My comments have two main 'impartial' stating points:-

1. The discourse about food quality has changed entirely. Once, food quality was low, and the main discourse was whether the food was edible or not (for example, people may have had to eat meat from sick animals) and we marvel that they survived. By our modern standards, all of humanity had malnutrition throughout all of history. However, there is now a new 'food quality discourse' about the effects of additives and new genetic techniques - we now worry that what we eat is becoming remote from nature.

2. We once had a sustainable farming system of a 3 or 4-course rotation. The typical crops in successive years would be - potatoes (manure added) - cereal - fallow grazing - roots/beans. This gave long term sustainability and maintained the natural fertility in the land over centuries. This method now seems to have been largely abandoned, as has any concerted attempt to maintain fertility for future generations. The 'assets' in the 'bank of nature' are all being spent at once. The same can also be said about oil resources, mineral resources, water reserves, climate and soil fertility.

Now, many food products are unnatural (pot noodles and Pringles are made of processed starches, artificial colours and flavourings), and I am extremely concerned that what we are doing is not sustainable. I am equally concerned that the Government uses the word 'sustainable' in almost every sentence, but they seem to have no workable definition or measurement of sustainability, no grasp of what it might mean to re-introduce sustainability, and no idea of how to create it. The 3 or 4 course rotation was known to be sustainable - there are no other systems where this can be said. In my view, we have almost no sustainability in any sector of the UK food and farming industries. The Government may use the word, but their policies are unlikely to have any real effect - they are window dressing.