Food distribution report – update

The report has been covered in the national and trade press, ranging from the Guardian, which focused on supermarket choice editing and meat consumption, to Fresh Info, which argued that the report was parochial. The Fresh Info story was prompted by a reaction to our report from the Fresh Produce Consortium (FPC), which said that “a change in diet can be a more effective means of lowering an average household’s food-related climate footprint than ‘buying local’.”

“We particularly welcome the FPC’s response,” said the Food Ethics Council’s Paul Steedman. “It underlines the growing consensus on this issue. After all, the top headline from our report was that the biggest reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from food and farming needs to come ‘from from changing what we eat and how it is produced rather than from cutting food miles’. Where we go further is to emphasise that sustainable development initiatives need also to tackle other environmental, social and economic problems on top of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.”