sustainability awkward

Sustainability — The Most Awkward Word in Food

Gavin Wren Food Opinion Pieces, Writing

Sustainability. What a word, eh? Just look at it, all six of it’s magnificently uncomfortable syllables lined up in a row, begging to be used as frequently as possible in government, the corporate world or as shorthand for anyone who wishes to demonstrate how planetarily woke they are. Making potato peel crisps or porridge patties? That’s REAL LIFE sustainability happening right before your eyes.

In reality, sustainability is a bit dull, you can’t go out on date night for some sexy sustainability, or have a quiet Sunday relaxing on the sofa with some sustainability. It’s not a hobby or a team sport, you can’t get together with your pals on a Tuesday evening at the local leisure centre and play a few rounds of sustainability. Sustainability is like a beautiful butterfly, fluttering around, touching everything we see, yet, should we reach out to grasp it, it will evade our capture…

Food is Complex as Hell and Your Cause is Not the Only Answer

Gavin Wren Food Opinion Pieces, Writing

Yesterday I attended a talk at Hay Festival entitled ‘Feeding the Nine Billion’, which very quickly qualified that the large population growth predicted for the next thirty years will almost exclusively be found in developing countries.

This news is no surprise, it’s long been acknowledged that parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America are growing at a rapid rate and this is where our ‘global community’ will be developing the most. The chair, Jonathon Harrington, an agronomy advisor and fierce proponent of GM crops, began by saying this was the most important question of the day and wanted to see how we could solve it in an hour.

For a discussion of developing world issues, it was acutely amusing that this talk featured the whitest audience I’ve seen at a food talk for a long time, and that’s really saying something, for a genre of events which is famed for…