Food-Waste Rebel

Remember a while back when we talked about Tristram Stuart and his campaigns to end food waste? He's been recently featured as a National Geographic 2014 Emerging Explorer, and has released an excellent new video. You can check it out here:

I'll be back soon to talk about the environmental impacts of cocoa and coffee production!

Intoxication Season at Kew Gardens

Last week I had the opportunity to visit Kew Gardens. For my overseas readers, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew were founded in 1759 and named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2003. The garden's mission is to "inspire and deliver science-based plant conservation world-wide, enhancing the quality of life". The site is home to numerous impressive greenhouses, different plant ecosystems and habitats, and a large number of seasonal exhibitions.

For my first visit at Kew Gardens, I went to see a very interesting exhibition called The Intoxication Season. The exhibition showcased the history behind intoxicating plants and fungi, and highlighted the ways in which plants can be used as both medicines and intoxicants. Throughout the garden, specific plants were indicated by a poison symbol, and information was provided on the ways they have historically been used as either medicines or intoxicants. In addition to the various displays throughout the gardens, guided tours were given, including the Dark Side of Plants Tour which I attended. The tour was delivered by one of the garden's excellent volunteers,  who brought the group around different parts of the garden unveiling the dangerous secrets hiding behind the exteriors of many beautiful plants. We talked about the celebrated and well-known effects of plants including Cofea (coffee), Theobroma cocoa (chocolate), Aconitum (wolfsbane), Papaver somniferum (opium), Artemisia absinthium (absinthe),  Ephedera (epinephrine), and Salvia officinalis (sage), among many others. 

The part of the tour that particularly struck me was the guide's emphasis on the fact that plants produce their intoxicating or medicinal properties for their own benefit - not for the benefit of humans or other animal species. Although these chemicals and compounds have been of great use to humankind for millennia, they were not particularly intended for our use, and above-all serve the plants themselves, often through defensive mechanisms. The guided tour ended at a greenhouse that was entirely devoted to The Intoxication Season, which housed some of the most mind-altering plant varieties, including Cannabis (marijuana), Coca (cocaine), Salvia divinatum (salvia), Agave (tequila), and many more.

Throughout the tour and my visit at Kew Gardens, I found that I had a lot of questions about these special plants, besides their particular mind-altering properties. It's great that we have been able to tap into the benefits of such truly remarkable plants - but what are the environmental consequences of our preference for certain species? How has the rapid expansion in demand for certain products affected the environment? How are these plants produced on large scales? In light of these unanswered questions, I will be devoting the next few blog posts here at Picnics Past & Present on the environmental impacts of the production of some of the mind-altering species I saw at Kew Gardens. I also plan to focus on some of my personal favourites - coffee and chocolate!

UN Climate Summit & Meat Free Mondays

There's certainly been lots going on in the climate change front over the last week. I find this extremely exciting, especially as a recent graduate in the climate change field. It's really wonderful to see that both individuals and international governments are taking climate change seriously, are pushing for action, and are acknowledging that it isn't a "far-away" problem. The world-wide demonstrations preceding the UN emergency Climate Summit in New York last weekend were truly inspiring - and it looks like governments have heard us. For those of you that aren't familiar with the 2014 UN Climate Change Summit, below is a short summary (a longer one can be found here on the UN website):

-The purpose of the summit was to "raise political momentum for a meaningful universal climate agreement in Paris 2015 and to galvanize transformative action in all countries to reduce emissions and build resilience to the adverse impacts of climate change".

-Leaders from government, business, and civil society were asked to build a global vision for low-carbon economic growth and to advance climate action via various pathways.

-The main points of discussion for the global vision on climate change were the following: convergence on a long-term vision; cutting emissions; moving markets and mobilizing money; pricing carbon; strengthening resilience; and mobilizing new coalitions.  

-100 Heads of State and Government attended the Summit.

What does all this climate change talk have to do with food? Well, as we've talked about in previous posts, the food industry is heavily intertwined in our complex climate change problem. On the one side, large-scale food production is a dominant greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions contributor, and therefore a major contributor to anthropogenic climate change (Vermeulen, 2012). On the other side, climate change threatens global food production through its negative effects such as drought and limiting water resources (IPCC, 2007). 

Something else really exciting happened this week. Ahead of the UN Climate Summit, Sir Paul McCartney released an original song, Meat Free Monday, in order to promote his campaign on the reduction of meat consumption to combat climate change.  You can listen to the song in the video below - I hope you'll enjoy it as much as I did! If you're interested in pledging your support for this campaign, you can do so here. 

Buddha Pears

Good afternoon dear readers,

I came across an interesting article today by Rebecca Rupp of the National Geographic's The Plate about pears shaped like baby buddhas. Yes, you heard me correctly, pears shaped like baby buddhas!

Pear shaped like a baby buddha (photo from the National Geographic)

A while back we talked about a National Geographic series, the Future of Food, which aims to investigate how food will change with increasing pressures such as climate change and growing global populations. This article on buddha pears is part of this series, despite its rather light and airy tone (in case you're wondering, the pears are shaped this way thanks to specially designed molds in which the pears are grown). However, the article isn't all about funny-looking fruit. The main message that Rupp is trying to convey is that food is routinely wasted because it doesn't meet society's aesthetic requirements. Rupp goes on to talk about regulations which only allow the sale of produce that conforms with certain aesthetic standards and what certain companies are doing to try to decrease the waste of "imperfect" produce.

Personally, I love it when I buy a bag of carrots to find a forked one, or cutting into a bunch of beets to find that one of them has two heads. On the whole, I don't tend to favour fruits and vegetables which seem more perfect than others. I was wondering how you feel about what your fruits and veggies look like? Do you prefer consuming vegetables and fruits that all fit the same mold, so to speak? I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Food Demand & Climate Change

Have you noticed the food headlines (e.g. here and here) of late? A new study published by engineers, plant scientists, and food specialists from the Universities of Cambridge and Aberdeen used a transparent, data-driven model to demonstrate that projected food demand will drive agricultural expansion, contributing to critical environmental issues such as the loss of biodiversity, climate change and pollution. The authors, Bajželj et al. (2014), warn that it is absolutely essential to find ways to achieve food security without promoting the negative side effects of agricultural expansion and increased greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

Cattle livestock. Source: The Guardian (2014)

Bajželj et al. (2014)'s study aimed to estimate the environmental implications of the projected increase in food demand by 2050. They were also interested in quantifying the extent to which measures including sustainable intensification and demand reduction could reverse these negative effects. The authors' approach was to use a model of the current global land system based on emprical data, with 2009 as a base year. The model included 2 main components, namely an analysis of land distribution leading to the allocation of land-use change, natural ecosystem losses, and GHG emissions, and a map of agricultural biomass flows. Based on their analyses, the authors concluded that an increased demand for inefficient pathways of food supply such as livestock products causes the food production system to become larger and increasingly inefficient. 

The authors then went on to investigate 6 future scenarios based on agricultural intensification, waste reduction and dietary preferences. Their results indicated that increases in agricultural expansion and agriculture-related GHG emissions were only prevented when significant elements of demand reduction were included. Bajželj et al. (2014) suggest the reduction of meat consumption and an overall improvement of diet as potential solutions to avoid reaching dangerous levels of climate change.

We touched on meat consumption in previous posts (e.g. here and here), and saw that demand for animal products has been increasing in recent decades. Based on the evidence presented in scientific studies such as the one described above, would you be willing to decrease your intake of livestock products to take action on climate change? I, for one, am certainly convinced!

I'd love to hear your thoughts on meat consumption and climate change, or any aspect of the food production system at all. Feel free to share in the comments section below.