Vegans, vegetarians and Muslims should receive special food rations if disaster strikes Britain, according to a food crisis expert.

Prof Tim Lang said people needed to eat familiar food in times of shock, and the government must cater for dietary requirements.

An emeritus professor of food policy at the University of London, Prof Lang is an adviser to the National Preparedness Commission, an emergency planning committee set up in the wake of the Covid pandemic.

"If you want people to carry on not being in psychological shock, they need to have things that they're familiar with and comfortable with, not to experience the new," he told an audience at the Hay Festival in Wales. "They have just experienced a lot of things - explosions, energy outage or whatever it is - and you want them to have things that they know they can eat.

"You don't want people used to a halal diet to eat a non-halal diet, for example, or vegetarians and vegans to have to eat meat. You've got to have some flexibility about what is normal now. It's very different to 1940."

Prof Lang shared the Hay stage with Sir David Omand, a former director of GCHQ and the author of How To Survive A Crisis: Lessons in Resilience and Avoiding Disaster.

Sir David warned that Britain was more vulnerable than ever to an attack on its infrastructure, saying: "Historically, crises have arisen and the human race has survived.

"But what's different now is that we're more vulnerable. If you've got complex systems, they are very difficult to fix when things start to go wrong. You just need to think about cyber: would you have guessed that Marks & Spencer would have £300 million taken off their bottom line by a ransomware attack?

"So we are more vulnerable and we will struggle at the moment if some of these things actually happen. You just need to look at extreme weather events, never mind what could happen in the longer term."

Differing diets

Prof Lang said planning by other European countries, including Germany and Switzerland, was "getting into the minutiae about different diets, different ethnicities, different income groups and so on".

Crisis planning should take into account what people eat, he said, adding: "What are your fears? What are your habits? What are you used to? What do you consider 'normal' food?"

In the Second World War, the nation accepted the basic foodstuffs distributed as part of rationing. But Prof Lang said: "Now, Britain's favourite food for children is pizza. It's a different world today."

He suggested that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) had failed to grasp the importance of Britain's diverse eating habits.

"Getting prepared is about anticipating and part of that has got to mean anticipating the public. You can't assume Defra knows what the public is doing, or thinks, or its diversity," he said.

"I want some new committees, and existing committees like the scientific advisory committee on nutrition, to actually analyse British diets and say 'ok, we need to have different dietary advice for different conditions'."

He also criticised the previous government for issuing basic advice in May last year that every household should stockpile three days worth of unperishable food.

"This made me tear what hair I had out, because we need to think very carefully about what sort of food in what sort of circumstances," he said. "Can you cook? Maybe the electricity system has just gone. Let's think through the detail."

Food storage concerns

Prof Lang said the absence of food storage in Britain would be keenly felt in the event of a crisis.

"Britain feeds itself from nine companies who account for 94.5 per cent of all food purchased," he said. "Those companies are very competitive, very powerful, they control long supply chains which have all been managed in an increasingly integrated way to get rid of storage.

"They go literally from the farm through to that point when you buy it in the supermarket, and your bill is re-ordering the food. They've spent 50 years, the logistics industry, getting rid of storage.

"What if it had been Tesco [hit by a cyber attack], not M&S? Tesco sells nearly a third of all food. If that goes down..."

Sir David referred to the "paradox of warning", when a known threat is looming but there is no political impetus to solve it until it is too late.

He said: "There is a terrible phenomenon which is that we don't actually think this will happen because it's our policy that it shouldn't happen. This is my explanation of Oct 7, when Hamas attacked Israel. They weren't expecting it, it was a surprise, because in the policy the Israeli government was following, it couldn't happen because that wasn't the policy.

"You can think yourself into hubris, complacency... and my worry is that we are rather complacent, and we'll get the wake-up call when suddenly we flick the switch and the lights don't come on because of some cyber attack or Russian attack or whatever it might be."

Sir David said planning must also take into account "the psychological resilience of the public" in the event of a crisis, and expressed doubt that Gen Z or Gen Alpha could cope as well as older people.

He asked: "Is this generation or the upcoming generation more resilient than our generation was? You'll get two views but my hunch is probably a bit less, unless the youngsters have actually been abroad and done aid work or whatever it might be. When bad things happen, they're going to feel it more."