The important detail of that National Food Strategy
Tim Lang and others return to The Guardian to insist that there really must be a National Food Strategy to, well, to be a national strategy about food we suppose.
A group of food experts have written to ministers this week calling for the national food strategy to be updated to take account of the risks and prepare the UK for a future of higher temperatures and more severe weather.
So, higher temperatures and more severe weather make reliance upon food grown in any one geographic area more risky. Therefore the appropriate response is to diversify across ever more geographic areas so as to reduce the risk from any one area.
Right?
They highlighted three priorities on which they said ministers should concentrate: resilient domestic production of healthier food;
Ah, no, they propose exactly the opposite of what is rational in response to their claims. Ho well, politics, eh?
The most revealing, to us at least, comment on this whole idea of this national food strategy is this comment by Tim Lang in his previous Guardian article:
It’s time for a reality check: food systems depend on ecosystems. Britain’s favourite fruits include strawberries, tangerines and bananas. The latter two cannot grow here, and we depend on oil to transport them. In the UK, strawberries only grow easily for a few months.
Consumer tastes are out of sync with what can be grown seasonally and in a low-carbon way, and expectations need to readjusted.
Rather than trade to gain what we desire you must learn to do without. Because Tim Lang said so. Which is the National Food Strategy.
We say “Pish” to both Tim Lang and the National Food Strategy. If no one’s willing to send us any bananas then that’s a cruel insistence by an uncaring world. But the idea that we should not have bananas just because we might not be able to have them in the future - or because an emeritus professor thinks we shouldn’t have bananas - is absurd.
We agree, this is all difficult to explain but perhaps this is just a nostalgia for the DDR - theme song here.
Tim Worstall