Elizabeth Creak Distinguished Guest Lecture 2025
“Food security or food resilience? Unravelling the links, interests and challenges”
Tim Lang, Professor Emeritus of Food Policy, Centre for Food Policy, City St George’s, University of London
Tuesday 4th November 2025, IBRB, Gibbet Hill Campus, The University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL
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Drinks from 5.30pm, lecture starts at 6.00pm and event closes at 8.00pm
Is the UK’s food supply as secure as we assume? In this timely and provocative lecture, Professor Tim Lang challenges the complacency surrounding food resilience in wealthy nations. Drawing on his recent report for the National Preparedness Commission (Just in Case, Feb 2025), Professor Lang will unpack the hidden vulnerabilities in our food system. Whether you're a policymaker, researcher, student, or concerned citizen, this lecture offers essential insights into the future of food and why public engagement may be the key to driving change.
Professor Lang's Abstract
The notion of resilience (the capacity to bounce back from shock) is being increasingly used in discussions of the UK food system yet the UK’s resilience planning system almost entirely ignores food. The default policy position appears to be that rich societies such as the UK are intrinsically food secure. Food follows the money. The UK is rich, ergo it is food secure. This lecture suggests that rethinks are needed for both security and resilience with regard to food. The National Risk Register gives only one food risk of 89 facing the country yet many analysts disagree pointing to internal and external tensions and potential disruptions such as: geopolitics, climate change, price inflation, uneven distribution of added value down supply chains, the ‘weaponisation’ of food (think Ukraine, Sudan, Gaza), health inequalities, and the fragilities of Just-in-Time logistics on which almost all food supply depends. How the public experiences disruptions can itself become a dynamic affecting the food system. If food is a trust relationship, what happens if the trust is stretched or even broken? The lecture suggests that the terms security and resilience might benefit from both some tightening and extending! In a report for the National Preparedness Commission (Just in Case, Feb 2025), I have explored where the public interest might lie in all this. The lecture will sketch the risks and vulnerabilities the UK public and consumers in rich societies face today, and the strategic options that lie ahead. It argues that policy makers are unlikely to be able to avoid facing what security and resilience might mean. As ever, public engagement will probably force the issues.
About the speaker
Tim is Emeritus Professor at City, University of London’s Centre for Food Policy. His work addresses the challenges of creating a food system that meets the needs of consumers, environment, social justice and public health. His research interests have ranged across sustainable diets, food security and the implications of Brexit. Across this work, he’s explored the policy mismatch between production and consumption, and why we seem reluctant fully to address food’s impacts on climate change, biodiversity, water and land use, and culture.
Tim has worked at the highest level with regard to food policy in the UK – advising four Parliamentary Inquiries - and internationally at the EU and the UN. He was Land Use and Natural Resources Commissioner on the UK Sustainable Development Commission, 2006-11, a member of the UK Council of Food Policy Advisers, 2008-10 and since 2009 has been a member of the London Food Board advising Mayors of London. He was policy lead of the EAT-Lancet Commission’s highly cited 2019 Food in the Anthropocene report.
Tim has recently prepared a report for the National Preparedness Commission on civil food resilience – how would the food system work in the face of national shocks, such as war or a pandemic like the one we recently experienced and a paper on ‘UK horticulture, its policy lock-ins and route options ahead’.
Tim is an honorary graduand of the University of Warwick.
The lecture will be hosted at the state-of-the-art Interdisciplinary Biomedical Research Building on the Gibbet Hill campus. Drinks will be served before the event.
(Pictures of supermarket shelves courtesy of Pixabay free images.)