WE RARELY TALK sensibly about food – the throwaway line ‘food for thought’ is about as close as we come to connecting thinking with eating. This isn’t an attitude we can afford any longer. Our food production and distribution systems, and all the cultural practices that go with them, are facing some deep challenges. It’s time we had much more thought for food.

Lots of things are going haywire. Ocean acidification and resource exploitation are ruining global fish stocks. Rapid urbanisation in the developing world is sucking the life from agricultural regions. Declining crop yields have large parts of the world on famine watch. And, idiotically, we’re switching crops from food to biofuel production at a time of soaring populations.