How to fix the broken food system: Henry Dimbleby
Picture credit: Sam Robinson
In this episode
The global food system is one of the most destructive industries on earth. Of course, we all need to eat. But is there a way of doing so that doesn’t come at a cost to our health and to our planet? If that's all sounding a bit heavy, then step forward: Henry Dimbleby. Formerly the government’s food tsar, he’s been exploring the secrets of the global food system for decades and he's hungry for change. Henry talks to Ed and Geoff about the secrets behind the ultra-processed egg sandwich, the glory of Japanese food culture and why Liz Truss once banned him from attending meetings. What's changed about the food we eat today, and what can we do about it?
Guests
Henry Dimbleby, author of Ravenous: How to Get Ourselves and Our Planet Into Shape (@HenryDimbleby)
More info
Buy a copy of Henry's book, published by Profile Books
Read the National Food Strategy and the School Food Plan
We love hearing from you. If you have views on this episode, or ideas for future shows you can contact us via our website, our social media (@cheerfulpodcast) or write us an email (reasons@cheerfulpodcast.com)
Episode transcript
Ed: So let's now start the conversation with Henry Dimbleby, who has written a book with Jemima Lewis called ‘Ravenous: how to Get ourselves and our planet into shape’. He's the co-founder of healthy fast food chain Leon, which was launched in 2004. He was the government's food tsar, a position he left in March 2023, after having published the National Food Strategy. Henry, thank you so much for joining us.
Henry: Thank you for having me.
Ed: Let's start in a slightly strange place, which is: you got knocked over in the street in Tokyo and landed on a piece of scaffolding pole. Apart from the fact you had a nasty accident, there's an interesting sort of lesson about food as a result of this experience.
Henry: Yeah, so I think one of the things is that we’re so stuck in our time and our space, and actually culture changes all the time. I fell over on this scaffolding pole. It felt like getting a kind of body punch from George Foreman. It completely knocked the wind out of me. And then anyway, I went out for dinner, woke up in the middle of the night, kind of inflated, like a rubber dingy, I couldn't bend! I kind of shimmied out of bed sideways and picked up my phone and ended up in hospital. And it was like living in a completely different world. I was in hospital in Japan for three days. It was like going to a spa every morning! Every morning you'd be served breakfast of a little miso soup and some pickled vegetables and fish and then you would have a Bento box for lunch. I mean, it was extraordinary.
Ed: It doesn't exactly sound like the NHS, does it?
Henry: But the point is people think that this Japanese food culture is kind of God-given! That it's descended upon them from heaven, and it's just always been like that. And that is absolutely not true. So the Japanese food culture is completely created by the state, and it started in the Meiji restoration, at the end of the 19th century, when the Japanese opened up for the first time. At the time, they had a very meagre diet. And the emperor said, ‘we've got to do something about this if we're going to compete in the modern world. We have got to get physically fitter.’
Then he got the Army cooks to create a whole new set of recipes for the army. For example, Katsu Curry which we think of quite a typical Japanese dish was stolen from the British Navy. It was fried chicken with a curry sauce from India. Then they got these army cooks to go on the radio and to broadcast and they produced books of recipes. And then by law in Japan they restricted fast food. It was hard to get fast food outlets and in schools, every child gets a properly cooked lunch every day.
The point is, we could do that! We could decide to have good food in hospitals, we could decide to have good food in schools. We could decide to do that stuff, but we don't because we have this kind of ideological idea that somehow deciding to feed our children well is too much intervention from the state and we should let the market do its business.
And it is just worth saying, you know, if you are somebody who says, ‘well, I don't want that intervention’, what is the alternative? The NHS thinks that the cost of type two diabetes alone by 2035, that's one diet related condition, will be more than all cancers put together currently.
The reason I wrote the book is because I don't think people realise quite how much the food system is responsible for two of the biggest things facing Western society: our health and the destruction of the environment. And it's a call really to say ‘we can choose to do better!’
Geoff: What do you think lies underneath that resistance? I don’t know if it’s unique to the UK or in common with other Western countries. Is it media hysteria? Is it something different?
Henry: We coined the phrase…well the phrase came into common usage, ‘the nanny state’ in this country in, in the sixties, early sixties.
We don't want to tell people what to do. We don't want the state getting too involved in people's lives: what they eat, what they smoke. We’re seeing it a bit with vaping at the moment. We don't want to tell people what to do. And I think what is interesting is we did a lot of work when we did the food strategy on what the citizens’ views were on this.
And in this area, the politicians are completely out of step with citizens! Citizens are fed up. When you talk about banning advertising on junk food, which is something that's been kicked down the road again now until 2025 by this government. That is a wildly popular policy, but for some reason this kind of ‘nanny state’ thing hasn't gone away.
Geoff: But there's this squeamishness as well, isn't there? It can look like wealthy people telling less-wealthy people what they should be eating.
Henry: Yes. And it's funny that the only people who ever say that to me are relatively wealthy people. You're not telling people what to eat. You are recognising that they are in a food swamp. We created this environment where it's very difficult to eat well. And we are all getting sick, and we need to create a better environment for ourselves, our families, our children.
I think the one area where there is genuine concern at the moment is the cost-of-living crisis. It simply is the case that the cheapest foods are refined carbohydrates, refined vegetable fats, refined sugars, and if you are struggling with the cost of living, it is easier to buy products that are largely made out of those things which you know your kids will eat. They are cheaper than buying vegetables and then if your kids don't eat them, you can't afford something else.
Ed: Your book is full of so many fascinating insights. I do want to talk about some of them but I also want to talk to you about the egg sandwich. Because I eat quite lot of egg sandwiches. I know I'm famous for eating bacon sandwiches, but actually I eat a lot of egg sandwiches and you slightly put me off.
Geoff: Is this you trying to reclaim your narrative there?
Ed: No I'm trying to…I’m afraid that Henry really rather put me off the old egg sandwich.
Henry: It's harder to have a bad photo taken eating an egg sandwich.
Ed: I am not sure that's necessarily…I could disprove that. It’s less about the photo and more about what's in the egg sandwich. Tell us a little bit about this.
Henry: So there is a lot of talk at the moment about ultra-processed foods and whether foods that have been through a huge amount of processing are worse for us than other foods. And I start the chapter on ultra-precious foods. It's a chapter called ‘The Anatomy of an Egg Sandwich’.
I was on a train from Cumbria to London and bought an egg sandwich. Something that if you make it at home, has four or five ingredients: eggs, oil, mustard, wheat, yeast, you know, not much. And it had 32 ingredients on the back of it, this sandwich! And I looked at it, I thought, ‘well, let's just find out what's going on with one of these ingredients.’
I took one that was relatively uncontested: rape seed oil. Now it turns out that the rape seed oil that you or I would normally buy from a supermarket, chemically has very little resemblance to the rape seed oil that you would squeeze out of a rape seed. You basically take it, you heat it, you crush it, you bleach it, you pass it through a kind of clay cake that was used to make World War One gas masks.
So all of these things are to turn it from something that is strongly flavoured, colourful, and goes off over quite a long time, into something that is colourless, flavourless, and will last forever. And so the question then is: if you look at that sandwich that you would eat, if you were to try and look at the molecular level of that sandwich, it would look very similar at a kind of fat, carbohydrate, protein level. But it would look very different at a micronutrient level. And then the question is, does that matter? And increasingly the answer seems to be it does matter because we love the food that's high in fat and sugar. A lot of the ultra-processed food in packets is high in fat and sugar, and it has ratios of sugar to carbohydrate to oil that don't appear in food from scratch.
Ed: That's true of the packaged sandwich.
Henry: That is true of the packaged sandwich.
Ed: I mean, imagine a world, Geoff, where you could make your own! Where you could go into a shop and…
Geoff: Oh no, I knew he'd bring it round to this. Henry, Ed has got this idea for a business that is a ‘make your own sandwich’ chain. So, it's not like Subway where you go in and say what you want on your sandwich, but you're getting your hands in there. I say it is a hygiene minefield!
Henry: My sister-in-law has a business idea, which is that at birth, everyone should be given a full set of Tupperware by the state and that you should keep that Tupperware for life. And I think those two ideas fall into a similar category of likelihood to be successful.
Ed: I’m gonna get in contact with your sister-in-law.
Henry: Yeah, because you could then take…you could make your sandwich and put it in your state's Tupperware.
Ed: Honestly, I think we could do great things together. And you're gonna regret not investing in it, you two.
Henry: But let me tell you about Kevin Hall. Because I wanted to finish this story about this sandwich that you're eating. So Kevin Hall, who's a physicist, who thought this ultra-processed food stuff, he got group two groups of people together. He locked them up effectively - with their consent - for four weeks. He put them in loose fitting clothes, so they couldn't really tell if they were putting on weight or not. And he fed them these ultra-processed foods for four weeks and food cooked from scratch for four weeks. He balanced them for nutrients, the macronutrients. They said they liked the two kinds of diets similarly.
When they were eating the ultra-processed food it was laid out like a buffet, like every day was a wedding in this facility. So it was laid out like a buffet. They ate what they wanted to eat. On the ultra-processed food they ate 500 more calories a day and put on a kilo of weight. And really interestingly, their ghrelin hormone, which is what makes you hungry, was elevated and their GLP-1 hormone, which is what makes you full, was in decline.
So there is clearly something that is going on with this food that is making us overeat it. What we don't know is if there is something else going wrong, but we don't know that yet. But there's probably a way in which it's reacting with the microbiome.
After the war the biggest problem we had was that we were going to grow from 2.5 billion people to 8 billion people. We wouldn't have enough land to feed them. Food companies created this extraordinary farming system we have now, which produces twice the number of calories per person off the same amount of land. They process the food to make it easy to buy and to make it cheap. And now it turns out it's killing us and they are stuck. These companies are really stuck because their whole commercial model is built around creating products that - in the long run - are going to seriously undermine our society if we don't do something about it.
So we need government intervention. We need bravery. Funnily enough, I think one of the people who gets this…Tony Blair was talking the other day about smoking and about how everyone told him that this was electorally disastrous: ‘Everyone's going to hate it. It's nanny state.’ And, you know they banned smoking on buses then in restaurants and in public places. And the response was, ‘oh my God, thank you. I can't believe we did it.’
Ed: I mean, I don't necessarily disagree with you, but it's slightly different because the argument with pubs and clubs was the sort of passive smoking element.
Henry: But interestingly, on things like the advertising of junk food to children: you don't ban it, you change the commercial incentives. So parents feel that it is absolutely the same thing. ‘You are creating pester power for my child.’
There was a journalist the other day who tweeted a picture, who said, ‘this is the cereal in Sainsbury's that is at my child's head height’. And it was Nestle's Kit Kat Cereal and Crave, which is Kellogg's. And that was to me was the junk food cycle in one photo, two huge companies competing for the attention of this guy's daughter with products that were unbelievably unhealthy for them.
Ed: Let's talk about your experience in government, Henry. Because I think it is quite sort of fascinating. So you went from establishing Leon. You published a school food plan 2014, an independent review for government, and then you became a non-executive director at Defra and then you were given the role of doing a national food strategy. Just talk to us about that national food strategy experience.
Henry: They are two very different jobs. On the non-exec thing, it was fascinating, I was there during a period of five years: we marched the government up to Brexit no deal and down again four times. Which was a huge bit of work. We then had Covid, we then had the war. I operated under five secretaries of states and four prime ministers. And so the ability to get anything deeply systemic done in that environment was very, very difficult.
Ed: And then talk to us about the food strategy
Henry: So we published it in July 2021. Boris Johnson was doing a big speech that day, and the food strategy took over the grid. It took over the headlines. He was asked what he thought of one of our recommendations, which was a salt and sugar reformulation tax.
He said, ‘I'm not in favour of additional taxes on hardworking people’, to which I was like, ‘yeah, nor am I.’ It’s a reformulation tax. That works slightly differently. The narrative was that they ditched the whole thing.
What actually happened is there were three elements to it. There was: how do you support the diets of those in poverty? And thanks to Marcus Rashford who campaigned for a whole bunch of those things, quite a lot of that has been done. And the biggest thing the government's done is the holiday activity and food programmes. If you are now a child who is eligible for free school meals, you can get that during the holidays, which is huge.
The second piece was the environmental piece, and how do we create a farming system that restores biodiversity, sequesters carbon and produces enough food? So on one hand, the government is doing these incredibly difficult farming reforms, which are going in the right direction. And I very much hope that if Labour get into the next government, I think they probably will continue that. But on the other hand, you had Liz Truss who did the crazy Australian trade deal…
Geoff: Who banned you from attending meetings!
Henry: She banned me from attending meetings. Yeah. So, she rang me quite a lot on the weekends leading up to it saying, ‘you've got to support this deal.’ Her view was that all trade is good, right? She's very ideological. And I said, well, I just don't see how you can expect your farmers to produce food to a certain standard and then do a trade deal that allows people producing to a lower standard to undercut them. It just didn't make sense to me. And she got bored of me saying that. So I got banned from meetings.
So on poverty, they've done a bit. On environment they're internally conflicted. And then on health, they've gone backwards. So Boris Johnson, you might remember after his time in ICU he came out and said, ‘right, we're going to get this country healthy again! I've realised that my diet-related issues almost made me die. We're going to do the advertising ban’
And that has gone backwards and that is deeply ideological. There's a set of back benchers who threatened to cause an uprising if they bring these things through. But anyone sensible and looking at the thing knows that unless you do something about this, it's going to cause huge problems down the line.
Ed: On the question of balanced diets. I think you talk very well in the book about the challenges of inequality and the challenges of…you have a sort of exchange with somebody who says, ‘it is actually much cheaper to buy vegetables’. And you are like, ‘well, hang on a minute. Not if you live in certain areas without the right places.’ It’s a very partial account of it. And then you have very compelling testimony from somebody who's on your food task force, about it.
Henry: Daisy Stemple. Yeah. Amazing. Daisy's an amazing woman.
Ed: I think it's quite important for listeners because it avoids very much a kind of, ‘middle class preaching’ type thing.
Henry: Yeah, so on the poverty issue I was very aware of never having been anywhere close to budget on food in my childhood being an issue.
I was very lucky for two things. One was Daisy Stemple, who I had met in Thanet, because she'd been to visit a food bank in Thanet, and she'd been a previous client. And I'd talked to her a lot and I said, will you come on my advisory panel?
The advisory panel had supermarket CEOs, farmers etc and I said, I think we need someone who's lived this to come on the panel. And she was brilliant. It was extraordinary seeing her just explain what was actually going on. So people would say - and this was a very distinguished economist who I've been talking to separately - who said, you know, ‘if I look at the cost of things, a large bag of peas, and chicken is cheaper per calorie than the cheapest pizza’.
He kind of makes this argument that you could cook from scratch and she would go, ‘well, hold on, I don't have a freezer, my fuel budget was a concern’ (and this is a much bigger issue now than then). We did a lot of discussion in food banks, which is: ‘if I create the healthy stuff and my children don't eat it, I don't have the money to give them something else. The nearest supermarket was quite a long bus drive away. And I have to pick my kids up.’ So that logistically was difficult.
And funny enough, at the end of her testimony, she says, ‘luckily my mum was a hippie, so I had very high level cookery skills. So I kind of just about managed’. But she saw other people there who didn't have that luxury of having a mum with that knowledge who really struggled.
She was always in this tension between doing the right thing and maybe running out of money. So I just think that's this idea of lived experience that people talk about. It's very hard to understand how people's lives work in theory. And it's impossible with people's lives to theorise about what they might be like. You always get things wrong. And I was very lucky to have Daisy and others who kind of helped me and that's why I put it in her voice. So I didn't try and write it, I just put the email that she sent me about it.
Ed: You talk quite a lot about meat alternatives. How much of danger is there that in the meat alternative sphere, we end up with processed foods, just like we do now?
Henry: High. So, my view is that there are two transitions. For our health, we need to eat about 30% more fruit and veg and about 50% percent more fibre. Those are the two biggest things we could all do for our health. Meat eating is about the environment, it's not about health (I mean, it's a little bit about health, but not really) it's not about methane even. It's about land. Currently, the animals we rear to eat - and we kill 80 billion of them every year - weigh twice as much as all the humans on the planet and 20 times as much as all the wild animals.
85% of the land that that we use to feed us is used to rear animals or grow food to feed to animals in the UK. So my argument was given that 50% of the meat we eat is already used in processed food – so it’s used in the form of mince, it’s not served roasted or cooked from scratch - we have to make a transition to cooking more from scratch to getting rid of the processed foods for our health. But while they [processed foods] are there, I think the opportunity to use them to reduce meat eating is too good to be missed.
In the book I wrote about ‘Goujons of Hope’. So I wrote about these chicken goujons that I was sent from America, which are fake chicken goujons. And I opened them up. At the time my daughter was vegetarian, my middle son literally only ate meat and fruit like some kind of tech billionaire cave man diet. And my eldest son ate everything. I gave these chicken nuggets out to them and all of them wolfed them down. I mean, it was terrifying. They must have eaten 10, 12 nuggets each. And I was like, ‘I'm not gonna bring these back.’ So that's a really good example. Those chicken nuggets involved a lot less animal cruelty than real chicken nuggets. The River Wye wasn't polluted in their creation. But they clearly had that moreish junk food thing to them. When you see, you know it. It's the PR. Pringles even used to, they've stopped, they've taken it off the packet. They literally used to say, ‘once you pop, you can't stop’. You know, they made a virtue of the fact that literally these things were irresistible!
Geoff: So, in other words, meat alternatives might not be where you want to end up, but they’re a good way of getting people to eat less meat?
Henry: You know, people say, ‘is there an answer’? And the answer is lentils, you know?
Geoff: But people don't want to hear that!
Henry: But if everyone ate more legumes, they would be much healthier.
Ed: What's your favourite lentil dish, Henry? Inspire us about lentils.
Henry: So my wife has started making a shakshuka. It's not lentils, but she makes a shakshuka with black beans in the tomato and pepper mix, and it's really delicious.
Ed: I confess I had a very bad experience which Geoff knows about, with black bean soup, which got the massive thumbs down from Justine. Maybe I'll get your wife's recipe for black bean check shakshuka.
Henry: It’s really good.
Ed: Can I ask you a question, as we sort of draw to a close. I'm very struck listening to you that you must have been on quite journey in the 19 years since you set up Leon. Please don't take this in a negative way, but I mean, has this whole experience quite radicalised you about the need for big, fundamental change?
Henry: Yeah, I'm a completely accidental campaigner. So, John and I set Leon up because we wanted to eat nicer food, fast food on the go. We could only eat delicious Kentucky Fried Chicken that made us feel terrible afterwards or the kind of cold, soggy, neon lit chiller cabinets full of sandwiches.
And so, and that was it. That's all, you know, we just wanted that. And then as you say, you get in there and you begin to see things. I remember my wife saying - she had a particularly gruesome medieval labour with our first child. And she said that she wanted, when she came out into London Fields afterwards, she wanted to go up to people and shake them and say, ‘don't you know what happens?! How can you all be walking around as if you don't know that women go off and have these medieval experiences? Why aren't we talking about this?’
And it got to the stage when you think that the food we eat is going to bring down the health service and destroy our economy. And at the same time, it is by far the biggest cause of biodiversity collapse. It's the second biggest cause of climate change. I accidentally got filled up with that and then I became the person going up to…this book is going up to the person saying, ‘look, don't you see!
You know, if you think that The Sun had an editorial after Boris Johnson scrapped the advertising ban, which said, ‘I'm glad to see this. We need more common sense measures like educating people and exercise.’ And that is why most people think that they are sick. If you ask them why they are sick, they’ll say it’s because they're lazy and stupid and it's just not true! And when you see the fact that it's not that, it's because the commercial incentives to make us sick are so huge that that's what the food industry does.
Ed: Well look, Henry, it's been an absolute pleasure to talk to you. Really fascinating. The book is ‘Ravenous: how to get ourselves and our planet into shape’. It's by Henry Dimbleby with Jemima Lewis and it is out now. Thank you so much for talking to us.
Henry: Thank you for having me.
