In the month since I wrote my last blog, I’ve been reflecting a lot on the first item on the food systems wish list I shared – women’s leadership.  I’ve had a second preoccupation this month too: the basil on my windowsill. 

My preoccupations with the basil started a few weeks back when I planted several pots dotted around in the room where I work at home. Watching the plants grow has stimulated a mix of emotions.  The basil I placed at the end of the room germinated fast; the first flush of tiny green emerging from the soil was an exciting moment in grey days. But then the seedlings grew spindly and crooked; it seemed that straining towards the light from the skylights above in the dark British spring made their stems tall but weak, lacking enough energy to grow leaves. Now, the plants that survived are permanently stunted.
 
On my (indoor) windowsill, though, the seedlings flourished, growing more slowly, still leaning towards the light, but with sturdier stems and larger leaves. It’s been a small pleasure between Zoom calls to stand up and turn the pots around so that the plants straighten up as they move direction and grow again towards the light. 
 
Yet even here I’ve seen some of the seeds grow shorter than the others, crowded out by those that seem unstoppable. With my inexpert hand, I must have sowed the seeds at different depths, and spaced them unevenly, rushing rather than taking my time. I did not give them the fair conditions they needed to grow.
 
Now, in an attempt to help the smaller plants grow better, I moved a few into their own pots, not entirely successfully. This morning, I took more desperate measures, cutting the larger plants down to a size like the smaller ones, hoping that those crowded out now might stand a better chance. I recognise it probably won’t work - by snipping off the already stronger plants above the smaller shooting leaves below, the already taller ones will likely simply grow back bushier and stronger.  
 
As I’ve been trying to course-correct the basil, I’ve been pulling together shared ideas on leadership into a paper with my colleagues in the Next Gen(d)eration Leadership Initiative. A new collective designed to create a leadership movement towards a well-nourished world (I first wrote about it in September last year), our working hypothesis is that while women dominate the world of nutrition and food systems, the strengths they have in leading through complexity, conflict and across sectors to effect and sustain real change are not being leveraged.
 
To that end, kudos to Jemimah Njuki, IFPRI’s Director for Africa and Custodian for Gender and Women's Empowerment for the UN Food Systems Summit for her recent proposal for a “Global Food Systems 5050.” As she wrote in a blog a few weeks back, the idea is that “hundreds of organizations working in food systems … make commitments to elevating women’s voices and representation, achieving gender parity in leadership, and gender equality both in their organizational cultures and their policies and programs.” It builds on the excellent Global Health 50/50 report that has done so much to highlight the need for global health institutions to walk the talk on gender representation in leadership. 

The questions we are exploring are: How could leadership be better practiced? How can we unleash the power of women to leading change towards better food and diets for all? These are issues we raised in the first of a series of “ChangeMaker Connect Forums,” initiated this past April, where around 100 women came together to discuss their experiences of leadership, talking frankly about their perspectives on type of leadership they’d like to see.  It was a wonderful experience, feeling such energy and connection with women across the globe. But it was also concerning, albeit not surprising, that so many women said despite their desire to stand tall, to act with ambition for nutrition, when they tried to reach higher, they felt crowded out. The issue was a sense of being limited, a sense that the way they wanted to practice leadership was not being rewarded, neither for them nor for the purpose of effecting the changes we all want to see.
 
It reminded me of those smaller basil plants, the ones for whom conditions limited their growth, the ones somehow not able to stand as tall as they wanted, but nevertheless, in whatever position they found themselves in, were still doing everything they could to reach towards the light, to take agency to make the best of imperfect conditions. It struck me more than ever that for real change in the journey towards better food, we must change the conditions in which leadership is seeded early on, and then continue to pay attention to unleashing the agency lying latent. If we want leadership to grow, we need the right conditions to put the power women already have to work.

Thanks as ever for the inspiration from my Next Gen(d)eration colleagues for shaping and influencing the thinking in this blog.   More on the initiative and Forums can be found here.

What are the policies and actions that could bring radical improvements to food systems? And who has the power to get them done? This is one of the big questions being asked in the global food systems conversation. It’s a controversial question. What is needed to effect change in one place differs from another. No one action can change things on its own and will only shift the system, not “fix” it. And, of course, perspectives on what will actually work contrast and conflict.
 
Yet there are surely some big ticket items that could universally bring about change, things that just need to happen, things where it is relatively clear who needs to do what to unleash positive ripples across the system. Here are a few on my wish list. They are inspired by a vision of people taking action to do things differently,  a vision of food systems full of leadership, diversity,  dignity and celebration. 
 
Leadership
 
1. All institutions concerned with food systems break down the barriers in their contexts to placing women in leadership roles. Given women are fundamentally involved in food from farm to fork, why not let them lead? This is not only a way to better represent the voices of the millions of women who work throughout food systems, but to ensure that the leadership practices needed for food systems change can thrive. 
 
2. Presidents/Prime Ministers and city and local government leaders appoint (into their offices) a food system champion with the task of developing and delivering a coherent food policy for the nation or city/locality. Achieving coherence across the food system is not an easy task; there is much to consider, many conflicting interests and actors. A champion with authority can at least engage across government to identify what is already happening, what needs to change, and who needs to do what, emerging with a shared vision of change.  Cross-learning between countries and cities could enable lessons to be shared on how to get it done in solidarity .
 
3. Relevant leaders in the public, private and third sectors take training courses and educational programmes in food systems thinking. It’s hard to lead transformative change without understanding the systemic nature of the problems, the different perspectives on how to solve them, and the entry points for effecting change. Universities need to step up to provide these courses (as they increasingly are). Forgive the blatant plug but feel free to check out this MSc Food Policy and short course that aim to do just that.
 
Diversity
 
4. Ministries of agriculture, industry and skills correct policy biases against small- and medium-sized businesses. Entrepreneurial farm businesses, smaller traders and distributors, food hubs and outlets offering healthier, more sustainable food cannot compete when they face red tape rather than the infrastructure and finance they need. Much can be done to unleash their economic potential and inject greater diversity into food systems. Donors and development partners need to consider this when funding private sector development projects.
 
5. National governments and international agencies revise laws and invest in infrastructure to enable a more diverse array of producers to access markets for public procurement (as well as restaurants, etc.). These markets provide stable and structured markets for smaller producers, farms using agroecological and nature-friendly methods, small- and medium sized manufacturers and women/minority-led enterprises. Infrastructure, cooperatives, aggregators and laws to unshackle procurement rules are needed to make this possible. 
 
6. International, regional and national trade bodies redefine the purpose of agri-food trade and cross border commerce from promoting competitiveness to improving food systems. There is no question that trade policy has transformed food systems over past decades. It has brought benefits for some, yet all too often crowded out the diversity of actors we need. Now it’s time it caught up with the food systems conversation. There are no clear answers about how global, regional and bilateral trade agreements can support nutrition, sustainability and livelihoods. But a new mindset that puts trade at the service of food systems — rather than the other way around — could start a conversation about how it might be achieved.  
 
Dignity
 
7. Food businesses ensure that their employees - and the employees in their supply chains - can afford to feed themselves and their families. It’s morally troubling that anyone involved in food production, processing, distribution or retailing are themselves malnourished and unable to afford and access a healthy diet. It’s encouraging to see that one large company has already committed to paying a living wage to all its employees and all who directly provide them with goods and services. If that’s too burdensome for smaller companies, they could  provide healthy meals or give employees vouchers to spend on nutritious foods.
 
8. Finance ministries allocate a sufficient budget year-on-year to social safety net programmes, providing cash or other forms of support to low-income households that enable them to buy enough nutritious foods. No food system anywhere can be seriously transformed if the majority of the world’s population cannot afford to eat healthy foods produced by people who are paid properly to a standard that protects and promotes nature. It’s especially important for infants and young children given around 75% eat substandard diets. Given the cost of these programmes, development partners need to weigh in, too, building on existing commitments.
 
9. Ministries of education (or whichever relevant ministry) allocate sufficient human and budgetary capacity to school authorities and/or local governments to make children’s centres and schools spaces where children learn to love and value good food. Few disagree that schools should offer young children and adolescents healthy sustainable food along with education, skills and support so they can become food literate for life. Yet given schools and children's centres have little budget and other things to worry about, capacity and funding are needed to ensure it is done, done well, and adapted to local context. 
 
Celebration
 
10. Media platforms and other commercial marketing channels replace unhealthy food promotion with celebrations of the power of good food. This is perhaps wishful thinking indeed. But just imagine if all advertising and other forms of commercial promotion for unhealthy junk was replaced by messages about good food, creating aspiration for foods like vegetables and legumes, with positive stories about food, planet and people. The platforms that carry promotions - such as Google, You Tube, TV  channels, supermarkets, owners of outdoor billboards, etc. -   have the power to refuse the unhealthy and unsustainable and incentivise the good. Regulation, investor pressure and civil society activism could help push them to make the right choice.
 
11. Local community groups seize World Food Day (October 16) as a “people’s food day” to celebrate food, encouraging and enabling citizens to share food freely with one another. Far from its current home in the corridors of power, World Food Day could spill out into the streets and fields across the world, building on the tremendous capacity for communities to support each other, as the experience of COVID-19 has shown. Food can never be an entirely free good. But for one day it could be shared. Such a day could celebrate the work of so many religious organisations already sharing food with people who do not have enough, the amazing Apps dedicated to food sharing, and the thousands of community initiatives out there. There is so much going on in so many places. For a single day each year, food could be truly celebrated -  like it should be everyday.
 
These things might be wishful thinking. They are. But with a bit of imagination and a lot of hard work, the opportunity is there for people to seize the day and make them possible.  The exciting thing is that there is so much that can be done now. This wish list is just a start.

​These ideas were also inspired by the huge amount of learning I have experienced over past months; thanks to the many who’s great ideas have inspired this list.

February 17 saw the announcement of a new expert group to assess the need for an International Platform for Food Systems Science. Given the mutterings ongoing for years about the need for an “IPCC for food,” this is a welcome announcement. In assessing the science related to climate change, the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has proved pivotal in generating and compiling the necessary evidence to make the case for change. Given food systems cover an even larger scope, it makes sense to start with a process of figuring out what value such a Platform might add and the form it could take.
 
The announcement set me thinking about the type of scientific knowledge needed to inform food systems change.  It’s been on my mind, too, with the preparations for the UN Food Systems Summit drawing both on formal scientific evidence (via its Scientific Group) and the knowledge of experience of people who work and engage in food systems (through the Action Tracks, Food Systems Dialogues and Champions Network). As the UN Special Envoy for the Summit, Dr Agnes Kalibata, has said: “It is all of these people who have the knowledge, insights, and understanding to help improve the system at large and make it more inclusive, more sustainable, and more resilient.”
 
This acknowledgement of the role of different sources of knowledge is commendable. Happily, too, the make-up of the new group (with experts from the natural sciences, law, economics and other social sciences), suggests a desire to gain insights from multiple disciplines. 
 
Into the knowledge mix, I’d like to put a large stake in the ground for the evidence generated by researchers observing, talking and engaging with people about their lived experience of food systems. In other words, evidence from qualitative research. Qualitative research tends to fall between two stools: it generates data, but not the numerical type typically associated with ‘science'; and while it’s about people's knowledge of their food systems, it analyses and interprets this data to produce new knowledge not necessarily held by the participants, for whom (like all of us) seeing the big systemic underpinnings of their every day experience is tough.
 
I’d argue this evidence is vital, especially when it comes to understanding why people eat what they do. Knowledge of why people make decisions about what to eat is made in the multiple systems in which people live their lives. Understanding how peoples' lived social, economic and psychological realities shape what they eat has huge implications for what policies and interventions will succeed or fail. 
 
Take, for example, the issue of food access. A large number of North American, European and Australian studies indicate a paucity of shops selling healthy food in deprived communities (in contrast to the plethora of ‘unhealthy’ ones). An intuitive policy response would be to introduce new stores, or have existing markets change their product offer. But by involving people who live in such neighbourhoods in taking photographs - as studies have done in urban Philadelphia and Madrid  - researchers ascertained it is the nature of social interaction in stores that really matters for shaping a healthier food environment, not just what they sell. In a more rural setting, a study conducted by the African Population and Health Research Centre in 2017 found that the Maasai community lacked adequate physical access to markets – yet participatory photo research methodologies revealed that empowering, supporting and including women in food and nutrition decisions was likely more crucial for addressing poor access and food insecurity than better transport. Both these examples indicate the extra value of engaging with the people experiencing the problem to inform the actions needed for effective change. 
 
It is noteworthy, as well, that a gender perspective tends to emerge from these studies. After all, they often reveal the stories of women who struggle to do their best feeding themselves and their families, women whose voices are rarely heard, whose experiences are often diminished.
 
This past week, colleagues from the Centre for Food Policy and collaborators from 20 different institutions published a document aiming to contribute to bolstering the legitimacy of this form of knowledge. Understanding Lived Experience of Food Environments to Inform Policy: An Overview of Research Methods names, categorises and exemplifies the different qualitative methods available to researchers to explore the decisions people make about food, and their response to existing policies and interventions. Methods include in-depth interviews, focus group discussions and photo elicitation to explore perceptions, beliefs and practices; observing practices in situ, such as on go-along tours or transect walks; and designing policy and interventions with people based on their lived experience, such as  co-create and co-design methodologies.

Researchers around the world committed to the rigorous and ethical application of such methods are now coming together into a Community of Practice, meeting regularly to discuss how to increase the quality and quantity of this evidence and work together to maximise its ability to inform change. At our meeting last week, we heard from three policymakers about their perspective on this type of knowledge. They - Esi Foriwa Amoaful, Director of Nutrition at Ghana Health Service, Tristan Gorgens, Acting Director at the Department of the Premier of the Western Cape Province, South Africa, and Veronica Graham, State Manager for Healthy Eating and Active Living Public Health in Victoria, Australia - sent us a clear message: this type of evidence is vital to bring alive what is really going on in people’s lives. It provides knowledge that speaks clearly to the policy-making agenda, and focuses on finding solutions that work.
 
So my wish for the new Expert Group is that they figure out how any new Platform might integrate this form of knowledge into the science of food systems. It’s the job of any scientist, in the broadest sense of the term, to look and listen closely, to see and feel beneath the surface, and to grasp what underlies the patterns that emerge. In this case, the researcher's task is to read the signs in the store, in the street, and at the stove. The lived experience they are privileged to witness, interpret and share must, surely,  form part of the diversity of scientific knowledge needed to inform food systems change. 

The Community of Practice referred to in the blog is convened by the Centre for Food Policy at City, University of London, UK and  CIRAD-IRD-SupAgro, Montpellier, France. To date it involves around 70 participants actively engaged in research on lived experience of food environments all around the world, from PhD student to Professors. If you are interested in participating please let me know.

I'd also like to thank Kimberley Neve, other Centre for Food Policy colleagues, and collaborators from the African Centre for Cities, African Population Health Research Centre, CIRAD, the Global Obesity Centre and the Institute for Health Transformation at Deakin University, Flinders University, GAIN, Gehl, The George Institute for Global Health, INRAE, Loughborough University, SupAgro, UNESCO Chair in World Food Systems, University of Alcala, University of Barcelona, University of Ghana, University of Greenwich,  University of Hertfordshire, and Wageningen University for their work on the Research Brief "Understanding Lived Experience of Food Environments to Inform Policy: An Overview of Research Methods" (Centre for Food Policy, February 2021).

Yesterday marked the release of a new report from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Making Better Policies for Food Systems. Highlighting the “triple challenge” of food security/nutrition, livelihoods, and environmental sustainability, it raises a fundamental question for food policy in the 21st century: how to “simultaneously make progress on these three dimensions?” It’s not an easy question to answer. As the report is at pains to point out, policies designed to tackle these challenges are riven with incoherence and trade-offs.  So how can policymakers navigate the complex terrain of food systems? How can policy actually be fit for purpose for the 21st Century? Here are a few take-aways I took from this report about what policymakers can do:
 
First, pay attention to policy coherence. Good policymaking cannot escape the interlinkages between food system challenges. Policies designed to address livelihoods (such as agricultural subsidies to support farmer incomes) interconnect with food security and environment. Thus, if policymakers are to address all three challenges they must - at the very least - be aware of “the possibility that a new policy initiative may have spillover effects, or that an existing set of policies may be incoherent.” If they fail to even consider this possibility, problems will, intentionally or not, get worse. 
 
Second, focus on creating coherence where spillovers between policies are strong. Creating policy coherence is not easy. In fact, it’s really hard. Existing institutional arrangements mean spillovers are often hidden. There are no simple decision-rules available to manage trade-offs. And there are disagreements about the facts, diverging interests and different values among the people involved. Focusing efforts where it matters most – when a policy in one area is evidently undermining progress in another, or where there are strong opportunities for synergy, makes practical sense.
 
Third, prioritise managing the different interests involved.  It’s evident that different, often competing, interests exist in the food system. The report makes the important point that if efforts to create coherence are serious, these interests must be explicitly recognised and managed. It’s not enough to engage all stakeholders in an inclusive way and pretend that divergent interests aren’t there: different interests will always “try to influence decision-makers to tip the scales in their favour,” leading to less effective policy. The report makes several practical suggestions about how to manage interests, including guidelines, independent accountability mechanisms, offsetting the cost of reform for interests that may lose out, and building broad countervailing coalitions. 
 
Fourth, if you really want change, ignore differences in values at your peril. Values run deep in the food system. The report gives the example of ‘choice.’ “They take away choice” is an argument frequently used against regulations to restrict the marketing, sale or taxation of foods produced by large manufacturing companies. While it’s easy to blame special interests – indeed this is the source of the pushback – the notion of having the autonomy to make free choice is not just an argument, but a value that runs deep for many people. On the other hand, not wanting the consume the ‘ultraprocessed foods’ these companies produce is also an articulation of deeply held values, values that influence ideas and proposals about what food systems should look like. While generating facts and evidence on each side can help, science is never the ultimate arbiter: people are always more likely to believe the ‘facts’ that align with their beliefs.  The report presents a very useful categorisation of the way differences in values are typically dealt with in policymaking, including ‘structural separation’ (when competing values are dealt with in different spaces) and ‘bias’ (when certain values are prioritised and dissenting values excluded because they are too awkward to deal with). But, it concludes, none of them are satisfactory. Instead, it highlights the potential of “deliberative approaches” to “help to build societal consensus” through which values can come to be shared. They propose something else, too (my favourite line in the report): “finding specific actions which can be supported by people with different values.” It may appear impossible, yet in my experience, intelligent navigation and moderation of deeper motivations can make that happen.
 
Five, carefully consider the policy instrument.  A key decision for policymakers is whether to tackle the problem of incoherent policies through complementary policies, repurposing existing policy instruments, designing a bundle of mutually reinforcing actions, or replacing the policy with something completely different. While this needs to be decided on a case-by-case basis, the opinion of Making Better Policies is that “one policy instrument will rarely be sufficient to meet all objectives; rather, a mix of instruments is usually needed.” Trying to find a single policy that can, for example, maximise farmer livelihoods and mitigate the food system impacts of climate change might just be too much to ask. In any instance, the design and implementation of the policy instrument requires careful consideration.
 
Making Better Policies sets out a laudable vision – but a tough ask. It’s also not an ask that’s new. Indeed, exactly forty years ago, the OECD produced another – alas forgotten - report on the topic. The report, titled simply Food Policy, set out an astonishingly prescient vision of a more integrated, holistic approach to food policy.  “Concerning interrelationships among different sectors,” it states “policies introduced in the food economy can have effects on other sectors of the economy and, perhaps even more importantly, policies directed primarily at other sectors or the economy as a whole can have a very marked effect on the food economy. The food policy approach is intended to clarify this aspect of policy making by considering the overall effects of policies.” It’s vital, it said, to “recognise that there are competing pressures exerted on policymakers” and it is “particularly important to avoid the introduction of narrow measures catering to special groups (as all too often has occurred in the past).” 
 
The author who drafted that report in the OECD Secretariat was Wilfrid Legg, now serving as the Honorary Secretary of the Agricultural Economics Society after a long career in the OECD.  I spoke to him last week and asked him what he thought the most damaging outcome had been of governments and others not heeding his call. “If we had a more whole-of-government approach,” he replied, “we might have avoided many of the problems of the environmental impacts of farming.” That’s a pretty damning statement against incoherent food policy. “It’s dangerous to make food policy based on a single issue alone,” he said, giving the example of the risk of designing policies on cutting meat production and consumption driven by meeting the challenge of climate change, while not considering nutritional, socio-economic and natural resource impacts. 
 
But given its importance, why is the goal so elusive? The architecture of policy coordination is crucial, he said, and current institutional arrangements based on the single-issue model may no longer be fit for purpose. Forty years on, Making Better Policies for Food Systems makes the same point: stronger institutions are necessary, including international ones. While major new institutional arrangements came into place after the food crises of 1974 (e.g. the Committee on World Food Security and the International Food Policy Research Institute), it’s evident we do not yet have a model conducive to building a food system that creates synergies and co-benefits. 
 
One step forward, then, is to piece together the institutional jigsaw, adding capacity in the system to connect the pieces (rather than creating a separate body). Another approach, as I have argued before, is for every country – and city and region – to develop an integrated, overarching food policy that brings the issues together.  Neither of these is enough, of course, but they are steps in the right direction. In the meantime, we must focus on identifying and pushing out the solutions supported by broad coalitions of people with different values -  all of whom, wherever they may sit, care about a better food system.

With many thanks to Wilfrid Legg for taking the time for our conversation and to Ellie Avery and Koen Deconinck at the OECD for their support.

​As part of my involvement in the UN Food Systems Summit (I am chairing a subgroup of Action Track 1), I’ve been wrestling with the issue of affordability. The Action Tracks are tasked with coming up with “game-changing” solutions. In this case, it’s about how to make nutritious foods like fruits, vegetables, fish, whole grains and legumes more affordable, while making refined starchy foods, cheap fried foods, pre-packaged “ultra-processed” snacks and sugary drinks less so. It’s a challenge we are tasked with addressing for the billions of people around the world living life on a low income.
 
There are different schools of thought here. One says: make healthy foods cheaper. Indeed, the 2020 State of Food Security and Nutrition estimated that a healthy diet costs five times more than a diet dominated by starchy staples. Solutions proposed include supply chain efficiencies, food subsidies, and, to make the unhealthy foods more expensive, taxes.
 
Another says: tackle poverty. There is only so much you can do, the argument goes, to lower food prices; and besides, downward pressures on prices makes it even tougher for producers and suppliers of nutritious foods to survive. Moreover, if the “true costs” of food were taken into account (incorporating the environmental costs of production, for example), food would need to be more expensive, not cheaper. The real problem is poverty. Solutions proffered here relate to wages, equality in income distribution (including within the food system), gender issues, and social protection programmes.
 
Others argue that affordability is only a small piece of the puzzle. There are easily affordable nutritious foods out there – it's just that considerations of taste, convenience, knowledge, status and identity drive people towards less healthy alternatives. Suggested solutions include making nutritious foods more palatable and easier to prepare, food literacy programmes and campaigns to change behaviour.  Others point out that physical access is still a real challenge in some places, and requires targeted solutions. 
 
Another perspective is that transforming any the above is just too hard. People eat what they eat, and history tells us that tackling poverty or prices is not an easy thing to do. So, in the meantime, let fortification and reformulation do the job so we don’t have to alter income, prices or behaviour.
 
What’s it to be, then? What’s really going to make a difference? Which camp is right? My reading of the available evidence (cutting across a wide range of countries) is that the challenges faced by people experienced in their real-life contexts are overlapping and multiple. 
 
The first challenge is that while low-income households have significant skills in managing their food budgets, low levels of income, alongside variability and unpredictability, shape buying practices. Rational management of scarce food budgets leads to a focus on foods that offer satiety (“it fills them up”), lower-cost substitutes (e.g. cheaper meats), seeking out price deals (e.g. month-end price cutting), and prioritising foods that won’t go to waste.  
 
The second is that the nutritious foods people want to eat (and their children to eat) are often higher priced than less nutritious alternatives. In some places (e.g. more rural) and times (e.g. because of seasonality), they are also not physically accessible. The specific foods that populations find appealing but unaffordable varies between populations and context – could be raspberries, groundnuts, milk etc. Lack of assets to reduce waste (e.g. fridges), and gender inequality (e.g. inadequate decision-making powers), make these foods appear even more  unaffordable.
 
Thirdly, some nutritious foods are available at low prices but offer low perceived value. Cowpea, soya and millets are highly nutritious and cheap yet typically consumed less than refined staples. Certain vegetables, like cabbage and carrots in certain contexts, or indigenous or wild vegetables in others, may be affordable but likewise lack acceptability and appeal. Reasons are low convenience (i.e. they take time, energy and skill to prepare in the context of women's time burdens); concern about wastage (if family members don’t like them); and perception of low quality, palatability or status (they’re “poor people’s food” or “food for the animals”). 
 
Fourthly, fried foods prepared in and out of home, sugar, and “ultra-processed” sugary drinks and snacks aren’t only widely accessible: they’re also perceived as affordable and appealing. These foods are perceived variously as safe, aspirational, convenient and (for some foods at least) highly satiating. Sharing easy-to-like foods is also a source of social pleasure among friends and harmony in families. Thus people, including adolescents, are willing to pay for them, even when more expensive than nutritious alternatives. Sugar is notable for being widely accessible and for its ability to make inexpensive foods (e.g. tea, porridge) more palatable and appealing, especially for young children.
 
The fifth major challenge is the perception that “healthy foods” are unaffordable, even when they’re no more expensive than alternatives. People who believe healthy foods are more costly, or that good nutrition is a luxury only for the wealthy, tend to buy less.  
 
All told, the evidence suggests that this is a multi-dimensional issue. The problem isn’t reducible to any single story. There is no doubt that poverty plays a major role in shaping what people eat; tackling income inequality has to be a core part of the solution. At the same time, increasing income to the degree possible through intervention won’t alone solve the problem. Neither will lowering prices alone be a magic bullet. Over the short-term, efforts to lower prices of the nutritious foods people already find acceptable and appealing appear to have the greatest chance of success. Other situations demand a focus on enhancing the acceptability of existing nutritious foods already affordable, taking into account womens' burdens at home and work. Enhancing people’s perception that nutritious foods offer good value relative to others – nutritional bang for the buck – could also work for some foods in some contexts, as could enhancing physical access. Coming down hard on the processes that make unhealthy foods aspirational, and building in the “true” costs of their public burden into their prices could also be part of the picture. 
 
What emerges here is the need to layer up solutions, each one catering to a different aspect of the problem, tailored to fit context, between them collectively addressing the problem as it is actually experienced in the reality of people’s lives.  
 
Perhaps the first game-changer we need, then, is a narrative shift. A shift away from the idea that one approach is “right” and others “wrong”; a shift away from spending time arguing a particular position. And instead, spending time figuring out how all the different solutions fit together to change the game for the people who experience the challenges. It’s not that “anything goes,” of course, but recognising there is no one single story, no one way to tackle the problem, and that understanding it from the perspective of the people who experience it is a good way to start. 
 
This is not just relevant to affordability, but to the food world in general. Too often we see experts and activists standing in different camps, lobbing solutions at each other. My solution is better than yours. We have the truth, the evidence, and you don’t... If there is to be a more fundamental shift in the current way of doing and thinking about food systems – the formal definition of a game-changer – we might begin by changing the way we execute our own business. We don’t have to agree upon every proposed solution. But by asking the right questions, and showing patience in listening to the answers, we might at least begin to understand where each piece fits in the jigsaw of solutions.

​With credit to Stella Nordhagen for her research support on Action Track 1 and her contributions. The views in the blog are also inspired by the emerging findings of projects in South Africa and the UK involving engaging with populations living life on a low income.

Today sees the release of a series of brilliantly informative papers in a UNICEF and GAIN special issue of the journal Global Food Security on children’s food systems. Focused on diets and nutrition, its core message is that food systems need to work both for and with children and adolescents. In this blog I reflect on what this means in the context recent political events.

​In her inaugural speech this past Saturday as US Vice-President-Elect, Kamala Harris had a compelling message for young people: “dream with ambition, lead with conviction and see yourselves in a way others may not, simply because they’ve never seen it before.” It’s the type of leadership I’ve been amazed and inspired to see emerge in the world of food systems in recent months. Indeed, the same day as Harris’s speech, British footballer Marcus Rashford announced his campaign pushing for measures to provide food for kids in poverty had been successful – a campaign in which voices of young people proved so powerful, young people like 17-year old Christina Adane calling out the absurdity of children going without food in the world’s sixth largest economy. 
 
The previous week I’d heard the equally powerful demands of Pierre Cooke Jr. on the World Obesity Federation webinar How are young people catalysing action on Childhood Obesity during COVID-19? Pierre, Technical Advisor at the Healthy Caribbean Coalition, One Young World Ambassador, and member of the National Youth Parliament in Barbados, had a clear ask: children deserve to be protected from unhealthy food. Kenyan Amanda Namayi, GoGettaz Lead at Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa and part of the Climate Smart Agriculture Youth Network, is another example of a powerful voice talking on the very different but equally vital issue of youth engagement in agriculture and climate change (I’ve learned plenty these past months from her excellent articles on COVID, agriculture and food in Kenya).  
 
And then there are the youth leaders involved in the UN Food Systems Summit (as co-chairs for each of the Action Tracks). 16-yr old Janya Green is leading innovation and training in community gardens in Georgia, USA (recently winning the 2020 4-H Youth in Action Pillar Award for Agriculture). Lavetanalagi Seru, co-founder of the Alliance for Future Generations in Fiji, aims to build a “movement of young people to effectively and meaningfully engage in efforts for sustainable development”; Mai Thin Yu Mon is fighting for indigenous people’s rights in food systems at the Chin Human Rights Organization (CHRO); Mike Khunga from Malawi is campaigning for better nutrition as part of Scaling up Nutrition (SUN) Global Youth Leaders (I recommend their excellent advocacy toolkit co-created with youth). 
 
These are just a few examples. And their message is clear: 

• Don’t Ignore us! Youth can be agents of change in food systems. 
• “Nothing for the youth without the youth” (as Pierre Cooke put it) -  children and young people should be involved in the decisions that affect their lives.  
• No tick-boxes: youth engagement must be meaningful. 

 
It’s all a sign of new possibility for food system transformation -  young people taking agency, showing up with conviction, with ambitious goals for healthier, future-proofed systems; food systems centred on serving theirs and society’s needs now and in the future.
 
Yet, at the same time, a series of recent studies consistently identify a rather different, troubling form of children’s agency in modern food systems. The words of a parent from Hanoi, Vietnam, say it all: “Children nowadays are very different, they will never eat what they don’t like, and we cannot force them to eat it.” The result, according to the research in low-income communities by Sigrid Wertheim-Heck and Jessica Raneri, is that while parents favour healthier meals, the priority they place on getting their kids to eat means they end up cooking “western” style fried foods, treating their kids to snacks at supermarkets on weekends. 
 
It’s the same story in Indonesia. According to researchers at Umeå and Gadjah Mada universities, parents across the socioeconomic spectrum feel “concerned and conscious” about poor nutrition, but also “defenceless” when their kids demand “chicken nuggets, cookies and instant noodles.” Their kids become “mad,” they say, when they try to get them to eat fruits, vegetables, traditional foods. In the Ecuadorian indigenous Kichwas community, grandparents say their grandkids challenge them when faced with a healthy, traditional home-cooked meal: “can't you cook anything else”? In rural and urban settings in Malawi, research just published by Valerie Flax and colleagues shows that mums, wanting their kids to be “loved and happy,” capitulate to their requests for “Kamba puffs, fizzy drinks, sweets, biscuits, sugar cane freezes.” This despite their overall preference for healthiness. In the US, too, a study by Priya Fielding-Singh illustrates that in the context of significant financial constraints, mums give in to requests for inexpensive yet unhealthy snacks; it’s the one opportunity they have to say “yes” to their teens. 
 
Thus emerges an apparent paradox: through their voices, their demands, young people are driving forward both positive and negative transformations in food systems. On the one hand, they are taking agency to transform food systems for the better; on the other, they are taking agency against their own parents and caregivers to demand a rather less savoury change: diets counter to their own development. Yet we should not be surprised. As Elizabeth Fox finds in her paper published in the special issue today, children are susceptible, susceptible to the way these foods are positioned as giving them what they want. In the context of (often) financial deprivation and the aspiration for better things, these foods can appear to children to meet their otherwise disregarded needs.

So we do have to listen to children and young people – but we also have to be smart enough to understand what lies beneath their demands for these easy-to-like foods, smart enough to see the more subversive forces at work that create a kind of junk food populism, nurtured at far too early an age, in countries everywhere. It can't be right that food systems are effectively pitting children against their parents. 
 
If young people are to have the courage and confidence to be future leaders, as Kamala Harris calls them to be, if we want the “better angels to prevail” rather than the “darkest impulses” — as President-Elect Joe Biden said in his own maiden speech to Americans —  we need to protect them against the forces that subvert their interests, that tout certain foods as cool and aspirational. We must set parameters about what food is right for children and what isn’t (as the paper released today by Hollis et al. does).  We must give parents the space to parent the way they want to. We must listen to young people while also providing them with the acumen to understand what lies beneath. And we must give youth the platform for meaningful engagement, so they can reflect, along with adults, on the commercial environments that surround them, that sometimes engulf them, coming to their own collective conclusions about what needs to change and how.
 
Youth can be agents of positive change in food systems. It’s up to all of us to make sure they have a fair shot at succeeding where adults have failed. 

This blog builds on the paper "Five steps towards a global reset: lessons from COVID-19" published in the journal  Global Sustainability. 2020;3 on October 2 2020

​
It’s been hard to make sense of COVID-19. At least, I have found it hard. So many deaths. So many changes to everyday life. So much political strangeness. So much uncertainty about the future. 
 
But what has happened does, kind of, make sense. There is a logic to it. And food, kind of, illustrates why. Why it has happened and why the consequences have been so vast.
 
Through intensive production systems, the food system is one reason why animal pathogens and human populations interact more closely than before -  the type of interaction which enabled the virus to jump from animals to humans in the first place. This was the result of an economic system focused on short-term gains rather than protecting our planet for future generations, an economic system that also incentivises the production and consumption of junk food, raising the risk of obesity and diet-related disease, now firmly established as intensifying the consequences of COVID-19. 
 
In turn, COVID-19 hugely impacted the economic aspects of the food system – think of the closure of the food service industry, the loss of income affecting food counter workers, and the impact on fisheries. 
 
This then reverberates into people’s lives to cause food insecurity and hunger.
 
So who gets bailed out? That’s a political decision, with leaders weighing up what matters most to them, affecting the health of the food economy and the health of people. This has varied everywhere, with political systems in different places responding to COVID-19 in different ways, affecting who got it and how severe it was. The capacity and the state of health systems also played a huge role, as did social attitudes in influencing adherence to lockdown measures. And once it had started, responses implemented to address problems in one system inevitably led to effects on others. That’s why it’s been so immensely hard to address.
 
In short, the existence and severity of COVID-19 was the result of activity in multiple systems and the interactions between them. It’s impact was huge because it – and the responses to it - reverberated across multiple systems. 
 
Everything is connected. Looked at this way, COVID-19 seems all rather predictable. 
 
COVID-19 may be the most extreme global challenge to have these characteristics, but it’s not the only one. Every global problem, whether it’s climate change or malnutrition, poverty or conflict, emerges as a result of the inter-connected nature of multiple systems. Surely, then, if fundamental solutions are to be found to major global challenges, they have to be based on the understanding that in practice, everything is connected. For me, I can’t see a pathway forward into the future – for food or anything else – unless we move away from behaving as if the world can be divided into boxes. It can’t. Each and everyone of us live in a system of systems whether we like it or not. The trouble is, while connections are inevitable, when run loose they create chaos – as the world has experienced. 
 
So to get things working, there is a need to actively manage those connections, to see them, to be aware of them, to manage those relevant to solve the problem at hand. To do so, we could embed them in everyday operations, from the top to the bottom of institutions. For example, we could:

1. Train system leaders - Systems leadership training could become standard in all universities, and existing leadership training programmes and schools incorporate systems thinking skills.
2. Employ a new cadre of system connectors - Roles could be created in organisations, businesses and governments explicitly designed to address a named global challenge by managing interconnections between systems.
3. Identify solutions across systems - Systems mapping techniques could be used to identify the roles of different systems in solving the problem.
4. Manage trade-offs - Intensive engagement across systems could find win-wins where possible and identify new incentive structures to enable them.
5. Kickstart system redesign for co-benefits - Opportunity spaces to create synergies could be identified and actions implemented to force the hand of systems redesign.

 
I think taking these types of steps could make a fundamental difference. Maybe it could even help towards the “global reset” that so many are calling for. But I have to confess, while it might make logical sense, I feel rather like a pontificating academic proposing something that, for the moment at least, hasn’t got a hope in hell of being implemented. Especially given the political situation in so many countries.
 
Yet we can all do something to connect systems – to take on the role that in many ways I see as most important. To be the knobbly bit that connects the pieces of the jigsaw; the double headed arrow on the systems diagram. To be a systems connector. It’s not about delving in deeply and trying to fix someone else’s problem; it’s about seeing what connections we need to make to solve our own problem, beyond our comfort zone, reaching out, and then figuring out if there are opportunities for co-benefits. And investing time and effort in doing so.
 
Changes in the system can only take place when we make connections in the system. Perhaps if each of us just did one thing to connect with another “system,” not for the sake of it, but because it will help us solve a problem we want to solve, we could begin to turn the current chaos of connection into more systemic unity of solutions.  

Read more in  Five steps towards a global reset: lessons from COVID-19

One of the most unsettling things I have read about the impact of COVID-19 – and there are many – is the report published by CARE International last month Left Out and Left Behind: Ignoring Women Will Prevent Us From Solving the Hunger Crisis (August 2020). It doesn’t hold back. Despite being the backbone of the food system, too many women have lacked access, information, and inputs needed to fight food insecurity and malnutrition during the pandemic. They have struggled disproportionately with food production. Rising food shortages mean they are at even greater risk of gender-based violence and mental health problems. They have struggled to afford a balanced diet and so often they eat last and least. In some cases they are not even permitted to register for COVID-19 safety net programs. Yet a tiny fraction of international reports on the coronavirus response propose “concrete actions to resolve the gender inequalities crippling food systems.” 
 
The message is clear: deep gender inequities in food have only gotten worse and the international community has not stepped up to address them.
 
But then, a bit further down, another finding, very striking: “Women and girls are … already leading the charge to meet COVID-19-related challenges. Women leaders at all levels are finding solutions: from planting crops during curfew to keeping markets open, to supporting the poorest people in their communities.”
 
The implication here is clear, too: despite the structural barriers they face, women still exhibit leadership behaviours. It takes competence, adaptability, resilience, collaboration and ingenuity to solve problems in a crisis.
 
It’s an implication that also emerged strongly from a webinar I tuned into this week on gender and food environments. Hosted by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), the Fundación InterAmericana del Corazón (FIC) Argentina, Centro de Estudios de Estado y Sociedad (CEDES) and Instituto de Efectividad Clínica y Sanitaria (IECS) presented their latest study from low-income communities in Buenos Aires confirming, perhaps, what was predictable: women lead the provisioning and preparation of food for their households. They decide what to buy, cook. They take the lead in asking for help when they need it. And importantly – especially given the current crisis – they participate in social networks and work collectively to provide food to their local communities. 
 
This is leadership. Getting things done by building coalitions, motivating collective action with purpose, staying energised and positive when things get tough.
 
These behaviours have done so much to solve problems during COVID-19. UN Women gave a further example this week (September 14) in their story about the “agile adaptation” shown by a women’s group in Indonesia in distributing food in their local communities. And, I would argue, they are the very behaviours needed to lead the journey towards a well-nourished world. Tackling the plight of the global diet, malnutrition, and the food systems and inequities that exacerbate them, is a hugely difficult, complex task, full of potential conflict. It needs both vision and an ability to navigate the many nuances involved. It needs leadership honed through a grounded understanding of the everyday experience of acquiring, preparing, eating, growing and providing food. It needs a leadership that goes beyond fields, homes and communities, and enters too into the political and economic realm. To paraphrase Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the US Supreme Court judge who passed away on Friday, leadership behaviours so often used by women “belong in all places where decisions are being made.”  
 
This means we need to do more to name those behaviours, nurture them, and elevate them into our own workplaces as well as into the corridors of power.
 
This is why my colleague Dr Shu Wen Ng and I have started a conversation with a group of women who work in food and nutrition across the world. We are just getting started. But we have already learned much from each other (informing so much of this blog). By being curious about ways to lead, open about our own strengths and struggles, we hope to sow the seeds of a leadership movement, provide a nurturing space where effective leadership behaviours can thrive, where we can support each other as we make inevitable mistakes, and work strategically to break down the structural barriers out there. 
 
We are convinced that the right type of leadership is lying latent. Learning from the skills and behaviours that have proved effective on the ground, nurturing them upwards, elevating them into decision-making spaces and our own workplaces, will only help us take the right steps forward.
 
This is not just a women’s agenda, important though that is. It’s a leadership agenda, a call for better decisions about the food we eat through more effective leadership. It’s about generating greater individual and collective awareness about the type of leadership needed for real change. It’s about taking the unsung leadership behaviours that have served communities so well during COVID-19, recognising them, crediting them, and enabling them to thrive.
 
 
The Next Gen(d)eration Initiative is now hosting experimental virtual ChangeMakersConnect  gatherings on April 1 2021 8am GMT/UTC REGISTER ​here and April 7 2021  8pm GMT/UTC    REGISTER here.

I’d like to thank Shu Wen and the other colleagues taking the initiative forward. The ideas in this blog would not have been possible without our collective learning. 

​The Finalists of the Food Systems Vision Prize were released this month (August 6 2020). Reading them has made me think hard about the opportunities and challenges of a shared universal vision and agenda for food systems. It’s particularly relevant right now given the plans being forged for the UN Food Systems Summit in 2021. The Summit “seeks to energize and accelerate our collective journey to eliminate hunger, create more inclusive and healthier food systems, and safeguard the health of our planet.” I’m excited about the Summit, but also challenged by it: there is such a diversity of stakeholders in food systems, such a diversity of goals, that the promise of a “collective” journey seems distant.  While diverse players from the World Economic Forum to the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems all agree that a vital first step to food systems transformation is alignment around a vision, actions in the field remain focused on sector-specific visions – reducing undernutrition, tackling obesity, sorting out greenhouse gas emissions, addressing food insecurity, fighting for food injustice, getting sustainable foods to market, reducing gender inequality, etc. There are, moreover, powerful ideological differences about what needs to be done and by whom. Overall, this fragmentation means the tremendous power of these multiple communities to connect and act along a common path is being lost.

That’s why The Rockefeller Foundation, and its partners SecondMuse and Open-Ideo, are hosting this new prize. Envisioning can be a powerful thing. A good vision unites, activates and ignites honest debate. It inspires the question, “How can we get there, together?” Indeed, the motivation behind the prize is to unite “fragmented system of actors” to “source, and support positive Visions for the future of the global food system,” and inspire “actionable solutions.” To be selected as a Top Visionary, collaborative teams were invited to answer the question: What is the regenerative and nourishing food system you aspire to create in your specific place by the year 2050? What would it look like? It proved a compelling question: 1300 teams applied from 110 countries. The Top 10 Finalists, chosen for their potential to inspire “real, positive and bold transformation,” make a compelling read.

In Beijing, China people will “have easy access to healthy, freshly made and nourishing foods with the help of numerous Good Food Hubs.” In India, the food industry will “provide and promote both healthy and tasty options as the norm.” Lima, Peru, will be as “green as the Lima discovered by Francisco Pizarro 500 years ago”; and Treaty Four territory in Canada will be a vision of “swales, creeks, and sloughs… linked by green corridors, the tree-surrounded fields tracing landforms,” rather than the monotonous checkerboard of fields it is today. In South Western Nigeria, farmers will have become “their own kind of celebrity,” and in the Netherlands, citizens will “participate in food policy councils to collectively decide about local food environments.” In the Hudson Valley, New York, Chef Pruitt will don her apron “with the same smile she shared with her coffee” after a day spent at her partner farm and micro-processing enterprise central to the networked, circular food economy that now exists. In the Rosebud Indian Reservation, South Dakota, the Sicangu people will “get all of their food from the local operations of tribal citizens.” And in Nairobi, Kenya, “dignified, economically empowered and food secure” residents will share the food they have with each other.

These are surely very different visions to the food systems we have today. And, importantly, we can learn from them about the type of vision we need. There are many food systems visions out there, full of words like “sustainable,” “equitable,” “inclusive,” “resilient,” “democratic,” “diverse” and “healthy.” Good words. But what do they actually mean?  Well, lots of things, depending on how you interpret them. Easy to say, hard (and complex) to pin down. Everyone can agree on the vision of a sustainable, inclusive, healthy food system – and then promptly disagree profoundly on how to get there. Indeed, people do agree. What’s to disagree with? But the very same people disagree on how to get there. Agroecology or agribusiness? Fortification or indigenous foods? It’s a shared vision. But it’s a superficial one. Everyone can stand up and stake allegiance to this vision, and then carry on along their divergent paths. If it’s a collective journey we are looking for, it won’t get us very far.

That’s why we should learn from the Food Systems Vision Prize: it goes beyond vague aspiration to help us think instead about what the food system will actually look like? It forces us to get real, to make the vision concrete and tangible. We can imagine these Visions in our mind's eye: people sharing food, a marketplace full of fruits and vegetables; fields, surrounded by trees; a chef visiting her own microenterprise. They are visual. They can be seen. And they can inspire action. Do we agree with fields surrounded by trees? If not, we can say so in concrete terms, start a debate about why not. If we do, we can connect with others to make it happen, asking collectively: What do we need to do to get there? Who needs to be involved?  How can I help? What's the first step? This picture of possibility belies the need for big, well-intended but essentially hollow words.  
 
So when crafting visions, let’s draw on the power of visualisation, focus on what we want to see. But there is a snag. And it’s a pretty major one. The Prize specifically asked for a Vision in a specific place (that was part of its power). Places look different. They are different.  They contain different people. Their context is different. There is no one vision for every place. The Hudson Valley looks very different to New York City not far south. Nairobi is different to the pastoralist communities out in the Sahel. So while a visual vision is the best way forward to inspire real change, it belies a shared, universal agenda. There is too much specificity and context involved. It’s no wonder that probably the most talked about visual vision of food systems transformation of the past few years – the Eat-Lancet diet, depicted on a plate – was derided for being culturally insensitive. When it comes to seeing things differently, people like to see it in their own places. A bold vision of the future it might be, but at least it should meet them where they are.
 
So for a universal agenda, the temptation is to go back to empty signifiers again – healthy, sustainable, inclusive, etc. - useful, at least, in that they can be applied everywhere. 
 
But there is another way: to step back from the vision and ask instead:  what is the food system for?  In short, to articulate the purpose of food systems – the “why” that lies behind the vision. The reason why food systems exist. Funnily enough, unlike the call for vision, this question is rarely asked. Perhaps this is because it is obvious. To produce food, right? Well, yes. But is the universal purpose to produce enough calories? Or to support people’s nutrition, health and development?  Is it to produce cash? Or is profitability rather a means to an end? Answers to these questions have profound implications for what needs to be done and how. If the purpose of the food system is to regenerate and nourish, this implies a very different food system to one which aims to provide calories and cash. If the purpose of the food system is to feed the world, this means producing more. If the purpose is to nourish people, this means it also has the task of actively enabling and encouraging people to eat well and nourishing the billions who labour in the food system. If the purpose is to regenerate, this has profound implications for every single action taken to produce, transport and sell food in the future.
 
It’s this shared sense of purpose for the food system that ultimately we need to agree upon. What is the food system for? It’s a universal question that transcends place, population or plate. Unlike the call for a shared vision, it allows for a universal answer. 
 
So this is what I’d suggest for the UN Food Systems Summit: create a universal sense of purpose for the food system and then inspire millions of communities, cities, and countries to build visions in their own spaces of what their food systems would look like if they were to put that purpose into practice. It’s a shared, universal agenda that also allows us to celebrate the wealth of diversity and difference in our food systems around the world.


Disclaimer: I was not involved in the development of the Food System Vision Prize. I have recently signed up as a mentor to support a subset of the Finalist teams. 

Public health advocates across the world welcomed the announcement in the UK this week that the government plans to further restrict unhealthy food marketing. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s experience of complications of COVID-19 appear to have chastened his view that the state has no role to play in what people eat. (His reawakening apparently came after his doctors told him that his own excess weight was culpable.)

Johnson’s attitude to marketing regulation might be new, but the policy proposal itself is not.  Globally, calls for restrictions have been rumbling on for decades. There is a huge amount of evidence that unhealthy marketing is pervasive, whether on TV or social media, food packaging or at point-of-sale. In the past year alone, studies from Brazil, Canada, Guatemala, Hong Kong, Kenya, Mexico, New Zealand, Oman, Russia, Slovenia, Spain and Turkey have added to the growing list. It has been known for years, too, that promotion influences children’s food preferences, attitudes and consumption. A recent video by Jamie Oliver’s Bite Back initiative shows just how advertising slips under the realm of critical thinking. Thus emerges the rationale for regulation: marketing works, so getting rid of it will stop it from undermining kids health. 

Yet efforts to take unhealthy food out of the promotional spotlight have been slow on the uptake. Just 16 countries have some type of limited regulation compared to at least 36 countries that have mandated food standards in schools and a similar number with sugary drinks taxes. Only Chile – and now the UK – has taken a tougher stance. This is despite the World Health Organization recommending in 2010 that governments act.

Such slow progress reflects large pushback from members of the food and advertising industry. Their current argument is not so much that marketing makes no difference (they lost that one). It’s that banning it makes no difference.  As one food business executive told the Financial Times this week, “we haven’t seen the evidence base that supports the idea that these measures will actually move the dial on obesity.”  An advertising industry analyst, cited in the same article, opined that the ban has “no prospect of successfully addressing this health crisis.”  

These types of arguments inevitably get waved away by public health campaigners. But who should we believe? Who is right and who is wrong?  

As so often with black and white arguments, we have to dig a little deeper to understand what is really going on. 

Food companies advertise in order to compete with other companies and brands. Advertising greases the wheels of competition: may the best win. One of the great innovators of advertising back in the early twentieth century, The Quaker Oats Company, understood that plastering a brand on an otherwise undifferentiated product and sticking a coupon on the box could elevate their product above the rest. In more recent years, promotion has been essential to the process of getting the word out about the millions of new products that hit our store shelves every week, all jostling in a crowded marketplace to get ahead of the rest. Promotion has, in a way, become part the product; there is not much point in producing a product, if it’s not possible to promote it. 

By taking away a means to compete, then, marketing restrictions create a disincentive to produce unhealthy products in the first place. And by taking away the means to compete for unhealthy products, they set a new, level playing field on which companies can compete for healthier ones. This is what gives them their huge potential power: marketing bans undermine the core business of unhealthy businesses while stimulating progressive companies to innovate, reformulate, and shift their product portfolios. Unhealthy laggards simply lose out. It’s no surprise that some of the more progressive food companies have welcomed the move in the UK.

There is, however, a problem here: the competitive dynamics are still there.  As reported by the Financial Times, “others in the [food] sector warn that without advertising, producers would compete on price and quality, either cutting prices or adding sugar.” It is already known that when one marketing channel is cut off, companies will find another: squeeze one part of a balloon, and another part will grow. But the larger point is that it must be recognised that there is an audience for these products. Financial insecurity, poor housing, lack of space to prepare food, stressful lives, the search for convenience when low on time, inadequate information and knowledge, feelings of low self-esteem, aspiration to be a fully paid-up member of society – all of these things drive us towards unhealthy foods; it’s not just that we saw an ad on TV. And once the often sweet, salty, easy-to-like flavours become habitual, our taste buds can’t cope with much else.  For many businesses, in other words, there is still a market worth competing for.

By putting advertising regulations into this bigger, systems context, we can see they are a mere snip, a government wielding a pair of scissors, cutting a link in the system without changing the system itself, changing neither the free market economy that elevates competition nor the systems in which people live their lives. Thus the food execs have a point: as a single step, restricting marketing may not have much effect at all.

Where does this leave us? It leaves us with the recognition that every action on the better food journey is both necessary and not enough.  There are many snips, many new ties, that will be needed to build a healthier system. In the meantime, we need to start somewhere. Limiting food marketing is a powerful way to send a message that enough is enough; that in itself will stimulate some type of systems response. And then we continue along the road, getting on with all the other things that need to be done to effect systems change.

Looked at this way, we can see both black and white are right. We need to act where it makes sense – but we also need to recognise that we cannot say with any certainty that marketing restrictions will make enough of a difference. No, we have to act despite uncertainty.

This past Friday, I was asked to appear on a late-night TV show (Newsnight) to talk about the UK announcement. Known for its hard questioning, I was joined by a Member of Parliament and an ad man. The discussion soon became black and white. “I am right, you are wrong.” No space for nuance. No space for engagement. No space for uncertainty. No space to find the common ground that provides the base for more collective, effective action. While this is (unfortunately) to be expected from our rapid fire, macho-style media machine, it also reflects a broader political discourse that elevates black and white thinking. If we ever care to wonder why we are not getting further along the pathway towards change, we don’t need to look much further than that.