Food for
Thought This Christmas
By Liz Barling, Food Ethics Council
At Christmas our thoughts turn towards friends and family, giving gifts and offering hospitality. A key part of the festivities is sharing food, celebrating the year that’s past, and anticipating what’s to come.
We’re encouraged to break this festive bread (and turkey, salmon and exotic fruit and vegetables) by sustained advertising campaigns in newspapers and on TV, whipping us into a frenzy of seasonal indulgence.
As environmental industry insiders, we know that the food we eat can have serious implications for the environment. Here at the Food Ethics Council we are working with government, food companies and third sector organisations to navigate through the difficult issues that arise from how our food is produced
The out-of-season vegetables stacked on the supermarket shelves at Christmas are often imported by air. They are responsible for greenhouse gas emissions, and can sequester crucial local resources such as land, water and food.
The turkey, ham and other meat on our Christmas day menus add to the UK’s collective output of GHGs - meat reared and eaten here accounts for 8% of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions. And eating meat is a thirsty business too. It takes 5,000 litres of water to produce the average amount of meat consumed by a person in the UK every day (compared to 2,000 litres for a vegetarian).
Air freighting fresh produce raises concerns about its contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs), and, consequently, to climate change. Consequently there have been calls to reduce the practice of flying food to fill supermarket shelves. Yet others argue that this reaction could cause harm to communities in poor countries who depend on horticultural exports. It’s a seemingly lose- lose situation.
What about the traditional smoked salmon? We all know that fish stocks are perilously low, and farmed fish can destroy the sea bed. There’s another dilemma staring
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balefully at us from our plates.
And finally, the amount of food we throw away is a crime. In Britain and America alone we throw away enough cereal-based food to lift 224 million people out of hunger. On average a British household throws away £xxx worth of food every year. You can bet some of that will be leftover Christmas dinner.
As consumers we are caught between a rock and a hard place, faced with some seemingly impossible choices. We juggle our budgets with our responsibility to the environment and the developing world. What is the right thing to do?
A report by the Food Ethics Council finds the total GHG emissions from air freight are fairly low. So although air freighted produce is very GHG intensive, there are other aspects of food production and processing that generate far more GHGs, and pulling out of developing world countries could harm poor people’s livelihoods.
Food businesses should instead be focusing on their own particular GHG ‘hot spots’, looking to improve the efficiency and planning of their import arrangements, and planning more effectively – and transparently - for lasting development partnerships in the countries they work with. The deeper questions raised by the airfreight controversy about the value and vulnerability of export- led approaches to international development also warrant serious attention.
The issue of water is another (Christmas) chestnut. Growing food is a thirsty business, but whether that matters depends on how and where it’s grown. Intensively reared animals are fed on soya and other commodity crops that require significant irrigation. And many salad vegetables are grown in water-scarce areas of the Mediterranean. This means we are in effect importing ‘embedded’ water in our turkeys and tomatoes.
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