EXCLUSIVE: Don't eat our world
Professor Tim Lang told the WMN there must be a "total transformation" in the way Britons live, ending the over-consumption of the world's food supplies, slashing car and airplane use and using land to produce the maximum amount to eat.
People would have to get used to eating less meat and not being able to "eat the world" with stores full of thousands of items shipped in from across the globe.
Only the uplands of Britain should be used to rear animals for food if the land could not be used for growing crops, he said, insisting consumer expectations had to change.
Prof Lang, professor of food policy at City University, said the Government had to intervene to force through policy changes to the way Britain fed itself.
"The reality is that changing diet looks almost inevitable. For one very simple reason – a rich country like Britain over-consumes in terms of resources. Britain doesn't feed itself. It uses other people's land, it uses other people's water, and it is using other people's minerals.
"If you extrapolate for the rest of the world to eat like the British, you would need three planets... five planets... something like that.
"At a time when population is going up... climate change scenarios look extraordinarily sobering. It seems to me it is almost inevitable that we are going to have to change our diet."
While stopping short of calling for enforced vegetarianism, non-meat eater Prof Lang added: "It may be that uplands which cannot grow grain and cannot grow other crops will be useful for meat-rearing.
"It may be that animals will be useful for eating and using waste, which is what they used to be. They have been made into ends in themselves. We have got to reduce that focus on meat as an end in itself."
Prof Lang was recently named as a key figure on the new Council of Food Policy Advisers set up by Environment Secretary Hilary Benn to overhaul the Government's approach to the subject. He also attended the recent launch of a major Commons inquiry into securing Britain's food supplies for the next half century.
Prof Lang stressed that Government policy had to be "more discriminatory", focusing not just on the level of self-sufficiency but the differences between fruit, vegetables and meat.
"Of course price is important but is it not the only determinate. We know that sustainability has got to be a number one value. Anyone who says that price is everything, is speaking nonsense.
"The biomass on which humanity is parasitic relies on a terribly thin layer around the planet. It is astonishing that we still have a food system like we do."
Prof Lang was hopeful that in Government policy, there was the "beginning of the recognition of the importance of climate change. It is pathetic our response to it. Car use should go. Airplanes should go. Our whole lives need to be restructured. A total transformation of how a country like Britain lives has got to happen".
He said the culture of eating in Britain must change in the same way as during the two world wars.
"We have all got used to walking in and thinking food shopping is having 30,000 items of food. Why? No-one buys 30,000 items of food.
"How can we engender a change in that culture, an expectation that I can eat the world?"
He said that television chefs like Jamie Oliver had begun to communicate the message that "food is not just about skills and cooking, it is actually about how you want to live your life". He added: "It is nonsense when people say you can't change it or it has got to be left to consumers. Events change things. Consumers can change."
Prof Lang pointed to the Government's recent carbon labelling project as proof politicians must take the lead to make things happen.
"We have all got to grow up actually. We have got to say actually Government has got to play its part, business has got to play its people and people have got to play their part.
"At last there is a recognition that food policy is not just about food safety. Life depends on it; there is a big agenda that needs to be addressed. How we address it, that's a matter for politicians. I don't say it lightly but life depends on us getting it right and at the moment, we are not."
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