Spaghetti Frittata from Sussex Surplus

Sussex Surplus is Foodrise social enterprise taking fresh and surplus food in danger of being wasted and transforming it into soup. 

Cooking the right amount of pasta can be tricky but this Italian classic is a great way of using up leftover spaghetti. If your leftovers have a lot of sauce on already you may want to stir in a handful of breadcrumbs to help your frittata firm up.

The recipe below can be used for up to 4 people, use a small frying pan for 1-2 people or a large one for 3-4. For chefs and community kitchens, this recipe scales up really well and can be cooked in catering size frying pans very easily.

Ingredients:

eggs, 1 per person

leftover spaghetti, 100g per person

1 tbsp olive oil

1 tbsp butter (or use 2 tbsp oil)

salt and pepper

Optional: fresh herbs, peas, cherry tomatoes,  cheese, olives, chilli flakes, pesto…. Or anything else you like to eat with pasta!

• Break your eggs into a large bowl and whisk well.
• Season well with salt and pepper and then add any other ingredients and flavourings you are using. My favourite is to use a lot of fresh basil, olives and a little cheese… experiment with what you have to hand and your favourite flavours to eat with pasta.
• Add your spaghetti to the bowl and mix really well, you want the egg to coat all of the pasta.
• Heat half the oil and butter in a frying pan on a medium heat.
• Pour in your spaghetti mixture and flatten it down well so it fills the pan evenly.
• Cook for 5 minutes on a low to medium heat.
• Slide the frittata out onto a plate.
• Add the remaining oil and butter to the pan and then flip your frittata back into the pan and cook for another 5 minutes, until both sides are golden brown.
• Cut into triangles and serve with a little cheese if you have some to hand and a side salad for a delicious and easy meal.

Seasonal Minestrone from the Alchemic Kitchen

The Alchemic Kitchen is a Foodrise-start-up social enterprise working alchemy with surplus food & building a  regional food economy in the North West of England that challenges inequalities.

This minestrone recipe is great for using up whatever veg you have to hand, you start with a simple base of carrots, onion and celery and then get creative with whats in your kitchen. This recipe can be adapted so in autumn use squash, tomatoes, rosemary, peppers. In spring, new potatoes, spring cabbage, baby turnips, wild garlic.

Serves 6

Ingredients:

5 carrots, thinly sliced

3 onions, thinly sliced

2 sticks celery, thinly sliced

8 tbsp olive oil

Whatever veg needs using up (potatoes, courgette, cabbage etc)

1.5 litres vegetable stock

400g tin cannellini beans (you can also use butter beans or chickpeas but not kidney, they are the wrong flavour)

Optional toppings: fresh herbs, pesto croutons, grated cheese

• Gently heat 8 tbsp of olive oil in a heavy bottom pan and add onions, to soften but not brown.
• Add carrots and then celery. This is when you can get creative – for example 300g potatoes diced, 3 courgettes diced, 100g french beans sliced, 225g savoy cabbage shredded. You could substitute peas for beans, use butternut squash for courgette, kale for cabbage etc etc. You can also add squishy tomatoes, diced. Add each veg type one at a time to the carrot/onion/celery mix, cook for a few minutes and then add the next.
• Once all veg has been added, pour in the veg stock – if you have a parmesan rind knocking about (NEVER bin them!) then this is the point you add it to the soup. If prepping for vegetarians/ vegans, leave out parmesan.
• Cover the pan and let everything cook very very slowly for around 2 hours until thickened but not stand a spoon up thick – add a bit more water at this point if too thick.
• Add the cannellini beans  Cook for 5 minutes, then turn up the heat and add the pasta. This will take about 10 minutes.
• Fish out the parmesan rind if used (nice to gnaw on). Give it all a good stir and check for seasoning. Serves 6.
• We always invite people to style their soup so provide some chopped herbs – basil/ parsley, extra virgin olive oil to drizzle, pesto, croutons (made from stale bread, dried in the oven or in a dry frying pan and seasoned with oregano and a splash of olive oil once toasted), grated cheese etc.
  

Plum Betty from Food SOS

Food SOS is project run by Community Youth Ventures CIC for Foodrise as part of the Growing Food Citizens project in Buckinghamshire UK. We work with young people and families to look at ways to reduce the food they waste in the home. We worked together to explore recipes that help people from all backgrounds to use up items that are commonly wasted or neglected in the home like bread, banana and milk.

This recipe is a delicious way to use up stale bread and make the most of plums when they are in season. 

Ingredients:

200g old bread

85g butter or vegan alternative

85g brown sugar (white also works)

1 tsp cinnamon

1.25 kg plums, chopped

1 tbsp caster sugar

1 tbsp cornflower

200ml cold water

yoghurt, to serve (optional)

• Preheat oven to 200 degrees
• Tear bread into chunks
  Spread chunks over large baking tray and bake for 10-12 minutes, stirring occasionally until evenly crisp
• Scrape bread into bowl, and stir in butter, brown sugar and cinnamon.
• Reduce the oven to 160 degrees
• Put plums, caster sugar and cornflower into a large lidded pan
• Over a medium heat, stir for 1-2 mins until the cornflower has dissolved.
• Add the water, cover and simmer for 15-20 mins
• Layer the plums and bread chunks in an ovenproof dish and bake for 20 mins.
• You can serve alone or with yoghurt, cream, ice cream. You can also try adding honey instead of sugar. Or even combine other fallen fruits depending on season and crop (eg blackberries, rhubarb or apples)

This summer Growing Food Citizens joined forces with three local Climate Action Groups to run an amazing poster competition to make people locally more aware about the food they eat, and how we can reduce the food that is often wasted in our homes.

Enlisting the creative flare of our children and young people, we asked them to take part in our exciting competition and design an eye-catching poster reminding people to think about the food that they buy and reduce food being wasted. Encouraging people to eat local and seasonal food, which is better for our planet and climate, whilst also encouraging them to try growing their own food!

Lots of people across the UK, and in Buckinghamshire, have noticed how bad we are about using up all the food we purchase, and we often then throw it away! This isn’t the best use of our money, plus it’s bad for our planet as it wastes resources; as well as produces gases linked to the climate crisis. We also wanted to encourage people grow their own vegetables and eat locally grown food that doesn’t get flown across the world which also impacts badly on the environment.

The four winners were:

Clara Richards- Aged 8 (Don’t Waste Food)
James Bowers- Aged 7 (Grow Your Own)
Orlaigh Nowak-Scase – Aged 8 (Grow Your Own)
Gracie Harrison Age 9 (Buy Food Locally)

All the winning posters will be appearing out and about in community spaces, near shops, allotments and town halls for Zero Waste Week 2021 to raise awareness around making our relationship with the food we eat better. All the winners received family passes to the Green Dragon Eco Farm in Buckinghamshire, which we are sure they will enjoy.

Thanks also goes to the support from Zero Carbon Haddenham, Hazlemere Climate Action and Climate Action Wendover.

Last week’s National food Strategy correctly responded to the overwhelming weight of evidence when it called for a 30% cut in meat by 2032: we likely need to make a bigger dietary shift yet to reduce climate change. People are ready to cut down – both the English and Scottish climate assemblies saw assembly members from all walks of life voting for measures to reduce meat consumption. ‘Less meat’ doesn’t mean ‘no meat’ and for personal, social or cultural reasons, some people will still want to eat some meat.

Where this meat should come from and how it should be produced is a big question, especially in an era of trade deals and post-Brexit changes to agricultural payments in the UK. One answer comes in a new Foodrise position paper, ‘Living Well on Leftovers’ which shows that we can produce about a third of our non-ruminant (pig and chicken) meat intake using only food waste as a feed. In doing so, we could significantly decrease the climate footprint of rearing these animals, which mainly comes from growing their feed. Indeed, scientific evidence shows that a diet that is plant-rich yet contains some animal products from animals fed exclusively on leftovers uses less land than a diet containing no animal products at all.

Eating meat and animal products contributes up to 60% of the greenhouse gas emissions from our food system – and with food production and consumption contributing a third of overall emissions, reaching safe emission limits without addressing animal source foods is impossible. The National Food Strategy said we need to eat 30% less meat, though we would need to eat even less than that if we want to make room for countries that currently hardly eat any meat at all to eat a bit more.

It’s not all about the climate; livestock use 70% of agricultural land; growing crops for animal feed requires millions of hectares of soya production, much of which comes from the Amazon region, which has now become a net-carbon producer. There are more livestock on the planet than humans, so that’s a lot of mouths to feed and a lot of feed crops. Reducing pressure on natural habitats requires smaller livestock numbers.

But is it necessary to cut out meat altogether? Of course, that’s a personal choice, but from a sustainability science perspective it is a nuanced question – Foodrise’s definition of ‘better meat’ is currently meat from animals which are reared only on food waste and by-products and do not graze or eat crops from land that could be used to grow human-edible crops. In fact, eating some meat, fed exclusively on leftovers, maximises the nutritional output of our land (because there’s always some surplus in the system which if it isn’t fed to people or animals would go to waste). A diet with some meat also allows us to get some of the nutrients, like vitamin B12, that are more readily available from animal products (but which do not require us to keep eating the amount of meat that we currently do!).

Eating a high-veg diet that contains only products from animals fed on leftovers meets the four objectives of the National Food Strategy:

1. High welfare, low-impact meat amongst a colourful veg-rich diet fulfils the first objective to escape the junk food cycle and protect the NHS.
2. Government interventions that make this diet accessible and affordable for all will avoid a two-tier food system and meet objective number two: reduce diet-related inequality.
3. The third objective, to make the best use of our land, actually requires us to consume the diet described in our paper- all other dietary scenarios have a higher land footprint, including a vegan diet.
4. The fourth objective, create a long-term shift in our food culture; is about making sustainable diets the easiest to access and to produce; we can produce all our meat in the UK, rearing non-ruminants using only our own leftovers and with no need for imported soy or purpose grown feed crops.

To meet the pre-conditions for a low/better meat approach, we first need to lower our meat intake, then create a regulatory system that allows us to feed treated food waste to non-ruminants like pigs, chickens and salmon. This would mean creating the systems, resources and oversight bodies to ensure that food waste is processed safely – we’re not advocating a return to the low-oversight approach which led to the Food and Mouth outbreak in 2007. There are other important considerations – cost savings from using feed from leftover food shouldn’t lead to an increase in intensively farmed pigs and chickens. We have a proposal for how this approach could be trialled safely and fairly in our paper.

We know we urgently need to adjust our diets to include more veg and less meat in order to protect communities around the world that are vulnerable to dangerous climate change. But we don’t have to cut out meat altogether and can actually have a more nutritious diet that uses less land if we use food waste to feed non-ruminant livestock, instead of importing damaging soya and other crops from fragile habitats.

This week, the long awaited National Food Strategy was released, the first major review of England’s food system in 75 years. The strategy takes significant strides in tackling meat overconsumption, food waste and food inequality and it is exciting to see many of the things we have consistently campaigned for feature in the strategy.

After a pandemic which has exposed the shameful extent of food inequality in the UK, and as alarm grows over unchecked destruction of nature, this Strategy shows us that a vibrant, productive, sustainable food system is within our reach, but that Big Food’s business as usual – on sugar, on meat and on waste – cannot continue.

Making the clear case for meat reduction

To effectively address climate change, we simply have to eat less meat. The National Food Strategy recognises this and calls for a target for meat reduction – a big step in the right direction. Without immediate action, the global meat and dairy industry will account for almost half the world’s 1.5C emissions budget by 2030. Raising meat uses 85% of our land in the UK – land we need to preserve nature and plant trees. Crucially, the strategy also points out that some of the most powerful players – supermarkets – must play a central role in this change. It includes a survey showing 50% would support a government target for supermarkets to reduce their meat sales – Foodrise’s supermarket scorecard calls for all supermarkets to adopt a target to halve their sales by 2030.

Mandatory reporting on food waste for large corporations

The Strategy calls for corporates to take more responsibility for what they sell – recommending that the government makes it mandatory for big food businesses to report on how much they waste, among other indicators. While not the whole story, this is vital: we have consistently called for food waste reporting to be mandatory, it might not seem like much but knowing exactly how much waste there is, is a crucial first step to reducing this industrial scale problem. Globally, around one third of all food produce is wasted, yet we don’t know the exact amount as currently corporations do not have to report it. The government has considered making it a legal requirement to publish how much food goes to waste; we hope the strategy’s strong recommendation for mandatory reporting pushes this into law.

Failing to address farm food waste

Although the strategy rightfully calls for mandatory food waste reporting for large corporations, it does not adequately address food waste on farms. Our wasteful food system forces farmers to produce more food than they need to secure contracts with large supermarkets. Research in this area is sorely lacking, but conservative estimates suggest that 3.6 million tonnes of good food is left to rot on UK farms every year. From our Gleaning Network, we have seen firsthand piles of perfectly good produce being wasted on farms, it’s heart-breaking for the farmer and disastrous for our planet. The government can address this, by including big farm businesses in mandatory food waste reporting and helping farmers by addressing unfairness in our food supply chain.

What about access to good food?

The Strategy is right to focus on how the government can help create good green jobs in farming, and make it easier for people in every income bracket to eat a healthy, fresh and sustainable diet. But more healthy start vouchers won’t work if there’s nowhere to buy fresh, healthy food in your area. Foodrise staff working in Merseyside see every day how poor access to good food hampers people’s confidence, health and ability to feed their families well – that’s why we’ve helped set up a mobile veg van to visit some of the worst-affected areas, but that isn’t a long-term solution. Government needs to cough up the cash to seed local and regional food economies, help local authorities and bodies like schools and hospitals buy local and provide the resources to help civil society get beyond the food bank model.

Failure to address sugar from beet to sweet

Much media coverage has been given to the recommendation for a ‘sugar tax’. The proposed tax is on wholesale sugar (and salt) — the idea being that this will push food companies to reformulate their products and reduce sugar content. But a critical part of the picture is ignored: production. The UK produces vast amounts of sugar in the form of sugar beet, enough to exceed our Recommended Daily Allowance (RDA) three times over. To make matters worse, we use our prime agricultural land to produce sugar beet. The level of sugar production is at odds with aims for sugar reduction; if we continue to produce three times more sugar than we need, what will happen to that over-supply? To address sugar effectively, we need to produce less of it in the first place.

The elephant in the room – who has the power?

The Strategy makes many good recommendations but fails to effectively analyse who has the power to create or perhaps more importantly to stop vital change. Our food system is largely controlled by a handful of large corporations. In a system dominated by corporations profit maximisation will always be the ultimate goal. We must ensure we have a national food strategy that works for people, not profit. That means a government that is prepared to intervene where necessary to curb corporate power. At this crucial moment for people and planet, as we begin to recover from the pandemic and face the growing realities of climate change, Foodrise’s work feels more important than ever.

Further reading:

Foodrise’s Meat and Climate Scorecard

Meating the climate challenge: Why supermarkets must urgently cut their meat and dairy sales

When there’s no waste, there’s a way (to net zero) A call for policy for food waste prevention

Too much of a bad thing: The use and misuse of UK soil and land to grow sugar

I started my EcoTalent internship after a six-month spell of looking for jobs, having graduated from University with a Journalism degree in the middle of a pandemic and economic recession.

The job title was intriguing – EcoTalent Intern Student Engagement: Food and finance. The application process for the job was as unique as the job title. It did not require a CV or a cover letter. I remember writing about how to diversify the environment sector in the UK, which is 98% white. In the application I answered questions about my enthusiasm towards learning about the environment. This is a great application approach especially for internships as this allows for people with passion and enthusiasm to work for organisations with the same values, and the skills training comes with the job anyway. My four-month internship could be divided into two parts: the biweekly EcoTalent days where I would be given coaching on soft skills and self-development, and student engagement work with Big Livestock vs The Planet and SOS-UK.

Learning about the big impact of Big Livestock

During my first week, I started learning about Foodrise’s Big Livestock Vs The Planet campaign. I had read about deforestation in the news but never really grasped the scale and the impact it had on indigenous people and biodiversity. The image I had when farmland was mentioned to me was fields of crops. I thought the burning of the Amazon rainforest was being done to create farms to grow crops as a source of food for people, rather than as animal feed for industrially reared cattle. I believed it was a dire necessity for local food security. You can imagine my surprise when I found out that most of the land being cleared was not for crops for human consumption but for cattle ranching and cattle feed. The amount of forest and land that was disappearing on a daily basis for cattle farming was significantly more than what would be needed for growing food crops for humans. The connection between industrial meat and dairy companies and loss of land in the Amazon was made evident to me through the Big Livestock vs The Planet reports. The impact Big Livestock has on biodiversity, indigenous rights, and food security is an injustice created by greedy corporations: the fat cat corporates getting paid millions for jobs that lead to climate breakdown. According to  National Geographic Big Livestock together with other grazing animals contribute about 40% of the annual methane budget.

Expanding my knowledge

The issue of land use was not only exclusive to Big Livestock, vast amounts of land is also being used in countries such as Malaysia for palm oil. I found out about this after I was encouraged to join a Global Justice Recovery webinar. This was a great opportunity to meet and listen to activists from across the globe, from the Philippines, Japan, Nigeria, Brazil, America, and Britain. Each workshop and story had hundreds of people, all eager to engage and learn. This is where I found out about the impact palm oil has had on the Malaysian people, threatening food security and decreasing fertile soil land for food crops. The fertile lands in Malaysia that could be used to grow crops for the locals and indigenous populations are being used to grow palm oil trees. Like Big Livestock, massive corporations are abusing their power by snatching the rights of Indigenous Peoples in Malaysia while creating food insecurity problems.

What needs to change?

So, what needed to change? People’s attitudes. Change begins from within and has a ripple effect on others. Having seen the impact environmentally extractive companies have during this internship, I have had time to self-reflect on the choices I have made previously, such as choosing which bank to use or what products to buy. The environmental decisions and discussion I have with my close circle of friends and family has left an impact on them. We are eating less meat now compared to before. It has led to them making environmentally friendly lifestyle changes as well. These individual changes by people lead to a ripple effect that creates huge movements. The change comes from education and self-reflection within an individual. A success story which was highlighted to me was the fossil fuel divestment movement which has to date had over 15 trillion dollars pledged to be divested by financial institutions. This was done through individuals and organisations putting pressure on financial institutions to divest from Big Oil. Students came together and collectively called for their Universities to commit to divesting. Glasgow University was the first university in Europe to divest from Big Oil and in less than a decade 87 other universities joined to commit. It was individuals deciding they had enough of Big Oil investment and band together to make change possible. So why can’t we do the same for Big Livestock?

We came up with the idea to get university students across the UK involved in our campaign to call on their universities to divest from Big Livestock through a targeted email. This project would allow us to contact students involved with environmental societies and students’ unions to call on their universities to divest from Big Livestock. This was the very first time I had been involved directly with environmental campaigning. There was a lot of researching, writing and communications strategy involved. My very first task was to make a one-minute-long campaign video to be posted online which allowed me to use the video editing skills I had from university but also gain new skills in campaign editing and writing. The video had to be short and bold in text. I had to make sure the colour scheme, text size and font were matching the organisation colour and text style. This was all new to me so learning and gaining these skills has been extremely beneficial for future work in campaigning.

At the end of our project, we had universities reaching out to us to get involved with our campaign and asking for help with existing campaigns they were running. This felt like an achievement as it showed the impact of my targeted email. It allowed us to build relationships with young activists, help get our campaign idea on campuses and we were happy to help them with their own environmental campaigns as well.

My internship was not solely focused on the Big Livestock campaign. On my first week I was asked what Foodrise and SOS-UK could do to provide me with the skills I wanted to learn. This is not something you often hear in a workplace. I wanted to learn more about environmental journalism and how charities can work with media organisations to raise awareness. I was given the opportunity of a meeting with Alexandra Heal, an award-winning investigative journalist who works at The Bureau of Investigative Journalism and reports on the environment. It was a great opportunity to learn about the key skills that editors look for in young journalists and what to focus on as we move more towards a digitalised word.

Learning new skills & challenging my inner critic

EcoTalent days were run on a bi-weekly basis. The aim of these days was to help us enhance and gain soft skills. Creativity, communication, networking, and personality development were some of the few things we worked on. Every session was different and run by a leading coach in a specific soft skill. My goal was to gain confidence and to be able to articulate my opinion well enough so that my message is understood. It was as skill that I believed I lacked and for the type of communications jobs that I hoped to get into, these skills are vital. I want to be a journalist to help tell the stories that no one else has covered. By working on my confidence and articulation, I know I can do justice to these stories when covering them.

Each EcoTalent day was memorable for its unique reasons such as learning about permaculture, agroecology, or self-reflection. But the EcoTalent days that resonated with me the most were when public speaker and comedian Thanyia Moore. The coaching by Thaniya on public speaking was unique as she delved deep into the causes of our issues in public speaking and gave honest suggestions on how to fix the problem. The environment campaign coaches helped in our personal development of suppressing our inner critics and taking initiatives on our values.

Overall, this internship has been great in meeting likeminded interns like me working with other organisations. It has given me skills that are easily transferable to other job opportunities, widening my job prospects. It has also taught me to think critically about the environmental impact that government and corporate policies have on the planet. We don’t have much time; we must act now to make a change.

Foodrise is working across the UK and Ireland to mobilise students to take action against industrial livestock. Below, Harvey from the Climate Justice Campaign at Jesus College, Cambridge, outlines why universities must look beyond fossil fuel divestment when cleaning up their finances. If you are a student (or not!) and would like to get involved, you can find more information here and get in contact with our campaigner, Mia, here.

We thought it would be easy. When we started investigating our College’s current investments, we wanted to find out exactly how much we were investing in fossil fuels. Full divestment, we supposed, needed to confront the big-name extractors and polluters and challenge their social license to operate. What we realised early-on in the research process, however, was that fossil fuels are just the very large tip of a very large iceberg: conventional divestment simply wasn’t going to cut it.

We were shocked by what we found. Our new report Investing in Exploitation and Extinction: Why Climate Justice Demands That Jesus College Goes Beyond Divestment exposes the College’s £807,000 in the fossil fuel industry. It also finds, however, a minimum of £4.3 million in additional worst-offending exploiters and polluters, which would remain ignored by a traditional divestment announcement.

Through just one of the 22 funds in its portfolio, Jesus College is currently investing £37,482.51 in major dairy distributor, Mengniu Dairy Company. While this may seem insignificant in comparison to the £124,689.27 that it invests in Shell alone in another of its portfolio funds, the  ecological impact of this investment may be on par with the oil giant’s. Indeed, Big Livestock and fossil fuels are responsible for an equal share of our annual methane emissions. Methane is 28 times more powerful than CO2, meaning that its production through industrial animal agriculture, which often involves the twin process of deforestation and ecologically destructive monoculture, is accelerating our trajectory towards a 3-4℃ rise in global temperatures – in contrast to the IPCC’s recommendation that we must limit global heating to a maximum 1.5℃ rise. Methane levels are at the highest they have ever been – and they continue to rise. Greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture are now estimated by the UN to contribute at least 30% of total net anthropogenic emissions. The corporations  take no responsibility for their skyrocketing methane production. “Few of these companies are even reporting their emissions”, says Shefali Sharma, European director at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy and author of a recent report which found that just 13 dairy firms were associated with emissions equal to those of the entire UK. In other words, responsible financial practices must involve moving away from financing industrial animal agriculture if they are to be ‘responsible’ at all.

Leaving aside the well-documented health consequences of our meat and dairy consumption, the industry threatens our future wellbeing.  As we begin to recover from the devastating effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, the bankrolling and legitimisation of industrial animal agriculture by institutions like Jesus College is increasing the likelihood of future pandemics. According to a recent white paper by Humane Society International (HSI), the industry’s corporate negligence is providing the perfect conditions for viruses to develop and spread. Expansion of farms (which often involves large-scale deforestation) brings wild and domestic species into contact with one another, potentially causing ‘viral spillover’. Novel viral strains are also created through cramming vast numbers of stressed animals in a tiny space. Around 75% of infectious diseases are now zoonotic (jump from animals to humans), according to the United Nations Environment Program. Should investors and consumers continue to finance Big Livestock, another global health crisis surely awaits.

An acre of rainforest is deforested every second, frequently for cattle grazing, with countless species displaced from their homes or even driven to extinction. Those who stand up to the corporations which continue to perpetrate this violence are ignored or silenced. More than 1,100 Indigenous activists, small farmers, judges, priests and other rural workers have been murdered in “land disputes” in the last two decades alone. This is an industry whose bottom line is built on violence. And yet it is an industry that remains ignored by most of the divestment announcements from Cambridge colleges and other institutional investors.

True, effective divestment will never be easy. As we found out when researching our report, the scope of the climate crisis is large, encompassing and intersecting with many other social injustices worldwide: from modern day slavery to the arms and mining industries. Looking back, it is easy to wonder whether we would have been better off remaining convinced that fossil fuels were the beginning and end of the climate breakdown. It is overwhelming to think how many other industries and systems of oppression need to be confronted before we can begin to comprehend what climate justice will look like.

That is not to say we should give up, however. We have an obligation to use our privilege to do everything we can. This means reframing the way we think about divestment. As our report proposes, we need to move away from passive public-equity investing, and start actively investing in real change, through impact bonds and other schemes which will actively utilise our financial capacity to have a positive social and ecological impact. This is a time-intensive, ethically treacherous process.

The changes we need to see in the way we invest will not happen overnight. But the first step towards actualising climate justice is simple: it’s time we knew our enemy. It’s not just fossil fuels. It’s exploitation: of people and of planet. It’s violence: landgrabs and the suppression of Indigenous resistance. It’s profiteering from environmental collapse. We know that, even now, we have much more learning to do, but that’s what ‘beyond divestment’ means: we are calling on Jesus College and other higher education institutions to learn with us, to explore just how embedded the climate crisis is in not only the way we invest, but also in the way we work, study, and eat.

There is a vast and wide range of expertise within local community food sectors, and in Buckinghamshire this is no different. So, when local group Grow Together were considering how to progress their Urban Harvest Project, we called upon our local network to take part in a HarvestHack event.

The Food Heroes Project in the Netherlands inspired our HarvestHack through its work bringing together innovative food entrepreneurs working on the reduction of food losses in the ‘neglected’ parts of the food chain. We wanted to try this approach in Buckinghamshire and see if we could conjure up energy, inspiration and provoke new ideas to help progress and develop Urban Harvest for this year’s yield.

Facilitated by Foodrise’s Growing Food Citizens team, the event spanning just under four hours provided a mix of experience of orchard management; community growing, social enterprise and business, food waste redistribution and commerce; as well as voluntary sector engagement. Meaning that people were enthusiastic to share their thoughts, good practice and understanding to explore how to overcome barriers based on their own experience and knowledge.

Two clear directions were identified through breakout rooms and discussions, one being an enterprise based approach of customer demand, production and sales; the other community, education and collective action. Both would help to reduce fallen fruit from being wasted but interestingly would take different routes for a future pathway.

‘This has given us so much to think about, I was overwhelmed by people taking the time out to participate and help us develop our project.” Sheila Bees Grow Together Urban Harvest Coordinator.

Urban Harvest are now looking at community based partnerships to embed raising awareness of reducing food waste and how to upkeep fruit trees and bushes on private land; alongside the picking, preserving and product processes for this coming season. We wish them luck securing funding to continue inspired by the event and to see all the innovative ways to prevent fallen and unused fruit going to waste.

I don’t consider myself naive about the state of the world, but every so often I read something that leaves me utterly dismayed. Since the start of the pandemic, there have been many horrifying stories of how badly workers have been treated; one story that truly shocked me was that managers at meat giant Tyson bet on how many workers would contract COVID-19. If we ever needed evidence of how utterly broken our food system is, managers literally betting on workers’ lives should be enough. 

The pandemic has highlighted the different realities we all live in: as has been pointed out, we may all be facing the same storm, but we are definitely not in the same boat, despite what that cringe-inducing celebrity Imagine video may want you to think. Or, Gwyneth Paltrow’s pandemic low point being eating bread, whereas for many it was not being able to eat at all. Research from the Food Foundation shows that food insecurity remains higher than pre-Covid levels, affecting an estimated 4.7 million adults (9% of households) over the last six months. This compares to pre-Covid levels of 7.6%. 

As someone who has worked in food policy for years, the pandemic sadly confirmed my worst fears about our current food system – that it’s an inherently unsustainable system based on extracting cheap labour and precious natural resources. This extractive industry sees its workforce as expendable, which is how we ended up in the paradoxical situation where workers are essential but also deemed unimportant, essential but underpaid. Research from the Living Wage foundation shows that 16% of key workers earned below the Living Wage in April 2020, and when it comes to supermarket workers, the situation is much worse, with almost half (45%) of the 900,000-strong supermarket employee workforce earning below the Real Living Wage. Through my work, I’ve had many discussions with supermarkets, and whenever the topic of food being too cheap (i.e. the price does not reflect the environmental impact of its production) is brought up, supermarkets are quick to argue that cheap food is important for food access. If supermarkets are concerned with food access, why not simply pay their own essential workers more? 

A 2021 report by the Baker’s Union found that one-in-every-five people working the food sector cannot afford the food they produce, serve and sell. This is particularly shocking in the context of research by the High Pay Centre,  showing that Ocado had the highest pay ratio for UK companies, with a 2,605:1 ratio between the CEO and an average employee (meaning that, for every pound earned by an average worker, the CEO earns £2,605). Tesco and Morrisons also feature in the top 10 corporations with the highest pay ratio: Tesco’s is 305:1 and Morrisons’ is 217:1. Moreover, Waitrose continues to refuse to return the £85m of government business rates relief despite record-breaking profits and other supermarkets giving the money back. It’s time to recognise that food access is not supermarkets’ key concern, but instead using cheap labour to sell us cheap food. Supermarkets will tell you that they don’t control the market, but that is simply untrue:  the ‘top ten’ UK retailers control around 94% of the UK groceries market share, and 75% of UK individuals say they visit a supermarket twice or more a week. They are the market; you can’t dictate the terms of the game and then claim you are powerless to change it. If supermarkets truly care about food access, it’s time to put their money where their mouth is. 

The reality is the climate movement has to centre social justice, which means that there must be a redistribution of wealth and power. If the food system continues to be dominated by corporations, then the concern for delivering profit to shareholders will always come before protecting people and the planet. The pandemic has highlighted that, to fight climate change, we need a post-corporate food system; we need to put our trust in the collective, in the real essential workers. We must redefine the function of billionaires: they can never be heroes when their hoarding of wealth is diametrically opposed to the equality we need to secure a just future for everyone. 

Yesterday’s announcement of a new national target to reduce the UK’s emissions, including from international aviation and shipping, by 78% by 2030, is a welcome indication of the government’s commitment to taking a bold position on climate change.

But with the effects of climate change already being felt around the world, particularly on those who have done least to cause them, ambitious targets to reduce emissions are only the first step. What matters is what the government plans to do to meet them.

Foodrise is disappointed to see that the enormous value of pursuing healthy diets lower in meat and dairy, and of halving food waste across the supply chain, is excluded from the government’s plans.

Both these measures have enormous potential, for our health, for the robustness and diversity of our agricultural system and importantly for our ability to rapidly decarbonise. A recent report by the UN highlighted that the food system accounts for over one third of all global greenhouse gas emissions. To put it plainly, even if every other sector of the economy decarbonised, without addressing the climate damage caused by the food system, we cannot meet climate goals to remain below 1.5°C of warming.

The failure to take the enormous opportunity presented by public measures to support greener food choices and prevent waste is particularly disappointing considering that the government’s own expert Committee on Climate Change recommended sustainable dietary shifts as a ‘low cost, no regrets’ option. With COP26 rapidly approaching, the UK is losing an opportunity to demonstrate the seriousness with which it takes the climate crisis, and to employ the most effective tools at its disposal to combat it. We hope, particularly with the publication of the National Food Strategy later this year, that the government will reconsider.