Apocalyptic scenes are becoming difficult to ignore. Wildfires are tearing through much of Europe, including in the UK, where we have just recorded our hottest day of 2026 – the fifth-hottest ever. This is not simply a climate story. It is a food story, and therefore a story about power, inequality and democracy.

Across Europe, farmers are seeing yields shrink as drought and extreme heat put crops and water supplies under pressure. The climate crisis is exposing just how fragile the food system we have built has become.

A system built for profit, not resilience
The Covid-19 pandemic should have been a warning. It exposed vulnerabilities in a food system dependent on complex, highly interconnected supply chains and a workforce vulnerable to borders, illness and labour shortages.

The UK’s food system prioritises speed, low inventories and economies of scale. We are heavily dependent on food grown elsewhere, importing £14.4bn of vegetables and fruit in 2024, including around half of our fresh vegetables. Food can travel thousands of miles, crossing borders by ship, plane and lorry before reaching our supermarket shelves.

Imports are not inherently a problem, and a diversity of supply can provide resilience. But dependence becomes dangerous when multiple suppliers are exposed to the same climate, geopolitical or infrastructure shocks.

The government is aware of this threat. Its most recent Food Security Report, published in December 2024, acknowledges that our “just in time” food system – with its minimal stock levels and reliance on uninterrupted transport – is extremely vulnerable.

When climate shocks, geopolitical instability, rising energy and fertiliser costs, or labour shortages collide, our highly concentrated supply chains buckle – and our supermarket shelves empty.

Just in time is efficient, until it isn't.

More than just empty shelves
Food security is not simply about whether there is enough food somewhere in the country. It is about whether people nationwide can reliably access sufficient, nutritious food that they can afford.

Almost 10% of people in the UK lived in a food-insecure household in the year ending March 2025. Among those with relative low income – defined as households with less than 60% of median income – the figure was 19%. Nationwide, more than nine million people are reliant on food banks. These figures matter because a food system can be technically well supplied while still failing people.

What happens when you live in a food desert, where fresh produce is hard to reach but takeaways, convenience stores and betting shops are everywhere? When the nearest supermarket is too far to walk to, and the local “express” store has a narrower and more expensive range?

The idea that people simply ‘choose’ unhealthy food ignores the environment in which those choices are made.

The World Health Organisation has found that energy-dense, nutrient-poor foods are widely available, heavily marketed and relatively cheap, while price promotions and product placement can push consumers towards unhealthy purchases. It now recommends stronger government intervention, including fiscal measures and mandatory restrictions on unhealthy food marketing to children.

We must stop asking why people don’t make better choices and start asking who designed the choices available to them.

Food is a climate issue – and a democratic one

Food systems generate around a third of global greenhouse gas emissions and are major drivers of biodiversity loss. Agriculture and land use account for the largest share of food-related emissions.

Yet the people least responsible for designing this system often have the least power within it: farmers squeezed on price, food workers on insecure wages, families struggling to afford healthy food, and communities with little influence over what shops open on their high streets.

This is why food cannot be reduced to individual responsibility.

Nor can climate adaptation simply mean telling farmers to ‘grow differently’ while leaving them to absorb the financial risks of increasingly unpredictable weather. Farmers need water infrastructure, investment, appropriate storage, resilient seeds, fair prices and long-term policy certainty.

And consumers need more than a supermarket aisle full of individually packaged, heavily promoted products and the instruction to make ‘better choices’.

Local action can change the system
There are already examples of what a different food system could look like.

Take the Queen of Greens, the mobile greengrocer operated by my organisation Alchemic Kitchen and partners in Liverpool and Knowsley. It takes affordable fresh fruit and vegetables directly into communities with poor access to fresh produce. In 2023, more than 250 families visited the bus each week; today it operates across more than 25 community locations.

This is more than a bus selling vegetables.

It demonstrates that if healthy food is physically accessible, affordable and sold in quantities people can work with, such as loose produce rather than sealed plastic bags that hold too much, people will buy it. It also shows how local authorities, communities, social enterprises, health services and housing providers can work together to reshape food access. The University of Liverpool is now evaluating the model as part of research into dietary inequality – the kind of experiment we should be scaling.

Local authorities could make healthy food businesses eligible for reduced business rates. Public spaces could be made available for community and farmers' markets. Food should be embedded into local climate, health, housing, transport and economic strategies rather than treated as somebody else's responsibility.

And national government should recognise food security as strategic infrastructure alongside energy, water and transport.

A question of power
The climate crisis is not coming for our food system in some distant future. It is already here, in parched fields, failed harvests, rising prices, stressed water supplies and increasingly volatile global supply chains. We should not respond by blaming individuals for what they eat.

We should ask why a system capable of delivering asparagus from Peru and green beans from Kenya can struggle to ensure that families in Britain can afford a bag of locally grown vegetables. We should ask why farmers carry so much of the risk while so much power sits elsewhere in the food chain. And we should ask what kind of food system we want.

One built around maximum efficiency and maximum profit will remain vulnerable to climate breakdown. A resilient alternative food system would look different: more diverse, more local where appropriate, better paid, less wasteful, more seasonal and designed around health, dignity and ecological limits.

Food is not merely a commodity. It is a basic condition of a functioning society.

If we want food security in a warming world, we need to stop treating food as an individual consumer choice and start treating it as a democratic question – one in which communities, workers and farmers have a real say.