The absence of adequate food policy in England reflects a wider culture in which most of the population has been disconnected from food production for a very long time.

There is a maddeningly persistent view in the UK that caring about healthy food is snobbish or middle-class.

(Witness the rage that greeted Jamie Oliver when he dared to try to improve the quality of school meals in 2005.)

England is far from the only country where responsibility for food policy is spread across multiple departments.

In South Africa, for example, food policy is splintered across 15 different departments.

But one of the big differences is that South Africa also has a Department of Cooperative Governance, whose role is to coordinate food polices across all the departments at a local and national level.

In 2019, South Africa was ranked as the most effective government in the world for its commitment to tackling hunger and undernutrition by the Hunger and Nutrition Commitment Index.

Under South African policy, ensuring adequate food for the population is seen as such an urgent priority that nutrition has its own separate budget line.

Compare and contrast this with the UK, where hunger is still not generally recognised as an issue.

In England, there is not a single department assigned lead responsibility for hunger, despite the fact that, in 2018, the Food and Agriculture Organisation found that there were more than 2.2 million people in the UK in a state of food insecurity.

(The 2021 figures are undoubtedly higher).

Last winter, for the first time in 70 years, Unicef stepped in to feed hungry children in the UK.

Yet Parsons reported that the government continues to see hunger as an overseas issue.

If England has fragmented food policies, it is partly because this is a country that does not recognise how much food matters.

In modern western societies with an apparently abundant food supply, treating food as trivial is a common mindset, as historian Paul Freedman shows in his short new polemic Why Food Matters.

Effective food policies have a better chance of taking root in countries with long-established cultures of cooking, where it is normal for families to gather around a table every day.

One example is Brazil, where school canteens are obliged to source 30% of their ingredients from local family farms.

In 2014, Brazil totally rewrote the script on nutrition policy when the department of health issued new food-based nutrition guidelines urging Brazilians to avoid ultra-processed food and to eat more freshly produced food.

At the time, these guidelines were unlike any other nutrition policy in the world, although similar policies have since been adopted by other countries including Ecuador, Peru and Canada.

When I asked Geoffrey Cannon, a British researcher who helped design the Brazilian nutrition guidelines, why Brazilian food policy is so much more ambitious than that in England, he pointed to the prevailing food culture.

In the Catholic tradition, Brazil is still largely family-based and therefore family meals are normal.

Even when people move away from home to the cities, they can still buy cheap home-style food at per quilo restaurants selling unpretentious food priced by weight.