Give us, this day, our sustainable daily bread

When it comes to food shopping, we all want to try to make a positive difference and do our bit for sustainability-but how exactly should we go about it, asks Jane Wheatley

- Jane Wheatley

SUSTAINABLE' has become something of a weasel word. Like 'natural' or 'green' or 'wild', it's slapped onto food labels and adverts to make us feel better. Genuine sustainability concerns food security and resilience, climate change and the environment, human and animal health and wildlife biodiversity. How to take account of all this as we stand uncertainly in a supermarket aisle clutching a shopping list?

Consumer choice is more powerful than we might think and, although it’s not easy to be a truly conscious eater or navigate what can feel like a minefield of competing priorities, we owe it to the planet, to livestock and ourselves to try. That could mean doing without or cutting down on the foods we've come to take for granted, such as cheap chicken fed on soy linked to deforestation, green beans irrigated with precious water in low-rainfall Africa and prawns from farms trashing mangroves and polluting coastal waters.