Leading food campaigner Henry Dimbleby has used a prestigious University of Aberdeen event to call on the Scottish and UK governments to implement food reform plans - or risk presiding over a "sick and impoverished nation".
The Leon restaurants founder and former national food tsar delivered the Andrew Carnegie Lecture in honour of the 75th anniversary of Rowett Institute founding director Lord Boyd Orr receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1949.
In a message to political leaders, he expressed his concerns that too little practical action is being taken to address sickness related to bad food “which now costs the UK almost £100 billion a year and is savaging the NHS, the economy and most importantly bringing worry, work and logistical strain to both the sick and their loved ones.”
“They have ideas, they have frameworks - but so far we haven’t seen enough on health; we haven’t seen a plan,” he said of the Westminster government.
“And even though Scotland has been ahead in some ways, I would say that’s a similar situation: we have ideas, we have frameworks; we don’t have a plan, we don’t have boots deep in the mud.
“And until we do - and unless we do - we will end up both an impoverished and a sick nation.”
That outcome was “not inevitable”, he concluded, remembering the shock he encountered when he recently told a group of young people that there used to be smoking carriages on the London Underground and other public transport.
“If we grasp the nettle, there’s a chance that we could look back in 30 years’ time and say ‘wow - that was the time we ate all that stuff; that was a bit odd. But now we’re doing better.
“We are not going to solve this just by reforming the NHS – no matter how successful we are, the health system will not be able to cope with the increasing number of sick bodies we are throwing at it.
“Instead, the Scottish and the English governments need to tackle the food environment in a systemic way. They have frameworks. They have ideas. But there is no plan and without that plan we will become both a sick and impoverished nation.”
The lecture - Eating ourselves to death: How the modern diet is destroying our bodies and our planet – was followed by a panel discussion featuring present Rowett Institute Director Professor Jules Griffin, Professor Alexandra Johnstone, the institute’s theme lead for Nutrition, Obesity and Disease and leader of the £1.6m Food Insecurity and Obesity (FIO Food) project, and Food Standards Scotland chair Heather Kelman.
The Andrew Carnegie Lecture series, a ten-year programme of public talks at Scotland’s ancient universities (Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Glasgow and St Andrews) is a project funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York to celebrate its centenary.