Caroline Walker (food campaigner)

Early life

Caroline Walker was born in Hampshire and educated at Cheltenham Ladies College. In 1972, she graduated with a degree in Biology from Queen Elizabeth College and then did a postgraduate degree in Human Nutrition. Her MSc thesis in 1978 was on the relationship between poverty and food, which she 'knew nothing about at the time'.

Early career

In 1980, after a time working as an editor at Elsevier Scientific Publishing in Amsterdam, Walker started work at the Dunn Clinical Nutrition Centre in Cambridge, working on nutritional problems in the community. Her work at the Dunn Center included a field study designed to see whether high blood pressure was linked with high salt consumption, for which Walker experimented on herself, adding sodium chloride and lithium to her diet. She then embarked on a critical review of the state of the scientific literature on diet and the major Western diseases in Europe, starting with heart disease, whose findings would inform her work for the remainder of her life.

From 1983 to 1986 she worked as a community nutritionist for City and Hackney Health Authority, in charge of the heart and stroke prevention programme. Meanwhile, she had embarked on a career as a polemicist and writer, publicising the effects of poor diet on health.

The Food Scandal

In 1984, Walker co-authored with Geoffrey Cannon, who would later become her husband, The Food Scandal: What's Wrong with the British Diet and How to Put it Right. The Food Scandal was a bestselling book that disputed the Department of Health's official statement (from 1981) that "Nutrition in Britain is generally good". The background to the book was the NACNE (National Advisory Committee on Nutrition Education) report on the British diet. NACNE was a committee of doctors and nutritionists commissioned by the British government to produce a report on food and health in the U.K. The report was delayed for two and a half years, thanks to lobbying from the food industry, though its existence became public knowledge in 1983. When it finally appeared, the message was that the British would be much healthier if their diet contained less fat and sugar.

The Food Scandal took the findings of the NACNE report and popularised them for a general audience. Prefiguring Michael Pollan, Walker and Cannon argued that the "basic message about food and health" could be stated in one sentence: "For good health, eat whole, fresh food; and prefer food of vegetable origin." The book pointed out how far the British diet in 1984 departed from this ideal, noting for example that since the 1950s the British ate half as much porridge and twice as much packaged breakfast cereal. They also noted that the British ate a "miserable 2 1/2 ounces of fresh fruit" per day and just 4 ounces of fresh vegetables. "Think what that might look like: the odd onion, a couple of carrots, a few sprouts." The Food Scandal also exposed adulterations, such as the addition of water to sausages and bacon; and exposed the prevalence of mechanically recovered meat in the British food supply.

Later career

In his biography of Caroline Walker her husband Geoffrey Cannon summarised some of the work she did in the brief years that remained after The Food Scandal:

In less than a year, between July 1985 and April 1986, the enlarged edition of The Food Scandal was published; she was advisor to the BBC TV Food and Health campaign, and also to Granada TV and Thames TV, for a total of over thirty nationally networked programmes; wrote or co-wrote six booklets most of which accompanied television series, requested by a total of half a million viewers; was a Woman of the Year; advised and guided the Coronary Prevention Group, the London Food Commission and New Health magazine; co-founded the Food Additives Campaign Team, wrote a chapter for Additives: Your Complete Survival Guide, and shared the Periodical Publishers' Association prize for Campaign of the Year. Yet she also lectured up and down the country, often to small groups, and wrote any letters of encouragement to people who heard her and asked her for advice.

The Caroline Walker Trust

In January 1985 Walker was diagnosed with bowel cancer; by 1987, her condition worsened. Towards the end of her life, she talked about a trust to be set up in her name to continue her work. The Caroline Walker Trust's charitable work now includes producing reports on nutritional guidelines, giving awards to those who seek to help public health through good food (recipients of a Caroline Walker Award have included Joanna Blythman, Sheila Dillon and Sophie Grigson) and funding an annual keynote lecture on some aspect of public health.