposable wealth, and still less are they intended to concentrate wealth in the hands of the dominant minority (the oligarchy of big governments, corporates, banks, and financiers). And precisely because those people are dominant, they call the shots. So we are stuck with neoliberalism and an open-mouthed veneration of high tech, which is equated with progress. Democracy (which some still feel is rather an important concept) is reduced to populism.
All in all — as always, it seems – the answer to all our food problems are conceptually simple: farm according to the principles of agroecology and re-learn how to cook; or, more specifically, emulate the world’s greatest cuisines. And, as chef Raymond Blanc likes to emphasise, whatever fancy forms the greatest cuisines may take, and however wondrous the skills of the greatest cooks, the greatest cuisines in essence are peasant cuisines, and so with practice should be within reach of everybody. But to enable us to do the simple and obvious things well would require a complete overhaul of the economy, which no conceivable government has the power or the desire to undertake. Ho hum.
The False Economy of Big Food is based on studies at the University of Surrey by Prof Tim Jackson and his colleagues, and published by the Food, Farming, & Countryside Commission in November 2024.
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