Our food system is at a breaking point—designed to prevent famine in another era, it now fuels obesity, ill health, and the climate crisis. Author and global nutrition expert Stuart Gillespie exposes how our food system, rooted in colonialism and dominated by powerful corporations, has spiraled into a mechanism of harm.

But it’s not all bad news. Gillespie celebrates transformative case studies and grassroots movements that offer hope for a better food future. Drawing on real-world successes, he highlights solutions to nourish both people and the planet.

Stuart Gillespie comes to The Conduit, led in conversation by public health researcher Dolly van Tulleken, to explore the urgent need for transforming how we grow, distribute, and consume food, highlighting the intersection of health, climate, and justice while reimagining a system that works for everyone.

Speakers

Stuart Gillespie has been fighting to transform our dysfunctional food system for the past forty years. Stuart worked with a range of UN agencies across the world, before joining the International Food Policy Research Institute in 1999. Here he founded the Regional Network on AIDS, Livelihoods and Food Security, the Transform Nutrition research consortium, a flagship Agriculture for Nutrition and Health programme and the Stories of Change initiative, amongst a host of other interventions in public food and nutrition policy. Stuart’s new book ‘Food Fight: From Plunder and Profit to People and Planet’ is published by Canongate on 10 April 2025. His newsletter, ‘Food Fight Files’, tackles the political and commercial drivers of food injustice and malnutrition and what can and should be done about them.

stuartgillespie.substack.com | @stuartgillespie.bsky.social

Dolly van Tulleken is a policy consultant and visiting researcher at Cambridge University’s MRC Epidemiology Unit where she completed her PhD and postdoctoral position specialising in government policy processes and the history of government policy on obesity and food-related ill health in England. Her research has been published in leading journals such as The Milbank Quarterly, BMJ Open, PLOS One, and Public Health Nutrition. Dolly’s expertise lies in analysing policy effectiveness and identifying the mechanisms that drive meaningful public health change. In 2024, she co-authored Nourishing Britain: A Political Manual for Improving the Nation’s Health with Henry Dimbleby, which contained practical political insights about food-related health policy from 20 prime ministers, health secretaries and other senior politicians. Prior to her PhD and consultancy work, Dolly led the childhood obesity and grassroots sport research at the Centre for Social Justice think tank and was a parliamentary researcher in the House of Lords. Dolly co-founded 50:50 Parliament’s cross-party #AskHerToStand campaign which helps women in the UK get selected and elected. She is Vice President of ex-offenders employment charity Tempus Novo and an ambassador of women military veterans charity Salute Her.