An Unherd post from the farmer and best-selling author James Rebanks on the precarious state of the UK's food security.
He suggests that the food supply chain that we assume will always provide food to fill our supermarket shelves is far from stable.
Britain probably has less than a week of food supplies. The only food in the UK is what’s on the shelves of our supermarkets now, and what’s in their lorries on the way to the shops. Oh, and whatever you have in the fridge, plus a few crops growing on UK farms or stored in barns, and whatever is edible and roaming around in fields. And perhaps you could hunt or forage if you have a gun or a trap or two.
So if there is a sudden crisis, you'd better get to the supermarket fast.
There are no emergency stores of food and Brexit and the fractured nature of some international relationships (and the growing cost of conflicts in several parts of the world) mean that there is more likelihood of problems, and that's before you even start factoring in the impact of the climate breakdown on food production in other parts of the world where much of our food is being produced right now...
If a crisis hits:...you will suddenly wish you had a pantry like your grandma had, full of preserved foodstuffs, and a deep freezer. We used to have much more food storage in our homes and communities, but we outsourced that to the supermarket shelf from around the Eighties.
As he says:
In 2022-23, 11% of the UK population lived in a household experiencing food poverty — including 17% of all children. That same year, 2.3 million people lived in a household that used a food bank.
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