Food Security Policy

Baroness Jenkin of Kennington Excerpts

Thursday 24th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jenkin of Kennington]

My Lords, like other noble Lords I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, for securing this extremely important debate. As many noble Lords said, the issue should be extremely high on both the domestic and international agendas.

While there is a high level of food security in the UK, there is also, as other noble Lords mentioned, a very high level of food waste. I will concentrate my remarks on that area. Shockingly, some 30% to 50% of all food produced is never consumed. In the developing world this is for a variety of reasons, which boil down to inadequate infrastructure or adverse weather conditions. In the developed world the problem is far more behavioural. People buy too much, are resistant to buying wonky fruit and vegetables and demand new and exciting food every night, with leftovers not being used. Food that is safe to eat—a total of 7 million tonnes a year—is chucked in the bin, largely because people are scared by stringent food labelling and cautious about sell-by and best-before dates.

Until a couple of decades ago, the old adage, “Waste not, want not”, was well understood, but today it no longer rings true. It is absolutely wrong that wonky and ugly fruit and veg, and offcuts of meat that we have forgotten how to cook, are thrown away. I recently came across Rubies in the Rubble, an admirable social enterprise based in Covent Garden market, which makes jams and chutneys out of surplus produce that would otherwise be sent to anaerobic digestion. Organisations such as this should be nurtured, encouraged and supported to ensure that productivity is born out of what would otherwise be wasted.

Earlier this month I participated—along with a number of other noble Lords including the Lord Speaker, who bravely took part during the week of State Opening—in the Live Below the Line challenge, living on £1 a day for five days for all our food and drink to draw attention to the 1.4 billion people who live on the equivalent of £1 a day every day of their lives for much more than their food and drink. Although we all found the challenge difficult, in this country we have such an abundance of choice that if I could not find a cheap tin of baked beans in one supermarket, I was bound to in the next. Incidentally, I was struck by the fact that cost of a tin of value baked beans had increased from 25p last year to 29p this year. We in this country have become accustomed to this huge choice, even when living on a tight budget, but is it really sustainable in the long term?

I should like to take this opportunity to draw attention to a couple of examples of innovative campaigns, all in their different ways making a real difference. Incredible Edible is a scheme that started in Todmorden in Yorkshire and has now spread to 23 towns and villages across the UK. From their beginnings with herb gardens, local people now plant and grow vegetables and fruit all around their town. They use land outside the fire station, the railway station, the health centre—where they replaced thousands of pounds worth of shrubs with apple and pear trees—turning all available local space into vegetable patches and herb plots for anyone in the town to come along, pick and take home their produce, promoting healthy living and a real sense of community, as well as the start of genuine local food security.

I commend the Mayor of London’s Capital Growth campaign, which aims to support 2,012 new growing spaces in London by the end of 2012. Currently at 1,719, it is an eminently achievable target. Jamie Oliver’s Kitchen Garden campaign and the Government’s task force, led by Garden Organic, are promoting vegetable patches in every school in order to further educate future generations and address the issue of food security, and at the same time are helping to reduce the growing epidemic of obesity in this country, which, as was referred to earlier, is another huge problem waiting for us down the track.

An appropriate infrastructure must be created to connect up demand and supply. As mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, FoodCycle, with its community cafés, and FareShare, which distributes surplus food to local charities and organisations—they are both known to the Minister—are tackling these issues at different levels of the supply chain, making sure that food that is still good gets to those who are at risk of food insecurity. For each of these different models, all tackling waste and food insecurity in different ways, there are many other local initiatives and examples. I ask the Minister please to do what he can to make it easy for such organisations to innovate and flourish.

I end by reading a short e-mail I received from a friend who sponsored me on my Live Below the Line challenge, which sums up in a very human way the challenge facing us all. It states:

“starting last Sunday I voluntarily decided I would see if a human could live off porridge for breakfast and dinner and 2 eggs for lunch, a glass of milk and a bunch of grapes a day (and as much water as wanted). This was sparked by something that occurred to me on a run—‘how much of the food we eat do we actually need or do we just believe we need it’. The surprising thing for me was that, even still running 15 miles a week, I did not feel hungry and actually felt quite energetic. It is hard seeing so much very appealing food around and ignoring it but my body seems to have coped well on what seem very meagre rations. Importantly here though, in preparation, I did strongly empower my beliefs with the notion that this limited amount of food was adequate which I think is an important part of why it felt OK. I guess the point here is that I wanted to reinforce, in myself, my belief that there is absolutely plenty of food and water to feed the whole planet. It just feels that it is distributed in an inefficient manner. Clearly yours and my little experience prove that we in wealthy countries probably consume, in general terms, far more food than we need … the challenge though is how to best share the food around the whole world population”.

This seems to be the nub of the question we are debating today, and it is one that our generation cannot afford to duck.