Urban Food Chains

the links between diet and power

domestication draft animals food production
Horse sense
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A cornerstone of Urban Food Chains crystallised this evening. Fundamental to the structure of a supply chain is the basic unit of transport and energy. Taking three major themes of this blog, let’s unpack the topic. First, before the dawn of time, generations of early agriculturists worked for millennia to domesticate species and crops that we would recognise today. They also tamed fire, an evolutionary trump card. Their lasting achievement was to breed forerunners of today’s strategic ungulates: cows, pigs, sheep and horses. Fast forward to the early twentieth century, when the first world war slaughtered millions of draft animals.

This high tech cull of horses, in particular, damaged the bedrock of the agricultural world. Livestock numbers would take decades to restore, if indeed there was either the economic resources or the political will to do so. The first world war was a reset that made way for change on a global scale, for humans and animals alike. Thousands of years spent establishing stable working relationships turned to dust in the heat of battle.

The penny dropped when I read Christopher Turnor, an author of the time, complaining that the UK had too many pastures, they were blocking food production. The origins of all this empty grassland are to be found in Edwardian England, but the wartime cull of draft animals accelerated the trend. The rest is not so much history as a race to plug the economic gaps left by the ravages of war.

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Food values
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To paraphrase Saint John, in the beginning was the meal. And the meal was with God…

We live in a world with more explanations than questions, more doubts than answers, more belief than knowledge. What sustains us is an unseen chain of events that conspire to make human life happen, whatever it takes. Our dependence on this process is total. Welcome to the world of food.

Our shared origins go back to the beginning of time before crops or livestock had been domesticated. There is general agreement once hominids had domesticated fire — tamed is probably a better word — there was a further four to six millennia before domesticated animals and crops emerged on the scene. Scholars may disagree over when this change came about, but we can be sure that until it was a fait accompli, everything else in the story of civilisation was on hold. There are quibbles about when exactly such a change can taken as read, but everybody is counting in millennia.

The rest is history. The trouble with history is its dependence on written records and sometimes incorrect attribution of artefacts. The reason we know so little about early agrarian populations is because they had neither written records nor surviving artefacts to bear witness to their passing. This is a pity, since what we do know about these groups is that they lived in harmony with nature and were environmentally enlightened. We are indebted to some of the world’s most dedicated and skillful archaeologists, who have traced the remains of villages that were built in the trackless alluvial wetlands. At this time, hominids and animals fed future generations of flora and fauna. Man was still bound to the laws of nature at this time.

When the world’s first states emerged, they were expressions of an agrarian social structure. Their dealings with the world around them were probably more extensive than we will ever know. What matters is that we learn and understand from such scraps as we can glean, to focus on value without being diverted by units of account.

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It’s a wrap
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Researchers at Portland State University (PSU) have confirmed high levels of microplastics in five species of wild fish caught inshore by local fishermen. Some 180 out of 182 samples analysed for the study showed signs of contamination by microplastics, which can be persistent and harmful to many species, including humans.

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Fewer shops, fading footfall, future gloom?
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Up and down the UK, we see Big Issue vendors on the high streets of Britain, clutching a bundles of magazines in a bid to sell an incisive vision of consumer society. As an example of the high standards of news writing that fills the pages of the magazine, issue 1060 published at the end of January carries a well-researched snapshot of the decline that is tightening its grip on British high streets and shopping centres. A downpage panel records the 2.2% year on year drop in footfall, as fewer shoppers venture out in 2024. Some 13,500 shops closed during the year, nearly one third more than the previous year’s 10,494 retail closures. This averages 37 shops closing every day, according to the Centre for Retail Research. Figures from the Altus Group record that there are now 38,989 pubs still trading in the UK, after 400 closed in 2024. Some of this decline could be laid at the feet of online shoppers, but the figures tell a story of dwindling economic activity.

crunchy numbers FFCC food manufacture UK economy
What can £38/week buy?
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The impact of Government policy to improve the national diet comes with proportionally higher costs for poor households. This would apply to any government, of any stripe and any motivation. Structural change in food policy throws differences in earnings into sharp relief. When the Food Standards Agency published the Eatwell Guide in 2016, a headline price rise of £38 a week would mean a doubling in food bills for poor households, compared to increases of just over a third for affluent consumers. Using Eatwell data on a national scale, the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission (FFCC) researchers calculate that legislating for a healthy, sustainable national diet would come with a £57 billion price tag. This is not unreasonable, indeed it is good value, given that the direct cost of healthcare arising from diet-related illness is running at £91 billion, lost productivity is costing the economy an estimated £116 billion a year and the human cost a further 60 billion a year. The numbers basically accuse the food industry of being more interested in making money than feeding people. However, the scale and scope of the money extracted from UK health authorities by pharmaceutical corporations is several orders of magnitude greater and no less reprehensible.

If the market economy functions as one might have hoped, would this ever have occurred in the first place? Part of the problem with economics is that its practitioners quite cheerfully play “what if?” games as they go along. The problem is not that a variable might be unreliable, but that the outcome can change in so many ways that it is impossible to attribute a given outcome with a single input. Treating the food/health sectors as a series of events, for example, creates a dislocated view of the biosphere, with more gaps than development. Some gaps are inevitable, but you can have too much of a good thing.

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Welcome
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Urban Food Chains is going through a reset with a jolt from the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission (FFCC) study The False Economy of Big Food.

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They still don’t get it…
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Amazingly, there are still folk around Britain who have failed to grasp the meaning of the words”third country”, let alone why it matters. The Centre for Inclusive Trade reports a 16% drop in British food exports to the EU and is calling for concessions that would be unfair to other third countries. There isn’t a cat in hell’s chance of the European Commission doing a special deal for a former member state that opted to become a third country.

FFCC
Upward pressure on food prices
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There is no way that food prices can be expected to go down anytime soon, whatever market watchers predict. There is a quaint notion that supermarkets live like church mice, dedicated to fighting a selfless battle for ever lower prices for the consumer. It is no more than a quaint notion (here is a link to an earlier item on this topic). The reality is closer to a shark-infested reef that tears the keels off passing ships when the tide is right, leaving rich pickings for the sharks.

FFCC economists need to retrieve Ariadne’s thread in the labyrinth to continue. Having said that indirect data is hard to stand up, it is time to attempt this, anyway. The distinguishing feature of supermarket buying departments is that they have complete control on costs and margins. They do not need to be over-concerned about whose pocket they dip into: a supplier is as good as a consumer for this purpose. More on this anon.

The cornerstone of the FFCC analysis is that there is a sustainable price for a healthy diet; this could be realised through savvy investment, with luck. This is the figure at the heart of the study, which does not leave scope for prevaricating. Once the government is satisfied that unhealthy diet and chronic disease are linked, there is an urgent need to act first and reflect on whether it was necessary later on. The chances of doing much more than scratching the surface of a national public health disaster are slim to the point of non-existence. We can no longer afford to talk of future health crises when the one we are in at the moment has been building momentum for years.

Nobody doubts that modern diet is overloaded with sugar, saturated fats, short on fresh produce and fibre, as well as being laced with toxic residues. Far from being a marginal issue, the growing proportion of Ultra-processed foods (UPFs) in the UK’s adult diet is 57%, while two thirds (66%) UK adolescents’ diet is based on UPFs. For years, the food industry has driven its growth by selling increasingly unhealthy products. The scale of the problem has not been confronted in time to make a difference: rather, it has been milked to fill the boots of the UK’s food industry leaders. Only now is the British public beginning to wake up to the scale of the problem. It may well be too late to save more than a sparse handful of those trusting souls who never made the connection between years of poor diet and chronic illness.

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Process of elimination
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If there is so much money at stake, how strong is the case for accusing food manufacturers of Ultra Processed Foods (UPFs) of wilful distortion? The arrival of wall to wall processed foods in British aisles in postwar years has been accompanied by rising numbers of patients needing treatment for heart disease and diabetes. While the nation gorges on sugar, salt and saturated fats, there is a drop in foods that bring whole grains, let alone fruit and vegetables. Processing very finely divided ingredients allows fertilisers and other toxic residues to spread downstream through the food chain. More worrying is the uptake of UFPs in the population. These foods now account for 57% of the adult diet and 66% of adolescent food intake. The health issues in later life are already filling up British hospitals and soak up two thirds of the health budget.

crunchy numbers FFCC food manufacture UK UK economy
Big Food’s Big Secret
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The UK government spends more than GBP 90 billion a year treating chronic food-related illness, according to the Food, Farming & Countryside Commission (FFCC). Researchers estimate that investing half that sum would be enough to make a healthy diet accessible to everyone living in the British Isles. The full extent of the damage caused to the UK economy by a dysfunctional food sector is GBP 268 billion pounds a year, taking lost productivity and early mortality into account, FFCC warns.

The Food, Farming & Countryside Commission is an independent charity, set up in 2017 to inform and extend public involvement in ongoing discussions about food and farming. Using government data as a starting point, FFCC argues that it would be significantly cheaper to produce healthy food in the first place. More to the point, it is not an option to go on footing the bill for damaged public health resulting from the commercial sector’s activities. There is simply not enough money in the kitty and time is running out. 

Researchers took into account government estimates of productivity and lost earnings arising from chronic illnesses. These indirect costs are borne by a range of actors in the economy, such as local government departments. Such costs are real expenditure, but the total figure is not recorded as a single aggregate figure. When combined with the initial figures, the result is a more imposing figure and looks like figure S1.

The direct costs (in red) are existing government data; indirect costs (in orange) indicate the economic impact associated with the prevailing levels of unemployment and early mortality. Like the submerged part of an iceberg, we ignore these costs at our peril.

Working with indirect costs opens the door to accusations of misinterpretation, but economists have worked hard to establish methods that can avoid serious pratfalls. Healthcare is supported by a wide range of funding sources, from government down to private individuals. The money is real enough, even when it comes from private individuals. It just becomes harder to count. There are times when budgets for nearby or related units will be skimmed to meet ad hoc requirements. Welcome to the economists’ underworld, where early retirement due to ill health is just another negative variable.