Omni-standards - you heard it here first

The Times
December 5, 2008
Green beans from Kenya and rice in a drought? There is more to food than its effect on our waistlines
Emily Ford

There is a certain art to coining words. Tim Lang, professor of Food Policy at City University and food adviser to the World Health Organisation, has a knack of sneaking new terms into our daily lexicon. Since he quietly invented the term “food miles” in 1991, the hidden distance in food production has implanted itself in the nation’s vocabulary.
Seventeen years on, Professor Lang is trying to do it again with another term that, if adopted, could change for good the way in which we eat. “Omni-standards” is, he admits, a less appealing mot juste. However, it is the best word that he has to describe the 16 biggest food-related issues that he believes we need to urgently address.
Currently, the environmental challenges in food are treated as separate from health or ethical standards. Omni-standards bring them together in one. Food, especially agriculture, is one of the biggest factors in climate change. “The whole food system is going to have to change for carbon – and that is just one issue,” Professor Lang says.
Some issues are already familiar: the safety of food is carefully monitored, as is nutritional value. Others are less known. Embedded water – the amount of water it takes to produce food – is “an impending catastrophe”, Professor Lang says. Water is becoming rapidly scarcer and climate change will affect drought-prone countries disproportionately.
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“If you thought about water protection you would eat a different diet,” he says. “You definitely wouldn’t eat rice, because you’d say that it should only be eaten in areas where that’s the only staple they can grow. It’s got huge amounts of embedded water.”
The problem, he admits, is how to reconcile the different factors. Food miles created dilemmas; in carbon terms, it can be better to walk to a supermarket selling international food than to drive to a farm shop to buy local produce, for example. “I don’t think we know what a good diet is,” Professor Lang says. “In terms of health, yes, but not overall.”
What we do know is that the British food system, on a global scale, is unsustainable. We require land three to five times the size of our country to feed us. The amount of food produced here for British consumption has fallen from 83 per cent to 70 per cent and is still falling, and urban areas are poor at growing food. “London should be covered with fruit trees,” he says.
Restructuring the food system is a task for governments and world organisations such as the UN. It is a move away from consumer power, Professor Lang admits; consumers can’t be relied upon to do the right thing. The food system was last reconfigured after the First World War threatened the security of supply. However, bv the 1970s, the growing availability of cheap fat, sugar and salt had created a health disaster that has yet to be overcome.
Despite the five-a-day fruit and vegetables mantra, the average number of portions eaten hovers stubbornly around 2.4 and obesity figures are not decreasing. Curbing overconsumption is a huge task; the average 26,000 items in a supermarket tempt us into buying what we don’t need and about 30 per cent of food is thrown away.
Professor Lang’s solution is “choice editing”, which is removing ethical hazards in the way some food producers have removed excess salt. “Get it out before a consumer gets it,” he says.
On the positive side, there has been an “explosion of consciousness” on climate change, he says. As well as the health traffic-light system, some supermarkets have begun including carbon footprints on their labels.
However, Professor Lang says: “Putting carbon on a label is not good enough when we eat green beans from Kenya in the middle of winter and every stem is four litres of drinking water from a water-stressed country.”
The lowdown
Who Tim Lang, Professor of Food Policy at City University in London
What Omni-standards, a proposed measure of a responsible, sustainable food system that takes into account health, quality, environmental and ethical factors
When Professor Lang called for the introduction of omni-standards in September and is lobbying the Government and food retailers to start introducing them
Where Western nations with an unsustainable model of food supply, such as Britain and the US, need to lead the way by growing more food at home and addressing how they source food. Developing nations should be encouraged to ensure they can grow enough food to feed their own people before exporting it
Why The multiple challenges posed by climate change, including how to curb greenhouse gas emissions and prevent water shortages, will lead to a global food crisis if this is not addressed. Health remains a concern