Henry Leveson-Gower and Dil Green map potential paths to escape the tyranny of Big Food.
The modern food system delivers cheap calories at scale, but at the cost of health, nature and decent livelihoods. Ultra-processed foods, industrialised agriculture and corporate concentration – Big Food – are its hallmarks. And Big Food must keep growing to serve its investors, displacing traditional food so family meals come in takeaway buckets. As Stuart Gillespie explains, the food system is not broken; it is working as it is intended to work, for profit not for people. Weight-loss pills may challenge Big Food’s current model, but can we rely on the result being a real improvement when profit still drives the outcome?
It is tempting to believe that governments will solve this problem through regulation if we shout loudly enough. However, experience to date suggests that Big Food is too powerful a lobby. At the same time, governments remain hooked on economic growth and unwilling to examine the costs, even as rising obesity stares them in the face. Most seem to be in permanent crisis, staring into the headlights, frozen in inaction.
The key question is how to build alternative food systems from the ground up that reflect different values.
The key question then is how to build alternative food systems from the ground up that reflect different values: providing nutritious food for everyone, grounded in environmental stewardship and fair labour. If such systems can demonstrate such adoption, governments might support them, especially as climate change and global disruptions weaken the resilience of Big Food supply chains – risks they appear to deny.
So what kinds of institutions, financial arrangements and everyday tools may help embed these values in practice and sustain them in a hostile political economy?
Beyond simple localism
Much of the focus on developing alternative food systems has been local, such as food hubs and community-supported agriculture. Clearly, it is easier to develop and build upon shared values and strong relationships when you are geographically close. Traditional food identities can offer strong foundations. However, some key elements of food systems require economies of scale – for example, processing pulses and milling grain.
Hodmedod (see Box – Values in a national supply chain) has done pioneering work building markets for pulses and grains grown in the UK. It operates at a national scale, with modern processing, website and distribution, yet maintains close relationships with growers and customers, and is explicit about its ecological and nutritional aims. The chain is shortened and values-led, but not confined to one locality.
What matters most is not the radius of the supply chain, but the nature of the relationships within it.
Online food platforms may be the most effective pragmatic way to sidestep supermarkets’ dominance and build alternative systems; Ooooby and the Open Food Network are examples.
Although it operates at industrial scale, several features mark it out from conventional commodity supply chains: long-term relationships with growers; collaboration on crop rotations and new varieties; transparent stories about farming methods; and a focus on minimally processed foods.
In practice, this is a values-led chain operating at scale, and an example of how economies of scale can be combined with closer, more reciprocal relationships.
What matters most is not the radius of the supply chain, but the nature of the relationships within it: whether they are defined purely by price and power, or by shared purpose, mutual commitment and longer-term thinking. That applies in a village, a city-region or an online network. Such relationships depend on tools such as language, culture, and knowledge-sharing methods. But new kinds of relationships – especially when we need them to do new things, like scale across time and place – may require new tools.
Tools that change relationships
There are a range of emerging tools that could make it easier for values-led relationships to emerge and endure. I have grouped them loosely into four families.
Governance: putting collaboration into the rules
Common purpose is emerging through dialogue, debate and connections. For instance, place-based food partnerships and alliances have played a key role in building common purpose in the UK. They convene councils, anchor institutions, community groups and businesses to agree shared objectives for food – on health, emissions, access and livelihoods – and coordinate action. These forums increasingly explicitly reference values-led visions, rather than treating food policy as an add-on to economic development. They are, however, generally loose policy partnerships rather than practical delivery bodies.
To create new food systems, collaborative economic relationships along food supply chains are required, and to endure and be transparent, they will need to be formalised. Multi-stakeholder cooperatives are a potential model for bringing together farmers, workers, buyers, and citizens as members of a shared enterprise. Instead of decisions being driven purely by investor returns, boards will need to consider multiple interests. This can change how prices are set, how surplus is used, and which investments are prioritised. Oxfarmtofork, a local food system in Oxfordshire, UK, linking local growers with Oxford Colleges’ catering, is exploring this option.
Commons-based structures go further by placing key assets – land, buildings, and infrastructure – under community control and management. This can protect them from speculative sale and align their use with agreed social and environmental goals.
Finance and credit: spreading risk, anchoring control
Conventional finance tends to pull control away from producers and communities. High interest and short payback periods push businesses towards cost-cutting, consolidation and growth for its own sake.
Alternative tools aim to make finance a servant of purpose rather than its master:
- Mutual credit systems allow businesses to trade using internal credit lines instead of bank loans. Debits and credits are recorded in a shared ledger; balances are managed collectively. This can ease cashflow pressure for smaller enterprises and keep trade circulating within a network of values-aligned organisations.
- Use-credit obligations fund assets by pre-selling long-term access. A pack-house, grain mill or training kitchen is financed by future users committing to a certain level of use over several years. Repayments are made in kind (use) rather than in cash plus interest.
- Internal clearing resolves debt chains and circuits without the need for much cash, allowing dense trading networks to do more with less.
- Community shares and bonds give residents and supporters a direct stake in food enterprises and infrastructure, often with capped returns. They can help anchor critical assets – such as markets, processing facilities or farms – in community hands (see box – financing food infrastructure as a shared asset).
Mutual credit, use-credit obligations and community shares are all ways of turning finance from a driver of extraction into a servant of purpose.
The same approach can be applied to food infrastructure. A pack-house, grain mill or training kitchen can be financed by future users – growers, bakers, caterers, community groups – committing to a certain level of use over several years. Instead of servicing commercial debt at interest, the facility is effectively paid for in advance through guaranteed custom.
Governance is anchored in commons principles: assets are held in trust for community benefit, key decisions are made collectively, and any surplus is reinvested rather than extracted. In practice, this turns critical infrastructure from a privately owned bottleneck into a shared platform that underpins multiple food initiatives and remains aligned with social and ecological aims over the long term.
Complementary currencies: shaping flows and access
Vouchers, loyalty points and similar instruments can be seen as a family of “complementary currencies” – tools that sit alongside national money and influence how and where value flows.
In a values-led food system, they can be designed to support both collaboration and access:
- Food vouchers for fresh produce, redeemable with participating traders, direct purchasing power towards independent outlets and growers who meet agreed criteria. They can be funded by public health budgets, employers or philanthropy.
- Loyalty schemes can reward spending within a network of ethical food businesses with points that are only spendable within that network, reinforcing local or values-based circuits of trade.
- Time credits recognise and reward unpaid contributions – volunteering at a community kitchen, helping with harvests, peer-to-peer training – with credits that can be exchanged for meals, events or learning opportunities.
These instruments are not only about solidarity; they are also about shaping the architecture of everyday transactions so that values-led options become easier and more attractive. They could form a single complementary currency system that could also provide returns on community investment (see Box – a complementary currency for a city-region?).
Complementary currencies are not just about solidarity. They are part of the everyday architecture that makes values-aligned choices easier and more attractive.
Employers choose to pay part of staff benefits in this currency; local authorities channel some food support through it. Over time, a network of producers, shops and kitchens linked by the scheme gains a more stable customer base and a shared identity, while low-income households gain additional access to nutritious food.
From Acoins great oaks could grow!
Information and coordination: seeing the whole
Values-led systems also need tools that make relationships visible and allow for collective learning.
Shared data platforms can map who is producing, processing and selling what, identify gaps (for example, lack of local milling or storage) and support coordinated investment. Public dashboards, linked to agreed visions, can track progress on issues such as diet quality, farm incomes or emissions, and provide a basis for adjustment.
Storytelling and labelling, when used carefully, can reinforce these efforts by making the underlying relationships visible to eaters: explaining why certain crops are being supported, why prices are set as they are, and how choices connect back to land and labour.
Many experiments, shared direction
There may be no single blueprint for a food system organised around shared purpose rather than capital. Different places and sectors will combine these tools in different ways; some initiatives will succeed, others will fail and be learned from.
What seems to be emerging, however, is a family resemblance. Wherever people try to reorient food systems towards health, fairness and ecological care, some combination of collaborative governance, alternative finance, complementary currencies and shared information tends to appear.
There is no finished design waiting to be rolled out. What exists is a growing toolbox and a shared direction of travel.
Seen together, these experiments suggest that the shift away from purely capitalist relationships in food is not an abstract ideal, but a practical, ongoing process. The task now is to deepen the conversation between those involved, connect the tools and examples, and create the conditions for a diverse ecology of food systems – at multiple scales – that can genuinely deliver good food within planetary limits.
