How can a business that generates more losses than profits not only survive but thrive? Easily, as long as the losses fall on economic actors outside the company. It wouldn’t be good for the economy as a whole, but the company would be laughing all the way to the bank. 

Somehow, we have allowed the entire global food system to become just such a drain on wealth. A report issued by the Food System Economics Commission last year counted all the hidden environmental, health and social costs of the global food system and found that they added up to $10 trillion per year in 2020. ‘In short,’ the group of internationally esteemed researchers concluded, ‘our food systems are destroying more value than they create.’

How we got into this scandalous mess and how we get out of it should be among the most pressing questions of our age. Stuart Gillespie is well placed to give us some answers, having worked for more than forty years in the fields of food, nutrition and health for