Some of us are already unable to eat healthy meals, because heavily processes foods are all that we can access.
Others miss meals so they can feed other members of their families, whilst increasing numbers don’t eat because food is simply a luxury that they cannot afford.
It’s easy to dismiss the realities of other’s life experience when we’ve never had to go without a good healthy meal at any time in our life. But that doesn’t mean that any of us are safe or protected from the questions surrounding Food Security in the UK today. Questions that left unanswered may mean that we all have massive problems in store – potentially any day.
Politicians are treating UK Farming and Food Production as a political inconvenience; as if they will always be able to source the food that the UK needs from Europe or from other Countries abroad – Because politicians assume that imports will always be safe.
Meanwhile, the elites look upon the stories of food being grown in warehouses, created from ground up insects, from fungi or from processes that are even worse, and are very happy with the idea that this is how the masses will soon be fed. Because the true realities that underpin manufactured, processed and synthesized foods are not a problem that they believe could ever affect them.
Food is a basic essential of life.
Food is therefore a public good.
Yet generations of politicians have allowed commercial interests to take over almost every part of food production and supply across the UK.
Small numbers of very wealthy people and the companies they own make more and more money from addicting as many of us as possible to foods that taste nice and look good. And many genuinely believe that they are good for us, for no better reason than these highly attractive and fashionable foods appear to be a luxury that most people can afford.
The politicians and the narratives that the money behind this avoidable direction of UK Food Supply buys, deliberately tells us that Climate Change, the needs of Net Zero and with too many people to feed, the food of the future does not lie with farming or food production of any traditional kind.
But this is a constructed story that simply isn’t true and benefits only those who want continually growing profits and the control over everything that maintain it.
The narrative is all about destroying the ability that the UK currently has to feed our own population and creating a situation where the same people who are responsible for so many of our problems – just so they can make money, will be able to make even more. Because in time, their actions will make democratic forms of government redundant and will be able to assume absolute control.
This is no conspiracy. This is what the systematic destruction of UK Farming and the ability of UK Farmers and Food Producers to run viable businesses has been and is all about.
It is time to wake up to the reality that the future the establishment proposes for us all, because they know better, isn’t the healthy future that any of us need. Nor is it one that is necessary or inevitable for us to have.
However, without change, we will soon no longer have any choice.
The world has many problems. But it is the abuse and manipulation of money and how that affects every part of our lives that is the real problem underpinning them all.
Those who care only about money, don’t care about people.
That means they are not worried about what any one else eats. Especially if there are public health systems in place that will continue to address the problems they cause and that their friends with pharmaceutical companies can also continue to make profits from, by providing many different expensive treatments for.
Funny that they never create any cures.
Politicians will not address the issues that the World faces. Because it is not in the interests of their ‘careers’ and whatever they believe they have to gain in the future, by not going against these ‘interests’ and by otherwise not making decisions that are in the best interests of the people who elected them instead.
This is why when asked, politicians appear to understand the problem and talk about solutions. But nothing ever happens that addresses the real issues that they have facilitated and therefore caused.
Food is our Freedom. As long as the Food we eat remains under our control
What we eat is the foundation of everything that we do. It is the foundation of our future. It is the foundation of our lives.
If we surrender what is left of our ability to choose what we eat and where our food comes from, we will no longer be able to make choices about our health or the health of the people we care about.
The only way that we can maintain the little control we have over food and then increase it to where that control should be, is to ensure that the UK Produces all of its own food.
We must ensure that the food the UK Produces always comes from natural processes, growing and animal husbandry that takes place on local UK Farms.
It is no understatement to say that the food we eat, that makes other people very wealthy, is actively destroying our health. In growing numbers of cases, it is slowly killing us too.
We need to put Food Production and Supply back into the hands of people and business that we know and can trust.
Whilst we continue to be without politicians who will stand up for us and legislate for us all as they should, the best way that we can help to instigate the changes that we all so desperately need, is to buy as much basic or essential food that isn’t processed, from local farms or from small shops and businesses that source everything they sell from local farmers and suppliers.
Basic or essential food is food or food products that we buy in a form that is recognisable for being in its original form, or has undergone basic processing such as milling, pasteurisation, breadmaking or cheesemaking etc., that doesn’t involve the addition of manufactured ingredients or additives and could or traditionally would have been processed or prepared by hand.
The more we use small businesses, independent retailers who are committed to local food production, and farm shops and box schemes that are from identifiable sources too, the more accessible and affordable the food we should all be able to eat every day will become.
It’s a lot of responsibility for every one of us. But the people we elected to take that responsibility on our behalf are effectively refusing to do so.
It’s the actions of our politicians that we all need to watch, rather than just accepting their words.
Instead of leading us, it is the Politicians who need to be led.
The best way to lead our politicians is to demonstrate how change works without them. So that joining the growing momentum the People create will feel right to them, rather than making a choice which they currently believe would make them look like they are wrong.
There is nothing in life that everyone shares the same need for, whilst having such individual, specific or idiosyncratic approaches to, as food and what we eat.
Minded that to be healthy, we should all have access to at least 2 nutritious meals per day, it is amazing that so many of us think so little about the food that we eat. Where it comes from. What it consists of. And whether the food we are eating is actually benefiting or harming us, despite the fact that eating continues to be a socially shared activity, and what we put in our mouths is just as important as the air that we breathe.
The lack of interest or ‘taking food for granted’ of those who aren’t really thinking about the food that they eat, regrettably makes the issues that surround food and how it can be used to further the interests of those who are aware of that disconnect, very easy to exploit.
In times like those we are experiencing and with the very uncertain future that we currently have, this means we are quite literally in a situation where food cannot only be used to control us. Food can also be used as a way to hurt us both physically and emotionally, whilst Food Security and access to the supply of food is and can continue to become less safe, as it is progressively taken away from us as consumers and from the people who grow and produce it.
Food Complacency
On the face of it, too many of us are happy to accept the idea that if we have eaten and therefore, we are not hungry, it doesn’t matter what we actually eat.
Take that one step forward again. Many have an increasingly restricted choice about what they eat, because the priority of what they eat isn’t based on a decision between what might be on offer. It is based solely upon what the person or family can afford.
Whilst there are many who would happily debate the questions of whether food is a fundamental right or whether food is a public good, the fact is that we are only in a position where we can even have such a debate or that it is possible for these questions to exist, because there are other cultural, legal, ethical and many other manmade ‘rights’ that place some of us in a position where we can control what anyone or indeed any living thing on the planet can have access to.
Meanwhile, the questions that we should be asking but are not is whether it is right and proper within any part of Food Production and the supply chains around food, that any parts of it can or should be privately owned, and where they are, what those interests should allow them to do to food and how we access it.
The absence of ethics in profit-driven Food Production and Supply
Food is a basic requirement for life that we all share. Yet the processes, issues of ownership and what food can be used to achieve for anyone with the power to do so, have now become all that food is really about.
The entire food supply now revolves a global system that quickly moved way beyond improved methods for feeding larger numbers of people and became all about the money that can be made by those who are in control instead.
The creation of large food chains, where so little can be seen has meant that the real truths that have increasingly underpinned all parts of food production for so long can easily be hidden.
When so much of the food chain processes has been hidden and maximised for the profit that it can provide to vested interests, the next step for those who are driven by greed is to then manipulate and change the content of food so that every bit of profit that it contains from every ingredient that can be added, can then be exploited and profited from just the same.
Food in its most basic or natural forms is the healthiest for all of us that it is possible for it to be
Whilst basic processes such as milling, pasteurisation, cheesemaking, baking, hanging, smoking and all those things that are ancestors have been doing to store, preserve and create meals from basic, natural ingredients have done for centuries, it stands to reason that adding anything to food that isn’t readily available to us in some natural or hand-processed way, isn’t going to help anyone who eats it, because our digestion is designed to work naturally with foods that we eat in natural forms.
It’s an equation that doesn’t require us to understand science for us to make sense of. Because it really is common sense that we all eat food in its most basic or unadulterated forms.
The Taste Trap
Before reaching any conclusions, it’s also important to understand the role that sugar and salt, and more recently, anything that appears to improve the taste or feeling that we have from eating food that contains it has had, and the genuine take-away that we should be having from it.
It is thought that sugar was first recognised for its sweet properties around 8000 years ago. However, sugar didn’t come to Western attention until the time of The Crusades in the 11th century, and even then was a luxury until at least the 16th century when the first industrialised sugar processing began.
Although it ultimately comes from natural source, Sugar must be processed to be used in the way that we use it as a food ingredient and in the refined forms that we add it to drinks like coffee and tea.
Sugar in its modified or rather in its changed form is highly addictive. And if you understand the role that excess sugar plays in health-related conditions such as diabetes and obesity, it is also much easier to see the relationship that exists between eating any kind of food or ingredient that doesn’t resemble its original or natural form, and the impact that it can have on the human body.
The body is effectively tricked by unnatural ingredients and responds in what often end up being very destructive ways when those harmful ingredients are consumed regularly or in quantities that are simply too much for the very clever system that our bodies have to deal with.
In these modified forms, these artificial ingredients are no better than being a poison that becomes more and more dangerous in its cumulative forms.
In respect of the ingredients that are added to foods to enhance the taste and hide many other ingredients within processed foods and the UPFs that we wouldn’t otherwise consider eating, the line in the Savage Garden hit song ‘Affirmation’ – “junk food tastes so good, because it’s bad for you” is absolutely correct.
We are being conned into eating foods that we shouldn’t, so that those who make and sell them can continue to make a profit – with the true cost always being at the expense of our own health and wellbeing.
Whether we like it or not; whether we believe we have a choice of what we eat or not, as a nation, the UK is addicted to foods that are actually harming and, in some respects, killing us.
The people who are pushing us in this direction and want us to become even more reliant on manufactured food, rather than the fresh food that can only come from a local garden, field or farm, are very happy to exploit that addiction so that they can keep benefitting. Whilst the whole process is doing each of us and the whole of the UK more and more harm.
The Ethics of Food are about Taste all the same
The odd thing about taste is that it manifests as both a physical sensation and also in the way that we think. That’s how addictions generally work, after all.
So, when anyone becomes obsessed by a particular way of eating, because of the way that they think, the rules of addiction – and the need to force others to join us in that same addiction so that they can share that particular form of guilt, inevitably also play out, no matter how clever or compelling their arguments might be.
When people are at peace with their eating habits or indeed anything else that defines them as the person or the individual that they are, they will not experience any need to force their own approach into the lives of anyone else, no matter what the habits of those other people are, or indeed, what it might be that they eat.
It really shouldn’t matter what anyone else eats. The only thing that we should all be concerned with is that each and every one of us has access to natural, healthy and fresh food in an adequate quantity from which we can then exercise any health-related, ethical or other form of choice that doesn’t impact upon the choices of anyone else.
The Food Hangover is just one way we know that the food we eat isn’t good for us
Whilst few who drink alcohol would relate their drinking habits to being an addiction at any level, it is unlikely that anyone who has ever had more than a few sips and done so on a regular basis, hasn’t had a hangover at some point afterwards. Before they find themselves back in a place where they feel physically the same as they did previously.
Headaches, sickness, insomnia, feeling ‘groggy or lethargic’ or generally not feeling anything like ourselves, are typical post-alcohol reactions that we class as hangovers – because we have been drinking ethanol, which is a poison.
When we have been eating foods that are processed and are filled with many additives and manufactured ingredients, the results for any of us taking note, can be similar if not exactly the same.
Food that is natural or in forms that we can recognise in their original form when we eat them very rarely make us feel unwell. Unless we eat too much of them, or they haven’t been prepared in a way that removes any bacteria or anything else that can harm our bodies in some way.
The direction of UK Farming and Food Production is all about a greed-driven reliance upon manufactured food
It is at this point that it is time to recognise just how important the problem that UK Farmers are facing really is, for us all.
There isn’t some great conspiracy at work in the way that conspiracy theorists are increasingly presenting it.
However, there are people who for one reason or another have gained significant power and responsibility over the lives of others. They see it as being imperative that the whole world is changed so that everyone behaves in ways that they have decided that the world can sustain, which at the same time will coincidentally ensure that those same elites can continue making obscene profits, being quite literally ‘baked in’.
Everyone making money out of the masses eating manipulated ingredients that will cause increasing levels of health problems and in all probability lead to early deaths, isn’t worried about the nutritional value of the food that people eat.
The most important thing to all of them is ensuring that the masses can never make the argument that they are going hungry. In that way, no matter how bad the food may be for anyone, if its tasty and available, the elites will always remain in control.
Today, UK Farmers still have choices over what they grow and how they grow it. Even though many are tied into contracts that are ultimately controlled by a very small number of companies who control the food supply and whose longer-term profit-making interests will benefit if independent Farmers go out of business, so that they can control even more of the food supply.
Those with roles that are there to help, don’t help anyone at all
The useful idiots that we now have in government and running policy and services across the public sector don’t help matters at all.
Whilst very few can accept this truth at first glance, the reality is that decades of farm and food production related subsidies have only served to move more and more of the power that our Farmers and Food Producers once had towards the big companies that incentivise and control politicians.
Meanwhile, Agriculture has become more and more dependent upon the political lead. Whilst local infrastructure and everything that supports local and independent food production has been progressively destroyed, either legislatively or in direct physical form.
If we can accept this – and that’s by no means an easy thing to do, we can also then accept that UK Farming and Food Production needs to go in the completely opposite direction, embracing much more traditional methods of food production and returning Farms, Farming and Food Production so that they are providing everyone with the basic, natural, healthy, nutritious and fresh forms of foods that we all actually need.
For us all to have and benefit from this, means that Agriculture and growing food must be right at the heart of our communities once more.
Mindful eating
The battle to save natural food production in the UK (and in other areas of the world too), only exists today, because so many of us take for granted the lives that we have and the continued access to food and everything else that makes life seem so easy. All without being conscious of the real cost to us, or without recognising that we do have a choice.
Greedy profiteering companies only produce foods that can harm us on the scale that they do so, because we keep on buying and eating them, without ever giving any thought to anything that these companies and the people behind them are doing.
If we all began looking at the ingredients of foods and take note of where the food or where the ingredients actually come from, we would very quickly see the difference between ‘natural’ food that we can recognise because it usually resembles its original form, and everything else which doesn’t look like or resemble anything that we could recognise in nature.
This is a very quick and effective way of being able to tell if eating or drinking anything, is likely to end up harming us in some way.
Changing the way we eat is how we keep our freedom to be who we are
The harsh truth that we all need to face:
The control of food is power and the power behind food is a way that those dependent on someone else’s food supply be controlled.
Whilst the UK Farming and Food Producing communities now have a massive fight on their hands to regain control of their own destiny – not least of all within that community, the fact remains that we can all help change the direction of UK (and World) Food Production by changing the way that we approach the food that we eat.
By doing so, we will ultimately help ourselves.
The smallest steps are the biggest when it comes to change of this kind. And if we all start to do what we can to reject processed foods and UPFs wherever and in any way that we find them or that they come into our lives, the impact that we can collectively have upon the food chain and the way that food is produced would become meaningful in no time at all.
Changing the eating habits that we have is not easy for anyone. Not least of all, because our habits are the truth we have chosen to believe.
However, the truths that we believe about food today are not truths that we can call or should be prepared to accept as our own.
Good, healthy, nutritious, locally produced fresh food IS a public good and we all deserve to be able to access enough of it every day and at prices that we can all easily afford.
We can only make this possible if each and every one of us exercises what still remains of our freedom of choice to change the world for the better, one choice at a time.
To do so meant mentioning the founder, James Melville. I don’t know James personally, but because of my ongoing interest in politics and the true depth of the problems that the U.K. is facing, I have been aware of him since he first appeared as a growing voice in what I’ll call the anti-lockdown ‘movement’ that appeared in the summer of 2020 following the first lockdowns.
Whilst I have discussed my reasoning that NFNF will not be able to achieve anything more than the range of existing organisations that are already working on the issues UK farming faces or have tried to do so before, it is also important to recognise what this new campaign is doing differently: NFNF has reached a much wider audience and has captured the imagination of people in ways that many of the existing lobbyist organisations supporting UK Farming have not done, so far.
The impact of NFNF is down to marketing and online campaigning. Or rather, making the best of the communication mediums that are currently available to anyone or any organisation that wants to change anything in the public realm, and isn’t already in a position where they have a platform where they could have the same effect just by opening their mouths.
The people who could do that – who arguably should already be doing that on behalf of UK Agriculture, are the people who are already in power. The people who we have elected and the people with roles in the establishment, who aren’t getting the things that they should be right. Because they are putting what’s important to them or what’s important to the people who are important to them, first.
Having the exposure that James has generated repeatedly since he emerged online, or being one of those people with public responsibility who isn’t using it as they should be, all adds up to the same outcome, IF there is no understanding or appreciation of the cause of the problems beyond an obsession with their effects, along with an appreciation of how everything in government, politics and the establishment really works today. Which genuinely isn’t anything like what most of us expect – even some of those within it.
Appearing to have a platform, with growing support and ‘breakthrough’ messages that give the immediate belief that those behind it can achieve things, will bring many different people and interests out of the woodwork who want to use that exposure for themselves. Usually because they aren’t getting the level of success with their own approaches, that they can see that new platform has.
It’s this visually-derived focus that brings groups like Together, climate deniers, right-wingers, anti-Brexiteers, and all sorts of different people with badges those who disagree with their priorities have given them, who identify with the issues that UK Farmers face tom banners like NFNF.
They see a vehicle that could be the answer to whatever problem they see as the priority, believing that their ‘fix’ will be the one that fixes everything for everyone else too.
The biggest obstacle to a successful outcome or resolution to all the common issues that Farmers share, is what we are now seeing unfolding in the disagreements about NFNF.
Different groups and individuals are attacking each other or piling in on individuals who have said something they don’t like about their take on what NFNF are going to do, and using links, affiliations and everything but the issues around what will actually work, when the point is being missed that in its current form, with the current mentality and the current lack of genuine engagement of a kind that social media simply cannot give, there will be nothing meaningful that NFNF can achieve.
The truth is that there is a massive range of people with different skills, experiences and talents that need to be involved in any movement that is going to succeed in delivering change for UK Farmers and Food Producers, where so many have already failed or been bought off with meaningless compromises before.
The parallels between this new campaign and how entry to the current political system works are frightening. Success in one area of business, obtaining a platform or just getting yourself elected doesn’t equip anyone with the understanding that it takes to do anything and certainly not where the realms of public policy interconnect and interacting with a completely broken system are concerned.
We shouldn’t doubt the good intent behind NFNF. But it’s been said that the road to hell is paved with good intentions and a large number of rightly angry, desperate and frustrated people are getting carried away by an idea that presents a good story, that in reality will end up a very long way from what it now seems.
We cannot have all the things that we want. That much is clear from the reality that we are all living through.
We need to focus upon the things that we genuinely need.
What we have the power to do is recognise the key things or rather the aims that we have in common. Such as saving U.K. Farming and making sure that everyone in the U.K. has everyday access to good, healthy, natural and farm-grown food.
It’s easy to dismiss workable solutions on the basis that they don’t appear to deliver the solutions that we want. But that’s really the most important point.
If we work together to deliver what’s right for everyone and not just what we want, what we want is likely to be delivered or will become a lot nearer by doing so.
We will then be winning multiple times over. Rather than fighting each other for no good purpose and not delivering anything to help anyone at all.
The real problem and barrier to progress in achieving the meaningful change that UK farmers and food producers need, is agreeing on what change is needed and what that change will therefore be.
The number of people, business owners, organisations and lobbying organisations that have an interest in the future of farming and food production, simply because of the many areas that the food chain touches and relates to, is mind boggling.
Every one of them has a different take on what’s happening. What the real issues or causes and effects of the problems are. And therefore what the solution needs to achieve.
In many cases, that also means they will already have an idea of what the solution needs to be.
This is where everything hits the metaphorical brick wall. Because we all have a habit of getting emotionally tied into the dynamic of the experience we have vs the problem as we see it vs what we know the solution needs to be or look like for us.
Work together. Find all that we have in common. Then we will have common cause
It’s frustrating to watch the same old arguments unfold and play out between different interests that have so much more in common than what are probably just a few ideas that divide them.
Ideas that would probably be progressed anyway, by focusing on what aims we share in common, with the people that we might today be refusing to listen to. Because the few things we appear to disagree on appear to make everything else they have to say or can do to help us, wrong.
For instance, we all:
Need to eat (healthy food that will not harm us)
Need to drink (clean, healthy water)
Need food and water that is natural with a good nutritional base
Want eating healthy food to be ‘normal’ or easy
Want food to be readily accessible to us at a price that we can afford
Need Food Security
Need the UK Food supply to be sustainable
Need the planet to continue being able to support our lives
Want to be happy
And there will certainly be more.
However, the issues we see about issues like climate change (and whether it’s real), money, being vegetarian or vegan, rewilding, wild animals, animal welfare standards, who deserves to be guaranteed access to food, hedgerows, building on productive land, what a sustainable life really looks like and just about everything else that can be argued as being personal to us and therefore how we see ourselves, is a belief.
It isn’t what we have in common.
That’s why adopting a purist approach and saying anyone or all of these priorities we have MUST be the end result, in order for us to agree, is what stops us all from coming together to achieve something that could quickly become very good.
This post has been taken and adapted from the book Food From Farms Guaranteed, published on Amazon, 16/02/24.
We need to ask the questions: ‘What does it mean to be a stakeholder?’ and ‘Who are the real stakeholders?’
Because the interests of the people who are guiding, influencing and controlling the most visible forms of food standards that communicate what farmers do to those who consume the food produced, are not focused or aligned with the interests of the most important stakeholders who are located at each end.
The focus of power and influence in UK food production is instead directed to the many middle parts of what is in the main an otherwise unnecessary chain.
No value is added. But production prices are squeezed from every angle, whilst the price to the consumer is repeatedly being raised.
The role of commercial, profit and greed-led businesses in UK food production is bad enough. But any argument that statutory authorities have the right to dictate the direction of food production and also insert themselves into the food chain as a key stakeholder, is willfully and deliberately misplaced and, in all honesty, wrong.
Government and the public sector exists to serve the people. Not to make every decision that will dictate what any person or what any business can do.
This is where we are all getting our relationship with the establishment and every part of it wrong.
This post was taken and adapted from the book Food From Farms Guaranteed, published on Amazon, 16/02/24.
Adam Tugwell 