Ravenous
George Ttoouli reviews Henry Dimbleby's 'Ravenous', finding it to be solidly-informed but insufficiently bold in its vision.
Ravenous - How to get ourselves and our planet into shape
Published by Profile Books, 2023
Ravenous is a solidly-informed review of food in the UK from farm to fork, held back by trying to steer current political leadership in better directions instead of outlining a radical vision for genuine, long term sustainability. Obvious topics - from agriculture to retail, dietary trends to climate damage - are well complemented by Dimbleby’s recent UK-centric experiences as lead non-executive board member for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and then in trying to influence government policy with the National Food Strategy. Yet despite Dimbleby’s own framing for these themes, Ravenous offers a subtler argument – one that Dimbleby is perhaps not brave enough to spell out – for radically overhauling our food systems at a pace commensurate with the climate emergency.
Published in 2021, the National Food Strategy gained visibility across the media in part, as Dimbleby admits, due to the efforts of footballer Marcus Rashford (p.109). Rashford’s support leveraged public opinion, then government action, on recommendations relating school meals and holiday meals for poor families, while drawing attention to the poor nutritional content of existing meals. Yet the majority of the Strategy’s fifteen recommendations still flounder, despite positive noises from the Conservatives.
This, then, is the context for Ravenous. Chapter by chapter, Dimbleby unravels the complex resistance the strategy met, from corporate lobbyists, the National Farmers Union, politicians unwilling to make unpopular legislation and a British public culturally obsessed with eating meat (even, at one point, calling back to the old French nickname for Brits, ‘les rosbif’ (p.173) as if there are no vegetarians or vegans living in the UK). Dimbleby tries to detail exactly why the National Food Strategy recommendations have been underfunded or entirely neglected, which, ultimately, serves as an interesting map of the power dynamics at play in our society. At time of writing, New Labour’s MP Steve Reed has announced a refreshed food strategy from DEFRA for 2025, but it remains to be seen whether this will genuinely alter these power dynamics. Sometimes despairingly, but always with good rigour, Ravenous documents just how precarious and unhealthy our food systems are for us and the planet and, more importantly, why. This is the main contribution here: the challenges faced by any attempts to shift our society toward greener, low- or zero carbon operations, are sharply outlined in ways that can be mapped into action.
Short sharp shocks
The middle chapters are the book’s real insight, offering a series of short, razor-sharp shocks on inequality, food security, nutrition, land use and power relations. Dimbleby writes well about the urgent changes needed to tackle several crisis points for the good of the planet’s climate and to prevent starvation. Rigorous data underpins these chapters, which leads to strategic recommendations informed by legal targets, such as the 30% target for nature restoration in the government’s Environmental Improvement Plan 2023.
The cost of adapting farmland to sustain biodiversity, for example, is sympathetically handled. Dimbleby exposes a series of magnifying feedback loops stressing our agriculture. Dwindling soil quality leads to increased dependencies on fossil fuel-generated fertilisers and pesticides, which exacerbate weather extremes that further erode soil quality. Reducing fossil fuel-based inputs and replacing with physical labour costs risks pushing the poorest farms with the narrowest margins into bankruptcy. This is just one of several issues locking farmers into ecologically damaging approaches.
Against this, the Conservative government’s introduction of the Nature Recovery Network further burdens farmers to take responsibility for environmental restoration in their fields. As Dimbleby puts it, “Farmers are being asked to clean up everyone else’s mess, on top of their own. But the unfortunate fact is, they are the only people who can do it. They manage 75 percent of our uninhabited land” (p.186). Singling farmers out as nature stewards on behalf of the nation is all well and good, but there has been little assessment of the pressure this puts on an already burdened profession or the costs. Dimbleby is firm on how the strategy must underwrite its demands with hard cash and a clear timeline, to ensure British farming comes out more resilient and sustainable, both economically and environmentally.
A key point of contention is in how subsidies have been used to enable ecologically damaging agriculture. Chapter 19 offers one perspective on the need to reform subsidies in a way that recognises historical and current climatic pressures. From my outsider’s perspective, it seems obvious how farming subsidies very quickly convert into shoring up private profits, extending the power supermarkets have over existing precariousness in food production, retail and consumption. As Dimbleby points out, paying our farmers to grow sunflower oil would amount to subsidising the entire global sunflower market (p.199-200). Yet the sheer duration of subsidisation has also served to create dependency among smaller, less profitable farms on these payments. Moving or removing such subsidies will undoubtedly do little to make our food systems more resilient, unless such changes go hand in hand with a rebalancing of power between retailers and growers to create more security for farmers.
Against these challenges faced by farmers is the recent rising cost of food for households. Part of these price spikes relate to climate change-impacted yields Again and again, Dimbleby points out how the British public have consistently been fed a false sense of the real cost of food. This is partly achieved through the displacement of waste – the literal burden of food waste management – from supermarkets onto farmers, households and local authorities. Dimbleby slightly contradicts himself here by suggesting supermarkets produce so little waste because this is “just good capitalism. Waste is – well, wasteful” (p.205). Yet if retailers were forced to take responsibility for the waste they displace onto other parts of the system, such as by rejecting good quality, edible food on aesthetic grounds, our food systems could become less wasteful overall. As David Harvey clarifies in Seventeen Contradictions, waste is a key mechanism for allowing globalised control of supply and demand. Supermarket chains have concentrated power in such ways that they can displace blame and leverage government to protect their control of pricing over the livelihoods of growers.
Regardless, the artificially low pricing of our food very much comes across as one of the major barrels retailers are holding the government over, despite the growing awareness that their profits come at the cost of our health and our planet. What politician would stake their career on reforms that will drive the cost of food up to realistic levels, impacting every household in the midst of an ongoing cost of living crisis?
Playing to the economic rationalist crowd
This repeatedly-surfacing argument about political will sets a major limit to the book’s economic purview. Dimbleby’s experience with governmental processes appears to have left him settled for a certain way of trying – and, arguably, failing – to make change happen. Time and again, he plays to this particular crowd’s biases, trying to persuade proponents of short term economic rationalism to think about long term risks and losses. Given the National Food Strategy’s limited successes, this appears to be a futile gesture.
More than this, the effect is to occlude discussion of possibilities for a radically different economics. As if trying to keep adherents on side, caveats for some of the book’s more radical proposals are buried in footnotes or asides. In a chapter on land use and carbon sequestration, a discussion of how to clean up air freight is footnoted with reference to the ‘polluter pays’ principle, suggesting the air industry should take responsibility for their mess. The “cost of doing so would,” the footnote reads, “at current prices, halve their profits” (p.182). While Dimbleby does not come out in favour of the principle, it seems a no-brainer. If the cost of making such enormous profits is to make half the enormous profits and dramatically reduce emissions, then why not say as much?
At one point, Dimbleby notes, “The UK is a comparably wealthy country (even if that wealth is unequally distributed)” (p.192). Why caveat the heart of the problem underlying our society? The book’s own data declares how poorer UK families spend as much as 25% of their household income on food (and a further 40% on housing and energy), while the national average is 11%. Such averages, including GDP, conceal the massive injustices capitalism deliberately engineers by encouraging rigged markets, responsibility displacement and wealth accrual. Drilling into these problems would have strengthened the argument for change, but instead they are left as asides to an otherwise relatively conservative (small ‘c’) position.
Yet the most bizarre stance appears to suggest radical violent change is the only real solution to the problems in our food systems. The early chapter on inequality invokes Walter Scheidel’s somewhat contentious review of human history, The Great Leveler, which argues societies only become more equal after massive violent events – Scheidel’s ‘Four Horsemen’ of war, revolution, state collapse and pandemics. As a classicist, Scheidel takes a very long view of history. This allows him to draw crude trends while ignoring exceptions. Comparing peasant revolts, bubonic plague and Roman history to modern revolutions will undoubtedly provide some points of comparison, but historical conditions will be fundamentally very different, due to technology and also the amount of historical evidence available. More importantly, the points in history Scheidel selects are so widely spaced as to provide plenty of room for other scholars to find counterexamples. And, indeed, some reviews of Scheidel offer solid evidence to suggest alternatives, for example arguing how periods of strong unionisation in Denmark, Sweden and Norway, have had positive impacts on social and economic equality during peacetime.
Dimbleby’s frustration with the National Food Strategy’s limited impact sets him casting about for explanations – and solutions – in Ravenous. One of the most problematic areas he explores looks at how technology might secure our food supply. Lab-grown meat and fermented proteins are offered up with a strange kind of zealousness that, to my eye, read more like marketing than solid research.
Against the helpful data offered in other chapters, Dimbleby here fails to assess the impact on animal welfare, the energy costs, or even the timescale needed to arrive at affordable protein for mass consumption. Nor does he contextualise the impact of further privatisation of food against the many existing problems raised by Ravenous that are clearly caused by abuse of corporate power. Instead, he gives us the results of his personal taste tests and even shares a photograph of himself eating “a tasty but pricey meatball, grown from stem cells in a bioreactor” (p. 218). It reads as nothing short of product placement.
Compare this with Labour’s investment in untested carbon capture and storage technologies, which promise to reduce the UK’s annual carbon emissions – standing at just over 300 million tonnes per year – by 8.5 million tonnes per year starting in 25 years’ time. That £22 billion is almost equal to the amount subtracted from Labour’s cancelled election promise of £28 billion per year in green investments, and which could significantly decarbonise the UK’s operational carbon emissions now, through retrofitting housing, electrifying public transport and supporting farmers to transition securely to agroecological arable crops. Technological alternatives also appear to extend the lifespan of the most damaging, fossil-fuel based practices in energy and agriculture by delaying transition, and continue to serve corporate profits over public good.
The arguments around reforming arable farming and investing in technological solutions are very much playing out as we speak. See, for example, the debate between Chris Smaje, author of Saying No to a Small Farm Future and George Monbiot, who proposes a farm free future in Regenesis. The problems are rife and possible solutions very different when looked at by people who work our fields. Despite the lack of resolution in the debate, in July 2024 the UK approved the sale of lab grown meat in pet food.
Finding the right solution to our complex food systems will inevitably turn up some dead ends and create heated debate. The one point of agreement across these texts is that we need to make difficult, radical changes. Ravenous is clearly driven in part by the fear of worst possible outcomes if we don’t change our food systems before things get worse.
Unequal responsibilities
These are hardly Ravenous’ only oversights of inequality in our food systems. The introduction – even the book’s title – carry problems that run deep through the rest of the book. Reading a phrase like, “The population of humans has swollen to 8 billion” (p.10) leaves a lingering, sour taste, as if our species is a planetary inflammation that must be reduced. It makes all 8 billion of us complicit the harm done by our insatiable greed, rather than starting from the perspective of inequality and imbalance.
For example, high-income countries generally eat the most meat, and the majority of countries eating the least meat are located in the Global South, in Africa and Asia. Dimbleby’s UK-centric approach ignores this uneven distribution and the preponderance of plant-based diets across the Global South still in existence, as well as countries closer to home, around the Mediterranean, where peasant diets have traditionally been heavily plant-based for economic reasons. The book is also severely blinkered with regards to how meat-rich diets destroy ecosystems in these regions, triggering land clearances in rainforests to plant crops for cattle feed and desertification in places as close as Spain, which increasingly threatens UK vegetable imports.
These Western biases carry through the book. Looking up ‘starvation’ in the index leads to discussions of American starvation experiments in Minnesota, the impacts of Nazi food blockades on Dutch families during World War 2 and dietary changes in Japan from the late 1800s to more recent laws. There is no mention of starvation in developing parts of the world from where much of our cheap food imports come, and only a passing reference to food exports from poorer countries, by way of Brazilian beef.
As an antidote to these shortcomings to Dimbleby’s UK-centric focus, Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor lays out how food is just one of many ways in which structural inequalities harm our planet while sustaining Western countries’ dominance. These harms are generally made invisible in Western public discourse due to the slowness of the exploitation and damage caused. Much like the way climate change only seems to gain traction in media narratives through the sudden damage of extreme weather events, we are still being sheltered from the severity of ecological harm embedded in our food systems.
A report by the Institute of Mechanical Engineers from 2013 revealed as much as 30-50% of food grown for human consumption never reached a stomach. Action since then has reduced waste somewhat, but a recent UN Food and Agriculture Organisation report reveals global hunger and food insecurity have increased since 2020, with around three quarters of a billion people facing hunger, the majority living in African nations. The UK alone produces over 10 million tonnes of food waste per year.
The introduction’s covert way of collectively blaming human overpopulation for our food insecurity too easily opens the door to Malthusian-driven ideas of letting nature take its course, which means we should let people starve. The debate around human overpopulation takes an impending population crash as inevitable, and tends to renege on our responsibilities to reduce inequalities by redistributing concentrates of wealth, power and food security.
While Ravenous’ later chapters address these problems in UK terms, exploring the loss of cooking skills, the rise of fast and processed food, and the exploitation of our evolutionary cravings for fat and sugar by corporate food producers – to name a few of the problems – overall the book reads as inadequate to me. The Institute of Mechanical Engineers’ report alone suggests we could comfortably feed ten billion people with current food growing practices, if we made our systems fairer and more efficient. Of course, this would still wreck the planet, so a slate of reforms are needed to make these practices fairer, as well as sustainable.
Radical change is hard
Despite these limitations, it is worth reiterating the primary value here, which outlines why change doesn't happen. Ravenous is thorough on the historical and political reasons for inaction. A blunt summation would call it ‘capitalism’, but the nuance brought to understanding why change is slow is revealing.
An important point of comparison is Bill McKibben’s 2003 rewrite of The End of Nature. Ten years on from the landmark 1991 Rio de Janeiro Climate Summit, with all optimism evaporating in the face of incontrovertible failures to change – and, in fact, allowing things to accelerate in the wrong direction – McKibben had a lot of negativity to process.
Where McKibben offered mostly despair at political inaction, Dimbleby details the resources and power dependencies invested in maintaining our self-destructive status quo. Both books share hints that human nature is at fault, rather than the power structures shaping our natures for power gain, but the middle chapters of Ravenous offer nothing short of a road map for policy change. It is a pity that the National Food Strategy recommendations do not go as far as the road map offered by Ravenous could take us.
The problems Ravenous describes are Western problems, engineered by capitalism, which is the major driver of our behaviours and cause of ecological destruction. Jason W. Moore argues eloquently, in Capitalism in the Web of Life, for calling our current epoch the 'Capitalocene' rather than the more abstract Anthropocene, to expose how unequal the climate emergency is, both in its production and the burden of harm caused. While Ravenous provides an excellent review of the UK's failing and vulnerable food systems, the most serious flaw in the argument’s stance is that it fails to apportion blame in accordance with the power imbalances, such as to the highest consuming, most ecologically damaging footprints in richer nations and economic strata.
The inequalities of access to food in the UK are, however, laid bare, along with the extent of systemic failures to address food security, climate resilience and equity of access to healthy food. A close reader can easily deduce ways for regulating our way forward from the severity of the situation. That makes Ravenous a fundamental guide to anyone seeking to change policy for the better.
Paula Hunt
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