Discussion of obesity has similar vibes, but with this conversation specifically, there’s a sort of outdoor voice/indoor voice divide: one thing is said in public, another in private.

We have a big obesity problem, across the developed world and particularly in my home country of the United States. In the OECD countries, often used as shorthand for the advanced nations of the earth, half or more of all adults are overweight or obese. Here in America, one in every five children is obese. Overall, progress comes with a bitter (and expensive) problem: as countries become richer and more stable, obesity rates grow. Obesity is a classic “boiling frog” problem, both for individuals and for societies — a few pounds here and a few pounds there, and you’re suddenly facing real health consequences; a few percent here and a few percent there, and you’ve got projections showing that your already-overburdened healthcare system will eventually collapse. It contributes to heart disease, diabetes, cancer; it is estimated to cost the NHS £6 billion a year. Clearly, something has to be done.

And yet there’s an obvious set of complications. One stems from the simple fact that, though there have been some recent developments, consistent and scalable treatments for obesity are notoriously hard to come by. What works for some doesn’t work for most, and the constant endorsements of diet and exercise have proven totally unhelpful to many millions of people who have tried very hard to lose weight and found that they just can’t. And this connects to another complication: how do we create a public health system that helps people to lose weight and encourages healthy eating without unnecessarily insulting the people who struggle to do so?

It’s here that the polarisation comes in. While it’s increasingly unlikely for people to openly shame people for their weight problems, it’s still far more common than open racism or homophobia. Obesity is not in the same category as race or sexual identity, but as with those identity markers, being fat represents an unchosen vulnerability. The fat acceptance movement has been gathering steam for some time, arguing that not only does society unjustly mock and deride fat people, but does so based on bad science and bigoted ideology. While this general attitude is both understandable and humane, it’s taken to an unfortunate extreme. The “Healthy at Any Size” philosophy insists not only that fat people deserve equal rights and respect, but also that there is no inherent health disadvantage to being obese and that the public health community should be “weight neutral.”  Unfortunately, these claims aren’t true.

Is there no hope of synthesising these perspectives? Can we not communally agree not to be cruel to fat people, regardless of the origins of their condition, and recognise that people have profoundly different odds of being fat or thin, while also insisting on the importance of a healthy diet and regular exercise? Is it really so hard to say: “Obese people deserve love, respect, and understanding, even as we recognise that being overweight is unhealthy and that the obesity epidemic is a public health crisis”?

Two new books address some of these questions: the recently-published Ravenous, by Henry Dimbleby, and the forthcoming Ultra-Processed People, by Chris van Tulleken. Both of the authors have impressive credentials. Both take wide-ranging journeys through the obesity crisis. Both offer up explanations, largely complementary, for why we’ve become fat. And like so many analyses of contemporary problems, their diagnoses are more compelling than their prognoses. Only one of the books comes up with a vaguely realistic solution.

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Neither of the overviews of the obesity problem offered here is novel, exactly, but they both make a point that needs to be hammered home: expanding waistlines are not the result of declining public virtue, but of structural factors. For reasons of commerce, the modern diet has become unhealthy, filled with foods that offer us a caricature of real nutrition. This shifts some of the moral responsibility for our BMIs off our shoulders and onto the systems in which we live.

“Over the past 150 years food has become … not food,” writes van Tulleken. His definition of ultra-processed foods stresses artificiality in packaging and ingredients: “If it’s wrapped in plastic and has at least one ingredient that you wouldn’t usually find in a standard home kitchen, it’s UPF.” Dimbleby, meanwhile, writes of UPFs: “Colourings, emulsifiers, flavourings and other additives are added to make the products better-looking, tastier, more stable and longer-lasting. This makes them extremely ‘moreish’ – or ‘hyper-palatable’.”

Hyper-palatable, here, does not simply mean tasty. This food is dangerous not merely because it prompts us to desire it, but because eating it does not satiate that desire. These foods are engineered to keep you eating, to a degree that was unheard of prior to modern production techniques. Consider the relationship between fibre and sugars. In nature, they tend to be found together. Your body might crave the sugar in apples, but you can’t sit down and eat an entire bag of them, because apples are highly fibrous, and fibre makes you feel full. In contrast, you most certainly can sit down and eat an entire king-size bag of M&Ms, which have a dramatically lower calories to fibre ratio (1023 calories and 5.8 grams of fibre in a cup) to raw apple (65 calories and 3 grams in a cup).

Modern food is specifically designed so that you never want to stop eating, which makes the food manufacturers rich and you fat. Another element of this broader reality is that ultra-processed foods are often lacking in micronutrients such as vitamins and minerals. This, in turn, makes people continue to crave food even after consuming many calories, as they’re simply not getting what their body needs. In communities where UPFs are the norm, it’s very common for obesity and nutritional deficiencies to be found together.

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In fairness, the development of these techniques was not undertaken for entirely nefarious reasons. Dimbleby points out that the last food crisis created the conditions that led to the current food crisis. Early in the 20th century, concerns about how to feed a human population that was absolutely exploding — there’s Malthus again — created intense pressure to derive more calories from a given portion of land. There was also a compelling need for better food preservation, leading to the addition of a lot of new substances in our food and the removal of others. It turns out that making food last longer often involves removing fibre. (Think of the way celery goes soft over time and you have a sense of how short fibre’s shelf-life is.) In an earlier era, when there was a deficit of calories, this probably didn’t seem like a bad bargain for food scientists.

But the legitimate need to feed more people fits all too well with the capitalist dictates of the food industry. There’s little inherent financial reason for any given food producer to prioritise nutritional value, and those foods that do are usually more expensive or, at least, practically inaccessible to those who do not frequent farmers’ markets or upscale grocery stores. The “normal” food distribution system continues to prioritise selling as many calories for as little money as possible. As Dimbleby writes, “the food system we created prioritises quantity over quality. We have changed our diet to match this system, and this diet is now making both us and our planet ill.”

Both of the books are potential fodder for the obesity culture war, though they pretty firmly reject simplistic characterisations of obesity as a matter of character or willpower. “Every discussion of weight gain, whether in the press or in our own heads, is suppurating with blame, which is always directed at the people who live with it,” writes van Tulleken. He sees this as straightforwardly unfair in the face of the structural forces that have altered our food supply. Similarly, Dimbleby writes: “Berating or despising individuals for being overweight is unkind, counter-productive (it exacerbates the depression and self-reproach that so often characterise disordered eating) and, above all, misplaced.” Both authors reference research that demonstrates that, while exercise has a number of health benefits, weight loss isn’t among them; Dimbleby has a chapter titled “You can’t outrun a bad diet”, which underlines the fact that exercise increases food cravings, which prompt eating that undoes calorie loss. This has grown to become a bit of conventional wisdom over time, but the age-old advice to eat less and exercise more is hard to shake.

But what can you do? Van Tulleken suggests… just about nothing. He’s insistent that genetics, the presence of unhealthy food options, and marketing essentially hold fat people hostage. Ultra-processed foods, he argues, “hijack our brains”. Even his brief final chapter on trying to live without UPFs is positively fatalistic, mostly counselling people not to hold out hope. As is the fashion, he laboriously argues that poverty effectively prevents the impoverished from making any decisions at all.

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It’s a conclusion that is not, I think, supported by the evidence he presents. The existence of genetic predispositions and just-so stories about neurological predispositions don’t amount to a compelling dismissal of the role of the conscious mind. It is also a good example of yet more binary, polarised maximalism: it seems not to have occurred to van Tulleken that he could argue persuasively that poverty influences food choices and that our system incentivises eating unhealthy food without arguing that we are all essentially automatons in the hands of food companies that can literally dictate our behaviours to us. I suspect, frankly, that this lack of nuance had more to do with selling books than anything else.

And yet this extreme pessimism is undermined where van Tulleken argues that we must make demands of government. Mandatory food labelling, he suggests, is effective: “The labelling has had huge impact, with decreases in food purchases and, perhaps most significantly, research showing that the regulation made children ask their parents not to buy the products.” If labels can prompt better eating behaviour, how can van Tulleken go to painful lengths to insist on the futility of trying to make good choices. Over and over again, he emphasises that the individual is simply no match for the power of the food industry and their dastardly techniques. But elsewhere, his certainty slips, and he seems to suggest that, perhaps, maybe, just a little, an individual can moderate their consumption of the food he describes as poisonous, and in so doing improve their health. It’s a glaring contradiction.

Dimbleby is a little more sanguine, and allows for a bit more hope. But, like van Tulleken, he emphasises systems over individuals. Dimbleby’s chapter on solutions — titled “The Power of Love”, I’m sorry to say — insists that solving our problems will involve creating a new “food culture”. Using both government intervention and community effort, we can change both the economics of food production and our habits regarding food preparation, in a way that promotes healthier eating. “Change has to come from both directions,” writes Dimbleby: “top-down, in the form of government legislation, taxes and regulations, but also bottom-up, with talented and dedicated people determined to improve the food in their own families, schools or communities.” This simultaneously sounds like a very natural and necessary evolution for our society, and like a heavy lift. But it’s a more humanistic and workable vision than that of van Tulleken, who largely seems content to describe why things are so bad without imagining how they might get better.

Recently, a great deal of ink has been spilled on the power of semaglutides, drugs developed to combat diabetes that have been shown to have meaningful impacts on obesity where so many others have failed. With brand names such as Ozempic and Wegovy, these new treatments are not stimulants, which have often been used for weight loss, and don’t appear to be addictive. But can they tame an epidemic? Van Tulleken doesn’t mention these drugs, but Dimbleby does briefly. He offers an evenhanded approach, insisting that they aren’t a silver bullet, but also admits that the very few other treatments actually work.

And this might just be all we’re left with. Government intervention seems unlikely; the voluntary pursuit of virtue rather than profit by private corporations unthinkable; and individual choice deeply constrained by external factors. The immensity of the problem, the sheer destructive potential of obesity, leaves me wondering if a pharmaceutical solution is the only one we can really count on. No, hundreds of millions of people injecting themselves every week for the rest of their lives doesn’t seem particularly sensible or sustainable to me. But it is perhaps the least bad solution to obesity, a problem from hell.

While Americans everywhere are eager to pretend that the virus is under control, the situation in Wisconsin is getting precarious. According to the state’s Department of Health Services, a total of 920 people in Brown County — where Green Bay is located — have tested positive for Covid-19, up 603 from a week ago. The infection rate in the county is 3.54 cases per 1,000 residents — the highest in the state. By point of comparison, in Dane County, where the capital city of Madison is located, the rate is just .79 per 1,000.

The explanation for that disparity is simple: Dane County is, for the most part, a middle-class region.  Residents work predominantly for the state government, its legal apparatus, the huge University of Wisconsin and the technology sector. Brown County, in contrast, is working class, with the meat packing industry a big employer. As we’ve already seen (if we’ve been paying attention) this virus is particularly cruel to the working class.

Americans are huge consumers of meat. They eat 124 kilos per person per year, which puts them near the top of the league table of carnivores. Among major countries, only Denmark and New Zealand consume more.  Americans aren’t about to let a pandemic get in the way of their meat consumption — especially not with the barbecue season heating up. That demand for meat has placed a great strain on the processing industry — and particularly its workers.

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Earlier this month, one of the largest pork-producing plants in the US — Tyson Foods of Sioux Falls, South Dakota — closed indefinitely because nearly 300 of its employees had tested positive for Coronavirus. That was the first real hint of worrisome trend. Last week Smithfields, a huge pork processor, temporarily closed two plants because of the virus. At one plant, which employs nearly 4,000 largely Hispanic workers, almost 900 people were infected.

The spike in Brown County has been linked to JBS Packerland, a meat industry plant in Green Bay. Infectious disease experts have found that meat processing plants have become hot spots because employees have to work in close quarters, making social distancing impossible. Wet animal carcasses are passed from person to person along the production line, acting as conduits for the disease. The workforce at these plants is made up largely of recently arrived Hispanic immigrants who live in crowded housing. Throw in the language barrier, and it’s easy to see why controlling the spread of the virus within the packing industry is extremely difficult.

So far, 22 packing plants in the US have closed. Some 3,300 workers have been diagnosed with the virus, and 20 have died, but those figures are rising with every passing day. Plant closures were motivated by the need to protect the lives of workers, a noble principle. But the consequence has been a severe drop in the supply of meat — up to one quarter in the case of pork. There’s talk of having to euthanise millions of animals because of the lack of processing capacity in the industry at the moment.

Last Sunday, John Tyson, chairman of Tyson Foods, took out full-page ads in the Washington Post and New York Times warning that “as pork, beef and chicken plants are being forced to close … millions of pounds of meat will disappear from the supply chain”. In an intentionally apocalyptic tone, Tyson warned: “the nation’s food supply is breaking”. That’s not strictly true, since, for the moment, it’s mainly the meat industry that’s in peril, not the entire food supply. But, given the American fondness for meat, Tyson’s scaremongering hit home.

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Tyson is a long-time friend of Sonny Perdue, Trump’s Agriculture Secretary. Both made their fortunes in the chicken industry. Tyson and Perdue appear to have had a word in Donald Trump’s ear. On Tuesday, the President invoked the Defense Production Act (DPA) mandating that meat is a vital commodity and ruling that packing plants must remain open.

According to the executive order, closures “threaten the continued functioning of the national meat and poultry supply chain, undermining critical infrastructure during the national emergency”. The order designates that meatpacking plants are part of the critical infrastructure of the nation. Cynics might notice how quickly Trump invoked the DPA with respect to the meat supply, compared with his much slower response in the case of test kits, PPE and ventilators.

Along with that executive order came a “hold harmless” decree which stipulates that the plants cannot be held liable for the spread of the illness among employees. Occupational Safety and Health Administration guidelines designed to protect the worker in these factories have been temporarily relaxed in order to address the threat of meat shortages. Nowhere has there been mention, by the President or his assistants, that now might be a good time to cut back on consumption.

The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW), the largest US meatpacking union, has demanded that the Trump administration compel meat companies to provide proper protective equipment and frequent coronavirus testing for slaughterhouse workers. That demand, however, is likely to fall on deaf ears. The unions, already weak in the US, are powerless against a determined President who loves his hamburgers, and who seems to take delight in using this crisis to assert his power. It’s easy for him to argue that desperate times require desperate measures.

The workers in those packing plants are the innocent lambs led helplessly to slaughter. They’re faced with a stark choice: they can go back to work and risk their health, or they can protect their health and lose their jobs. With unemployment approaching 20%, the employers hold all the cards. Finding replacement workers at the slaughterhouses shouldn’t prove too difficult, even if the job has suddenly become deadly.

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In 1906, Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, his novel about the harsh conditions of immigrant workers in America’s meatpacking industry. Ironically, most middle-class readers of the book ended up more concerned about the insanitary processing of meat than about the welfare of those workers. “I aimed at the public’s heart,” wrote Sinclair, “and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”

Things haven’t really changed much since that book was published. Americans have always been more concerned about the meat they consume than about the unfortunate people who process it. No one really wants to think about what goes on in a slaughterhouse.

America has been hit in the stomach again. What we’re seeing is a particularly stark example of a phenomenon that will become painfully apparent in the weeks to come. And let us not pretend that this is an exclusively American story. Powerful people desperately want a return to normal. Normality, however, will be restored by the underclass – the low-paid, powerless workers who face the choice of protecting their health or protecting their livelihood.

In truth, it’s not a choice at all; those workers have no alternative but to become martyrs in this battle for meat. Middle-class habits will always trump working-class well-being.

I always imagined that the apocalypse would look a bit like the movie of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. But this valley seems oblivious to the crisis — it is all daffodils, snowdrops, birdsong, and trees bursting into leaf.

My flock is down in the valley bottom. The first lamb of the year was born today and is now lying with its mother. I come in from the fields and the TV news is like something from a science-fiction movie — they are building giant makeshift hospitals in the city centers. People are dying in their hundreds every day. But not far from the farmhouse a duck has made a nest by our pond and has laid thirteen pale green eggs in the midst of a perfect downy circle.

It is hard to connect the green fields where I work each day with the world of the virus. Hard to think it is the same world. But, of course it is. The virus has shown how connected we really are.

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Our elderly neighbours have locked themselves inside — we take them groceries and urge them to wash their hands and stay away from town. The schools have closed, so our children are helping us on the farm. And once a week, my wife travels to the local supermarket for supplies.

At first, she reported panic runs on face masks, disinfectant wipes, hand sanitiser, and toilet rolls; then it was staple foodstuffs, like rice, pasta, flour, and meat. Now, she describes the quiet (but very palpable) fear that has emerged about the robustness and resilience of our food supplies. The system doesn’t feel quite as permanent as it did.

It is because of that fear that people are hoarding. British people have a billion pounds’ worth more food in their homes than they did 10 days ago. Their panic and the subsequent spike in demand took stores — and Government — by surprise and we all need to calm down.

But the unexpected demand isn’t the whole story. The whole story is the fragility of our just-in-time food system, which the crisis has exposed.

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It’s a logistically brilliant system — it has allowed us to shop whenever we want for whatever we want, regardless of season or whether harvests have been good or bad — but it isn’t nearly as robust as it might need to be. Like our banks, which we learnt in the 2007-8 banking crisis were “too big to fail”, we now have food systems that are so hyper-efficient that they have little slack capacity for a crisis.

And the crises are coming thick and fast — the Australian bush fires destroyed 140,000 sheep and cattle — and many orchards, vineyards and crops; the African swine fever in China has killed millions of pigs and is spreading. The farming systems we have created are vulnerable; the more specialised and monocultural and crowded they are, the greater the vulnerability.

The obsession with efficiency in our food economy has done its best to destroy a distributed local and diverse food economy — local abattoirs are now as rare as hen’s teeth, farmers markets have very limited capacity, and most areas are so specialised in their farming focus that they rarely produce the things that would give us a balanced diet.

Barely any of us know the fields that feed us or grow a significant share of what we eat. There is way too little local fruit and vegetable production in most areas, and there has been a general loss of the food culture that once existed to turn local products in to great meals.

The Herdwick lamb and mutton we produce was used to make countless different meals in the past, using the whole carcass. Today, we eat only the most expensive plastic-wrapped bits of a chicken, sheep, pig or cow; the lower value cuts are generally exported or processed. Such pickiness suddenly becomes a problem in a crisis, because if exports close down, or kebab places are in lockdown, the system backs up with products with no market. Last week, for example, sheep prices collapsed, because the system was suddenly frozen with confusion and log jams.

And after months of media noise about everyone going vegan, we can now see the reality laid bare in the supermarkets: people want the foodstuffs they have always eaten. The meat, milks, dairy and cheese shelves are noticeably empty, and the plant-based fake food shelves are remarkably well stocked and uncrowded — as my neighbour stated in the store, “No one really wants to eat that shit”.

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The argument has always been that we simply don’t need the old, mixed farming systems anymore — in which farms produce crops and raise livestock. But is that true?

Normally, we don’t all shop, eat or cook from these local sources, but a food system isn’t safe if it only works in the good times. Like sound healthcare systems, sound food systems need to have slack capacity for freak events. Britain produces about 60% of the food it eats; the other 40% is imported. It probably isn’t sensible to aim for 100% self-reliance (growing bananas in greenhouses in cold wet places in Britain is daft), but we need to be really careful about dropping too far from current capacity. It will make us vulnerable in times of crisis.

Norway has a deeply protectionist food system that supports its farmers as a matter of national strategic importance. Farmers there, for example, produce 80-90% of the national demand for beef and sheep meat. Since large areas of Norway aren’t globally competitive for agriculture, it doesn’t want to ‘outsource’ what food production it is capable of and put its rural communities — where family-run farms drive the local economy — at risk. It may turn out to be a very sensible policy. Ask yourself whether you trust Donald Trump to keep food supply lines to Britain open in a time of genuine food crisis? Or whether he might look after America’s interests first?

Many of us were politely pointing all this out as we headed into discussions about a free trade deal with America, which might reduce the share of Britain’s diet that is produced domestically, if the gates are opened for cheap food to flood in from North America.

No one was listening.

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Less than a month ago, a UK government advisor, Professor Tim Leunig, was quoted in leaked emails as saying we didn’t need farmers, because the value of their output was a tiny share of the UK economy and we could import all the food we needed, perhaps at lower prices.

And for the past decade, a virulent strain of anti-farming environmentalism, led by noisy hard-Left radicals such as George Monbiot, has argued for us to turn away from farming towards producing food in synthetic industrial ways (with the promised pay-off of freeing more land for wild nature). This ‘land-sparing’ obsession embraces the worst industrial farming and corporate food systems.

Coming, as it does, from both ends of the political spectrum, this end-of-farming narrative is deeply worrying. My farming neighbours were rolling their eyes in disbelief a month ago at the absurdity of it all.

The obvious truth is that it takes a lot of food to feed 65 million souls — a fact that is so easily forgotten in the good times. With a full belly, everyone knows better than farmers how to manage land, and how to care for the countryside.

The lunatic anti-farming voices are rather quiet at the moment, though. The national discussion is, instead, about empty shelves, whether our food supplies are secure, and discussing whether farmers and others in the food sector are classified as ‘key workers’. Suddenly, more measured experts are being given airtime, farmers are being listened to — and our value understood.

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Today, an estimated 8.4 million people are at risk of running short of food — and food banks won’t cope with that sort of demand. The closure of restaurants, pubs, cafes and bars hasn’t helped: we get something like 25% of our calories from these places nowadays. And the supermarkets are going to experience demand unlike anything they have ever known — with challenges that they aren’t used to coping with. Our fruit and vegetable farms often rely upon migrant seasonal workers who can now no longer travel to the work.

Professor Tim Lang, one food system expert, is now openly calling for the UK government to impose food rationing before we descend into a greater crisis. It’s no wonder people are panicking and behaving in ways we haven’t seen in generations.

There is public fear that our food system might not be up to it, but I think we probably can avoid a genuine food crisis in the developed world. Governments have responded relatively quickly to this virus, and it will be overcome. You shouldn’t read this piece and panic.

Instead, you should stay calm and shop sensibly. And you should eat what you buy: remember, we waste 40% of our food.

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We do however need to think very carefully about how the nation feeds itself, because in the long run we will need a truly robust and resilient food system, with strong local food economies. This is our wake-up call to respect farming once more — not uncritically: we have an absolute right to want more nature on farmland, high welfare standards for farm animals, and safe and healthy food. But Britain must seek to understand and remember the value of farming and food production.

Things are going to get a whole lot worse if, after this is all over, we continue as though nothing has changed and throw British farmers to the mercy of global free trade and systems that are big, bad and ugly. We need to protect this key national resource so it is there for us through thick and thin.

Because if another disaster strikes — and it will — then I want a significant share of my diet to be available within walking distance of where I live. I want to know where I can source food for my family, and if that means I pay a bit more for food in the good times, then so be it. As one Twitter wag recently posted, the City of London may offer a better way to get rich than farming, but “You can’t eat credit default swaps, kids”.