Future-proofing your plate

We all want to eat more sustainably, but what does that actually mean? Emma Hughes explores the options

- Emma Hughes

SUSTAINABILITY: the foodie buzzword of 2020. It pops up on packaging and menus almost as often as artisan and local—sustainable salad leaves, anyone? (They’re grown underground in south London using hydroponic systems and LED technology, which means no pesticides.) Or sustainable crisps? (These come in a compostable bag made from UK-grown eucalyptus pulp.)

There’s no legal definition, but, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, sustainability is ‘the degree to which a process or enterprise is able to be maintained or continued while avoiding the long-term depletion of natural resources’. There’s no escaping the fact that what we eat has a massive impact on the Earth’s wellbeing: a 2019 report by medical journal The Lancet bluntly stated that food production ‘is the largest source of environmental degradation’.

The problem is that deforestation, pollution, animal welfare and human health and prosperity all make competing, and occasionally contradictory, claims on our attention. A glass of cow’s milk, for example, leads to three times as many greenhouse gases being produced as any plant-based milk—but it takes 1,611 gallons of water to produce only one litre of almond milk . There really is no such thing as a (guilt) free lunch.