A salt and sugar tax, doctors prescribing veggies, farmers regenerating land... The National Food Strategy uses the pandemic to propose big changes

We were impressed by the (English) National Food Strategy released this week, driven by the food entrepreneur (and founder of Leon), Henry Dimbleby (BBC report).

Though its main policy proposal - a sugar and salt tax on food manufacturers, forcing them to reduce these amounts in their products - was effectively rejected by the current government, we believe that much of it will be adopted.

It’s a very well researched, and explicitly systemic report - it identifies a “junk food cycle” that traps consumers and producers alike, and is clearly ambitious for an alternative system (planet-friendly, reducing obesity, regenerating the farming sector).

As this piece in The Article says:

Dimbleby estimates the initial cost at £1.4 billion per annum, but contrasts this with the cost of treating obesity-related illnesses, which kill 64,000 people a year. He has avoided grasping the nettle of reducing meat consumption by making retail prices reflect the true cost to the environment. But in other areas he has been bolder, pointing to long-term benefits of £126 billion.

Dimbleby is gambling on the notion that the pandemic has delivered such a shock to the system that people are ready to embrace a radical change in their lifestyles. He wants to harness the power of the state to appeal both to altruism and self-interest. 

Our A/UK co-initiator, Pat Kane, covered the biology and evolutionary theory behind our susceptibility to sugar and salt in his weekly column in the National (Scotland):

The science is well known by now. For most of our hunter-gatherer history on this planet, homo et femina sapiens would very occasionally come upon sugary substances (usually ripe fruit, packed with calorific energy).

When we gobbled down these rare delicacies our brains rewarded us with pleasurable chemicals (dopamine), guaranteeing we didn’t miss the next chance to do so.

Yet while that ancient wiring is still part of our physiology, our own food cultures have streaked way ahead of us. We can now produce sugary substances that are free from all those tedious, masticable fibres you find in fruit. Nothing now impedes our access to the sugar high.

The American journalist Micheal Moss has written two books – 2013’s Salt Sugar Fat: How The Food Giants Hooked Us, and this year’s Hooked: Food, Free Will And How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions – which pull no punches on these issues.

Moss calls out the food giants for consciously fashioning foods (and marketing) that taps into our ancient vulnerability to sweetness, saltiness and much else. In a recent interview, Moss relates one encounter with a former lawyer for Philip Morris (who are a food as well as a tobacco giant).

“We were just kind of chatting about smoking and his smoking habits”, relates Moss. “He said, ‘Look, I’m one of those people who could take out my pack of cigarettes and have a cigarette during a business meeting, and put it away, and have no compulsion to look at or take it out again until the next day.’

“Then he goes, and my jaw’s dropping, ‘but I couldn’t go anywhere near our Oreo cookies, for fear of losing control, because I would eat half the bag.’ And so to me, I think one of the most surprising, shocking things is how many insiders don’t touch their own products. Either because they know the health implications of that or because they know that they will lose control.”

Stories like this move you away from the tragic account of our food self-destructiveness. You know: we’re savannah nomads, vulnerable to the many sophistications that the ingenuity of our prefrontal cortexes have devised for us. What can we poor, forked creatures do? Are we fated to be Homer Simpsons, resisting all entreaties to better diet and exercise? Alas, alas!

Instead, we can move towards a systemic account (and one that’s more Lisa than Homer). How can we devise and design a better food system (composed of culture, laws, institutions and practices)? One that is better than our current commercial arrangements – dominated by what the Dimbleby report calls “our junk food cycle” – which exploits these old human vulnerabilities?

This is clearly where the National Food Strategy, in its tax suggestions, has triggered a minefield. The report’s director, the founder of the Leon restaurants Henry Dimbleby (yes, son of David), points to a successful precedent. The 2018 Sugar Levy on Soft Drinks drove manufacturers to “reformulate” their products. Which means they reduced their sugar levels by a third, while not passing the costs onto consumers.

WHY combine salt with sugar in the tax? Moss’s first book is intriguing on our craving for salt. He notes that our ancestors crawled out of a profoundly salted sea world. The hit could be no more elemental.

Our body-brain receptors and wiring fire up with salt intake – it seems in the same way (as one 2008 Iowa University study puts it) that “sex, voluntary exercise, fats, carbohydrates and chocolate also do, in their possessing addictive qualities.”

So with sugar, it’s a dastardly combination. But what Moss also points out is salt’s sheer usefulness to the making of processed food. Salt helps these foodstuffs stay appealingly coloured, masks their unattractive flavours (apparently, cornflakes taste metallic without salt), improves their shelf lives.

In Hooked, Moss also points out the massive investments in R&D that combines salt with other core tastes. The object is to improve “share of stomach”, “mouth-feel” and “bliss-points”, in the industry’s own creepy terminology.

So Mr Dimbleby’s top-line policy, setting thresholds for sugar and salt in foods that trigger taxes when breached, meddles with the sovereign right of commerce to game us as it likes (usually cloaked as “responsibility to shareholders”). In light of this radicalism, It would be very fair to this very well-researched report to cite some of its other recommendations.

The systemic emphasis – that is, how to build a better system to help us improve our health – is there throughout. Giving NHS doctors the power to prescribe vegetables as a response to the maladies of patients. Creating a Food Data System. Extending rights to free school meals way beyond the current Universal Credit qualification. And many additional educational and innovation proposals.

More here. The full National Food Strategyis here.