Category: FOOD-SUSTAINABLE_EATING_MN NEWS_ARCHIVE

Harry Wright’s new range of smartly packaged seasonings looks like the sort of artisanal fare found at any foodie market or upmarket deli. But they have a distinctive ingredient: ground, roasted crickets.

Michael Lavin, founder and managing partner of Chicago based, Germin8 Ventures, a purpose-driven VC firm that invests in companies fixing the global food system, shared his thoughts with us on the future of food production, with a particular focus on the rise of the plant-based foods and cultured meat sectors in the US.

Researchers at Aalto University in Finland have calculated that about 95% of current crop production takes place in areas they define as “safe climatic space”, or conditions where temperature, rainfall and aridity fall within certain bounds.

There is increasing acceptance that worldwide diets—especially of majority meat-eating countries—need to change to fall in line with global sustainability goals. This is reflected in a rising wave of dietary guidance on the best foods to eat, and which ones to avoid, for the sake of our own health and the planet’s. One prominent example is the EAT-Lancet reference diet, released in 2019, which made broad recommendations that consumers should switch animal-based products for plant-based foods, to reduce our collective dietary footprint.

“Choosing a better, more sustainable diet is one of the main ways people can improve their health and help protect the environment,” says Michael Clark, PhD, a researcher at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom and lead author of an article published in November 2019 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The article explores the links between food, environment, and human health.

Treehugger has been writing about the problems of meat forever, we have been pitching vegetarian and vegan diets for years as a way of reducing one’s carbon footprint, and we keep writing posts about reducing our intake of meat. But it is a hard sell; as Bill Gates writes in his new book,

People in the Sid Valley have responded enthusiastically to the many initiatives to increase biodiversity in our patch. But did you know that we can vote with our forks and eat our way to a cleaner, greener environment?

We love to eat, and we love nature. We need to eat well to keep healthy, and we need to be part of a healthy ecosystem. So can we eat our way to biodiversity? Yes we can, according to a new UN-backed report from the Chatham House Energy and Resources Programme: ‘Food System Impacts on Biodiversity Loss’ www.chathamhouse.org – but only if we reform our whole system of producing and consuming food.

The Hershey Company’s new commitment to ending deforestation includes a crackdown on any cocoa supplier who breaches the policy, which may lead to suspension or complete removal from the company’s supply chain.

The No Deforestation program was announced in line with the chocolate giant’s targets to reduce its global emissions in line with the Paris Climate Agreement to limit global temperature rise to 1.5°C.

RESEARCH SUGGESTS SWITCHING TO A PLANT-BASED DIET is one way a person can help reduce the impacts of climate change.

However, the U.S. dietary guidelines — nutritional advice published every five years by the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services — recommend “core elements” of a healthy diet that include dairy and various proteins.