Start With Good Food in the Public Sector

By Raymond Blanc

Our farming system has sacrificed good quality food in the name of efficiency. The environment, as well as our bodies, are suffering. Raymond Blanc explains

I first arrived in the UK in 1972. Hungry as I stepped off the ferry, my first meal, predictably enough, was fish and chips. The quality was poor, the cooking uninspired and the vinegar – probably to disguise the taste of the food – took my breath away.

As I acclimatised to life in the UK I found that meal was not an exception in those days. All around me I saw what I came to believe were the results of British people being separated from their food and farming system.

Of course, this is not the only place in the world suffering from intensive farming, heavy food processing, concentrated retailing and intrusive marketing. But, as the first country to industrialise, it is perhaps among the most affected.

Pressures on people’s time, coupled with relentless competition in the economy and society, have squeezed out time for food and its essential role in family life. Many people have lost the craft of cooking, replacing it with ready meals and food “on the go”. The concept of seasonality has all but disappeared.

The same pressures have led many farmers to abandon their traditional craft and replace it with machines and chemicals.

Seeds are now selected for their ability to grow quickly into large and cosmetically perfect produce rather than into food that tastes good and is nutritionally superior.

Where has this approach got us? The environmental damage caused by the food and farming system includes, of course, global warming. It is estimated that our food system is responsible for between a fifth and a third of our greenhouse gas emissions; more than all of the cars, lorries and aeroplanes put together.

But we are also damaging our water supplies, soil, biodiversity and animal welfare at the same time as diet-related diseases spiral out of control, particularly the obesity epidemic which costs us 30,000 lives a year.

If anyone doubts that the two are linked, even government reports now accept that the same diet which most damages our health is also the one that most damages our planet.

Despite this recognition, the power of multinational agribusiness means that the policy of this Government, and any likely successors, is essentially more of the same: global markets and technofixes like genetically modified crops that will somehow create a more just and sustainable food and farming system.

Yet in a world with a changing climate, a growing population and increasing competition for resources like water, oil and grain, trying to solve our problems by doing more of the same is hardly credible.

The latest rise in food prices is bringing the crisis home to British voters but the solution is not to make all food cheap again. Instead, we need to find ways of making the cost of food reflect its true price to the environment and to our health.

How could we start to construct such a system? Arguably the best place to begin is to use the 2bn the public sector spends on food each year to buy only healthy and sustainable food. Children in schools, patients in hospitals, older citizens in care homes – all of these need and deserve the best quality food. Too often they get served cheap, nutrient-depleted, overprocessed mush instead, all in the name of “efficiency”.

Very rarely can the ingredients in these meals be traced to a high-quality British farm, so our taxpayers’ money isn’t even supporting our precious rural areas, let alone our health or the environment.

The government in The Netherlands has set a target for 100 per cent of central government public procurement (including, but not limited to, food) to come from sustainable sources by 2010.This ambition matches the scale of the health and environmental problems we are facing.

The UK Government, by contrast, has just announced a voluntary Healthier Food Mark which might – or might not – become compulsory by 2012. Voluntary approaches – in this, as in many other areas – have failed to create the rapid change we need. It is time for our politicians to show some courage.

Raymond Blanc OBE is the chef patron of Le Manoir Aux Quat’ Saisons restaurant

(c) 2008 Independent, The; London (UK). Provided by ProQuest LLC. All rights Reserved.