insideKENT Magazine Issue 52 - July 2016

FOOD+DRINK change your habits, change the world Most of us tend to think about the personal effects of changing our diets from time to time – cutting down after Christmas; losing a few pounds before a holiday – but with world food consumption on the up and a noticeable increase in our intake of meat, fat, processed foods, sugar and salt – each one, a marked enemy of a healthy, balanced diet – isn’t it time we considered the bigger issues associated with this? The ones that go beyond our plates. BY POLLY HUMPHRIS Changes in agricultural practice over the past 50 years specifically have increased the world's capacity to provide food for its growing population, which is currently estimated to be some 7.4 billion people. Although this all sounds pretty positive on the surface, the methods by which we’ve got to this point are, sadly, not much to be proud of. The drivers that are largely responsible for our increased consumption – the rise of supermarkets; year round availability of most food; processed products with suspiciously long shelf lives; and intensive food production methods such as factory farming – all have a counterbalance, not least the decline of the local shop and the increasingly blurred lines where seasonality is concerned; surely we shouldn’t be able to buy strawberries in winter? In a nutshell, producing food for our growing population has been a cause of concern and debate for hundreds of years, but world food production has grown faster than our population, so per capita food consumption has increased. The availability of food has outstripped the need (in the western world, anyway), so most of us are eating too much to the tune of 500 calories daily. 2.3 billion people are living in countries with under 2,000 calories available per person per day, but on the flipside, 1.9 billion people are living in countries where the population is gorging on over 3,000 calories each. The balance is all out of whack and needs to be redressed, which is a pretty big ask and a problem that won’t be solved overnight. There are changes we can make, however – to the way we shop and what we eat – that will make a positive impact on the world and that we can all effect immediately. 58

insideKENT Magazine Issue 52 - July 2016 | Page 58