Opinion: Food v football – time to raise the level of debate
© Pixfly/Adobe Stock I know much more about football than I would like, having spent many thousands of hours milking cows and driving tractors, much of it tuned in to a radio.
When younger, this would inevitably mean Radio One and modern music. But from my late 20s I came to realise that this was all awful, and so increasingly tuned in to Radio 5 Live.
See also: Food production and environment go hand in hand, says Defra secretary
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Almost without exception, 5 Live is one long conversation about football.
It’s endless analysis and reporting of the national game, with no minor detail too unutterably dull or insignificant to warrant an hour spent on its scrutiny.
More widely, the national obsession with watching 22 hideously overpaid man-children hoofing a ball and rolling about on the grass leads to endless coverage in our newspapers, on our TVs and online.
Tens of millions of Brits are passionately, intricately informed about it.
I reflect on that when I consider the conversely dire state of our national conversation about food, farming and the environment.
This is especially galling given that, since Brexit, important issues around agriculture have rarely been out of the headlines.
Yet, in almost all cases, the quality of reporting has been both brief and abysmal, with a resulting impact on the level of understanding of the issues by the population at large.
I appreciate that TV and newspaper journalists can’t be expected to master all the intricacies of food and farming.
But I would expect them to take the time to understand the basics when reporting on a story and to avoid falling into the trap of taking a partisan position.
I’d observe, for example, that the majority of the media now repeat, verbatim, the words of “plant-based” advocates that British meat and dairy production is a primary driver of climate change, despite it not having the benefit of actually being true.
They have also taken to regurgitating the lines Brexit-minded MPs spout about the evils of CAP, thus poisoning the well for adult discussion about what a successor policy might look like.
This simultaneously overinflating expectations of what is deliverable on a shoestring budget.
Many public figures associated with the debate are similarly guilty of failing to present the issues in good faith, in order to suit their own agendas.
We now find ourselves in a dangerous landscape.
The importance of squaring the circle between sustainable domestic food production and restoring our natural capital has been almost completely sidelined in favour of seeing a positive post-CAP settlement in terms of how much land we can “wild”.
This is to infantilise an almost infinitely complex subject encompassing food, finance, the environment, climate, natural capital, health, migration, public procurement, trade, diet and affordability.
Any attempt to give voice to this smorgasbord of reality is inevitably subjected to the reductionism of “can you turn that into a 10-second soundbite?” and the false simplicity of binary narratives: “meat v plant”, “food v environment”.
We can – and must – do better. If the British people have an imperfect understanding of Chelsea’s 4-4-2 formation, it is unlikely to be particularly harmful.
If they continue to be fed nonsense about the future of their food supply and the realities of climate change, the implications are graver.