A food apocalypse is coming; There is no plan to feed Britain in a crisis

In the dystopian drama The Last of Us, a fungal virus has spread through foodstuffs turning infected humans into zombies. The survivors live in ghettos, among the ruins, armed to avoid a gruesome living death. They grow their own food to avoid the infected produce. Preppers and survivalist whackos find that their hour has come. Clean food has become a precious thing.

That’s where my interest in the show kicked in, because the future of our food system is something that I’m a little obsessed with. I am haunted by the memory of those empty supermarket shelves during the Covid pandemic, which didn’t quite lead to a food panic, but sent chills through anyone thinking about food security. We learned then that our just-in-time food system wasn’t very resilient and seemed vulnerable to collapse if given a major shock. (Spoiler Alert: Covid is nowhere near the grim end of the scale for disaster planning.)

I began asking questions about food security during Covid, and like a loose thread in a jumper, the more I pulled the more my already weak faith in the current food system began to fray. What I learnt is frankly a little scary. It turns out it isn’t zombies that we should be afraid of, but how poorly prepared we are for the future.

James Rebanks

Read full article by James Rebanks in UnHerd