It’s the beginning of a very exciting week indeed. By its end, we’ll have crossed a liminal threshold into a new era. Our new Government will have our mandate to change the world - well, the UK at least. But has anyone spotted its vision?
I can’t remember running so blindly into a new tomorrow. Ok, so there were the days when Jed and I took turns to blindfold each other as we planned a series of mystery trips. Stumbling through Gatwick Airport, led only by the hand and the thrill of where we might land, one would cover the other’s ears at the tannoy announcements, and whisper to air stewards who were only too happy to be complicit in our adventures. Not knowing was part of the story.
Later this week on Cooking the Books, Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall who has campaigned for access to healthier food for everyone in the UK for as long as I’ve been a food journalist, will be talking about his latest book, How to Eat 30 Plants a Week. Guess what it’s about?? As he updates us on the best news in gut health we’ve had so far, he shows us how to easily add at least 30 different plants to our diet every week and help reduce the risk of common diseases from obesity to diabetes, heart disease, dementia, depression, auto immune diseases, and allergies. With a foreword by Tim Spector who told me years ago for the delicious. podcast that the key to great gut health is to keep it guessing, this is a game-changer for the health of the nation.
I might have missed that in the election manifestos.
This afternoon, I was chatting to Chris Van Tulleken about his brilliant award-winning book Ultra Processed People which is an explosive read about the damage that ultra-processed foods (UPFs) are causing to our physical and mental health. One of biggest issues is the influence that UPF manufacturers have on governments and in funding clinical trials, but ‘the real source of shame and stigma’ he writes, ‘should be directed toward governments refusing to regulate this stuff.’
I get up pretty early, but maybe I was in the shower when our new Government-to-be was whipping us into a frenzy about how they’d change that.
Each week throughout the election campaign, I’ve been producing the Food Foundation Pod Bites in which Anna Taylor, its Chief Executive scours the hundreds of pages in the various manifestos to find the food strategies. And there are some, if you’ve got time to read that far in. In this week’s episode, she spots a YouGov poll of all the parties policy commitments; it says that of the 10 Labour policies that the public were polled on, their commitment to ban the sale of energy drinks to under 16s was the most highly favoured of all Labour’s policy commitments. ‘That’s really interesting’, she says. ‘This is one of the areas that is judged to be a nanny state intervention, and therefore not one that garners public support. In fact the contrary is the case; people recognise the importance of these policies to protect children’s health’.
HOLD THE FRONT PAGE!
A new Labour Government, if it acts on what its public wants most from them, will stop food and drink manufacturers and retailers from poisoning our kids! Well there’s a vision I didn’t see in the Leaders’ Debates. Hang on; I’m just googling the newspaper headlines over the past few weeks, and… nope. No ‘Britain Loves a Nanny!’ ‘Britain Votes for Nanny!’; ‘Nanny Saves the Nation'! No vision of a future where food is at the centre of decision making, where climate change and food policy are inextricably linked, where children are no longer living with obesity or overweight by the time they start primary school, and where ultra processed foods have finally been given a Government health warning. No story of how food could change society.
So thank God for BOOKS. Bee Wilson, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Chris Van Tulleken, the late, great Michael Moseley et al, Anna Jones,
we are so grateful for the clarity of your Big Ideas, your titles which stop us in our tracks, your commitment to weaving us into your dream of how life could be. Thank you for your passion, and to still caring after all these years of banging your heads against a brick wall.Do listen to Hugh at the end of Thursday’s episode of Cooking the Books before you go out and vote and feel your heart race. And let’s step into this new world, demanding that it is brave enough to fix our broken food system.
Who’d have thought in 2024, we’re still very little further forward in the government actually doing something about our broken food and health systems. We are still very much reliant on campaigners pushing and people generously giving up their time to head in to schools to share their food passion and knowledge. Thank goodness for nice people! I like your sentiment, we must not give up, one day, someone from within will listen and great things will happen.