From Calories to National Resilience
Written by Chris Fellows from Agri Web Media Limited
The post-war agricultural consensus was simple: produce more food, more reliably, at a lower cost. For decades, this productionist model delivered exactly what was asked of it. It rebuilt stability, filled supermarket shelves, and normalised the concept of abundance. But 70 years later, the risk profile of the UK food system has fundamentally changed.
Speaking at the 2026 Royal Agricultural Society of England Lectures, Ali Morpeth , Co-Founder of Planetary Alliance and a Registered Public Health Nutritionist, argued that the UK is no longer calorie deficient, but it is nutritionally fragile.
The assumption that volume equals resilience is failing to withstand the realities of modern supply chain shocks, climate volatility, and a growing public health crisis.”We’ve solved the food system for volume, but we have not solved it for dietary quality,” Ali explained. “We’ve got sufficient calories, but we don’t have nutritional adequacy, and that’s the paradox of abundance.”
The Paradox of Abundance
The UK food system is highly efficient, but efficiency is not the same as resilience. The current model relies heavily on globally extended supply chains, just-in-time logistics, and concentration among a relatively small number of suppliers. This structure leaves the system exposed to acute shocks. Recent years have demonstrated this vulnerability clearly, with disruptions caused by the war in Ukraine, the conflict in the Middle East affecting fertiliser and red diesel prices, and the logistical fractures of the Covid-19 pandemic.Alongside these geopolitical pressures, extreme weather is increasingly disrupting both domestic horticulture and imported produce.
Recent harvest conditions in the UK have been among the most challenging in decades. Furthermore, elevated atmospheric carbon is beginning to reduce the micronutrient composition of staple crops, directly impacting the potential quality of diets.Despite the visual abundance in supermarkets, the nutritional reality is stark. Less than 1% of the UK population meets the recommendations of the Eatwell Guide, the national reference diet for health. Ultra-processed foods now account for approximately 60% of total energy intake. Meanwhile, foods known to protect health are consistently under-consumed.
Only a third of adults eat the recommended five portions of fruit and vegetables a day, and average fibre intake sits at 18 grams, well below the 30-gram target associated with reduced disease risk.This nutritional inadequacy has severe consequences. Poor diets are responsible for around one in five deaths globally. In England, two-thirds of adults are living with overweight or obesity, costing the NHS over £6 billion annually. When wider economic impacts, such as lost productivity, welfare costs, and reduced economic participation from sickness are included, the cost rises to an estimated £60 billion every year.
“When the misalignment is scaled across a population, that becomes a fiscal issue, an economic issue, and ultimately, a resilience issue,” Morpeth noted.
The Externality Economy
The failure of the system to deliver nutritional security is not a matter of individual willpower; it is a structural economic issue. The food system is currently optimised for volume, low prices, and short-term margin optimisation. Per calorie, less healthy foods are significantly cheaper to produce and purchase than healthier options, constantly steering consumption towards the least healthy choices.This dynamic has created an “externality economy.” Globally, the food system generates about $10 trillion in market value annually.
However, when environmental damage, health impacts, and social costs are factored in, the negative externalities are estimated at $15 trillion. The system costs more than it creates when its full impacts are measured, with diet-related disease being one of the largest drivers of that cost.For decades, the system has been built around the “cheap calorie era,” maximising the production of a small number of high-yield commodity crops like wheat, maize, rice, soy, and sugar.
These crops underpin modern food manufacturing. However, the conditions that made cheap calories possible are shifting. Extreme weather events are affecting yields and price stability, input costs are becoming less predictable, and geopolitical shocks are feeding through to markets.
Redefining Resilience
The traditional metrics of food security, tonnage, trade levels, and price, rarely measure dietary patterns or nutritional intake. The UK produces about 60% of the food it consumes, but discussions of food security often focus primarily on energy availability. Many of the nutrients essential for health come from foods the UK increasingly relies on imports for, such as fruit and vegetables, which are key contributors of vitamins A and C.
Ali argued that the definition of resilience must move beyond the 20th-century focus on calorie sufficiency.
“Right now, it’s the ability of our nation to endure nutritionally, economically, and geopolitically under both acute and chronic stresses,” she stated. “Food security often focuses on ensuring that enough food is available, but nutritional security needs to focus on the fact that enough food is available to improve the quality of our diet. Those two things aren’t always the same.”
This shift in perspective places agriculture and food production at the centre of the solution.
Action on climate, biodiversity, soil, and water is not just about environmental sustainability; it is the foundation of good nutrition. Without bringing the food system back within planetary boundaries, the conditions needed to grow and provide healthy diets will not exist.
The Next Phase of UK Agriculture
The transition required is significant. Supply chains need to become more resilient while simultaneously adapting to shifting demand driven by nutrition science, consumer expectations, and new technologies. Managing these dual transitions will be a defining challenge for the next phase of the food system. Ali highlighted that this is not an abstract concept, but a practical necessity that is already beginning to take shape.
She pointed to initiatives like the ‘Fix Our Food’ programme in Yorkshire, which demonstrates how system redesign can work in practice. By deliberately bringing together farming, public health, food businesses, and local governance, it becomes possible to design a food system that supports farmers, environmental sustainability, and population health all at the same time. This offers a powerful proof of concept for how nutritional security can be operationalised at a regional level.However, this challenge also presents an opportunity.
Closer alignment between what is produced and what is consumed can strengthen resilience and unlock value across farming and land-based businesses. Initiatives like the Labour government’s target for 50% locally sourced or higher environmental standard food in public procurement signal a growing recognition of this need, though current self-sufficiency levels suggest significant work is required to meet such goals.”If feeding built the 20th century, nourishing people, communities, and landscapes will define the 21st,” Ali concluded.
The shift is away from treating food merely as a commodity and towards recognising it as critical infrastructure for health, economic productivity, and environmental sustainability.For farm businesses and policymakers alike, the focus must now be on designing a food system that supports farmers, environmental resilience, and population health simultaneously. This is not a rejection of the agricultural achievements of the past century, but a necessary evolution. The work that producers, businesses, researchers, and policymakers undertake every day must now align with this broader definition of security. As the sector looks ahead, the fundamental question is no longer just how to produce enough, but how to produce what is needed to keep the nation well.
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