Five moves forward for food systems (or, What comes after 'power and concentration'?)
Updated: Sep 18
I came into the world of food systems in 2019 via a lecture 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 during that period 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 also 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 Forks Over Knives and The Kind Diet activism of the 2010s had evolved into Eleven Madison Park's all-vegan menu. We were all watching Chef's Table and the Slow Food Movement led to a slew of crazy-grained artisan sourdough bakeries and dudes roasting coffee beans in warehouses near Elephant and Castle (I wrote a whole [terrible] 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 led to heritage grains and 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 general boredom with the project of 'ending 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've lost Anthony and are just watching Stanley Tucci eat pasta. David Chang and Rene Redzepi have been revealed as narcissist sociopaths. Artisan coffee shops are all owned by private equity now and Gail's ate all the artisans. And it kind of feels like the same topics are being recycled over and over at all the conferences. The EAT Foundation is winding down.
Obviously there is still so much important work going on. And of course that food system transformation we've been calling for still needs to happen and we desperately need to keep pushing, keep going. But the point is - morale is low.
We could point to any of the above-mentioned global traumas as the reason for this. However (as I tell my kids), we don't have any control over what's going on out there. We only have control over how we respond to it.
And it is my humble opinion that part of the reason it feels a bit flat right now is because we feel like we've run out of new things to say. We've shouted to the rooftops on a few specific subjects. And now 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 gotten a taste of nirvana and yet now 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 on food systems so that we don't grow despondent or stagnant. So that we remain clear-eyed about challenges but don't succumb to a victim complex or ennui. (Spoiler: None of it has to do with AI or Ozempic.)
Summary:
For those short on time, here's a consolidation. Click ahead to what interests you!
Starting point: | Move toward: | |
Diagnosis — who has power, how concentrated the system is, why change is difficult | Strategy under constraint — given that power exists, what interventions can actually alter outcomes? | |
Conversion — getting people to care, know, cook, eat, value food differently | Institutional design — make better outcomes possible without requiring mass enlightenment first | |
Aggregate need — “transformation is worth trillions / needs trillions, therefore finance should fund it” | Incidence and investability — who pays, who loses, what isn't commercially financeable, and therefore what do we actually need | |
Destination — modelling what a better food system looks like | Transition dynamics — modelling assets, firms, places, balance sheets, flows and adjustment between here and there | |
5. Fields | Food-system exceptionalism — treating food as a sufficiently distinctive object that we mostly learn from food | Comparative transition knowledge — how have other structural transformations actually happened, and what travels or doesn't travel to food? |
#1: Power - 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 system 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. 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, "We can't fix the food system until we fix the power imbalance!" is a bit like saying we can't solve the climate crisis until we solve capitalism. It doesn't really provide a pathway forward and it might not even totally be true. As I've said elsewhere, an over-emphasis on this issue risks turning us into pearl-clutchers, appalled and indignant at the state of the world, instead of participants in it.
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 shocked by it anymore and accepting it to some degree - not 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 speaking of a cure - industry concentration is a global macro-economy wide issue, not unique to food systems. And most of us are experts in food systems, not how to deal with industrial monopolies.
This issue is a whole area of expertise that people are working on across so many sectors so, if this is a topic we want to keep pushing on, let's learn from them about what to do, about paths forward.
#2: Public - Stop making change contingent 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!
Now, I might have hallucinated this but I have this very powerful memory of reading Bee Wilson's The Way We Eat Now a few years back. Excellent book. She's brilliant. She raised our collective conscious about food. But she had a line in it that I remember stuck me while reading one night - "If we could just get people to see that there is nothing as pleasurable as a well-cooked butterbean...." (I might have hallucinted this because I cannot for the life of me find the line in my copy. Someone help me out!)
So turning people on to beans is a great thing. Bold Beans Co. has obviously taken up the project with gusto.
But ok, has 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 the intentions are good and we want everyone to live healthy happy lives and to see Britain or the USA have the 'beautiful food culture' we imagine the French or the Japanese do. But truly, it is possible to live a healthy, happy life without devoting the care and time to food that some of us do purely out of love and enjoyment. Food is obviously an absolutely critical part of life - but it can also be a hobby. And it is not necessary for everyone to be so hobby-levels passionate about food for us to have better food systems.
Loving food 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 get their kids to gymnastics on time 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. Their love of other things is a gift to me and, hopefully, my love of food can be a gift to them by my devoting my life to try to make food better and easier for them. But this does not require their equivalent life-devotion to it.
I think we can tend to feel a bit desperate about it though because we feel that the powerful and concetrated food industry is shaping our food environments in bad ways and the only way to change it is to get everyone to mobilise and demand something better. And so we craft entire theories of change and political strategies contingent on everyone caring. I've written about the risks of this here and here. Any strategies that require a 'public awakening' (1) will require things of busy moms and low-income families and people who care more about other equally important issues than is fair to demand of them and (2) is not really necessary for making progress towards better food systems.
#3: Finance - Get specific 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."
First, let's distinguish between 'investment for agricultural development' and 'investment in food systems transformation,' because these are getting conflated. Ag development - building irrigation channels or purchasing machinery or what have you - these need finance. But finance for ag development has been going on for decades and has always needed finance and there are systems and institutions in place to deliver that finance. And there is a good financial case for it because what is being developed is not only the agricultural output but the livelihoods and cash flows that come along with it. 'You give me money. I grow more food. I get more money. I use that money to pay you back.' This all makes sense.
'Food systems transformation' is not the same thing as agricultural development (even if the terms are getting conflated in some publications.) 'Transformation' or 'transition' means taking something that already exists and turning it into something else - converting a poultry farm to mushrooms or turning a soy monoculture farm into an agroforestry operation or retrofitting a potato chip factory to freeze blueberries or whatever or even straight up purchasing a feedlot, shutting it down and rewilding the land. A transformation is taking A (unhealthy foods produced unsustainably) and turning it into B (healthy foods produced sustainably).
And 'scaling up finance for food system transformation' - this is not going to happen 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.
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 turning A into B, 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 - but this is mostly the case with nature finance and cellular meats. And yes, some things might be good investments if the policy environment were to change... but then what we're calling for is not 'scaling up investment' but policy change.
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. This does not get fixed by asking for more finance. It also (IMHO) does not get fixed by 'government de-risking' or even blended finance. Food system transformation can only progress after we acknowledge the reality of what we're dealing with.
#4: Models - 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 resolution - 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: Fields - 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. Stay curious, people!
