Reclaiming the Public Plate

Alex Colás reviews Kevin Morgan’s Serving the Public: the Good Food Revolution in Schools, Hospitals and Prisons, published by Manchester University Press.

Pupils, Patients and Prisoners

What do UK schools, hospitals and prisons have in common? All three are public institutions where billions of pounds in taxpayers’ money are spent every year contracting a handful of multinational companies (Sodexo, Aramax and Compass Group chief among them) to dish out insipid, unhealthy, ecologically destructive, and wasteful meals among school children, patients and inmates. The consequence of this disregard for the quality and standards in public food provision is not simply a matter of poor value for money. It is, for Kevin Morgan, reflective of a much more generalised displacement of values for money: the way in which the existing ‘public plate’ serves up all manner of social injustices, democratic deficits, and environmental harms.

In an accessible and tightly argued 250 pages, packed with factual and policy detail, Morgan summarises the argument he has been making over the last two decades, broadly under the Foundational Economy umbrella, for the power of municipal and regional authorities in promoting ‘good food revolutions’. Eating – something we all (should be able to) do three times a day – thus becomes a pathway for a more just, healthy, and sustainable society. His distinctive starting point is that public food procurement is a key tool in this endeavour.

Cities like Oldham in the UK, or further afield, Malmö, Toronto and New York City have shown that linking-up food quality, short supply chains, and decent work through policies like universal free school meals can provide collective benefits far beyond the direct need to feed the public. Similarly, raising the standards and social significance of meals served in hospitals and prisons can change the former from sites of mere clinical treatment to places of enduring health promotion, and contribute toward safer, more effective and peaceful penitentiaries.

A False Economy

Morgan reports across three chapters dedicated respectively to schools, hospitals and prisons how “nearly a third of patients admitted to [NHS] hospitals are at risk of malnutrition” while time constraints, stress and disrupted eating patterns mean that one in four nursing staff are obese. A 2006 Age Concern survey found that six out of ten elderly patients were at risk of becoming malnourished while in hospital.

In some British prisons, just under £2 per day is spent on meals for each inmate, inevitably affecting the quality and quantity of the prison population’s nutritional intake. That this is a false and cruel economy became readily apparent when in 2002 a randomised trial was conducted at Aylesbury Young Offenders Institute revealing that offering prisoners supplemented diets reduced offences by 26.3 percent and the most violent offences by 37 per cent. Prisoners, patients and pupils are – no less than the general public – subject to psycho-physiological effects of good food eaten regularly in safe and comfortable environments.

For schoolchildren this has an additional developmental and educational value which generates a virtuous cycle between nutrition, school attendance, and academic attainment. A 2022 Cost-Benefit Analysis on expanding universal free school meals in the UK estimated that every £1 invested in such a scheme would generate £1.71 in core benefits (costs savings for school, NHS and households, as well as increased lifetime earnings).

The Good Food Revolution

Given the obvious immediate and long-term benefits of organising public food procurement through an interconnected purchasing, production and consumption system, why is it that successive UK Governments have failed to instigate a good food revolution? The book identifies various culprits: ideological invocation of the ‘nanny state’, the lobbying power of a highly concentrated corporate agrifood sector, and the enduring legacy of a neo-liberal Compulsory Competitive Tendering system which from the 1980s and 90s baked-in ‘low cost’ catering across the country’s public food offer.

But for Morgan, the fundamental  issue is the lack of political will to make public food provisioning a strategic priority through joined-up Government that empowers local and devolved authorities, in collaboration with civil society stakeholders, to deliver the good food revolution the world’s sixth largest economy can so readily afford.

Part I of the book focuses in particular on several progressive, even radical schemes which have across the years emerged from both public authorities and campaigning coalitions – from the Department of Environoment, Food and Rural Affairs’ 2003 Public Sector Food Procurement Initiative or the 2012 Public Services (Social Value) Act – both of which broadened ‘best value’ to include health and sustainability – to the Soil Association-led 2003 Food for Life programme which piloted a good food revolution in primary schools nationwide. There is therefore no shortage of innovative proposals, successful pilots, and corroborating evidence to support a good food revolution The problem lies in the poor execution and limited resources attached to this objective.

 An Opportunity for the Labour Movement

Morgan makes a compelling case in this deeply informed and committed book-cum-manifesto for the central place of “devolved and polycentric governance systems” in generating good food environments. Scotland’s 2022 Good Food Nation Act, the roll-out of universal primary school meals in Wales and London, and the mushrooming of Local Authority food strategies across the country all indicate the arguments are being heard and actions being taken.

The announcement last December of a second  National Food Strategy led by Defra in collaboration with the Department for Health and Social Care and the Department for Education offers yet another opportunity for the good food agenda to take root across central Government. But it also requires a wider nationwide mobilisation in all sections of society and public authorities.

Trade unions are largely absent from Morgan’s analysis. This in part reflects a comparative lack of interest within the UK labour movement for the country’s food system outside those unions like the BFAWU, GMB, Usdaw or Unite whose membership works in the sector. Yet it is clear from Morgan’s analysis that workplaces – including of course the schools, hospitals, and prisons he focuses on – are at the core of any successful good food revolution.

Similar to the ‘just transition’ to a decarbonised world, not only can democratically transforming our public plate materially benefit workers in all sectors, but it will also require improving pay, terms and conditions among the millions employed in the agrifood system – from fruit pickers to catering staff. There is a real opportunity for the whole of the UK labour movement to step up to the plate, politically and organisationally.

Alex Colás teaches international politics at Birkbeck, University of London and is co-convenor of the Food and Work Network.