“Don’t forget the vegans when catering for the apocalypse,” ran the headline earlier this week. That seems unlikely — the vegans will remind you of their presence on a regular basis. Boom tish.
It’s easy to mock the mung bean munchers, but the story attached to the headline was a serious warning from a serious man: Tim Lang. He is professor emeritus of food policy at City St George’s, University of London, possibly Britain’s pre-eminent expert on how we feed ourselves in this country. He has spent the last two years writing Just in Case for the National Preparedness Commission, set up in the wake of Covid, when it became apparent that the UK was not very well prepared for a pandemic.
Lang was speaking at a book festival and discussing the possibility of disruption to our food supply chain. We saw it in a small but very visible way in 2020. After the loo rolls disappeared from supermarket shelves, pasta ran short, then rice and instant noodles.
His point was that if Vladimir Putin was to fire a rocket at us, we would — for a few days, maybe more — have to rely on ration packs. Beyond the need for basic calories, when people are in shock “they need to have things they are familiar and comfortable with”. You might think if your city has been nuked by a dictator, you wouldn’t have the luxury of insisting on tofu rather than biltong, but you get his gist. Even during the Second World War vegetarians were catered for with extra egg and cheese rations.
Lang’s more important argument was slightly lost in the “let’s have a laugh at vegans” discourse — fun though that is. Namely, never have the threats to Britain’s food chain been more apparent while Britain’s food chain has never been more vulnerable.
The threats are clear and they don’t just include Putin. It is now a month since hackers infiltrated Marks and Spencer’s IT system and the retailer is still not accepting online orders. M&S has a mere 4 per cent share of the grocery market and in any case the online food arm is outsourced to its joint venture with Ocado. Imagine if the hackers had attacked Tesco, with 28 per cent market share.
The vulnerabilities are less obvious. We presume because we can waltz into a supermarket in December and buy six varieties of melons and 342 different packs of coffee (that really is the number Tesco stock) that we will never run out of necessities or exotic goods.
This is a false assumption. Our food chain may be complex, but it is also fragile. Take one example that the Department for Food and Rural Affairs has recently highlighted: calcium carbonate.
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It is mandatory in the UK to fortify all our (non-wholemeal) flour with calcium carbonate. If you look at the back of any packet of flour (yes, even the fancy artisanal stuff used to make a £7 loaf of sourdough) you will see this ingredient.
Calcium carbonate is, in effect, edible chalk and it has been in all our bread since the days of food rationing, when it was realised that the nation was at risk of all sorts of malnutrition, notably rickets, which causes bone weakness in children and is brought about by a calcium deficiency. You may think it’s nanny statism, but in 2012 nutritional scientists concluded that mandatory fortification needed to stay.
What’s this got to do with food security? It turns out that the UK flour millers used to get this ingredient from a quarry in Steeple Morden, Cambridgeshire. However, this source is no longer deemed of sufficient quality to be used in food, so the entire UK flour industry now relies on a single quarry in Orgon, near Avignon in France, owned by a private Swiss chemicals company, Omya.
Defra says that it is deeply concerning that so much of our food hinges on this one quarry. After all, a third of all products sold in UK supermarkets contain flour fortified with calcium carbonate.
What happens if the Channel Tunnel is out of action? What happens if French lorry drivers go on strike? If Omya goes bust?
The vast majority of our food imports come through just two ports: Felixstowe and Dover, which itself relies on private security guards to ensure the smooth delivery not just of melons and coffee but calcium carbonate too.
In a report a few months ago, Defra stated: “Bread is a staple food for the UK population with a short shelf life and any disruption would be felt immediately by the population and would likely affect public confidence in the UK food system.”
Calcium carbonate is one tiny cog in a vast Heath Robinson system that ensures food ends up on our table. There are hundreds of other products reliant on just one or two suppliers because the food industry has consolidated in the search for efficiencies.
Exacerbating this precariousness is the supermarket industry’s decision to axe nearly all its storage space, in favour of just-in-time delivery. A large Tesco or Asda does not have a serious stockroom, just loading bays for the continual arrival of lorries.
Switzerland, not a country one associates with hysterical over-reaction, stores three months’ worth of food centrally. Lang believes that putting the onus on either central government or individual households is the wrong approach. The former is too large an entity, the latter too small without any economies of scale. Covid taught us that neighbourhoods, in fact, co-operated remarkably well and storing enough food for a parish or its modern equivalent — a WhatsApp group — is about right. Maybe food banks could double up as a back-up for when hackers or Putin throw a spanner into our brittle supply chain. Or for when that French quarry gets flooded.
But, for now, buying a few extra tins of lentils might not be a bad idea.
