Chapter 3 shifts the spotlight to the National Health Service in the UK. Here, the poor quality of hospital food has been a perennial problem and there are many reasons for this sorry state of affairs. The main argument is that hospitals are essentially clinical treatment sites rather than health-promotion sites. In this overly medicalised culture, a low status has been attached to food and nutrition by both hospital management and the clinical profession. Yet the real costs of malnourished patients – which involve longer stays in hospital and poor recovery rates - are rarely factored into the financial equations of the medical-industrial complex. The chapter highlights the paradox of the hospital, which consists of the Sisyphean task of trying to provide a clinical solution to a societal problem – the problem of diet-related diseases associated with the rapid growth of cheap, ultra-processed food. Notwithstanding these problems, the chapter focuses on the agents of change within and without the health service who have collaborated to try to embed a good food culture in the NHS through local experiments.
Chapter 4 focuses on the prison, a unique public sector setting because the consumers are incarcerated. The chapter examines the experience of the US and the UK because these are the liberal democracies where the carceral state is most pronounced. The chapter begins with a scene-setting section about prisons and prisoners in the UK and the US, focusing on their conditions of life, their poor state of health and the hugely important role that food plays in their daily lives. Thereafter the chapter explores two key themes: the carceral diet and the prospects for rehabilitation. Regarding the carceral diet and its discontents, the chapter highlights two extraordinary episodes in prison history – the Aylesbury mystery in the UK (where successive governments refused to act on evidence that showed a clear link between nutritional supplements and anti-social behaviour) and the nutraloaf controversy in the US (where a gross food concoction that allegedly meets nutritional guidelines is used to discipline and punish prisoners in a manner that evokes the carceral analysis of Michel Foucault). To assess the prospects for rehabilitation, the chapter focuses on the food training programme of the Clink charity in the UK, which runs a network of gardens, kitchens and restaurants through which prisoners are trained within the prison and mentored afterwards in the community to find gainful employment, which reduces the incentive to re-offend.
Chapter 2 outlines three models of school food provisioning from the welfare model of collective provision, through the neoliberal model of consumer choice under Thatcherism to the ecological model of sustainable provision, a model that is emergent rather than fully realised. The chapter focuses on two key themes: first, the whole school approach that aims to align the pedagogy of the classroom with the food served in the dining room; and second, the campaign for universal free school meals. The whole school approach is analysed through the prism of the Food for Life programme, the gold standard in the world of public sector food provisioning. The campaign for universal free school meals is the most exciting development in school food policy in the UK since the creation of the welfare state in the 1940s. In the UK it has been pioneered in Scotland, Wales and a minority of London boroughs, all of which have much to learn from leading municipalities in Sweden, such as Malmö, an internationally acclaimed exemplar of good food provisioning.
Chapter 5 shifts the focus from the sectoral world of public food systems to the spatial world of place-based food movements. It charts the rise of the Good Food movement, one of the aims of which is to mobilise the progressive forces of cities and other localities to utilise municipal and civic power to fashion more sustainable foodscapes by harnessing the public plate as part of an integrated suite of local food policies. The chapter focuses on the dynamics of the movement in the UK and the US. In the UK the Sustainable Food Places network is the most significant example of the emergent food movement, which aims to overcome the limits of purely local action. Forming a national network yields a double political dividend: it raises the profile of cities and regions as agents of change, and it enhances the voice of localities as advocates for sustainable food systems. Although local food movements have done well to survive the ‘age of austerity’ in the UK, many of them are struggling to sustain themselves financially. In the US the Good Food movement has a longer lineage, where it emerged to fight the scourge of hunger in a country with a notoriously weak welfare state. The chapter focuses on three significant expressions of the movement: the Food Policy Councils that exist throughout the whole country; federal level networks and alliances such as the Good Food Purchasing Program; and the inspiring case of New York City, a pioneer of good food policies.
Good food means different things to different people, but in this book it is understood to mean food that is appetising, nutritious, culturally appropriate and sustainably produced. Seldom is good food associated with public canteens in schools, hospitals and prisons. While pupils, patients and prisoners are clearly very different people, they nevertheless have one thing in common: they are all highly vulnerable people whose well-being depends on a nutritious diet. Because of its unique role in sustaining life, food is the universally accepted index of our capacity to care for ourselves and for others. The introduction sets the scene for the book by focusing on the problems that good food provisioning can help to solve: the problems of climate change, poverty and hunger. Sustainable diets are part of the solution to these problems if we can provide ‘win-win’ diets that are good for people and planet alike. But while the relief of hunger has the greatest claim on our moral sensibilities, the good food agenda can’t be reduced to a single issue because, by its very nature, food has a multifunctional character. Therefore, we need to resist the temptation to reduce the meaning of ‘good food’ to a narrow nutritional agenda since a purely needs-based perspective cannot do justice to the kaleidoscopic character of our food and the multiple prisms – social, economic, political, ecological, cultural, physiological, psychological – through which food is viewed, valued and used in society.
Chapter 6 explores the prospects for change in the UK and the US, where the ultra-processed food culture is most advanced. This chapter examines the prospects for reforming the food system by focusing on three dimensions of change: (1) the clash between the power of new ideas and the power of vested interests, (2) the role of civil society organisations and public sector bodies as key agents of change and (3) the need for more powers and resources to be devolved to cities and regions in the name of subsidiarity, because these subnational agents are pioneering climate-friendly food policies and fashioning new spaces of deliberation in which local citizens can be actively engaged in shaping the process of change.
Chapter 1 sets the scene by examining the evolving international debate about the food system and its role in the multiple crises of health, environment and climate change. While global summits are belatedly trying to craft a reform agenda for the food system, the nation-state level remains the key arena where food policy reforms are fostered or frustrated. Taking the UK as an example, the book argues that more than forty years of neoliberalism – the political ideology that demonises the public sector and lionises the private sector – have bequeathed a noxious legacy in the form of a food system that is dysfunctional for producers and consumers and a public sector that has been denuded of capacity and resources. Chapter 1 also highlights progressive efforts to reclaim the public plate, tapping the potential of the power of purchase through regulatory reform from above and grassroots social innovation from below. Drawing on the pathbreaking Food for Life programme to illustrate the scope for reform as well as its limits. While public food procurement is now fashionable in political circles, I argue that it is being set up to fail unless it is part of a food system approach that integrates the interdependent domains of purchasing, production and consumption. A food system approach presupposes a food strategy, but successive Conservative governments have been ideologically averse to embracing such ideas because they smack of too much state intervention.
This book explores the good food revolution in public institutions. In schools it examines the challenge of the whole school approach, where the message of the classroom needs to be aligned with the offer of the dining room. In hospitals it examines the quest to put nutrition on a par with medicine to fashion a health service worthy of the name. And in prisons it shows how good food can bring hope and dignity to prisoners, helping them to rehabilitate themselves. The good food revolution refers to the struggle – locally, nationally and globally – to create a fairer, healthier and more sustainable food system. Charting the rise of the Good Food movement in the UK and the US, the book reveals how this new social movement is playing a prominent role in putting good food on the political agenda. But the struggle to reform the food system will need to overcome two formidable obstacles: the lobbying power of Big Food and the damaging legacy of forty years of neoliberal governments in thrall to free market policies.
This chapter focusses on inquiry as an instrument of international order and how the League of Nations used it when dealing with a wide range of international issues during its lifetime. The League’s model of inquiry was not created out of a vacuum but drew upon precedents from international dispute settlement to domestic and colonial inquiries. In this chapter, inquiry as an instrument of international order is discussed through the prism of a border delimitation dispute that created tensions between Albania and neighbouring countries Greece and Yugoslavia in the early 1920s, while juxtaposing this case study with elements from later League inquiries to reach a greater understanding about the instrument’s overall purpose. The chapter shows how officials and politicians at the League of Nations often spoke about truth, impartiality and independence when pertained to inquiry, but it was left unspecified how these aims could be fulfilled when commissioners were sent out to collect information. As a result, inquiries relied on informal practices and the personal authority of individuals to produce and qualify relevant information, creating a contrast between the institution’s formal adherence to fact-finding and impartiality and a markedly different reality on the ground. League inquiry is better understood if it is not strictly considered at face value, not as a fact-finding instrument but rather as an instrument of diplomacy and the interwar international order. Frequently it served as a safety valve, allowing a greater degree of flexibility to respond to an escalating conflict or a sensitive cross-border issue.
The transformation of the concept of self-determination to a principle to be applied in international politics in the first half of the twentieth century gave rise to several key practices that have shaped the field of international relations. This chapter discusses the recasting of self-determination to an instrument of international politics during the Great War and its immediate aftermath. It focusses on the Victorian underpinnings of the liberal understanding of self-determination that came to be associated with Wilsonianism and explains how the concept of self-determination became one of the key regulatory principles of international politics in the dawn of the interwar period. By focussing on Anglophone debates on national questions and the transformation of the Habsburg and, crucially, the Ottoman imperial space, this chapter assesses the application of ‘self-determination’ as a method to assuage national questions and stabilise international affairs.