Articles

‘Bioengineering’ nutrients into our food – a promise which so far has failed to materialise – distracts us from real issues of soil degradation, climate change, poor diet choices and lack of political will to support a right to food.

2019 has begun with questions about food. How will we eat in the future? What is the healthiest diet for people and planet? And who do we trust to decide this for us? These questions took centre stage over the last week as a new report, Food in the Anthropocene, was published. The report, compiled […]

The Scottish Government has just voted against a proposal to allow mechanical dredging of kelp forests off the coast of the Western isles. The controversial proposal to industrialise Scotland’s natural kelp forests has been in the pipeline for many years. Marine Biopolymers, the company behind it, argued that the dredging and processing of the kelp […]

There is no question that our food system is broken. The way we farm, the way we process, sell, buy and eat food has become an exercise in a polluted environment and polluted, undernourished bodies. Against this backdrop the word ‘organic’ is sometimes waived like a flag – or worn like a magic cloak – […]

Last week a San Francisco jury supported a school groundskeeper’s claim that his terminal non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma was caused by regular exposure to the weedkiller Roundup (the active ingredient of which is glyphosate). Dewayne Johnson was awarded $289 (£225) million in damages, which was an extraordinary sum and not something anybody could have predicted. More predictable […]

An experiment in feeding farmed salmon GM feed is underway in the highlands of Scotland – and you should be worried. The BBC news, naturally, was the first to trumpet the benefits of the GMO experiment, claiming that the aim of the trial was to increase the nutritional value of the fish and that a […]

How we talk about food dictates how we perceive it, how we respond to it, buy it, cook and eat it, but increasingly also how we produce it. Most chefs and many others in food service hold the notion of ‘provenance’ as important. It’s regarded as near synonymous with notions of ‘truth’, ‘integrity’ and ‘honesty’. […]

Last week EU Member States have backed a proposal from the European Commission to ban all outdoor uses of three neonicotinoid insecticides. As we have written extensively over the years, neonicotinoids, or neonics, have been implicated in the widespread death of bees around the world, including the UK’s population of wild bees. The ban has not come […]

As a nation, the UK is eating more fish than ever before. That is, potentially, a boon for health, but there are problems too. Much of our fish is being caught by destructive methods which are devastating populations of wild fish. What is more, our oceans are a mire of pollutants, many of which accumulate […]

We inhabit these bodies of ours for seven or more decades. We drag them around – or they drag us around. We take care of them, or not. We think we know them; and even if we don’t, we think others – like doctors and scientists – know them. But the truth is that the […]