The 2020 report on a food strategy for England by the Leon restaurant chain co-founder Henry Dimbleby and the resultant government plan have things in common, including a recognition that Covid highlighted significant issues over food and that obesity is a national crisis. But when it comes to solutions, the two documents could hardly be further apart.
Dimbleby’s report recommended a significant expansion of the free school meals programme to tackle food poverty and unhealthy eating, using expanded sugar and salt taxes to fund fresh fruit and vegetables for low-income families, and it also called for a 30% cut in meat consumption inside a decade.
Noting a pre-Covid toll of 90,000 annual deaths due to poor diet, Dimbleby said it was clear the state “has the moral authority to intervene in people’s lives to help them eat better”.
In stark contrast, the 27-page government food strategy produced by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) eschews bold action on food poverty and diet for a combination of can-kicking and minor policy tweaks.
Public health experts will wearily note a paragraph that talks about “an important role for individual responsibility and choice”, something successive UK governments have appealed to over the decades, with no apparent success.
Public health interventionism, inevitably labelled “nanny state” measures when rolled out in the UK, had a brief moment of prominence in 2020 after Boris Johnson blamed his brush with serious Covid on excess weight and promised a “war on fat”.
Such wars, however, take time and create enemies, and much of Johnson’s strategy was shelved last month, prompting a backlash among campaigners such as Jamie Oliver.
So what does survive in the food strategy, which repeats Dimbleby’s dire warnings about the health consequences of a society where 64% of adults and 40% of children in England are overweight or obese, and notes how excess weight is closely linked to poverty?
Not much, in truth. Much of what could happen is booted into the policy long grass, mainly the health department’s promised white paper on health disparities, or more research into ultra-processed foods. The idea of reducing meat consumption is not mentioned.
Eligibility for free school meals, perhaps Dimbleby’s key recommendation, will be kept “under review”, while an existing programme to help children learn cooking skills has a budget of “up to £5m”, or about £250 per English state school.
Measures for food poverty are similarly vague, with the only mentions of the cost of living crisis referring to existing government schemes, and justification that it would be pointless to be “duplicating work” on the issue.
As did Dimbleby’s report, the strategy covers other areas, notably food security, sustainability and the impacts of Brexit. On the first two, the government strategy stresses how Covid and the war in Ukraine have highlighted the need for resilience on food, but offers little in the way of policies beyond “taking advantage of new research and technologies and making the most of post-Brexit opportunities”.
It is on Brexit where the report is perhaps most eloquent, including a pledge to extend the seasonal worker visa scheme for food workers, and to liaise with industry on ways to plug other labour gaps.
More widely on Brexit it hints at food standards that, while not necessarily lower, could be termed more flexible, ensuring rules are “proportionate and based on the best available science”, while scrapping “bureaucracy that stems from old EU rules”.
Critics might say that is the easy bit, politically. Tackling obesity and food inequality was always going to be enormously hard and require radical solutions. The government’s food strategy has seemingly noted that, and so opted instead to simply not try.
