Hall of fame (judges' award)

A conversation with the winner of our prestigious lifetime achievement award is a walk through history. Along the way Tim Lang, professor of food policy at London's City University, touches upon the impact of both the industrial revolution and the repeal of the corn laws on our connection with the land. He praises the first Labour MPs at the beginning of the 20th century for helping create a school-meals service, and bemoans the terrible damage done to that service with the introduction of Compulsory Competitive Tendering by the Conservatives in the 1980s. We discuss the growth of radical politics in the 1970s, the death of the Greater London Council and the way Edwina Currie was forced to resign as a health minister, for pointing out - correctly - that the British egg supply was infected with salmonella. 'We British walk upon the shoulders of history,' Tim Lang says, 'But too often we don't look down.'

Lang's name may not have a high recognition factor among the general public but he is a first point of call for many journalists - including this one - who want to make sense of what is really happening to our food. In the 1980s Lang, now 59, was the founder and director of the London Food Commission, which did some of the earliest work on additives, and the effect of food poverty among those on low incomes. Along with his colleagues - he is keen to point up the collaborative nature of academic endeavour - he was one of the first to blow the whistle on the damage being done to both school and hospital meal services by Tory government policy.

He was directly responsible for founding Sustain, the highly influential network of non-governmental organisations concerned with the health of our food supply. He was the man who coined the term 'food miles' to describe the distance our groceries had to travel to reach us and his work made a major contribution to both the Food Safety Act of 1990 and the creation of the Food Standards Agency in 2000. Listening to him could be cause for great gloom and doom about the state of food in Britain, were it not for one saving grace: his enthusiasm. 'I think Britain is the most interesting food country in the world,' he says. 'Because we were the first industrialised nation in the world, the first to sever the link with the land but also the first to have a movement against the adulteration of our food, back in the 19th century, which everyone has forgotten.'

We also, he says, have one of the best climates for growing food in the world - and here he knows exactly what he is talking about. Back in the early 1970s, while working on his PhD in social psychology, he and some friends took over a 105- acre hill farm in Lancashire, where they raised sheep and cows and grew their own produce. 'I became intrigued by the principles of primary production,' he says. 'The way we use water, soil and light to create what we eat.' Seven years later the ramshackle project fell apart, but by then he had become deeply involved with radical political groups, where the first stirrings of what would eventually become the environmental agenda that dominates political discourse today, could be felt. 'I would sit up on the moors where we farmed, thinking about my own diet and the whole notion of food supply.'

Lang admits that, back then, talking about problems in the British food chain was seen as little more than eccentric. 'In the 1970s, issues surrounding food were associated only with the developing world. Everything here was regarded as excellent. But I actually think we are a very troubled food culture.' For Lang food is not simply about ingredients on the plate. It is a multi-disciplinary puzzle that has to be put back together; a puzzle that draws on everything from economics and transport, to chemistry, biology and culture. He is not, he says, the sort of Elizabeth David-quoting 'foodie' who has come to loom large in so much of the feverish debate by the middle classes over our diet. 'That's not me,' he says. 'To put it simplest I had become intrigued by notions of happiness and the part food played in that.'

A series of teaching jobs in polytechnics, running some of the first food policy courses in the country led, in the early 1980s, to an invitation to set up the London Food Commission under the auspices of Ken Livingstone's Greater London Council. In the mid-Eighties, when the GLC was abolished, the Food Commission was cut adrift and, while it still had funding, it had no one to whom it was officially reporting. 'So we started talking directly to the people,' Lang says. 'We issued reports on additives, children's food, the economics of the control of retailing, new technologies.' Was it only a bad news story? 'No. We made a point that we should always point up the good news. In the additives report, for example, we found there were a load of them which were only there for cosmetic reasons, brown for kippers for example, green for tinned peas. We made the point that they could simply be removed.' And they were.

But the greatest challenge came when the Conservative government decided that social meals services - in schools, care homes and hospitals - should no longer simply be provided by councils as a matter of course, but put out to tender to the private sector. Lang and his colleagues almost immediately saw the impact, as councils reduced their budgets, scrapped nutritional standards and headed as far down-market as it was possible to go. It is damage that is only now being repaired due to high profile interventions by the likes of Jamie Oliver. But Jamie Oliver would have had nothing to work with if it hadn't been for the way that Lang barracked central government with report after report showing the damage that was being done. 'If a country doesn't sort out how it feeds its children,' Lang says, 'it doesn't deserve to be called civilised.'

I ask him if he still gets angry. He laughs. 'Look at me. Of course I do. I feel like a therapist holding up a mirror to the food world.' That said, he fully accepts that, after 30 years working on what was seen as a curious and occasionally diverting field of study, it has finally entered the mainstream. 'We didn't invent food poisoning, or the obesity pandemic. What we have done though is help get those issues out into the public arena.' He also accepts that there are ideas for which he was responsible which have travelled a long way from him. The phrase 'food miles', he says, was coined by him for a television broadcast in the early Nineties. Today even retailing behemoths like Tesco build it into their environmental impact policies. 'I am a proud and distant grandfather who sits and watches the term become a serious issue of debate,' he says.

Listening to the constant chatter in the media, both on the news and feature pages, one could be forgiven for thinking that the argument over the importance of quality food and sustainable production has been won. Tim Lang agrees that there is some cause for optimism. 'I think the rise of the artisanal food producer is the articulation of the policy of choice,' he says. 'And there are signs that we really are trying to reconnect with our roots.'

But, he says, this is not grounds for complacency. 'My own view is that we're still sleepwalking into a shock. I think obesity is the health shock, healthcare costs because of obesity are the economic shock and climate change is the environmental shock. In the next few years the big issue will be food security, how we get what we need to eat. And I don't think we're paying anywhere near enough attention to that.'

It is a worrying forecast, but Tim Lang has a remarkable track for predicting where the food debate is going to go next. We ignore him at our peril. And that's exactly why we are proud to declare him the recipient of OFM 's lifetime achievement award.