It’s always good to get a surprise e-mail from someone you’ve not seen for over 35 years. It was such an e-mail that eventually led me to reflect on my experience of what the Food Ethics Council’s approach has been over almost 20 years (our 20th Anniversary is in 2018), since I joined it in 2000. That reflection has just been published in the open access journal Food and Energy Security – ‘Food Justice and a fair food future: An approach from the UK’s Food Ethics Council’.

It was an old colleague’s e-mail that led me to share this reflection at the 1st Turkish Agricultural and Food Ethics Congress in March 2017, a landmark event in Turkey. The Congress was the culmination of an EU financed project “Promoting Agriculture and Food Ethics in Turkey and Improving the Ethical Decision-making Capacity of the Stakeholders in Agriculture”.

Prof. Cemal Talug former rector and dean of agriculture at Ankara University had e-mailed me to ask if the Food Ethics Council would be an associate of the project. The Board agreed to this and I attended the project’s inaugural meeting in June 2016 – you can read my blog about it here.

Since then the organisers have carried out training courses in seven cities around the country with over 160 participants. The Congress attracted over 200 people from all over Turkey as well as speakers from the USA, Norway, the Netherlands and the UK. The organisers have also established an agricultural and food ethics association. This, they hope, will grow and develop after the project and become a useful contributor to how food and farming develops in Turkey.