Blog: Public diners - back to the future?

Only a few of the audience had ever heard of the public diners called British Restaurants at our recent Understanding Scotland Economy Tracker event. The concept is a stark contrast to the approach of food banks, giving people emergency food to take home, and which are now increasingly focussed on foods that don’t need cooking as people struggle to afford energy prices. Emergency food banks are a relatively new concept in the UK but public diners are not.

Why are the David Hume Institute interested in this?

Because the nutrition of our nation affects the health of our workforce and poor nutrition affects the public purse by increasing NHS costs. Our economy will not thrive if the population is under-nourished.

Anna Chworow from Nourish Scotland has more food for thought on the role of public diners and the issue of food, nutrition, public health and the economy:

It is a pub question waiting to happen: Which state sponsored a chain of 2,000+ restaurants serving a nutritionally balanced, price-capped menu to the general public? Russia? China? Venezuela? The correct answer is the UK under a Conservative Prime Minister.

British Restaurants operated across Britain during 1940’s and 50’s. They were state-subsidised, affordable public diners, serving healthy meals to communities across the country. What started as ‘communal feeding centres’ was quickly rebranded thanks to an intervention by Winston Churchill who wrote to the Minister of Food, Lord Woolton in 1941: I hope the term “Communal Feeding Centres” is not going to be adopted. It is an odious expression suggestive of Communism and the workhouse. I suggest you call them “British Restaurants”. Everybody associates the word restaurant with a good meal.

Churchill’s intervention set a standard and a level of ambition for these new public institutions. Far from being soup kitchens, they were described as ‘centres of civilisation’, their walls decorated with bespoke murals and at times art loaned from national collections. They operated with state-support and through a combination of volunteer and local authority effort. While they received a subsidy for start-up costs, they also had a strong economic model which used economies of scale: centralised kitchens produced some of the food off-site and many restaurants served 100+ meals a day. In 1943 there were 46 British Restaurants operating across West Scotland. There were six in Dundee alone.

Is it time to revisit this idea to meet the needs of 21st century Britain?

The most recent David Hume Institute’s quarterly Understanding Scotland Economy tracker, developed by Diffley Partnership and Charlotte Street Partners, shows clearly how the need to cut costs is affecting people’s ability to make healthy choices. Last month over half of us made choices about food based on price rather than health. One in four reported buying fewer fresh fruits and vegetables and/or choosing foods that need little or no cooking. It’s clear our current social infrastructure fails to protect our nutritional needs. This failure catches up with us downstream – and we pay for it from NHS’s budgets.

But even if affordability of food was not a barrier to making healthier choices we know that our ultra-processed, veg-poor, industrialised food environments make it extremely difficult. We need places which will make it easy to enjoy a nourishing meal, and where taste and health go hand in hand. And this is about more than calories and nutrients. Research has shown dining in company is key to us eating well. Yet, one in three of us regularly eat alone. The public diner is exactly the type of new social institution that could help us address these issues.

The British Restaurants might have started as an anti-poverty response but the raising of ambition led to them gaining a broader appeal. It was an easy way to eat well at a time when women’s labour was suddenly concentrated outside the home. The public diners took care of meal planning, shopping, cooking and washing up – and even served up a decent pudding in a convivial atmosphere.

If the idea of state subsidised public dining sounds utopian, it’s worth considering the state’s support for other areas of our lives. From GP surgeries, hospitals and clinics to outdoor gyms, parks, public libraries, museums and galleries, although the public sector is struggling it still invests in facilities designed to support our physical and mental health and collective enjoyment. 

Given the huge cost of health problems related to unhealthy diets, the question isn’t really why we should we invest in state-supported public diners. It is: why shouldn’t we?

END

 A version of this blog was first published on the Nourish Scotland website in July 2023.

Further reading about the history of British Restaurants

Read the Understanding Scotland Economy Tracker research August 2023