The food we eat is a complex and much debated issue. Diet can contribute to how children develop, how healthy we continue to be throughout life and often be used as a sign of where we stand on political issues such as the impact the food we eat has on the environment or how our food has been grown or treated. Like many of the other basic ingredients of a healthy and fulfilled life, such as access to clean drinking water and a home we can call our own, having the ability to consume the best quality food available to us is a fundamental building block of a healthy and happy life.
The quality of the food we eat and the impact it has on our health is the focal point of Kevin Morgan’s fascinating new book Serving the Public: The good food revolution in schools, hospitals and prisons. The book is broken down into three sections. The first sets out the responsibility to provide good quality food by the state and how Morgan believes it has not lived up to that responsibility in recent years. The second focuses on how food is prepared and distributed in those key areas of schools, hospitals and prisons focusing on specific examples of individual institutions which provide especially good nutritional food to those who rely on it. The final section looks at the Good Food Movement and how standards of food provided by the state can be increased across the board, instead of varying in degrees of quality between areas and service providers.
Morgan begins by picking on a particular example to illustrate that, despite concerns about our diet and how adequately a state facing economic pressures can provide nutritional meals, there are already individual schools, hospitals and prisons that have shown the way to provide edible, nutritious meals. The example he uses, Oldham, one of the first municipalities to win a Food For Life Served Here Gold Award, is the perfect demonstration that poverty and a poor diet do not have to be intrinsically linked. Oldham is a town that has suffered like many others in the post-industrial North from extreme levels of poverty and deprivation. Morgan argues that Oldham’s status as a town that could provide its school children with nutritional food, one that it sadly lost in 2020, was down to a municipal workforce that focused on the power of purchase and the calibre of catering, two core ideas that lie at the heart of his book.
It is these two core principles, the cost and quality of the food provided by institutions and the calibre of the individuals who produce that food that forms the core of the book’s argument about where we have gone wrong and how we can correct the errors. These errors, often associated with cost cutting, that have led to poor health outcomes for those people that rely on local authorities or prisons or hospitals to provide them with good quality food. Morgan’s example of the Welsh government’s overreliance on John Tudor and Son, a meat supplier who provided food for 44 schools across 4 local suppliers despite numerous complaints against them, resulting in an E coli outbreak in which one five year old boy died, shows the importance of both the quality of food that is provided to the public but also the quality of the decision makers who are choosing which suppliers to support.
Morgan squarely blames an overreliance on a neoliberal approach to not just food but also to the wider role of the state as the cause of the crisis in healthy food. Thatcher is thoroughly blamed by Morgan for the change in the state’s approach to providing adequate food to children with Thatcher’s “cultural reconstruction” compared both to Oliver Cromwell and “Gramscian Marxism.” In particular, the use of CCT’s or Compulsive Competitive Tendering, first introduced in 1980 and expanded throughout Thatcher’s time in Downing Street as a tool to force local authorities to put services out to bidding by the private sector, is seen by Morgan as key to understanding why the provision of food has declined. It resulted in the “proliferation of cheap, processed food and poorer terms and conditions for catering staff.” Morgan’s equal criticism of subsequent governments, describing New Labour’s approach as “a period of soft neoliberalism between two hard periods of neoliberalism” is contrasted by his praise to the approach in Sweden, particularly focusing on Malmo, Sweden’s third most populous city and a “beacon of good practice in national and international food circles.”
Morgan’s critique of both the overly market driven approach to food procurement and praise for the Swedish system are convincing, although at times it feels as if Morgan is picking examples solely because they have engaged with him – he mentions that both the Malmo food team, who Morgan invited to specific events and Ann Burns, the head of catering management at Oldham Council are people he knows well and has built up strong relationships with them. Whilst this is understandable given his field of expertise it may have helped his argument if broader comparisons had been used rather than just those he had worked with, especially in the context of international comparisons.
Equally, whilst its clear there is a great deal of relevance and justification in Morgan’s argument that the specific pro-market approach to the food we consume has often been a clear failure, there is little room for exploration of why the public voted for parties that explicitly advocated for taking control away from local authorities and giving them to the private sector. Morgan comments on the rise of neoliberalism as result of the “economic crisis of the 1970s” which led to the “political elites” becoming engaged with thinkers like Hayek and Buchanan, but there is no real attempt to analyse why the public may have felt the services provided for them in this era might be better in the hands of private industries. Only by understanding the reason that the public were willing to vote for figures like Thatcher and Reagan can there be a full and fundamental analysis of what was perceived to go wrong with the system prior to the neoliberal consensus becoming dominant.
Serving the Public is a fascinating book that delves into the various issues that surround the food we eat and justifiably criticises an overreliance on the private sector to provide the cheapest food possible, regardless of the quality of it. Morgan’s explanation as to the root cause of the crisis we face in the food provided by public services, whilst at times perhaps needing a wider scope, is a clear and believable demonstration that the issues we face are not insurmountable but simply need support from central government. The solutions offered by Morgan are compelling as are the potential benefits he cites – with better meals in prison, fewer incidents of violence occur and reoffending rates for former prisoners go down; children that have better meals in schools have better long-term growth prospects and patients in hospitals who are given better quality food tend to get better sooner. All of these outcomes, as Morgan outlines in the final section, demonstrate why properly produced, sourced and prepared food provided by public services should not only be considered a basic right but a fundamental building block for a happy, successful society. Anyone interested in why our food standards have declined and the vital importance of why they should be improved should read this book.