Assembly Speaker, 17 January
Sean Turner, Policy Officer for School Food Matters
Our speaker, Sean Turner, organises policies for campaigning the government to improve school food. He works with the CEE (The Climate and Ecology Bill, promoted under the name Climate and Ecological Emergency Bill, is a private member's bill of the Parliament of the United Kingdom aimed at tackling the climate crisis and environmental disaster) who has joined forces with MPs, brands and companies to help with bettering our school food with science based approaches.
The goal of the campaign is fundamentally about minimising the effect of disastrous climate change and Mr Turner passionately argues for it.
Sean gave us some really shocking facts about the way food impacts the ecology: for instance, the emissions of the food industry are ten times the amount of flying, so it’s important we address these massive issues. The problems of ecology and the climate are linked and to solve one we have to tackle the other. A third of all food is wasted and reducing this will reduce the emissions caused by the production and disposal. Moreover, a shocking 70% of food is wasted in the household. Our current methods of agriculture are ineffective and damaging our planet and the campaign is attempting to deal with this issue in the proposed bill.
12,000 years ago humans were a small percentage of biodiversity on this planet and during our development of species we have significantly diminished the diversity of our planet. The reduction of biodiversity destroys the functions of many plants and animals and makes a more fragile and weak ecosystem that can’t deal with climate change and its effects.
The government needs to respond to growing concerns about the food industry and the treatment of nature and come up with solutions as the ecosystems have partially adapted to our farming. How we use the land in this country, which is 86% is for pasture and the same amount is used for golf courses as we do for housing, 40% of cereals are used for feeding animals and lots of land is used for animal husbandry, all of which could be put to much better use such as carbon capture which is for us is expanding peatland which currently uses only 3% of land.The most effective land use for peat bogs is the land least economical for sheep and cattle and switching to planting foodstuffs rather than pasture we can more effectively use the land. Sean also spoke about how we should be eating better and society should promote the consumption of less and better sourced meat, or think about eating no, or at least a lot less, meat.
Many questions were asked about the effect of how we eat. Some of the most interesting questions were about the viability of methods to combat climate change. Some examples are:
What is your opinion on lab grown meat?
It seems less economically viable but if it becomes more so and people are happy to eat it, then that would be better.
How does fishing affect the climate?
We should be concerned about overfishing and aquaculture is important and farmed fish produce a lot of waste.
What’s your take on food miles?
Reducing them and buying locally isn’t always the solution but certainly reducing meat consumption is a good idea.
All in all, it was an eye-opening assembly and gave us all lots to think about in terms of our own eating habits and the potential effects on the environment.
Hassan Y13