Henry Dimbleby, one of Britain’s foremost food reform advocates, used his address at the University of Aberdeen’s Andrew Carnegie Lecture to call on Scottish and UK leaders to take decisive action on food reform—or risk creating what he warns will be “a sick and impoverished nation.”
As the founder of Leon restaurants and former National Food Strategy lead, Dimbleby issued a compelling call for change in honour of the 75th anniversary of the Rowett Institute’s founding director, Lord Boyd Orr, receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on nutrition and health.
Dimbleby minced no words in addressing Westminster’s lagging action on diet-related health crises, asserting that the government has “ideas and frameworks” but is still without a definitive plan to confront the UK’s unhealthy food environment.
This failure, he argued, costs the UK almost £100 billion annually—a burden that strains the NHS, the economy, and forces families to bear the logistical and emotional weight of caring for loved ones harmed by poor nutrition.
Scotland, Dimbleby acknowledged, has taken some steps forward, but he noted that even in Scotland, there is still a gap between policy frameworks and real-world action that meaningfully impacts public health.
“If the current approach persists,” he said, “we’ll see not just a sicker population, but a poorer one too,” warning that the nation’s health and wealth are inextricably linked to its food systems.
The former food tsar challenged today’s political leaders to create a future where, as he put it, we can look back in thirty years and find our current diet as “odd” as we now find smoking in public places—a decision he recalls astonished a group of young people when he shared how common it once was.
The event, titled Eating Ourselves to Death: How the Modern Diet is Destroying Our Bodies and Our Planet, closed with a thought-provoking panel discussion led by Rowett Institute Director Professor Jules Griffin, joined by Professor Alexandra Johnstone and Food Standards Scotland Chair Heather Kelman, all stressing the urgency of a national food plan.
The Andrew Carnegie Lecture series, funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, is a decade-long initiative that honours the legacy of Lord Boyd Orr and aims to promote important public health discourse at Scotland’s historic universities.
