Speciality Food April 2024

22 H enry Dimbleby is a busy guy. Fresh fromwriting 2023’s Ravenous – a timely book reflecting on howwe can get both the planet, and ourselves, into shape – he has recently launched venture capital firm, Bramble Partners, supporting businesses that improve food security, have a positive impact on health and nutrition, or that break new ground in agriculture. These are all areas Henry has found himself hugely invested in over the past few years – and a large part of what drives him forward. The curiosity and keenness to identify the ‘big issues’, with the resolve to not just sit back and complain, but actually do something about them. This tenacity, and problem-solving nature, is part of the reason Henry was asked to write 2020’s National Food Strategy and its follow up in 2021 – an engaging, jargon-free, absorbing book of recommendations for government, that honed in on @specialityfood Strategy almost 10 years later. It was at the time when we’d just come out of the EU. And it was about howwe create a food system that produces enough food, and sequesters carbon, and is secure.” It was during the two- year process producing the strategy that Henry really got “under the bonnet. And I began to feel a much stronger need to explain what’s going on to the wider world. It dawned on me,” he says, “when you looked at how destructive the food systemwas to health and the environment, that no one really knew about it. And we had a COP at Glasgowwhich was meant to be about biodiversity, and food wasn’t mentioned. I just thought, ‘why is no one talking about this?’ It’s central to two of the most critical issues facing society. You begin to feel a bit insane. Is it me, or them?” A big leap that’s taken place in recent history, which Henry says can only be for the good, is growing, mainstream interest, particularly around food security and sustainability. “You look out and see the fields are underwater. When it’s outside your window you cannot avoid it, and I think that is now really coming home to people. In a way, the fact it’s now so obvious makes me optimistic, weirdly. You can’t ignore it [climate change] anymore.” The most urgent matters for the UK right now, he says, are health and the environment. “We have 2.8 million people out of work, and they’re predominantly out of work due to musculoskeletal problems, Type 2 farming, UPFs, food security, and our public health crisis. Although there is a lot of doom and gloom to pick through, particularly when it comes to revitalising the health of the nation, Henry says overall there is a lot to be positive about, with changes afoot that could improve British food production for the better. A course for Henry’s path was set during his time at Leon – though it was, he says, entirely accidental. “It [Leon] was a bit of a selfish pursuit in that it was about how you can eat fast food that tastes good and does you good,” he says. “But because of the way that we spoke, people assumed we were doing all sorts of things we weren’t doing. They assumed we were organic, and then we felt we had an obligation to either live up to that, or explain we weren’t doing that. So we had to train our staff to tell people, if they ask ‘is it organic?’, to say ‘no’.” At the same time, Mark Sainsbury of London restaurant Moro, approached Henry about the “absolute nightmare” of sustainability in the industry, and with a vision to form a group (The Sustainable Restaurant Association). “The idea,” explains Henry, “was to take the burden away fromyou, as a restaurateur, trying to keep your restaurant open while doing everything else. We would just tell you ‘you need to do this, and this’.” Later, Henry would be asked by government to devise the School Food Plan. “And off the back of that I was asked to do the National Food diabetes, hypertension andmental health. Three of those are directly related to food, and one of them is exacerbated by it. If we don’t get this right, it’s going to make us both poor and sick. It’s a disaster, and we have the ability to fix that.” HFSS (high fat, salt and sugar) regulations are one of just a handful of recommendations the government has enacted so far fromHenry’s report, alongside Healthy Start, and Community Eatwell, with a programme following the Community Eatwell guidelines in London finding that children previously achieving 5% of their five a day, were getting up to 64% of their recommended intake. Amajor piece of feedback from the scheme was parents saying they felt they could have a fruit bowl at home, without it feeling like a waste of money. Henry admits more needs to be done on the health front. “Not only do we need to increase these kinds of schemes and trial themmore broadly, but we need to increase the free school meal threshold, which is outrageously low.” When it comes to the environment, Henry says we face a global disaster, but that green shoots of hope are peeping through. However, we cannot rest on our laurels and assume that just because we’re making the right noise and looking to do the right thing on home turf, other countries are following suit. It’s down to the UK to show producers and policymakers worldwide what good looks like, he explains. “We could do farming really well in this country and still climate change can carry on because we are a small part of the picture. Even if we got it right here, gradually the UK could sink underwater. I think our role in this is exciting. Yes, to fix our biodiversity problems, but more it’s to show that it is possible.” Already, Henry says, others are beginning to followwhere the UK leads, and the pattern of recent farmers’ protests has been telling. “England and Scotland are two of the countries who haven’t really had farmers’ protests, and Scotland hasn’t done a lot of the changes yet. But England has done a lot of change, and politically the ups and downs have been handled pretty well. Whereas if you look at protests inWales and across Europe, I think a lot of them are explained by well-meaning but bad policy. I think that, actually, we are showing a way policy can be done ‘I’mfeeling optimistic about the future of food in theUK’ As we continue to delve into the world of sustainability at Speciality Food , we speak to Henry Dimbleby MBE on the state of British farming, food security, public health and more