Five forward motions for food systems (or, What comes after 'power and concentration'?)
I came into the world of food systems in 2019 via a lecture on urban food systems during my masters. It captured me completely and, as I began diving into the world of food, it seemed like one of bottomless depths.
I was, undoubtedly, a product of the times. One only had to look at the countless books coming out at that time to get a sense of how much energy there was - and I was pulled along in the flow. Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma of course kick-started it all in a major way. But we had Food Wars, Food Politics, Eating Animals, First Bite and The Way We Eat Now, Eating to Extinction, Hungry City - the list goes on and on. The hippy China Study-veganism and animal rights activism of the 2010s had evolved into 11 Madison Park's all-vegetarian menu. We all started watching Chef's Table and the Slow Food Movement had made way to a slew of crazy-grained artisan sourdough bakeriess and dudes roasting coffee beansin wharehouses near Elephant and Castle (I wrote a whole dissertation about it.) The Victoria and Albert Museum had an exhibition called "Food: Bigger Than the Plate." Vittles launched on Substack. Shoppy shops were everywhere. The organic food movement had grown into diversified grains and heritage tomatoes. Groundswell and the Oxford Real Farming Conference were taking the British countryside by storm.
Nature Food launched in 2020 and Bloomberg and the Financial Times started covering food systems instead of just commodities markets. The UN Food Systems Dialogues were underway, leading into the UN Food Systems Summit in 2021. Major NGOs weren't just talking about deforestation in the Amazon, but advocating for 'global food systems transformation.' The EU was beginning to sketch out a new legislative framework for food systems.
But it's 2026 now and am I the only who has noticed that, in the last year or two, there has been a vibe shift? Maybe it was the pandemic. Maybe it was the war in Ukraine. Maybe it was the second Trump presidency, the gutting of climate funding, the end of ODA and boredom with 'end world hunger.' But it just feels like a bit of wind has gone out of the sails. I could feel it at London Climate Action Week. Funding cuts all over the place, years of advocacy and activism and very little major policy breakthroughs to speak of. Community food hubs built that can't sustain themselves. Large corporates talking about 'regen ag' programmes and then carrying on with business as usual. And now culture wise, we're back to just watching Stanley Tucci eat pasta. Artisan coffee shops are owned by private equity now and Gail's ate all the artisans. And it kind of feels like the same topics are being recycled at all the conferences. The EAT Foundation is winding down.
There is still so much important work going on, for sure. And of course we desperately need to keep pushing, keep going. But the point is - morale is low.
It is my humble opinion that part of the reason it feels a bit flat now is because we're all kind of bored. We've said all there is to say on a few specific subjects. And we're a bit at risk of beating our dead horses a little too much but we haven't quite figured out where to go from here - after we've discovered all these amazing things and the world is.... kind of where we left it, if not worse.
So I'm throwing out the five things I think we need to do to keep things moving forward. (Spoiler: None of it has to do with AI or Ozempic.)
#1: Stop treating power and concentration as the end of the conversation.
25 years of research into the scale and effects of power and concentration in the food systems has been very very important. It has allowed us to understand the landscape in which we're operating. It's given nutritionists a way to understand why its so hard for consumers to make good food choices and its helped activists understand why its so hard to get policy through.
But we need to stop using this issue as a trump card. Yes, there is power and concentration in the food industry and yes, it shapes what we eat in not-always-good ways and yes, it creates a very difficult political challenge. However, pointing to P&C and saying, "See! We can't fix the food system until we fix the power imbalance!" is not particularly helpful. It doesn't provide a pathway forward. What exactly would we like governments to do to fix this problem? Forcibly break up Unilever like it broke up Standard Oil? And would that actually get us the outcome we're looking for? Do we think small, un-concentrated sectors are immune to the market dynamics that lead to unhealthy and unsustainable food on our shelves?
Power and concentration is so frequently treated as the point, as the end of the conversation. It needs to be the beginning of the conversation. This requires not being surprised and shocked by it anymore - not necessarily accepting it in the sense that we don't think it should change, but accepting it as the starting point from which we then need to craft strategies through it. 'Power and concentration' is a diagnosis. Not a cure. And people only want to be told what the disease is so many times before their told what to do about it and a schedule for taking their medicine.
And the subject of breaking up monopolies is a whole area of expertise that people are working on across so many sectors - not only food. If this is a topic we want to keep pushing on, let's learn from them about what to do.
#2: Stop building strategies premised on getting the general public to care about our thing as much as we care about our thing.
Food systems people are a very passionate bunch. We love food! We care about food! We enjoy food! Food is life and life is beautiful!
But many years back, I was reading Bee Wilson's The Way We Eat Now. Excellent book. She's brilliant. But she had a line in it that I still remember to this day because it stuck me so - "If we could just get people to see that there is nothing as pleasurable as a well-cooked butterbean."
Ok, have anyone been to Dallas, TX? Or Milton Keynes? People there don't give a shit about a well-cooked butterbean. And you know what? They shouldn't have to. I know we'd all love to see Britain or the USA have the 'beautiful food culture' or the French or the Japanese or these countries we idolize because we think they don't have food problems. But first, they definitely have food problems. And second, a rich food culture is a beautiful thing - but it is not a moral virtue. I've stopped thinking that my sister is a bad person because she isn't passionate about food. She's passionate about other things - like accounting. And I'm glad she is! Because I really need someone to do my taxes! I also really need people who care about racial injustice and road transport and a well organized filing system at City Hall. And maybe while they are busy caring about those things and also trying to fill their kids tummies and get their 10,000 steps in and pay the bills, food is lower on their priority list than it is on mine. That is, truly and honestly, fine.
Any strategies forward that require a 'public awakening' to a beautiful food culture (1) hinge on the assumption that our thing - fixing food systems - is the thing that everyone needs to care about as much as we care about it, which is a big burden to place on everyone and (2) not really necessary.
#3: Get clear about where there is and isn't a business case for food system transformation.
Countless reports are coming out talking about 'scaling up' investment in food systems transformation. What I hear behind this phrase is, "We really need funding and government budgets are slashed and philanthropies are stretched and so now we need to try to get some commercial finance."
This is not going to happen in the way we want it to happen. To understand why, we need to distinguish between the economic case for food systems transformation and the financial case. The economic case is good - the costs of our current food system are so big that transforming it would be worth the costs of transformation and lead to net benefits for society. Cool. (We'll leave aside the fact that any economic case can be made depending on how you calculate the costs and the benefits and that the social cost of carbon is a basically meaningless metric these days.)
But the economic case for something is very different than the financial case for something. The first cares about maximizing economic welfare - that is, the most efficient allocation of an economy's resources. The second is about maximizing risk-adjusted returns.
If the financial argument was there for something, it would have already happened. If there's one thing finance is good at, its sniffing out a good investment. If they haven't invested in this because the investment isn't good. That's telling us something. And sure, there can be good investments that don't happen because a market is immature and you need some good ol' fashioned market building is needed. But this is mostly the case with nature finance and cellular meets and these have many more challenges that just being nascent. And yes, some things might be good investments if the policy environment were to change... but then we're talking about a different challenge.
Even if there is money to be made in a transformed food system, a whole-foods plant-based diet is not going to be as financially lucrative as the one we have now. It's why we....don't have it now.
#4: Build some new models.
Food systems modeling is a truly incredible field. The models that have been built are works of art. Truly remarkable things. The work done by countless people over decades to model these food and land use systems and integrate them with climate systems and economic systems - their amazing. Absolutely no shade. I don't even feel compelled to get into all that stuff criticising all the assumptions buried in models - "Ugh they all rely on the welfare maximising function which isn't how actual humans work," yeah yeah yeah. I get it. I used to think that myself to feel better about the fact that I didn't know how to use these models.
I'm not so upset about this anymore. However, I do think we are at serious risk of running into a bit of a path dependency problem. So much work has gone into building these models and then so much time has to go into leaning how to even use them that, once you're there, it totally makes sense to want to churn out as much research as possible with those models. The academic incentives push towards this. You work so hard to build up a model over so many years and you need to get as many papers out of it as you can. And no points go to do the grunt work to build a new model to answer new or different types of questions that will take you longer to do.
But these models are limited - as all are. They can answer certain types of questions with incredible power and resoltuion - and they can't answer others. So by using the same models over and over again, we're limiting ourselves to only asking a narrow set of questions because of the modelling suite we have available to us.
We may also have gotten perhaps a bit obsessed with the resolution of models and i think this stems from the (very good!) understand that food systems are complex and so encompass a lot of pieces. But then because we struggle with uncertainy and we like completeness, we set about trying to cram in every single detail, diving further into the crevasse. Sometimes this is great. It can also be a trap because the deeper you dive, the harder to get out and scan the landscape again.
We don't only need top-down macroeconomic land-use/climate models or dietary comparison models or trade flow or biophysical models. We also need microfinancial bottom-up, asset level and spatial models, food flows and financial models and a bunch of other stuff. These can help us answer different types of questions - the kinds that can actually help us start modelling the transition itself rather than what we need to transition to.
#5: Start learning from the energy people - and history.
Food systems are like energy's little cousin. Energy has been in this fight for a long long time and the energy transition has progressed far beyond the food systems transition. We have so much to learn, but there is almost zero interdisciplinary work happening here. This is a crime. The best part of my research the last 3 years has been learning from the energy economics and specialists around me and damn if there is not gold in them there hills.
The energy transition is very different than the food transition in many ways so we won't be able to port everything over. That's been a big learning from applying the 'stranded assets' framework to food systems. Somethings work and some things don't. But that in it of itself if part of the learning. In understanding what doesn't apply, we learn more about what in food systems requires its own specific approach and how we might go about that.
And even more so, we need to learn from history - both recent and further back. I, for one, am particularly obsessed with abolition in Britain and how that played out. Dimitri Zhengelis and team wrote an excellent chapter on stranded assets through the ages. I know we all love food here and so we want to talk about and read about and learn about food. But to fix food systems will require being curious, expanding our horizons and learning from others making change in their own spheres.
None of what I've said is meant to disparage any of the work that has come up to this point. All of it has been so essential - it's why I'm here! And it's why food systems transformation has risen up the agenda like it has. And work needs to continue so that we keep it on the agenda and keep moving towards the future we want and need.
To get there, we need to be reflective on when and how the conversation needs to keep moving forward. This will require perhaps holding loosely to some of the things we've picked up along the way. We might even need to be willing to strand some of our own assets. But all of this is what keeps the work vibrant and energised and alive.
