Subsidized community restaurants could help tackle the UK’s broken food system – here’s how

Subsidised community restaurants could serve seasonal dishes made with locally grown plant-based food, produced on farms that encourage wildlife through widespread tree cultivation, the use of cover-crops, and improvements to soil health. A mass roll-out of such restaurants could help tackle the UK's food poverty and malnutrition, while also increasing agriculture's resilience to climate breakdown and raising farmers' incomes.

Initiating such a bold change could start with a pilot scheme to ascertain its potential, and costs. Historical and contemporary examples can help conceptualize the establishment of such a scheme.

Similar restaurants have existed before. In the 1940s, there were over 2,000 state-funded "British Restaurants", supported by Winston Churchill, as part of the government's effort to improve public health. At their peak, they supplied about 600,000 low-cost meals a day.

British Restaurants were a great example of how local motivation and national policies were coordinated to generate socially beneficial outcomes, including improved diets. At the time, it was widely acknowledged that the food in these restaurants was high quality and filling.

Local authorities, citizens or MPs would present a case for a British Restaurant to the Ministry of Food. If successful, the ministry would channel Treasury grants to fund equipment and pay for workers. Local authorities had to supply the venues.

For 9d (9 pence), diners would get a three-course meal. Prices were capped according to the ministry's guidelines, making economies of scale (cost efficiencies gained through increased production) important.

Restaurants had to break even, and any profit was handed back to the Ministry of Food. Often based on a self-service canteen-style set-up, British Restaurants introduced new dishes, provided takeaway options, and were open to all who wanted to eat in them. They were disbanded in 1947.

But subsidised food provision continues today. Under Sadiq Khan's mayorship, London's City Hall funds universal free primary school meals so that every primary pupil is guaranteed a healthy hot meal daily. The Greater London Authority set a rate of about £3 per meal, funded by an initial central grant of £130 million.

In London, Made in Hackney – the UK's first fully vegan community cookery school and charity – raises grants to provide a range of services to its local community, including free meals and cookery lessons. In 2022, it provided six culturally diverse plant-based meals a week to 200 people.

What these examples have in common is a commitment to public health and sustainability, achieved through the provision of subsidized, nourishing and tasty food. Establishing a nationwide system of community restaurants could help tackle the current food and farming crisis.

A sustainable food fix?

Unhealthy diets are the prime drivers of obesity, with an annual cost of 1-2% of GDP in the UK. A recent House of Lords report criticized the "utter failure to tackle this crisis" by successive governments.

Fixing the food system requires bold ideas based upon a hard-nosed diagnosis of the problem. The current UK food system is controlled by profit-orientated corporations. It needs to be transformed to serve the public good and to protect the natural environment.

Powerful food and drinks corporations are, in the words of the Food Foundation charity, "relentlessly" pushing consumers to make unhealthy choices. Many farmers are poor, their farm gate prices depressed by powerful retailers. Monocropping and heavy chemical input use result in mega-profits for fertiliser companies, but is ruining the soil, reducing the nutritional density of our food.

The UK is highly dependent upon food imports. Any food produced here is increasingly vulnerable to climate breakdown, partly due to poor soils caused by chemical-intensive monocropping.

All the while, an increasing number of people cannot afford to purchase sufficient good-quality food. In 2024, around 15% of the UK population were living in food insecurity, and food bank use has soared since 2010. Obesity is the flipside of the coin of food poverty. More deprived areas of the UK have higher obesity levels.

Scalability should be on the menu

Depending on people's incomes, "entitlement cards" could be credited with several free meals a month (the more free meals the lower your income). Anyone wanting to eat in community restaurants would be able to purchase meals on their entitlement card, as cheaply as in fast-food outlets. Such entitlement cards would help regulate the demand and supply of food ingredients and meals.

Community restaurants could, if established en masse, become institutions like the NHS, state schools and universities. Central government subsidies would be needed to kickstart such a project. However, as with the example of British Restaurants, these could be run by local councils and be expected to break even.

Around 85% of the UK's farmland is devoted to rearing animals for food, yet it generates only 32% of the nation's calories. With a strategic use of public subsidies, land could be used to produce much more food through agro-forestry and rewilding.

Community restaurants could help accelerate a public shift away from environmentally damaging meat production and consumption, by constituting an expanding source of demand for locally grown plant-based food. In fact, public procurement is an important element of the so-called "protein transition".

Supported by the government's payment for ecosystems services scheme, farmers could receive improved prices for plant-based produce, reflecting their contribution to enhancing agricultural resilience, climate breakdown mitigation, and improving public health.

This would decrease dependence on food imports. Reforesting through agroforestry – agriculture incorporating the widespread cultivation of trees – could increase the resilience of farming to climate breakdown through improving soil nutrition and water retention (reducing flooding risks). Agroforestry and rewilding could transform the agricultural sector from a major generator to a net absorber of carbon emissions.

Would such a programme of community restaurants underpinned by a transformed agricultural system be costly? Yes. But what of the costs of not addressing Britain's broken food system? The costs of obesity – to the NHS, to society, and to people – is high and rising.

Fixing our food system could reduce the public and private costs of ill health, enhance farmers' incomes, reduce food import dependence, and transform agriculture from a net emitter to a net absorber of carbon emissions. And it could usher in a new age of enjoyable social eating and community renewal. What's not to like?

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Benjamin Selwyn, Professor of International Relations and International Development, Department of International Relations, University of Sussex

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.