As part of London Climate Action Week Summit I attended The Intersection of Food, Technology, Investment and the Climate Crisis by Food Tank. I was invited to be on a panel discussing 'making sustainable food available to everyone'. I was joined by Adele Jones, Executive Director at Sustainable Food Trust, Stefan Descheemaeker, CEO of Nomad Foods and Tim Stephenson, district manager of Compass at Google London.
Food Tank did a brilliant job of organising an afternoon full of thought provoking talks and discussion panels from such a diverse range of people with differing ideas of how to best tackle the big climate questions.
Attending these events make me realise just how important it is that farmers need to be a part of the discussion. After all, we are the people who know our land better than anyone else and we work hard to do what is best for it whilst producing food. It's so tempting to stay within groups of like minded people but this means we can be talking into an echo chamber - although certainly we do need to keep up those connections (eg Groundswell & other industry gatherings). It is only by appearing at these events and putting ourselves out of our comfort zone that we begin to extend the conversation.
It was so encouraging to have such lovely discussions after the talks by people who clearly respect what farmers do. So often in recent years it feels like there are too many obstacles against farmers, but by continuing the work many of us are doing - farming with nature to produce the best quality food possible - we can prove that we are a very necessary part of this country. It's becoming increasingly important that we hold onto our values as words such as 'regenerative', among many others, get thrown around and can lose their true meaning.
Other panels included 'the right to food, health and the climate crisis', which contained another farmer, Holly from Horner Farm who truly champions what farming with nature is all about.
It was great to hear within Lord Deben's opening talk about well managed livestock being a massive part of the answer to climate change. Later on, Neil Fletcher presented Nomad Food's research into increasing the freezer temperature by 3 degrees celsius and the huge carbon emission saving this would make.
There were presentations on both lab grown meat and vertical farming. These are the kind of future visions which worry me. In the quest to find the solution to the climate problems we, as humans, can forget that nature is pretty good at dealing with these issues. The more we move away from it, the more we lose sight of what its natural cycles have been doing successfully for many thousands or millions of years.
Jack Bobo from the University of Nottingham brought up the completely (or seemingly) common sense point about planting trees or rewilding areas of farmland, something Welsh farmers especially are facing at the moment, will only result in the country importing more food. Is this truly better for the environment?
Celebrity chef Asma Khan was a great finale to the event with her no nonsense talk about how chefs need to do more to buy local, seasonal and sustainable produce.
Photography credit to Shai Dolev Photography and Food Tank