Over the last few years, the default response to environmental, social and economic challenges has been to offer a quick fix.
If people can’t access enough good food, send them to a food bank. If a food business has surplus, pass it on to people in need and call for a scale-up of food redistribution.
If people are struggling with their weight, give them weight-loss drugs. If millions of people are facing cost of living challenges, make food ever cheaper, no matter the long-term effects on those producing our food and on the planet.
The temporary shot-in-the-arm approach has to change.
Many people in the grocery sector have become firefighters, reacting to the immediate crisis in front of them and only treating symptoms. In some situations, an emergency response, filled with compassion, is necessary.
The trouble is that ‘survival mode’ has become the norm. So many people and organisations are seemingly stuck delivering well-meaning, but only sticking-plaster, responses.
The layers need peeling back. We should interrogate why we are doing things the way we are. We should be asking why problems of injustice, ill health and oversupply are happening to begin with. We need to be honest about the structures that prop up the current food system.
We live in a neoliberal capitalist world. Those working in food companies are too often treated as cogs in a machine, churning out products in order to maximise financial returns for shareholders at all costs. That is at the root of a lot of environmental and social issues faced by the sector. We need to fundamentally repurpose the role of business, and then incentivise employees to help achieve that wider purpose.
When you’re next given a problem to solve in the workplace, first ask why it’s happening. For example, if you have surplus stock and someone’s suggesting the answer is to give leftover food to people in need, ask: why do we have so much surplus food? And why can’t people access decent food in the first place?
Then ask why again. And again. Then, explore whether it would be possible to redirect time, energy and resources into addressing some of the roots of the problem instead – rather than remaining in exhausting reactive mode and re-entrenching the problem.
I’d like to see a ‘Root Cause Taskforce’ introduced to hold food businesses and governments to account. It could use a ’root-cause-ometer’ to highlight where responses to food system challenges are on the ‘end of pipe to root cause’ spectrum.
When it comes to our health, the UK government has promised there will be a much greater focus on prevention. Take a bold step. In the new year, shift from firefighting to preventing fires – aka emergencies – in the first place. Together we can encourage lasting solutions that truly get to the sources of the problems we face.
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