I began working with the Consumers in Europe group, an umbrella organisation that represented UK consumer, voluntary and women’s organisations. We researched the impact of the Common Market, as it then was called then, and acted, in effect, as campaigners to protect the interest of UK consumers. While I was working there as a researcher, I started looking at the impact of the Common Agricultural Policy on UK food prices and the impact of European policies on food labeling.

It was that work, along with a strong family background in medicine, that got me interested in food as a public policy issue. The more I looked into it, the more clear the links between diet and health were. During the 1980s, I did quite a lot of work on the connection between poverty and poor diet. I was training as a probation officer and while preparing social inquiry reports - background reports on individuals requested by the courts - I was looking at people’s income and expenditure and asking basic questions about household budgets. It was very clear to me that many people, particularly women, had very poor diets simply because of having low income. This in turn has a huge impact on their health and the health of their children. For pregnant women, a poor diet has a negative impact on their growing babies, too.

In the late 1990s, I was the founding deputy chair of the Food Standards Agency. Prior to this, I had been a consumer representative on a number of advisory committees within central government, notably one which was set up by the last Conservative administration called the Consumer Panel. That was a very important new model of involving people from outside government in giving advice to policy and decision makers.

In 2000, I joined the newly formed Food Standards Agency as its deputy chair of the Food Standards Agency and later I chaired the School Meals Review Panel which advised government on what the nutritional standards of primary schools and secondary schools should be and, coming out of that, helped set up the School Food Trust, the development organisation to support the transformation of food available in schools.

But my take on things doesn’t just come from a consumer and advisory standpoint. I live in a very rural part of England and I can see, particularly through family connections, some of the problems of farming and rural communities, particularly in relation to livestock farming.

The issues

In my view, there is a huge diet-related health problem that has become more entrenched in the past 20 years. If I look back and think about the communities where I did food poverty research in the mid-1980s, I would say that the dietary problems have actually become worse rather than better. We’re now seeing, for instance, second and third generations of families that can’t cook, that have poor access to fresh food and whose chances of being able to translate healthy eating advice into the everyday experience of food on the table is minimal.

This brings a number of problems, the most obvious of which is obesity, but more generally there is a problem of malnourishment. For instance, I recently visited a very deprived housing estate in the south-west of England. I remember going into a household and the mum there told me about her three-year-old child who was already grossly obese, was under the care of hospital doctors and was anaemic. Changing his lifestyle was already almost an insuperable problem for his family - and he hadn’t even started at school yet.

The food-related drivers of health inequality have inflated the National Health Service budget and add to the catalogue of misery caused by unnecessary morbidity and mortality.

Beyond health, we need to think about the sustainability of the food system. We need a diet that’s not just fit for us, without the problems I outlined above, but also one that’s fit for the planet. One of the big issues is how we communicate to consumers the complexities of what it means to have a diet that is low impact from a greenhouse gas point of view. The difficulty we face is providing a healthy diet in a way that allows people throughout the food chain to make a reasonable living while being environmentally sustainable.

One important aspect of solving this conundrum is to focus more than we have done on the issue of productivity. We need to shift away from the idea that we don’t have to worry about how, or even whether, we produce food in this country. We can’t just assume that we can simply import from elsewhere. We need to have an overall food policy that includes clear goals on how much of our food we’re going to produce in 10, 20 and 30 years time, and how we’re going to ensure that food is produced sustainably. That must include recreating and sustaining the base of skills required to produce that food.

The solutions

As far as the problems of obesity and poor nutrition go, the answer is to support people through providing information and education, providing them with adequate skills and a sense of agency so that they can put into practice the information that they’re given. I think this means bringing back food skills into the general curriculum: shopping, cooking and budgeting. For many people, the only place they will learn these things is at school. Many parents haven’t acquired food skills themselves, so they can’t pass them on to their children. These are basic survival skills, but it is shocking how many people don’t have them.

I think this kind of education can be done for all age groups, and there is some really great work being done by community food projects up and down the country, often at an adult level. We know that when people are given the opportunity to learn these skills, developing their interest in food and feeding themselves, they begin to ask questions about how food is produced and become more discriminating consumers. In turn, that helps everybody in the food chain, from primary producers to retailers because it helps create demand for a diet that is not only healthy from a human point of view, but also healthy for the planet.

Sustainable food skills, from a consumer point of view, include not wasting food. That’s really important, because we throw away a third of the food we buy. While we’re becoming accustomed to talking about reducing our carbon footprint by turning down the lights or the heating, not making unnecessary journeys, and so on, we don’t make the connection sufficiently between food waste and climate change.

Finally, loss of skills isn’t just something that hasn’t happened with consumers, it’s clearly happened in production too. For example, pruning fruit trees is a very particular skill that we are in danger of allowing to disappear. It’s that sort of thing that is the food production equivalent of not knowing how to cook from fresh. These are basic skills in the food chain which have to preserve and recover.

Hope for the future

There is genuine government interest in the issue of food security, including issues of social justice and the need for a viable farming sector in this country. There is a Cabinet subcommittee on these issues, which reflects that concern at the highest level. I think the work that’s been done already to reduce waste by the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) is fantastic, as are the efforts of the food industry to reduce waste in the food chain.

It’s almost ironic, but the consumer response to recession has actually been quite positive. The figures show that there are more people cooking from fresh, more people are producing food at home and people are wasting less food. People are also showing more interest in growing their own food. In the past year or so, sales of vegetable seeds have started to exceed the sales of flower seeds in the retail market. We know that most people are going to get only a small amount of their diet from the food they grow themselves, but engaging with how you grow food and how it’s produced is very healthy and leads to a wider questioning of food production.

School food has improved a lot and it’s good that many schools are doing all they can to encourage children to have enquiring minds about the food they eat. I think the wider interest in local and seasonal food is very positive, too.

Another effect of the recession is the way that people are focusing more on the issue of fairness within the food sector and whether, for instance, the mass of producers are truly being treated fairly. I hope very much that concerns about animal welfare will translate into more conscientious buying in shops, with consumers buying more food that’s been produced with animal welfare in mind. Very often, that means buying food that’s been produced within the UK to rigorous welfare standards.

In conclusion, we have a lot of problems that we need to juggle in relation to food. But there are a wide range of encouraging signs, too, about how we can have better quality food, produced sustainably and in a way that benefits everyone in the food chain.

This article is based on an interview by Rob Lyons.

Dame Suzi Leather is chair of the Charities Commission and chair of the government’s Council of Food Policy Advisors