Between the meal deal, the delivery app and the protein bar posing as lunch, most of what this city eats was built in a factory. A closer look at how that happened, and at the quiet fightback underway.
Here’s a fun experiment for your next Tesco run. Pick up your usual meal deal and read the ingredients. Not the calories, the actual list. The sandwich bread will have emulsifiers and dough conditioners. The “natural” smoothie will run to thirty-odd ingredients. Even the yoghurt has been thickened, stabilised and preserved into something your great-grandmother would not have recognised as food.
This is not a niche problem. The latest analysis of the National Diet and Nutrition Survey puts ultra-processed food at 54% of the average British adult’s calories. For teenagers, it’s 66%, among the highest figures in Europe. And if the national numbers are grim, London is surely carrying the team. This is the city of the desk lunch, the 11pm Deliveroo and the fridge containing one lime and a jar of something ambiguous.
The strange thing is that we did this to ourselves remarkably fast. Rationing ended in 1954. Britain’s first self-service grocery had opened in Manor Park in 1948, run by the Co-op, and by the end of the 1960s there were more than 3,000 supermarkets nationwide. At its peak, Tesco was opening a new store every ten days. Add commercial telly from 1955, cereal adverts aimed squarely at children, fridges in every home and a food industry borrowing American manufacturing tricks, and within thirty years the British plate had been completely rebuilt. Not by anyone’s evil plan. Just by a system optimising, decade after decade, for shelf life and margin rather than for anything you’d want in your body.
The bill has now arrived. Around 30% of UK adults are living with obesity, costing the NHS roughly £6.5 billion a year, and a growing pile of research ties heavy UPF consumption to type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and several cancers. It’s the sort of thing that’s gone from wellness-influencer talking point to parliamentary briefing paper in about five years.
But, being London, there is a counter-current, and it’s more interesting than another £14 salad. The pandemic sourdough people never really stopped. Refill shops keep opening. And there’s a growing scene of people quietly buying oats, lentils and spices in kilo bags and cooking like it’s 1952, except with better music and garlic. One sign of the mood: Whole Food Earth, an online wholefoods grocer that’s been selling exactly that stuff for over a decade, has just launched a national initiative called the Whole Plate, whose entire ask is that food which was grown, not manufactured, makes up most of your plate, most of the time. The free 30-day pledge sends one idea a day: a swap, a recipe, a way to make a dhal you’d actually crave. No detox, no powders, nobody yelling about toxins.
That’s the refreshing bit. Nobody credible is telling you to bin the odd bacon sarnie or swear off Maccies forever. The argument is about defaults: whether the base layer of your week is actual ingredients or industrial product. The gap between those two Londons is the difference between cooking a pot of something on Sunday and paying £23 for a burrito to arrive cold.
Seventy years to get into this mess. It might take a while to get out. But if the city that invented the £5 lunch can fall back in love with actual food, the rest of the country doesn’t have much of an excuse.
