Food is back on the front page, and every level of government is being asked what it’s going to do about it. This portfolio is the shared answer — a common set of foundations that council leaders, national government and the people running food projects on the ground can build on together, instead of 32 boroughs improvising 32 different pilots.
Food systems resilience is built across multiple different scales. A coordinated effort across food actors and London boroughs has been identified as the most crucial element of a shared transition (be it in buying power of more resilient supply, distribution, local processing capacity or reserve). This call-to-all gathers actors to:
Boroughs hold the most direct levers — public meals, procurement, land, local partnerships. This initiative aims to map the tools already within boroughs’ mandate and show how they connect to food resilience and preparedness.
Working across boroughs, in public health, regional development or infrastructure — this is about coordinating what boroughs are doing on the ground, and pooling the buying power no single borough has alone. The Greater London Authority and the NHS sit here too.
Growers, grocers, community kitchens, food partnerships — this maps the policy environment that could support your work and the economic circuits you could become part of. The governance and financing case is being built around what you’re already doing, not instead of it.
The enabling infrastructure — the frameworks and fiscal instruments that make local and regional action scalable — sits at this level. We aim to strengthen existing and build new coalitions to influence national policy.
Whether you lead a council, think about a cross-borough coalition, work in national government, you’re already doing this work on the ground, or want to help develop financing and economic infrastructure around it — tell us where you fit, and how you’d want to be part of the next phase.
Tell us where you fit ↗Food inflation is forecast to reach around 9% by the end of 2026, and the Food Foundation’s basic-basket tracker already shows prices roughly 30% higher than in April 2022 — a second price shock inside four years, arriving on top of the first.
The Joint Intelligence Committee and Defra have both gone further, warning of a strategic risk of catastrophic UK food system failure by 2030 — not a distant scenario, but inside the term of whoever is in office right now.
This isn’t the first attempt. The UK has passed roughly 689 food and health policies and 14 national strategies over the past 30 years, with no measurable dent in obesity or health inequality to show for it.
That’s exactly the moment London’s 32 boroughs risk running 32 more uncoordinated pilots — each rediscovering the same procurement problem alone, the way national policy already has, repeatedly. The pathways below exist so that doesn’t happen again.
We need to be preparing a system that will have a lot less surplus and waste in it.
Rather than “chasing cut-price deals around the world,” public buying power should back domestic, resilient supply.
In Bury, embedding health and climate value into catering contracts pushed school-meal menus to up to 25% organic ingredients — proof collective procurement can move real farmland, not just budgets.
There are multiple plausible ways to transform the food systems. The pathways below set direction, organise interventions, and actors around resilience, health, environmental, economic vitality, and equity & fairness outcomes — each one makes the next possible, and skipping one is usually why a pilot doesn’t survive contact with scale.
For sustainable and local products
Nutrient-rich, sustainable & healthy
Outcomes
Procurement protocols and buying coalitions don’t feed anyone on their own. Grocers, dinners, workshops and community-run hubs are the layer that turn food into fresh meals someone can buy or receive.
No single borough’s contract is big enough to move a farmer’s decision. A buying coalition of London boroughs and businesses is — turning committed public and commercial demand into the confidence a grower needs to convert land.
New economics of food through policy, economic, accounting, financing, and monetary instruments. Sounds complex — plenty of best practice to learn from.
The baseline shifts from “enough food” to genuinely nourishing food — because a system that only solves for calories quietly manufactures the next public-health crisis while claiming to have solved the last one.
De-risking farm transitions
Nutrient-rich, sustainable & healthy
Outcomes
Every item below sits on one of the four waves above — hover a row to find its point on the wave. Demand makes healthy food easier to choose. Hub is the shops, pharmacies and services people actually walk into. New Food Economics is the instruments that make the other three payable. Supply makes sure enough good food is being grown in the first place.
What if the market-based food system we’ve relied on has already failed— and a fairer model, one that works for growers and nourishes communities, is what comes next?
The economics of food don’t move by tinkering at the edges — they move with a genuinely new arrangement of ownership, contribution, and price.
Look at the current food market as a product that’s failing and you get edge-adjustments: a nicer label, a voluntary pledge, food surplus recycling with CO2 certificates, that do a lot of good but do not change the underlying logic.
Look at the market-based nutrition as a product that has already failed — generating externalities and vulnerability faster than it delivers continuity — and the theory of intervention changes completely.
Public-interest grocers already show the gap: prices structurally lower on a fixed cadence, not “voluntary contributions” bolted onto a still-too-expensive shelf.
We need rules that stop this work being sold off or quietly undone later — similar to how some housing co-ops are set up so no single vote can ever put the building back on the speculative market (Mietshäuser Syndikat). The question is then:
Can food infrastructure be governed in a way that stays “with the people” and scales at the same time?
The Council keeps a seat at the table — funding, convening, advertising the work — without holding the steering wheel. A declared, public work programme replaces “come and collaborate.”
Peer boroughs — starting with a founding group of neighbours — take on shared standards, collective buying, and a common protocol, so the model compounds rather than repeats from zero each time.
The Future Food Dinner — an experiential, cross-sector convening format already tested in Camden — is the concrete mechanism for building that coalition one peer group at a time, not just its stated ambition.
Distributed governance consisting of multiple self-supporting nodes, where ownership, stewardship, and voting rights are distributed so the structure prevents speculation and keeps it in the hands of the community.
A policy briefing routed through leading experts and universities to national government, timed to a six-month window, arguing for the deregulation that lets already-brilliant local actors build without red tape.
A charter sits across all three tiers: what it takes to count as a genuine partner, and visibility between members so nobody drifts.
A charter sits above individual projects: minimum requirements to count as a genuine partner, and visibility between members so nobody drifts from the same goal. A food bank can be a member — but only if it’s providing real wraparound support, not a parcel and a goodbye.
The same logic extends to a borough market’s trader waiting list, hotel-development leases, and any contract long enough to lock in a supplier’s behaviour rather than just their price.
In practice, that means people nominate themselves for a workstream and declare, in front of the group, where they want to be in six months — soft accountability that turns “come and collaborate” into something with an actual deadline.
The “as infrastructure” move has done this work before — for urban canopy, through TreesAI.
This isn’t the first time the “as infrastructure” reframe has done real work inside Dark Matter Labs. Trees as Infrastructure (TreesAI) made the same move for urban canopy — building the funding infrastructure for something previously treated as decoration. Food follows the same logic, one step down the same road.
Dark Matter Labs’ role here is researcher, coordinator, and orchestrator of the work and the funding behind it. Camden is one of several London boroughs genuinely moving the needle on this — a partner, not a commissioner — each testing a local answer to what is, underneath, a global pattern. Cities everywhere are hitting the same wall: food fragility that no single council, or country, can price its way out of alone.
Every council should set up a small group — public health, local food businesses, food banks, community groups — whose job is spotting food problems early and knowing what to do if supply is disrupted. Government is deciding by 5 October 2026 whether to make this a legal requirement.
The National Preparedness Commission’s 2025 review, led by Tim Lang, recommends every local authority establish one as a matter of urgency. The Cabinet Office is now reviewing the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 to decide whether to make it statutory — with a call for views closing 5 October 2026. A borough that moves first has already done most of that work before the law asks for it.
Cost-of-living, food access, and community ownership. Valuable — but not built for emergency planning, risk assessment, or public communication during a shock.
Emergency prevention and response — working alongside the coops, the Food Partnership and the Borough Resilience Forum, not replacing any of them.
The portfolio is built to be true at three different speeds at once — because the people in the room for this work are living in different horizons already.
Food-price volatility and nutrition inequality are already moving cognition and health outcomes. The immediate, concrete move is standing up a Local Food Resilience Committee and responding to the Cabinet’s call for views before it closes — not waiting for a council procurement cycle to catch up.
The Food Partnership publishes a declared work programme, four London boroughs sit down together on collective buying, and a policy briefing lands with national government inside its six-month window.
Automation reaches logistics and white-collar work at scale. Food-as-infrastructure is the argument for treating nutrition as social-contract security before that shock arrives — not the response to it afterwards.
Each of these is a real, evolving model rather than a static deck — built to be interrogated, forked, and carried into the next room.
An indicative portfolio of work that treats food fragility not as a supply deficit, but as a demand-construction opportunity. The Negative Portfolio v2.0.
A breakdown of the pathway to actually implement the portfolio — from idea to intervention, in sequence.
A working model of how a single food-system shock fans out across many pathways at once — not one line, but a system moving together.
Where the food actually comes from — and the shocks that travel home with it along the same routes.
A dynamic map bringing together the existing food system across London — hubs, retailers, growers, and routes in one place, with a built-in audio update for anyone who’d rather listen than read.
A portfolio of economic and monetary instruments for food-system transformation — from municipal procurement and local currencies to a national investment bank. Built for, and developing on the ground in, Sweden — with lessons that carry directly to other contexts, the UK included.
Where existing food hubs, markets and civic spaces get mapped, matched and coordinated with each other — the working group carrying that forward.
Six distinct levers for moving London's collective buying power behind organic and regenerative farms, nutrient-dense food, shock resilience, and civic-led ownership — set out side by side, with an honest read on where the portfolio already has traction and where the gaps are.
This page makes a lot of claims. These are the primary sources behind them — useful whether you’re a council officer checking the evidence or a community group looking for who else is already working on this.
