Eat well - Save the Planet

This week at the British Consulate General we proved something, something very important for the future. We proved that it is possible to eat well, to eat high quality food, and to do so in a matter which does not contribute towards global warming and damaging our planet’s environment.

Normally, when we think of climate change and the emission of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, we think of power stations, chemical works and major industrial plant. We think of them simply because they are big and we have images in our mind: tall factory chimneys pouring grey clouds of steam and smoke into the planet’s atmosphere. And, of course, these heavy industrial sectors have to change with the times and with the needs and demands of our planet’s eco-system. But so does every other industrial sector. Take agriculture, for example, and food.

In the UK, food is the biggest single manufacturing sector. It employs somewhere over half a million people. And the processes involved – from driving tractors to transporting animals and crops, from spreading fertilisers to processing and packaging the final product and distributing it to shops and supermarkets – can be very intensive in terms of using finite resources and emitting greenhouse gasses. They can be, but they do not have to be.

So at the Consulate we decided to “Eat Well and Save the Planet”. After all, everyone enjoys a good dinner, but we all want to do something valuable in terms of the environment. That meant that we looked for companies whose products or whose processes were environmentally friendly and fully sustainable – processes that can be continued without destroying the environment or using precious natural resources. Let’s just take two examples.

Salmon. My friends Eugenio and Paolo run a small company called Edemar in Chioggia. They import salmon-fresh, cold-smoked and hot-smoked – from the North of Scotland. Now people have been farming salmon for many years, but farming salmon can be a damaging process. The fish are crammed together in small pens and are never moved. They are fed with pellets which are thrown into the water and the residue can sink down to the seabed where it builds up a toxic layer on the sea floor. But the salmon I am talking about, is sustainably farmed. The fish have a hundred times more volume to swim around in. Their pens are moved around regularly to allow the seabed to recover from any residue of food which falls through. And the result is salmon which simply tastes unbelievably good.

And then there was Welsh mountain lamb. This is imported by my friend Jeff and, according to him, the difference with his lamb is that the farmers have gone back to a system of farming which dates from medieval times or beyond. The lambs are given a lot more space to graze. They are moved between the upland and the low land pastures according to the seasons, allowing the pastures to recover fully after they have been grazed by the animals. And the result, again, is simply a better quality product. Something that is nicer to eat.

These are just two examples, but it is the principle that is important. Every economic and industrial sector must, and I mean must, play its part in helping to counteract global warming and climate change. But that does not mean that the quality has to suffer – especially with food!

Dr Laurence Bristow-Smith
British Consul General
& Director General for Trade & Investment