September 2026

We have just had a heatwave in Britain for the second year running. Temperatures reached nearly 40 degrees centigrade in the London area, and well over 30 degrees over the rest of the country, even in southern Scotland. There was no rain for weeks and water supplies were badly affected. Emergency measures have been in place, schools closed, trains cancelled, cool refuges suggested. Only the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, basically the area north of Inverness, have escaped the searing heat. The effect on our food supplies is likely to be serious. Last summer’s droughts and floods affected harvests all over Britain. This year, farmers are reporting serious problems again as a result of the extreme and unpredictable weather. Food security has become a hot topic.

At the same time, the war in Iran, a war which we ourselves did not start and in which we are not officially engaged, has disrupted oil, gas and fertiliser supplies. Farm machinery uses fuel. So do the ships and lorries which move food around the country, let alone the planet. We also face threats from countries who object to our government’s political position on various issues, which could easily, if things escalate, extend to drone attacks and cyber attacks affecting our food distribution system.

In an article by Professor Tim Lang in the Guardian in March this year, he pointed out that we import half of our food. Britain is currently only 54% food self-sufficient and this percentage is probably falling. For comparison, France is 100% self-sufficient, Germany 83%, the Netherlands 80% and Spain 75%. 

All of a sudden, journalists have started writing about the probability of food shortages in the UK and calling on the government to make preparations to guarantee food security. It has been reported that households over the whole of the UK are going to be advised to store a supply of tinned food and other essentials to last three days. (In winter, in the stormy north of Scotland, we already do that.) The MP for Orkney and Shetland, who is chairman of the environment, food and rural affairs committee at Westminster, secured approval for a debate on food security (The Orcadian, Thursday 11 June 2026 page 21). Mr Carmichael has pointed out that for many years, the UK’s food security has been taken for granted, but this is no longer sensible. People seemed to have forgotten what happened during the Covid pandemic. Or what is currently happening with supplies of certain medicines that many of us rely on.

In the Guardian article I learned several things about how our food reaches us that I had never thought about before. As a museum teacher and re-enactor, with a character based on a Tudor cook, I was regularly astonished by how few children could recognise common herbs and vegetables which had not been chopped up and frozen in plastic bags. As a gardener I know how to grow potatoes and parsley. But I now feel ashamed that I have never thought before about exactly how the bulk of my food gets from farm to fork, and what some of the implications of the current system are.

One is Distribution Centres.  Most of us buy our food rather than producing it ourselves. Most of us buy it from supermarkets. Most farmers have to sell their produce to supermarkets. Professor Lang described Britain’s current food supply system as “agrifood capitalism” rather than farming. The priority is profit rather than feeding people, and it is dominated by a few big companies.  Nine large retailers supply nearly 95% of all of our retail food in the UK. And they depend on only 131 distribution centres, where the food is gathered and stored before being distributed to supermarkets. If anything happened to even one or two of them, the country would be in trouble. It isn’t just the climate crisis which threatens our food supplies. There have recently been reports that companies such as Peter Green Chilled, which transports chilled food to several major supermarkets in Britain, have suffered ransomware attacks. Whether by criminals just out for money, or by hostile governments as a modern equivalent of the submarines which attacked convoys in WWII, the effect would be the same on our food supply.

For example, in Orkney, we have three supermarkets, Tesco, Lidl and the Co-op. Tesco supplies almost one third of all UK retail food, and depends on just twenty of these 131 distribution centres. As far as I can see from an internet search, only one of them is in Scotland, near Edinburgh in the Central belt. Lidl has “over 14” centres in Britain, but only one in Scotland, in North Lanarkshire, again part of the Central Belt. The Co-op is the 7^th largest food retailer in Britain. It is not a single company but a complicated conglomeration of individual independent co-operative societies (I got totally lost over their structure and its implications). The Co-op has 13 distribution centres, 1 national, 9 regional, and 3 smaller local ones to provide for remote areas. In Scotland, there is a regional centre in Lanarkshire and a local centre in Inverness. Orkney also has wholesale suppliers such as JW Gray in Kirkwall and James Wilson in Stromness, which supply smaller local shops, and businesses such as hotels, schools, hospitals, etc.  Most of this food gets to supermarkets in towns and cities in big container lorries. In the Northern and Western Isles, they travel part of the way by ferry as well.

The other is stockpiles.  I found a company blog which gives a brief overview of how food wholesaling works in the UK. It is interesting and worth a visit. One important thing in particular which struck me had been pointed out by Professor Lang. It concerns reserves or stockpiles. In order to minimise the amount of storage space retailers require, the system relies on, and is proud of, ‘Just-in-time’ supply. In Orkney, we already know what happens when our normal winter gales disrupt the ferries – empty shelves in supermarkets. ‘Just in time’ doesn’t work so well for us during a stormy winter. Perhaps it is not only individuals who should be thinking about stockpiling food supplies, even if it does reduce their profits by a tiny percentage.

Many European governments are now talking about preparing for emergencies. They are building up stockpiles to keep their citizens fed in an emergency such as war or a pandemic. Switzerland, for example, has a stockpile sufficient to feed its population for three months and is increasing it to a year.  Finland, which produces 80% of its own food, in spite of its northern latitude and short growing season, has deliberately prepared for the possibility of interruptions to supplies of food and other essentials, such as fuel to keep agricultural machinery and food transport running.    Finland also has an amazing government website with detailed and very clear information about what supplies to keep ready for an emergency. It is aimed quite obviously at an emergency caused by invasion by a hostile power but it is very useful as a guide.

All in all, we have a lot to think about at the moment. Our food supply in Britain is very vulnerable to things like hostile action by groups or countries, diesel supplies running low, IT failures, bad weather etc. The question of ‘food miles’ is not only a matter of protecting the environment, it’s also about protecting the actual supply of food itself.