Eating Better

Reflecting on the defeat of the Food Bill in Wales, we look towards future opportunities to prioritise healthy and sustainable food

Eating Better alliance member Feedback recently attended the annual general meetings (AGMs) of two major banks to question their continued investment in industrial livestock. Feedback’s Christina O’Sullivan explains that banks need to end their support of industrial meat production.

For a decade and a half the Kindling Trust has been playing a part in reshaping farming and how our food is grown to make it more accessible to communities and reduce its impact on the planet.

Eating Better together with Healthy Food Healthy Planet hosted a panel at the international Extinction or Regeneration conference with representatives from Italy, Spain, Poland to hear experiences of civil society collaboration across Europe.

Ahead of the international Extinction or Regeneration conference, to which Eating Better was a partner, we invited representatives from 7 European countries to share and learn from each other, nurture relationships and explore successes and challenges.

Plant and Share Month has become a much-loved staple of the springtime calendar running from 22nd April to 20th May 2023. The campaign, run by Eating Better alliance member Soil Association’s Food for Life programme, grew from a desire to make growing plants and food accessible and easy to learn about, bringing together communities up and down the country to grow together. During a cost of living crisis that has seen supplies of fruit and vegetables dwindle in the supermarkets and the cost of meat and dairy rising, growing your own herbs, salads and vegetables can be a great way of eating healthily and sustainably.

Stop Food Waste Day  aims to highlight how valuable food is and how reducing waste can save money, time and the environment. The UK alone produces around 6.6 million tonnes of waste a year just at the household level, accounting for 25 million tonnes of CO2 emissions - 5.4% of the UK’s overall emissions.

We are delighted to announce that The Woodland Trust is joining the Eating Better alliance.

At Eating Better, we are reflecting on what food justice looks like to us. We are starting to critically examine the role we play in transformation towards sustainable, healthy, just food systems. 

Our recent report ‘Sourcing Better Checked Out’ found a lack of effective sourcing policies to support local biodiversity in farmed landscapes. While many retailers had topline statements of ambition, there is almost no reporting on biodiversity actions or indicators throughout their meat and dairy supply chains.

Maddy Haughton- Boakes, Campaigns Advisor at the Changing Markets Foundation introduces their new report ‘Feeding us Greenwash’, which lifts the green veil and highlights the extent of greenwashing by food companies and how consumers respond to these environmental claims.

It’s World Pulse Day next month, which is why in the lead up to it I am supporting Eating Better’s, Anything Is 'Pulse-able’ campaign which highlights the power of pulses. It’s World Pulses Day and, “so what?” many might say. It seems that every day brings another ‘something day’, many with associated marketing and sales spin. I suspect consumers may be becoming immune and fatigued by these special ‘days’, and I can empathise strongly with that stance. All that said, please believe me when I say, World Pulses Day is different. The first indicator of this should be when you ask yourself, and you should: who established World Pulses Day, and why?

Bread n Butter is a Barnet-based social enterprise that teaches the basic life skills of cooking and sustainable, healthy, independent living. We spoke to them about how the cost of living crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic have changed their approach to working in their community and the positive impact that healthy eating can have.

Eating Better alliance member First Steps Nutrition Trust shows how pulses are great first foods for infants from 6 months.

New campaign from Eating Better aims to show how eating pulses can save you money and improve your health

Eating Better alliance member Sustain publishes new report on how UK councils are tackling the climate and nature emergency through food.

Ecologist and author, Carl Safina; scholar and activist, Dr Vandana Shiva; Director at the Centre for Food Policy, City, University of London, Professor Corinna Hawkes; writer, activist and academic, Professor Raj Patel; and UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Professor Olivier De Schutter, among top speakers announced.

How Hubbub used football as a hook to inspire fans to eat less meat  

Food service and food retail greatly influence how we shop and what we eat and holding them to account is key to shifting the dial to get us all eating better. Using the sandwich sector as a proxy, Eating Better tracked and benchmarked retailer commitment to sustainable eating by examining changes in their sandwich offer. Our new report “Sandwiches Unwrapped 2022” looks at changes in vegetarian and plant-based sandwich ranges against meat-based ones.

Ensuring everyone has access to a healthy diet that doesn’t cost the earth is a critical priority. The Food Strategy falls desperately short on effective, evidence-based measures to achieve this.

Eating Better regularly conducts public attitude surveys to take the temperature of where people are on the journey to shifting to sustainable diets with less meat and dairy and more plant-based foods. We examine what the trends are and what the barriers are to change. This year’s analysis also took a deep dive into food-to-go to find out what’s happening in that sector and if sandwiches, a British staple, are still popular.

As the UK’s civil society was coming to terms with the lack of ambition of its government’s National Food Strategy, which according to the Committee for Climate Change “will do precious little to tackle emissions from agriculture which is now one of the most serious contributors to climate change”, alliance member Changing Markets launched a new study looking at how much different measures can contribute to methane reductions in agriculture. The study confirms that policies promoting healthier diets could lead to the biggest methane cuts in the EU. Blog for Eating Better by Nusa Urbancic, Campaigns Director at the Changing Markets Foundation

The government has published its first food strategy in 75 years, in response to the independent review by its lead food adviser, Henry Dimbleby. Although the government has accepted some of the review’s recommendations, there is still a lot missing from the document, in particular the lack of acknowledgement on the need to reduce meat production and consumption to tackle the climate, nature and health crises.

The Nature Friendly Farming Network’s (NFFN) first annual Nature Friendly Farming Week (16-20 May) celebrated nature-friendly farming for five full days, where nature-friendly farmers took part in daily themes to share their experiences online using the daily hashtags.