Professor Tim Lang’s recent warning that the United Kingdom is woefully unprepared for food shocks should be read as a terminal diagnosis of neoliberal agricultural policy. Currently, the UK is only 54% food self-sufficient, a figure that pales in comparison to the 80% achieved by the Netherlands or 75% in Spain. This vulnerability is not an accident of geography; it is a direct consequence of a state system that has hardwired a dependency on a handful of global corporations to feed its population. As Lang noted at the National Farmers’ Union conference, the British state has glorified 'efficiency'—a euphemism for the just-in-time delivery models of agrifood capitalism—while ignoring the inherent fragility of such a system. In a world defined by climate volatility and the disruption of Middle Eastern supply chains, the lack of strategic stockpiling is a form of state negligence. The reliance on market mechanisms to ensure the survival of the citizenry is a gamble that the poor will inevitably lose first. While countries like the US and France maintain self-sufficiency as a pillar of national security, the UK has treated food as just another commodity to be outsourced. This 'vulnerability' is the price paid for decades of prioritizing corporate profits over community resilience. To secure the future, we must move away from the extractive logic of global markets and toward a model of food sovereignty that empowers local producers and treats the right to eat as a non-negotiable social contract.