Grub first, then ethics?

If we are to take the bakery, and not just the bread, then we should sit down and chat about it first. Over dinner, perhaps?

When you wake up, you might fry an egg and put it between two slices of bread before rushing off to work. You may make yourself a coffee or pour your child a glass of orange juice. When you break for lunch, you might go down to the Wrights’ pie van outside the office and buy yourself a pasty and a chocolate bar. When you come home, you’ll probably make the family some dinner. You will likely do all of this in a poorly insulated home you have paid a fortune for in rent, debt and energy bills.

The top story of contemporary British politics lies in the simple fact that people’s ability to afford these daily necessities - eating food in a home and looking after a family - has become unsustainably fragile. Most of us are sharply aware of how devastating the cost-of-living crisis has been. Under the interwoven weight of ecological catastrophe, corporate price-gouging, imperialist conflict, and tariff wars, our money goes a lot less further than it has for most of the twenty-first century. This problem is drastically magnified by the paucity and vulnerability of Britain’s import-dependent food supply chains. The self-suffiency drives of the British state after the Second World War were unravelled in the late twentieth century. Firstly, with Britain’s turn to Europe and the Common Agricultural Policy, and secondly, the swallowing up of the country’s family farms by supermarket supply chains. In the twenty-first century, food production and pricing have been subject to the disciplinary whims of firms like Tesco. The culmination of these dynamics and processes has been unequivocally disastrous.

Over the course of the past two years alone, in the shadow of the biggest rises in food prices in decades, the cost of bread continues to rise, egg prices have increased by over 14%, orange juice by 29% (after a 134% rise in 2020), coffee by 18%, chocolate by 17%, and beef by over 24%. The product you might cook your food in, olive oil (or ‘liquid gold’ as it has been comically rebranded), increased by 84% up until 2024. The anxious tour of the supermarket, totting up your list and making sure everything you need to buy is affordable on a tight budget, is a routine stress test that we endure every single week of our lives. And it shows no sign of getting any less fraught.

This has deleterious effects on us as human beings. Beyond making what should be a simple trip to get groceries a deeply alienating and psychically degrading experience, this state of affairs makes us poorer, sicker and lonelier. The Food Foundation reports that the cost of a weekly shop is 30% higher than in 2022. One in seven households with children struggle to afford meals. Of these families, 64% report cutting back on fruit, and 50% have cut back on vegetables. The cost-of-living crisis forces us to eat unhealthier food simply because it is cheaper and easier to cook. It also disrupts the possibility of sociality. Energy prices, supply chain disruptions, increased taxation and labour costs have resulted in a 35% rise in restaurant costs, inevitably creating consequences such as higher menu prices, consumer contraction, layoffs and closures. The lightness of our wallets exacerbates our isolation.

Neoliberal capitalism has today been outdone in its proven capacity to make life miserable by the kind of capitalism being born in its wake. We eat worse food, we have less income, we work more and have less time for family and friends, and any notion of real community dwindles as the rare sites of collective sociality we can point towards are stripped from us by the ceaseless quest for profit maximisation. Capitalism does not value life.

Within politics today, no leftwing figure in the country speaks to these dilemmas better than Green Party leader Zack Polanski. His ‘eco-populist’ demand for a wealth tax and his questioning of the household budget analogy which structures contemporary Treasury ideology, connecting the climate crisis to the wider corporate and austerian assault on living standards, has been infinitely more useful than the hazy social democratic soundings of Jeremy Corbyn or the declarative maximalism of Zarah Sultana and her claim that, “we need to nationalise the entire economy”.

The contemporary moment demands a politics and a practice that occupies and expands the space cleaved open by Polanski’s ‘eco-populist’ minimalism, connecting the felt reality of the present day to a longer-term emancipatory horizon. And how many human experiences are more sensual and freeing than the taste of good food, eaten in good company, maybe even in the comfort of a nice home?

Richard Seymour, in his seminal Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilisation, tells us that we may like bread and butter, but we don’t love it. Now, sidestepping my unhealthy fondness for salted butter melted over a lightly toasted scone, food is one of the intractable linkages of cultural life connecting human beings to one another. Any political meeting I have attended, for example, has been significantly improved by the addition of fresh samosas, bhajis and other nourishing delights. We need food, and we need one another too, and both combined can exhibit precisely what the left misses out in its insistence upon reducing socialist politics to a robotic language of winning elections and nationalising the commanding heights. So precisely what is it we fight for?

The quick answer is simply for all to live a good life, disalienated and deburdened, free to enjoy our short time on this planet. Yet, for this horizon to be more than simple sloganeering, we need a sense of both what battles can take us there, and what institutional complexes stand in our way. This is where the minimalist strategic paradigm, creating vertical antagonisms between the popular classes and billionaires, will not suffice on its own. In large parts of the country, we do not see the billionaires that Zack Polanski rightly wants to pay their way. But we do have some awareness and experience of the institutions which make our lives painful.

The rendition of British capitalism which presides over grimace today rests upon the power of institutions dedicated to creating pliant, exploitable subjects that can carry out the work necessary for corporations to flourish. But we must have a story to tell about these institutions and corporations that resonates with how people live. How, for example, do the power centres of the British capitalist state take the food out of your mouth?

Chief among them is the Treasury. Committed to curtailing the spending power of governments and neutering radical ambitions, this core institution of statecraft enforces the powerlessness of municipal councils, makes life easy for the wealthy, and then tells some of the country’s largest legions of workers (nurses, for example) or small restaurant owners, that there is no problem with either below-inflation pay rises or tax increases, respectively. The Treasury is, ultimately, the organiser of all our misery. Not far behind it, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) hands a pittance to the sick, disabled, and unemployed, forcing people into shit work just as it subsidises landlords and employers through universal credit and housing benefit. If the Treasury keeps the population’s needs unrealised by holding the purse strings, the DWP literally cracks the whip, disciplining working class people into immiseration. The Bank of England, the guarantor of our domination, nakedly independent from any democratic oversight, makes everyone broke and stressed. Under the phantasmic banner of stifling the inflationary wage demands of insurgent workers, Britain’s central bank raises interest rates, throws us all into a cycle of deepening indebtedness, restricts what we can and can’t buy, and then tells us it’s all our fault to begin with. Underwriting the power of these institutions is the nefarious Home Office, disempowering and impoverishing workers as a whole by surveilling, pauperising and controlling migrant workers in particular. In this instance, the centrality of migrant workers to agricultural production, logistics, and services is no accident. How could the capitalism we have spent most of our lives enduring have been possible without a growing pool of insecure, citizenless proletarians working harder for longer.

All these institutions have shielded and reproduced a version of capitalism, now falling apart under the pressure of its own contradictions, which eviscerated our domestic food systems, force-fed us crap grub, pummelled mostly migrant agricultural workers into below-subsistence conditions, and made us intensely vulnerable to supply chain shocks induced by runaway climate change. This structural arrangement has shielded and advanced the interests of the corporations that obstruct our right to food. The task of politics today, as leftwing politicians provide openings in the public sphere, is to take advantage of those cleavages by forging movements, campaigns, cultures and struggles that are lived and felt by the popular majority. And what is more felt and lived than the necessity and experience of food?

If we think about political strategy as a way of articulating different parts of a broad coalition to struggle on particular timescales for a distinct set of short-term outcomes which may open up the terrain for a deeper structural dismantling of capitalist power systems, then we must combine a notion of the present with the future, alongside a sense of what connects the two. The stories we narrate about how our food systems are currently managed and made inaccessible to us must reflect and cultivate a growing insurgency for food justice.

Food systems in this country are approaching breaking point. Our reliance on import-dependent food supplies and the private control of land achieved by a succession of capitalist and rentier enclosures puts the people in this country at risk. As food production no longer proves itself so profitable for the average English farm, supermarkets take advantage of their power over smaller producers through price wars.

The Slovenian Marxist Feminist organisation CEDRA (Centre for Social Research) argues - as brilliantly covered on Notes from Below’s Workers Inquiry podcast - that retail supermarkets have typically created a barrier towards the political unity of the working class by immiserating agricultural and distribution workers so as to protect the real wages of the wider working class. Today, as ecological catastrophe imposes planetary limits upon nature, supermarket chains are trying to reinvent this disunity by competing over lower prices in a general context of food price inflation. CEDRA argues that organisers should seek to reverse the impotency intrinsic to this political disunity by organising for both higher wages and lower prices, supporting workers to organise themselves across the supply chains of our food systems, combined with campaigns and movements demanding price controls from the state and capital. In the British context, these two arenas of activity would be well-served by recognising the power of logistics workers in these networks, and the need to dismantle the nefarious Seasonal Worker Visa scheme with its exploitation and repression of migrant workers.

Reproducing the practices of CEDRA in different conditions could be assisted by amplifying the struggles of migrant agricultural workers, such as the 88 Latin American seasonal fruit pickers who went on strike in 2024 and who are now appealing the Employment tribunal’s decision to throw out their case against Britain’s biggest berry producer, Haygrove Ltd. This strategy might also benefit from embracing and spreading the universes of food justice networks like Feeding Liverpool and Just Food and Climate Transition in Tower Hamlets (JustFACT) in their quest to create sustainable and affordable urban food systems; as well as tapping into football fan foodbank solidarity, standing with small restaurant owners against landlordism and government pressures, and building political lifeworlds in our parties, movements and communities that make food a staple of congregation. The shorter-term demands for higher wages and lower prices could be a prism for opening up a longer-term conversation about the socialisation of food and the democratic control of land, creating space for a popular critique of capitalism. Zohran Mamdani’s proposal for municipally-owned grocery stores selling healthy produce at low prices also operates as a medium-term proposition connecting struggles in the present to emancipatory visions of the future.

Supermarkets control our food, exploit our labour, ravage our natural environment, grab our data, accumulate an inordinate mass of profit and then, as the director of Co-op demonstrated with his comments on “organised looting”, have the cheek to complain about shoplifting. The various wings of the capitalist state organise and facilitate this process. As our food systems creak and capital attempts to reorganise food to their benefit, the left needs to take advantage of this disorganisation and cultivate new moral economies over how we consume food.

The importance we as a socialist movement give to food says something about how we value life and human possibilities. As mentioned, Zohran Mamdani won the New York mayoralty on a ticket that promised state-owned grocery stores. When he ran for Assemblyman in 2021, ‘roti and roses’ was the motif of the campaign. In the same year, he refused food for 15 days in service of successfully winning millions in debt relief for taxi drivers. Bringing light to the spectre of ‘halalflation’ was one of the digital interventions which went viral and spread the young politician’s reputation far beyond the streets of Astoria. And today, outside his press conferences as mayor of New York, his aides hand out samosas to people who come to watch. As Corey Robin writes, Mamdani made “the food of immigrant restaurants the centrepiece of his vision.” In treating food as a frontier in the class struggle, the democratic socialist mayor and his team evinced a radical politics confident in its embrace of cosmopolitanism, universalism and freedom. We could do a lot worse than heeding this lesson and animating a similar kind of politics in Britain today.

If socialists cannot connect an institutional critique of capitalism with a practice and vision for an alternative popular ecology, then the far right will present its own solutions. Nigel Farage’s attempts to hegemonise the farmers’ protests and Robert F. Kennedy’s popular Make America Healthy Again project aren’t knocking on the front door anymore. They’ve entered the house.