A food apocalypse is coming There is no plan to feed Britain in a crisis

In the dystopian drama The Last of Us, a fungal virus has spread through foodstuffs turning infected humans into zombies. The survivors live in ghettos, among the ruins, armed to avoid a gruesome living death. They grow their own food to avoid the infected produce. Preppers and survivalist whackos find that their hour has come. Clean food has become a precious thing.

That’s where my interest in the show kicked in, because the future of our food system is something that I’m a little obsessed with. I am haunted by the memory of those empty supermarket shelves during the Covid pandemic, which didn’t quite lead to a food panic, but sent chills through anyone thinking about food security. We learned then that our just-in-time food system wasn’t very resilient and seemed vulnerable to collapse if given a major shock. (Spoiler Alert: Covid is nowhere near the grim end of the scale for disaster planning.)

I began asking questions about food security during Covid, and like a loose thread in a jumper, the more I pulled the more my already weak faith in the current food system began to fray. What I learnt is frankly a little scary. It turns out it isn’t zombies that we should be afraid of, but how poorly prepared we are for the future.

A lot of people assume that somewhere in Britain there are sheds full of food that we’d distribute in a disaster. Surely there is a grain or butter mountain somewhere? Surely the UK government has a plan for such a crisis?

Nope. No sheds. No stores. No mountains of food. No plan.

All politicians say that food security matters, but no one admits that basically we don’t have it. 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.

If a major crisis hits, then, you better get to Asda quick before everyone else — or else pray that the trucks deliver more food to the store. And if that logistical system breaks down, let’s say during a major oil or fuel crisis, you are suddenly going to be paying a lot more attention to local food producers within walking distance of your house, and you are going to wish you had a garden or an allotment, or that your community had them.

In such a crisis, you are going to curse your little fridge-freezer because it doesn’t hold enough food, and 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.

You might expect the government to bring you food in an emergency, but frankly, they haven’t got any — and Covid proved that the extent of their strategy is “leave it to Tesco”. But supermarkets helped to create this mess; they aren’t our saviours.

Nor can we rely on neighbouring countries to feed us. World leaders from Trump to Putin to Xi are busy securing their own food supplies and openly putting their own needs first. The liberal peaceful global order is dead. And Britain has worse trading relationships than ever. In 2016, we left the EU, a massive source of food stability. Before the EU, we had an empire feeding us, but that’s long gone — our former subjects haven’t forgotten that we abandoned trading with them fairly when we joined the EU.

Since then, Britain has grown addicted to just-in-time supermarket corporate structures. And this could be our downfall. This may be something no one wants to hear, but we need to hear it in order to make it better.

The answer is to be ready, with a more resilient and secure food system before something goes wrong. We need an inspired farming system that’s largely confined to our own island, and which we can rely upon in a crisis. There is no food security unless we can feed people locally in an emergency.

I spoke to Professor Tim Lang, a leading authority on food security and author of a forthcoming report for the National Preparedness Commission (NPC), about what the big “shocks” to our food supplies might be. Some are happening already, like climate change, and we have to adapt to be resilient to them. One in four UK homes is projected to flood by 2050. And our remaining fruit and vegetable production is concentrated in low plain places, like Lincolnshire, that are projected to flood with rising sea levels in the next century. According to Professor Lang, this means that we’ll have to move our horticulture “up the hill” in the years to come.

Climate change is also driving more extreme weather events globally that profoundly affect food supplies. This is already affecting crops in the fields and the availability of food staples. Twenty years ago, it would have been unthinkable that fruit and veg would be rationed in stores — but this has happened several times in the last few years. Whole areas overseas that feed us, like the greenhouses of Almeria in Spain, are becoming unviable as their water resources diminish. Production is moving further from home, often to Africa, increasing the risks.

Another potential shock is biodiversity loss, which can lead to ecosystem collapse that can wipe out crops from whole regions. The food industry is already worried about these risks. One 2024 report by the Institute of Grocery Distribution, “Resilience: A System Under Pressure”, highlights the risk inherent in our ageing farmer population. Labour is vital for production, and yet the average age of a UK farmer is 59 years old. The report also raises concerns that a botched roll-out of new farm support schemes might de-motivate farmers and discourage their investment in future production.

We can’t afford to ignore their warnings. The idea that we’d all be confined to our houses for months by a virus would have been considered science fiction prior to 2020, but now it’s a well understood scenario. Disaster planners have to model worse epidemics than Covid, and we need to be ready for them.

Perhaps the idea of being blockaded by submarines sounds a little unlikely, a strangely nostalgic fear left over from the Second World War. But war is far from over. There are three major conflicts affecting millions of people’s food supplies taking place right now.

The Israelis have used food supplies to try to bring their enemies to heel in Gaza, something that is illegal under international law. In Sudan, six million people are at risk of famine at present because of a civil war. And the Ukraine-Russia war has revolved heavily around food supplies — the Russians targeted Mariupol to gain control of Ukraine’s grain exports, and regularly target food markets to try to intimidate Ukrainians into ending their resistance. Britain is involved in the Ukraine conflict already, so it is not hard to imagine a scenario in which Russia sabotages Britain’s food system to punish us. Think less U-boats in the Atlantic, and more sabotage of computer software by bot-farms in Russia to collapse our logistics. A single electricity outage could crash our entire supermarket system overnight.

The Ukraine war has taught us that our farms are often reliant upon hidden foreign inputs — synthetic fertilisers drive current crop yields, and imported feedstuffs prop up our milk, meat, and egg industries. The war doesn’t have to touch English soil for it to cut the yields of our fields by around 20-30%.

As we know, bad things never happen one at a time. Shocks can come from several directions at once and compound the damage of each other. Imagine a flooded city loses its electricity during a severe epidemic. Now imagine there is a war elsewhere in Europe that prevents food supplies coming to that city. Figuring out how we might find, move, cook and serve food for millions of people in such a scenario is a serious business.

There is an old saying that we are only three days away from anarchy, particularly with a food system breakdown. Yet Professor Lang is more optimistic. He says that what we often see in a crisis is not social collapse but instead people working together, finding ways to ration or share, displaying the best of human nature. But even with a lot of good will, people need a certain number of calories every day to stay alive.

It’s worth pointing out, as Professor Lang does, that access to nutritious food is not guaranteed in Britain even without a geopolitical crisis of the kind I am imagining. Millions of British people are suffering from food insecurity right now. 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. So poor is the British diet that the average five-year-old is now shorter than they were 20 years ago.

Add to this the fact that many British people have very poor access to, or else cannot afford, nutritious foodstuffs. Our diet of processed foods, full of salt, fat and sugar, is making us sick. In his recent report “The False Economy of Big Food”, Professor Tim Jackson estimates that our failing food system costs us £268 billion a year.

We don’t need a meteor or a war or even zombies to screw up our food system. For millions of vulnerable people, it is already broken. And they will be the hardest hit by any future shocks.

There are many farmers who use the “food security” argument as a way to say that farming can’t change. Leave us alone or there will be less food — I get it, but it’s a bad argument. Due to the rise of supermarkets and industrial technologies, farming has become massively specialised and monocultural. What’s needed is a food system that’s far more diverse.

We need lots more horticulture scattered all across the UK. We need orchards and urban farms. We need vast numbers of small and diverse food businesses to spread risks in the food system and avoid bottlenecks. And we need to support regenerative and nature-friendly farms that are less reliant upon imported inputs like synthetic fertilisers. Indeed, we need more farms not less, because giant simplified industrial farm systems are often the riskiest of all. Since they specialise in mass commodity production, they tend to grind to a halt when they can’t get rid of their pigs, chickens or milk because a processing plant stops working. They are also the most vulnerable to epidemics.

Furthermore, we need to create farms with closed nutrient cycles that utilise mixed livestock and cropping to restore soil and create resilience. We farmers can’t claim to be sustaining our food system’s future if we are degrading our soils — that strategy might produce cheap food right now, but only at the expense of our future. And no civilisation has ever survived that lets vital nutrients leak out of the food system. We need our waste to go back on our fields, rather than flushing it away.

Much of the farming we need, such as no-till organic horticulture, is human-intensive — it relies on human brains and skilled hands not magic bio-tech solutions. In order to make these changes, we’d need a whole new generation of brilliant farmers and some radical new thinking. Heaps of young people, including my daughter, want to farm, but the capital required to take on a giant industrial operation makes that a fantasy. We need starter farms, and opportunities for people from non-farming backgrounds to produce food and contribute.

If all this sounds fantastical and unlikely, just remember that our current food system is creating costs that are staggering. The status quo is not serving us. We can’t keep mindlessly copying a US food system that is fraught with costs and risks.

Change would require bold action and joined-up thinking across government departments. We seem to have lost faith in the government’s ability to solve problems. But remind yourself that we once rationed food to survive a wartime blockade. (Remarkably, the poorest 25% of the population were healthier under rationing than they had ever been before, with access to good food for the first time.) And remind yourself that we created the National Health Service. We can do hard things — and sometimes we have to.

Food system planning and delivery should be at the heart of progressive politics — a priority for investment, even in austerity. And it is an investment, not a subsidy. It will make us all healthier, happier, safer, and more affluent. It would benefit the poorest the most.

The current fight between the government and farmers about inheritance tax is staggeringly stupid. It is the wrong fight, with the wrong people, about the wrong issue, at the wrong time. It is terrible politics because the list of things we need from our farmers is long and growing. We need to help them, not undermine them, so they can invest to create the healthy real food production we need. After all, history is littered with civilisations that collapsed because they were unsustainable.

This whole shift requires a standard of political leadership that doesn’t exist at present. And leadership at the local level as much as in Westminster. We need to be more like the French and Italians, empowering local government and mayors to restrict the growth of supermarkets and fast-food outlets, and instead prioritising local and healthier real food growers and sellers.

The truth is we’ve gambled too long already on a risky and failing system. The world around us grows ever more hostile and we have chosen to be a stand-alone geopolitical unit. Whatever you think of how we got here, that’s our reality. We now need to do the work of building a strong and healthy food system for Britain.

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James Rebanks is a fell farmer and the best-selling author of The Shepherd’s Life. His latest book is The Place of Tides.

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