Self-Sufficiency

For a country blessed with rolling fields, a mild climate, and a long agricultural tradition, it’s astonishing how spectacularly we’ve bungled food self-sufficiency. Today, only around 60% of our food is grown here. The rest trundles in on refrigerated lorries or floats in by container, racking up emissions while we pretend we’ve “taken back control.”

And what do we do with our farmland? Use over 70% of it to feed animals, not people. Grazing, silage, oilseed rape for cattle – a logistical farce where we grow plants to feed animals to feed us, with about 10% efficiency if we're lucky. It’s the dietary equivalent of using a wood-burning stove to boil a kettle. You couldn’t invent a more wasteful system.

Beef and lamb are the chief culprits – calorifically expensive, environmentally catastrophic, and culturally protected by a fog of nostalgia. Meanwhile, fruit and vegetable growing is in decline, pickers are in short supply, and we import lentils from halfway across the world while our own fields are chewing cud.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: if we halved our meat and dairy intake, we could feed ourselves far more effectively. That’s not utopian – it’s the conclusion of detailed modelling by Oxford University and the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission. A 70% cut, and we could achieve near-total food self-sufficiency – not just turnips and tatties, but actual diversity, nutrition, and climate resilience. Rewild some uplands while we’re at it, and the future starts to look not just possible, but preferable.

Of course, the moment you say “eat less meat,” someone will bark “What, you want us to be like Ethiopia?” as if it’s Greggs or famine, nothing in between. Yes, Ethiopia eats very little meat – so do Bangladesh and Nepal – but they’re not models of healthy nutrition, they’re examples of poverty. The point isn’t to eat no meat – it’s to eat enough, and not too much, and make the rest of the diet matter.

Because if you look at the global data, what emerges isn’t a straight line but a curve. Eat too little meat and you risk malnutrition. Eat a moderate amount – like the Japanese – and you hit the sweet spot: long life, low disease, strong public health. But overshoot it – as the UK and US have – and the curve bends sharply downward.

This is where we need to be cautious. It’s tempting to look at that curve and declare: “more meat equals worse health.” But that’s a classic correlation–causation trap. It’s not the meat alone doing the damage – it’s what comes with it. In Britain, meat isn’t grilled and served with steamed vegetables. It’s slapped in a bun, deep-fried, or processed to death, then washed down with a litre of sugar and eaten behind the wheel.

Over 50% of UK calories now come from ultra-processed food – industrial bread, ready meals, reconstituted meat, sugar disguised as yoghurt. In Japan, meat is served with rice, miso, vegetables, and fish. In Britain, it’s served with marketing and a coronary.

Go further down that path and you land in America – world leaders in both meat and UPF consumption – where life expectancy is actually falling. It’s not just a diet – it’s a slow-motion public health collapse with a glossy wrapper.

So yes, reducing meat matters. But what replaces it matters more. You don’t swap a sausage roll for a vegan sausage roll and call it progress. You swap it for beans, lentils, grains, veg – real food, grown in real soil. If we did that, we’d free up land, cut imports, restore ecosystems, and likely live longer into the bargain.

If we could reduce our consumption of beef and lamb to 2 days a week with one of fish, we could be self-sustainable in food, as well as releasing enough land to be self-sufficient in renewable energy. If we ate chicken instead of red meat, the meat eating days could increase to 4 or 5, as chicken is less land-intensive. 

But try telling that to the “common sense” crowd who think hummus is Marxist and a carrot is a left-wing plot. If it’s not wrapped in plastic and deep-fried, they suspect subversion.

So next time someone waves the Union Flag and bangs on about “taking back control,” ask them how many calories we could grow here if the borders shut. The answer? Not enough to butter a crumpet – unless we stop feeding cows instead of people, lay off the ultra-processed gloop, and relearn how to eat like a functioning society.

Until then, we’re not self-sufficient – we’re self-defeating.