From the archive: ‘We need to break the junk food cycle’: how to fix Britain’s failing food system

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  This is The Guardian. The Guardian Archive Long Read.

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  Hi, I'm Bea Wilson.

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  I'm a food writer.

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  And I wrote a long read piece back in 2022 called We Need to Break the Junk Food Cycle,

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  How to Fix Britain's Failing Food System.

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  So I came at this topic from a few different angles.

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  One was that I came across this, to me,

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  absolutely eye-opening academic paper by a couple of academics called Martin White and Dolly Tice.

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  And it was about obesity policy.

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  And I had a sense that food policy in Britain had been pretty ineffective almost entirely

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  since the Second World War.

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  But when I read their paper, I just hadn't realised what a volume of these policies there had been.

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  And that from 92 to 2020, I think, there'd been nearly 700 different obesity policies,

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  many of them focusing on the idea that people have this choice and if they can just choose better,

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  they'll eat better.

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  And it just struck me that there was this horrible mismatch between that and the fact that obesity levels were rising.

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  And there just seemed to be this sense that we were constantly shaming people through policy for how they were eating without doing the slightest thing to make it easier for them to do so.

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  The big thing that's changed in the last three years is we've had a change of government and the new Minister for Health,

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  Wes Streeting, has said that his huge focus is going to be on preventative health care,

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  which should include food and more joined up food policy.

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