#canteens

The question of who is responsible for feeding people — and how — is back on the table. Nourish Scotland has been making the most rigorous case for public restaurants in the UK (and increasingly beyond i) — and Abigail McCall has helped bring that work into wider food-systems conversations, engaging many of us thinking about public restaurants as part of the food infrastructure we need. Their argument is straightforward: food needs public infrastructure, just as transport, healthcare, and education do. We build hospitals because the market alone does not guarantee health. We build schools because access to education cannot depend on what families can afford. We build public libraries, public parks, public transit. Why not public restaurants? Food is as essential as any of these — more so, arguably, since we need it three times a day. And yet we largely leave its provision to market forces that have consistently failed to make healthy, sustainable, delicious food accessible and affordable to everyone.

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If you prefer to frame it in terms of efficiency rather than rights: unhealthy diets cost billions in healthcare spending every year. Malnourished children learn less and earn less. And though this argument strikes me as overly productivist, I’ll leave it here anyway: workers who cannot afford a decent lunch are less productive. And market forces have not aligned profit with population wellbeing when it comes to food. The food industry has been extraordinarily effective at making ultraprocessed, nutrient-poor food cheap, convenient, and omnipresent. Making nutritious, sustainable food affordable has been far less of a priority. That’s not a moral failure of the market — it’s how markets work. Public restaurants are one tool in a much larger set of policies to improve food environments — alongside front-of-package labeling, taxes on ultraprocessed foods, subsidies for fresh produce, stronger school feeding programs. All of this can work together, with public restaurants anchoring a procurement system that sources from smallholder farmers and supports an agroecological transition. What public restaurants add is a physical space where good food is not a privilege.

The non-Martain ambassadors mentioned in the first page are the alien species featured in The Ambassadors of Death, just in case you didn't know.

@marvhellove 

This is what I do every year! 

In the words of senior research fellow Dr Marsha Smith, "we all deserve nice things. Everyone deserves a good, nutritious meal".

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Between World War One and World War Two, civic restaurants - as they were known - were commonplace in Britain.

The taxpayer-funded eateries were formally brought into law as part of the Civic Restaurants Act 1947, which gave local councils the power to establish and run restaurants to provide meals and at reasonable prices.

That followed the British Restaurant scheme during World War Two, initiated by the food minister at the time, Lord Woolton, which provided one affordable hot meal a day per person.

In a debate during the second reading of the Civic Restaurants bill in the House of Lords in March 1947, it was described as "small in size but important in its social purpose".

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"It [the British Restaurants scheme] was one of the biggest public health interventions in the UK, there were more of them than there are McDonald's now.

In 1940s Britain, at a time before fast food and ready meals were staples of the British high street and in a country struggling to deal with the ramifications of war, a popular new restaurant chain was established. It served high-quality meals at reasonable prices, attracted customers from the full spectrum of British society, and grew at a rate of 10 new sites a week at its most popular. The brains behind the operation? The British government, led by the prime minister, Winston Churchill. Churchill’s British Restaurants, a chain of government-funded canteens offering nutritious price-capped meals, were intended to counter inflation in food and fuel prices related to the war, as well as to boost community spirit. At their peak, there were more British Restaurants across the UK than there are branches of McDonald’s or Wetherspoons today. Now a new report is calling for the return of a “national restaurant service” in some form, as a way to tackle contemporary issues such as health inequality, food insecurity and even climate change in the UK. A forthcoming report entitled Public diners: the idea whose time has come, by food policy NGO Nourish Scotland, marks the beginning of a campaign to introduce restaurants as a new piece of national infrastructure, a call backed by politicians and experts. A public diner, according to the report, is a state-subsidised eatery serving quality and ethically produced food at affordable prices. Crucially, says Nourish Scotland, they are neither charity nor a treat, but rather everyday eating places for entire communities to access.

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Last year hospital data showed the number of patients in England and Wales being treated for nutritional deficiencies had tripled in a decade while a January 2024 survey by the Food Foundation found 20% of UK households with children reported experiencing food insecurity. And, Nourish Scotland says, ingredients could be sourced from organic farms, reducing unsustainable food production practices and food waste, and stimulating local economies. Public diners have already been realised elsewhere in the world. In Poland, government-funded “milk bars” (bar mleczny) gained popularity in the communist era as a way to serve traditional home-cooked food at low prices, and remain numerous today. Singapore’s “hawker centres”, market-style community dining rooms, emerged as part of the nation’s urban redevelopment following independence, and bring an array of street sellers under one roof to ensure vendors’ access to ingredients and space, as well as food hygiene standards and choice for consumers. The call for state-subsidised dining in the UK comes amid a growing international movement for public restaurants as key infrastructure.

31 August 2024