On Monday (7th August, 2023) I was delighted to speak at a panel event organised by Civic Future. Entitled Feeding Britain: Our Food Problems and How to Fix Them, it focused on a range of issues relating to Britain’s food system. The debate was chaired by Inaya Folarin Iman, and Professor Tim Lang was my co-panellist.
The overarching thesis I wanted to advance was that entrepreneurs working in the food and drinks sector will be crucial to delivering food which is more nutritious, affordable, environmentally friendly and – perhaps most importantly of all – tasty. For my opening remarks, however, I paid particular attention to a specific subset of entrepreneurs – those who are running startups working on the protein transition.
Below is a rough script I prepared in advance of the discussion, slightly edited for fluency. When the recording is uploaded, I’ll make sure to link to it here.
Let me know what you think!
The biggest problem facing Britain’s food system right now is our collective addiction to animal agriculture.
Quite simply, if we’re to strengthen our food system – and indeed our country – we need to begin talking far more candidly about this, and start making a lot more meaningful progress.
In my remarks tonight, I’ll touch on the consequences animal agriculture has for our environment, our health system, and our national resilience.
And because that’ll all be quite bleak, I’ll conclude on a more positive note – looking at some of the ways we can address these challenges.
So, beginning with the environment.
I think most of us are increasingly familiar with the impact animal agriculture has on the world around us.
Over recent years, awareness of the emissions from animals – in particular cattle and other ruminants – has risen markedly.
In numerical terms, agriculture as a whole is responsible for 11 per cent of Britain’s greenhouse gas emissions – around 50 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent.
More tangibly, that’s roughly the same as a year’s emissions from all the cars on Britain’s roads, or from all of the power stations which generate our electricity.
But that doesn’t tell the whole story.
Animal agriculture on the scale we currently practise requires space – and a lot of it.
It’s hard to arrive at a precise figure, but somewhere in the region of 11-14 million acres of land in the UK is given over just to rearing animals.
In contrast, approximately 170,000 acres is devoted to housing. (As a renter, this makes me very unhappy indeed.)
When we think about all of this space that animal agriculture takes up, we have to consider the counterfactual – what would be there if the farms weren’t?
In a lot of instances, it’d be ancient woodlands, or other natural features, like wildflower meadows, which we’ve actively chosen to eradicate from our landscapes.
So not only does animal agriculture contribute a lot of emissions, it also denies us the ability to sequester emissions too.
The wholesale clearance of natural habitats has also devastated our country’s biodiversity, with populations of numerous key indicator species in freefall over the past few decades – be that insects, amphibians or birdlife.
Finally, let’s not forget animal agriculture’s detrimental impact on air and water quality – issues which have shot to prominence of late.
So that’s the environment. Now, onto health.
I actually don’t care too much about personal health ailments that occur from what people eat.
With respect to food and health, I’m actually quite relaxed about this on a personal level. Frankly, if you want to gorge yourself to death on fatty burgers, I don’t think I should have the right to tell you not to.
What does scare me a bit more – quite a lot more in fact – is antimicrobial resistance.
According to the latest data I could find, 73 per cent of antimicrobials sold globally were for use in animal agriculture.
Animals are often given them prophylactically too – so, as a matter of course, rather than in response to any disease being identified.
What this means is that, to a large extent, we’re deliberately and willingly getting ourselves into an antibiotic arms race.
And given that no new classes of antibiotics have been discovered since the 1980s, it’s something I think we should be considerably more worried about.
Thanks to the mass medication of farmed animals, we could render some of our most powerful antibiotics completely redundant. In turn, this could make even relatively acute injuries or illnesses far more dangerous than they currently are.
It’s true that the UK has managed to somewhat reduce the amount of antibiotics in its farming sector – but use still remains widespread, and as the recent pandemic teaches us, in our globalised world, the distinction between what happens abroad and what happens at home is increasingly irrelevant.
And finally we turn to national security.
I guess by this we mean: “does the state have the means to secure a certain baseline objective in a time of crisis?”
And in the case of food, I guess that means a sufficient amount of calories per person, plus a good balance of nutrition too.
Here is where things just get really mind-boggling.
Eighty-five per cent of the land used to feed Britain is dedicated to rearing animals. Yet that area produces just 32 per cent of our calories. The other 15 per cent of land produces the remaining 68 per cent of our calories.
As a way of converting resources into food to eat, putting an animal in between us and the field really is quite dumb – to put it bluntly.
I’ll concede by saying that food shouldn’t just be seen as fuel. But we’re talking about national security here, not Michelin Stars.
So they’re the problems – what are the solutions?
As you might expect someone who works for a think tank called The Entrepreneurs Network to say, I believe the answer lies in the innovative zeal of our country’s entrepreneurs and startups.
In the last few years, we’ve seen an explosion in the number of companies trying to produce alternatives to meat and dairy.
I’m not just talking about plant-based alternatives such as Quorn – good as they may be.
Here I’m thinking more of exciting startups like Ivy Farm, who cultivate lab-grown meat to make authentic pork sausages without the pig; or Better Dairy, who use precision fermentation techniques to make real milk without the cow.
Many of these firms are still in their developmental stages – often held back by completely irrational regulations, and I would be happy to expand on these in the Q&A.
But they will be critical to fixing what I see as the biggest problem with our current food system, and as such we should be focusing relentlessly on doing what we can to help them succeed.
Thank you.