Brexit was never going to be good for food. The EU, for all its faults, has been progressive on food safety and labelling, on safeguarding local food traditions, on environmental protection, on GM regulation and on animal welfare. The Common Agricultural Policy has been stubbornly misdirected towards
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A few miles West of Dundee is the Intelligent Growth Solutions’ (IGS) vertical farm, on the James Hutton Institute campus. On the outside, it looks like a square steel structure, ten-meters-high, in a muddy field. Inside, there are four ‘towers’, each of which potentially contain 50 growing
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As the number of people struggling to access food has increased with this crisis, the experience of food insecurity has become much more widespread. Being able to access food safely and with dignity is now on the minds of nearly everyone. This has brought many more people into
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it is concerning that other significant emergency funding packages have fallen back on models of charitable food aid rather than providing direct entitlements. So we need to talk about the UK governments’ obligation to respect human rights, including the right to food during these challenging circumstances.
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At the beginning of the coronavirus lockdown, supermarket shelves were emptying out faster than we wanted them to, and many of us turned our attention to our smaller producers and retailers. The demand on these smaller sources suddenly rocketed. Amongst them is a diverse network of small
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Pete Ritchie, Executive Director of Nourish Scotland, is also the co-owner of Whitmuir Organic Farm, shop and café. Today he writes from his perspective as a local food business owner during the initial weeks of the Covid-19 crisis. Even though he’s already retired twice, Robert was at Shotts
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Thousands of people have died, and thousands more are bereaved. Jobs are lost, businesses destroyed, hopes and plans in tatters. But it could have been even worse. What if the shops had actually run out of food, not just delivery slots? They didn’t. The massive stocking up,
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It’s been a long time since we have collectively been so reminded of the importance of food. In recent days food has captured our imagination not only because it is one of the basic human needs. It is also often a vehicle for human connection, and as
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As more information has emerged about how coronavirus (COVID-19) will affect day-to-day lives, many of us have felt nervous, scared and confused about how we and our families will cope with the restrictions on our movement and potential health problems that will come. For many, this has
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One of the first lessons we’ve had to learn in this crisis is that running out of food is not a problem of supply. It’s a problem of distribution. £1bn worth of food that would otherwise be on the shelves, is in people’s cupboards and fridges. Meanwhile,
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